I was soon to learn, however, that not everyone in journalism felt this way. A few years later, still on the Congress beat but working for a large daily newspaper, I found myself frozen out of the juiciest stories and the most sought-after traveling assignments. I also knew what some of the veteran reporters said about me behind my back. “F … ing political scientist,” they called me. I knew perfectly well what this meant: I was the kind of reporter who knew all about the committee structure of the House and remembered whether Kennedy or Nixon carried Ohio, but wouldn't know a news story if it hit me in the face. It was in those days that I learned a second lesson: it may be an honor to be regarded as a political scientist, but one doesn't always want to advertise it in the newsroom.

I spent a considerable amount of time both with the reporters who operated out of the House press gallery and with visiting academics who came by in the process of working on a dissertation, a journal article, or a book. One day an epigram popped into my head: “A political scientist is somebody who knows all the right questions but has trouble getting the answers. A reporter is somebody who's great at getting answers but has no idea what the questions are.”

I use this line in speeches every so often, and it normally gets a laugh. More important, it suggests to me something about my own interests and professional values that still rings true all these years later. To me, the fun in reporting on politics lies in the larger questions that one has a chance to ask: How does this place (or system) work? Who holds the real power? How has the institution changed over the years?

These were questions that political scientists were asking about Congress all the time, and I enjoyed talking to them about what they had learned. Unfortunately, I soon found out that their ability to obtain answers was extremely limited and getting more limited all the time. Academics did not have the routine access to members of Congress that reporters had? it was common for them to wait months for an interview, which would then be postponed several times, if it ever took place at all. On the few occasions I sat in on one of these interviews, I discovered something else that puzzled me: political scientists tended to show up with a long list of excellent questions but sometimes failed to listen closely to the responses. Often they were so preoccupied with the task of getting every question in that they missed opportunities to let the conversation flow, even when it was clear that the source was willing to open up and say something really interesting. These were mistakes that no experienced reporter, covering Congress or any other beat, would ever make.

Of course, reporters behaved in their own strange ways. They ran in packs, more concerned about missing out on news a competitor had than about learning something fresh. They asked questions to which the answers were predictable and pedestrian, as if it were more important to fill space in the next day's paper than to uncover fundamental truths about an institution or the legislative process. When they wrote about the past, it was the very recent past? when they speculated about the future, it was the near future. They were preoccupied with what the House would do that very day or, at most, later in the week. Many of them seemed to have roughly the time horizon of fruit flies.

For whatever reason, my own instincts were different. I felt comfortable with the notion that many of the most crucial questions about politics and government have no easy answers, and some have no answers at all. So I gradually came to accept that, for better or worse, I had the genetic makeup of a political scientist. The fact that I had spent all these years in journalism was a triumph of nurture over nature. If others wanted to view me as an academic slightly miscast, I was willing to accept it and put up with any newsroom insults that came with the territory.

Still, these experiences left me curious about the differing ways journalists and political scientists view the world and about whether there is much hope that they can learn from each other. In pursuit of this perhaps unrealistic ecumenical goal, let me try to make a few fundamental distinctions.

The first of them is solely a distinction of method. Political scientists are people who charge off into battle armed with a thesis. As trained social scientists, they tend to feel naked without one. Reporters, on the other hand, are taught in journalism school that one does not decide what the story is until the reporting is finished? prejudging the news is not only questionable from an ethical point of view—it is also a good way to miss what is actually going on.

Beyond this, reporters are invariably shaped by the demands of daily or weekly publication. There's a reason they behave like fruit flies. They are trained—and rewarded—for seeking answers to questions of very short duration. Is the president going to Russia next week? What are the outlines of the trade bill that the administration is about to introduce? The fact that these details will be known in a few days anyway, with or without the benefit of journalistic initiative, makes no difference.

To almost any reporter—local, national, or foreign—valuable information is any information that is difficult to obtain and not generally known at the moment of publication, regardless of whether the world will be any wiser for it in the long run. Ferreting out secrets, including secrets that interested parties are willing to leak, can challenge the highest creative abilities of the most experienced reporter in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, that doesn't make the information interesting or worth all the trouble it takes to get it. (This is an opinion one is not well advised to express out loud at a newspaper, even a newspaper as sophisticated as the Washington Post or the New York Times.)

One common trait of journalists with academic leanings is a disdain for this kind of short-term, highly perishable information. Another is a tendency to ignore the words that politicians utter, at least those uttered in public. The morning paper is, after all, crammed with largely verbatim reports of statements that various government officials made the day before. The Senate Democratic leader says the president's tax cut is too large. The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks the budget for missile research is too small. If you find these daily exchanges of posture to be interesting, there is a good chance you can live a long and happy life in a newsroom in Washington or any other political capital city. If they tend to bore you, you may in fact be a political scientist at heart.

During the time I covered Congress for a daily newspaper, I came across the ideas of Sir Lewis Namier, the British historian. Namier's subject was parliament in the eighteenth century, but what he wrote applied equally well to the U.S. Congress in the 1980s. Ignore the speeches, Namier advised. Ignore the stands taken for public consumption. Look into the personal backgrounds and the human relationships. Find out which of the old Whig families get along with one another and which ones don't, or how the family of a prominent Tory was affected by the Puritan rebellion. Then you will understand what is really happening.

Obviously, this was not intended as advice for journalists, but I found it—and still find it—among the most useful and practical suggestions any reporter could hope for. Seemingly inexplicable events on the floor of the House of Representatives could be explained with reference to the rivalries in the California Assembly two decades earlier, or by the fact that some New Jersey Republicans could be counted on to desert their party whenever certain union leaders asked them to.

Finding out what sorts of people these politicians really were, where they came from, and how they got to Washington was the key to understanding what was going on. But this approach made clear another crucial distinction between journalistic and academic perceptions of the world. Academics are interested in institutions and curious to know how they operate. Reporters, by and large, are not? they are interested in events. It is difficult to find a news peg for long-term institutional change. It is almost impossible to find a news peg for institutional stability.

There is one important exception to this rule. Journalists take a serious interest in governmental bodies when they start to break down: when it turns out that an important committee of Congress has been placing prostitutes on its payroll, for example, or that some of its senior members have secretly been taking illegal payments from a Korean rice broker. It may seem obvious that the best way to understand disclosures like these is to know something about how the committee functions in normal times, when the outside world isn't paying attention. The Tolstoyan cliché about families—happy ones are all alike, unhappy ones are all different—does not apply to legislative committees or any legislative institutions at all. All of them are different. Each has its own function, its own culture, its own system of incentives. This is something one generally does not need to explain to a political scientist or anyone with a social scientist's perspective on life. It is not an idea that appeals instinctively to most reporters, even very good ones.

Perhaps the difference might be expressed as a small piece of a larger truth: political scientists are for the most part students of order, and journalists are students of disorder. Sometimes this is a communications problem worth trying to solve. Sometimes it is merely a fact of life one is better off accepting.

I spent nearly 20 years writing about Congress, some of this time as a newspaper reporter but most of it on the staff of a weekly magazine. Then, after taking a year off to work on a book, I moved on and became editor of Governing, a monthly magazine about state and local government. I had finally found a subject on which journalists and academics had something in common: neither group paid much attention to it. As far as both were concerned, states and localities were the underdeveloped world.

I had always known at some level the extent to which American journalism was dominated by Washington and the national polit- ical scene, but I never fully understood this until I began to cover the provinces. To most of the national press corps, print and broadcast alike, states were places where presidential primaries took place and where reporters showed up every four years to follow the candidates around. The idea that something important might be happening within state government itself was an unfamiliar notion. States had long ago botched their opportunity to solve modern social and economic problems, had been superseded by the federal government, and had turned into more or less permanent backwaters of the political system. So it was assumed.

I am exaggerating, but only a little. When I started editing Governing magazine in the early 1990s, I was convinced that a gradual but important change was taking place in the American federal system. Congress was ceasing to be the instrument of first resort for dealing with the crucial regulatory issues of the economy: health care, pollution, energy policy, and on and on. But this was a development that the national media—with a few exceptions— either did not appreciate or chose to ignore. We had a system of devolving power being chronicled by an anachronistically centralized press corps. The task of paying attention to state government was being left to the newspapers and television stations within each state, and they had little enthusiasm for it. The number of journalists accredited to cover state capitols had been dropping since the 1970s and continued its decline throughout the 1990s as well.

Among political scientists, the problem was considerably different. It would be unfair to say that they were oblivious to the changes taking place in American government? they understood federalism and were interested in talking about it. But as with journalists, the professional incentives favoring Washington as a field of study were too powerful to ignore. When I spent a year as a visiting scholar in a university political science department in the late 1980s, all the bright young Americanists seemed unable to resist the temptation to produce one more congressional voting study or one more survey of the presidential electorate. I don't think I ever met one whose ambition it was to roam the legislative halls of the country, seeking to find out what state politics was all about.

Local politics was another matter. A fair amount of scholarly work was being done on it every year, and most of this dealt with what appeared to me to be the important questions: Who holds power? How do they exercise it? Who benefits from this arrangement, and who loses out? But I was surprised to find that most of what I read—unlike most of the political science I was accustomed to reading on national affairs—was heavily, sometimes clumsily, ideological. More surprising still, scholars seemed mired in a debate I remembered from my undergraduate course in urban politics in the 1960s. It was a debate between pluralists and their enemies, between those who felt cities were more or less democratically run and those who felt that a secretive elite conspired quietly to make public decisions in their own best interest. It was an undeniably interesting issue, but I would have guessed that it had been long since resolved? instead, the same ideological positions were being staked out and defended, despite the large number of important developments in urban politics and urban life that had meanwhile taken place.

Political science may have been in something of a stalemate when it came to local government, but journalism was in open retreat. Few of the largest newspapers in the country took city hall seriously? almost none took the county courthouse seriously. Most of these newspapers had once devoted long columns of detailed, often impenetrable prose to daily accounts of what the mayor had said and what the city council had enacted. They had done this out of a sense of civic responsibility? it was no secret that most readers paid relatively little attention to coverage of this sort. But civic responsibility was a luxury amid the declining readership and shrinking news sections of the 1990s. Local government coverage dwindled as a result.

The career patterns of local political journalism had changed as well. The gruff, hard-drinking veteran columnist or reporter, steeped in local political history and familiar with all the players, was still a fixture on most big-city newspapers as late as the 1970s. Two decades later, he had all but disappeared, replaced by an endlessly rotating series of young reporters who took on the city hall beat for a year or two while waiting for something more attractive to turn up. This was not entirely for the worse: the old timers knew everything about everybody but were frequently too close to their sources to put it in the paper. The newer reporters were perfectly willing to publish whatever they knew. The problem was that they rarely knew very much. And so the readers didn't know very much either.

This is beginning to sound like the ranting of a curmudgeon, a sure signal that it is about time for me to stop. Actually, I don't find anything tragic about the failings of either journalism or political science. (They are what they are: separate disciplines with separate strengths and separate weaknesses. And some of the most serious weaknesses are deeply embedded in the nature of the work itself and will not disappear.) Nor do I think it is particularly necessary for a rich and well-meaning foundation to sponsor a new round of retreats or seminars or fellowships to help journalists and political scientists get to know each other better, although such events are nearly always fun.

What I do believe is that the contrasting values and styles of political scientists and journalists offer great opportunity to the individual scholar or reporter willing to take the trouble to become, in this particular sense, bilingual. That is, the reporter literate enough in political science to see the importance of asking big questions, to realize that institutions matter and that the only real way to understand their failure is to study the way they function in normal times. Or the political scientist secure enough in his professional identity to do what any good reporter does: train himself simply to look around and listen carefully, keeping the thesis in mind but seizing upon the small, serendipitous clues that lead to larger realities. Learning to speak in the languages of both journalism and political science isn't necessarily the best route to career advancement in either field. But it seems to me the best way to produce stimulating and provocative work.

For all of my carping, the fact remains that enough scholars and journalists have bridged this gap over the past generation to make singling any of them out feel a little presumptuous. I would only make the point that those who have succeeded have varied enormously in specialty, temperament, and technique, from Richard Fenno, Nelson Polsby, and Alan Rosenthal on the academic side to Michael Barone, E.J. Dionne, Jr., and Tom Edsall on the journalistic. Each of these students of politics has done it his own idiosyncratic way. But each has offered clear evidence that one can learn a great deal more by speaking two languages.

I don't know if advancements in genetics will ever make it possible to cross a political scientist with a journalist. It would be a risky experiment—the result might be a creature that writes unintelligible articles on subjects of little more than momentary interest. On the other hand, if done right, it could produce something truly valuable: a political animal who understands what the crucial questions are and also has an instinct for where the most important answers might be found.