Michael Desch offers an insightful analysis of the claim that political science research, especially in security studies, has become less relevant to policy makers over the past six decades. Desch is particularly concerned with the absence of explicit recommendations to U.S. national security policy makers in most published political science research. Instead, Desch argues, political scientists have concentrated on rigorously examining narrow questions that matter only to other academics. He attributes this trend to two sources. First, professionalization has led to an inward turn whereby political scientists can prosper without ever needing validation from the outside world. Second, the most intense collaborations between the academy and U.S. security policymakers have historically occurred during wartime.
A common response to critiques such as these is that the separation between the policy and the academic worlds is not a problem and perhaps even welcome. Academics are and should be engaged in basic science and the pursuit of pure knowledge rather than solving the particular problems that occupy policy-makers. This works fine as a defense of individual forms of scholarship but it is a poor response for the discipline as a whole. If a discipline becomes too insular, then knowledge accumulated through basic science will not percolate or will not speak to the most pertinent societal questions.
Yet, Desch’s understanding of relevance is too limited. First, if the purpose of social science is to ultimately produce knowledge that serves a social good then it is wrong to equate relevance with a narrow concern for U.S. national security policy. The burgeoning scholarship on the workings of international organizations, non-governmental organizations, private actors, and so on also deserves consideration. Political science scholarship may ask more confined questions but it has also broadened its scope considerably over the past half century.
Second, the disappearance of explicitly listed policy recommendations from scholarly articles does not mean that these articles don’t have policy relevance. Much scholarly work provides empirical context or conceptual foundations for policy debates. Policy recommendations based on research are often communicated through alternate outlets, like Foreign Affairs, op-eds, think tank briefs, crossover books, or blogs. This separation surely reflects professionalization but it should not be equated with the disappearance of relevant research.
Third, we should not care about the academy’s relevance per se but about its ability to provide pertinent knowledge that can improve societal outcomes. The goal should not be that political scientists are cited more by the New York Times, funded more by the government, or even appointed to more high-level government positions. The goal is to improve social outcomes by offering insights that are better grounded in empirical evidence and based on more solid conceptual foundations than that supplied by others, including the increasingly professionalized and expansive think tank sector.
This point is essential because the main villain in Desch’s narrative is the increased turn to sophisticated methodologies, especially formal modeling and quantitative methods. To Desch, the purpose of these methods appears to be little else than to obfuscate academic writing and to keep the laity out. Indeed, Desch categorizes formal modeling, statistics, and abstruse jargon all under the rubric “sophisticated social science methods,” thus seemingly discounting the possibility that sophisticated methods may actually yield better answers to questions.
To be sure, there is no deterministic relationship between the sophistication of a methodology and the soundness of empirical conclusions or the coherence of a theoretical argument. Yet many methodological advances are indeed concerned with drawing more valid inferences, including those that potentially benefit policymakers. Consider the recent turn towards more careful causal inference. This movement is shaped fundamentally by a desire to evaluate whether some social outcome of interest has improved as a consequence of a program or policy.
Fourth, it is an error to equate the grandness of a research question with policy relevance. There are grand debates that have little immediate policy relevance and many narrow questions that do. If there is any trend among the youngish crop of security scholars it is to ask precise policy-relevant questions and to answer these with sophisticated (quantitative or qualitative) methods that pay careful attention to measurement and causal inference. Indeed the U.S. government sponsored Minerva project, which Desch highlights, is responsible for funding many of these studies, which are often very rigorous and frequently quantitative.
Increased attention to statistics exists not just within the confines of the political science academy. Programs that train professionals in international affairs, including my own, now have required courses in statistics because students increasingly need these skills to compete for policy jobs. By singling out methodological rigor as the culprit, the movement to bridge the gap between scholars and policy makers runs the risk of alienating an important constituency of scholars who share the ostensible goals of the movement and who are meeting demands from parts of the policy community.
Desch acknowledges some of this scholarship in passing but argues that they are “at best ‘mixed benefit’ to policymakers.” That is an impossibly high standard that relies on an implicit comparison with an overly romantic version of what political science security research was like in the 1950s. Surely, there are and always have been difficulties communicating academic research to policymakers. Some of these will be exacerbated by the use of more complex methodologies. But there was never a time when U.S. academics had unfettered access to the government and gave them sound advice that was heeded all the time. The history of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War does not support such a rosy conclusion.
That said, Desch is correct that academics still have imperfect incentives to conduct research that addresses important societal problems and to ensure that this research reaches broader audiences. Unlike Desch, I believe that the trend over the past decade and a half has been positive. Yet, there are still many areas for improvement, including the academic publishing process. With several co-editors I have recently founded a new journal, Research and Politics, which caters to academic incentives by offering quality control through peer review while publishing short open access articles that are easy to find and be read by outsiders. The underlying model is to break the boundaries while maintaining the rigor. I do not expect this to be easy but it is a better bet than hoping that political science returns to (some romanticized version of) what it was like in the 1950s.
