MY JOURNEY

In 2007, done with my coursework, I was eager to return to Washington, where I had worked before going to grad school. I went back to DC to interview lobbyists for my dissertation, working out of the University of California’s Washington, DC center. I then did a Brookings Research Fellowship, followed by an APSA Congressional Research Fellowship. Working in Congress, the comparison with academia felt particularly stark. In Congress, I often quipped, people spent very little time thinking about questions that mattered to hundreds of millions of people; in the academy, people spent lots of time thinking about questions that mattered to a few dozen people.

I learned that policy people in Washington ignored much of what academic political science produced because it was often so encrusted in its own internal debates and language as to be unapproachable to outsiders. The academy’s deep investments in hedgehog-like thinking meant it had a hard time speaking the fox-thinking language of Washington policy people, who tended to be generalists.

For someone like myself, with fox-like aspirations, there was no obvious home as I finished my PhD. I didn’t feel that academia was the right fit. But I worried that too much of the analysis and writing in Washington was far too general. It was fox-like, yes, but often too fox-like, lacking any sense of academic rigor. If academics are far too cautious about what counts as a defensible inference, DC policy types and writers are too often anything but.

The big opportunity for me came in 2011, when I went to the Sunlight Foundation (a DC data and transparency organization) and started doing what would be best described as “data journalism,” writing short-to-medium length analyses that comprised a few key findings, primarily descriptive in nature, mostly on the topic of lobbying and money in politics.

As I began doing this writing, I soon realized there was a big space to write general interest political science-grounded essays with data. I’d put up a piece on the Sunlight Foundation blog, and it would be referenced in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, etc. I was on NPR. I was working with This American Life and Planet Money on a big piece on money in politics. Reporters were calling me for comment. This was fun! The Sunlight Foundation was also generous enough to give me time to turn my dissertation on the growth of corporate lobbying into a book, The Business of America is Lobbying, which Oxford University Press published in 2015.

In writing my essays with data, I had no quasi-experimental designs, no regression discontinuities or natural experiments, nothing innovative or “clever.” There was not much I could publish in an academic journal. But that was just fine with me. I felt as though I was making important descriptive observations, posing worthwhile questions (even if I didn’t “nail” anything). I didn’t have to spend two years navigating “peer review” only to see it finally published and therefore locked into obscurity behind a paywall. I just put what I wrote online, and if folks found my writing interesting and compelling, they’d share it, and discuss it. If not, they’d pass over it. I could participate in a policy debate in real time.

In October 2014, I took a position as senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, a DC think tank. I now write my short, wide-ranging essays for Vox (on a blog called Polyarchy), increasingly branching out beyond my initial expertise in lobbying and money-in-politics (becoming more of the fox I always wanted to be). I’m also getting started on a new book project that will attempt to answer the following question: if our political system were working as well as we can reasonably expect, what would that look like? It’s the kind of normative, big-picture book I would never start if I were worried about tenure.

After some initial struggles, I’ve found this career path incredibly rewarding. But it’s also clear to me that I would have never had these particular opportunities had I not done my PhD in political science. For one, getting a PhD greatly sharpened my analytical mind, teaching me how to think like a social scientist. For another, I learned not only the data skills that have been so valuable, but more deeply, I gained a love and appreciation for the power and potential of data that I didn’t have before.

THE ADVICE PART

My experience has largely been in the DC policy world, and in particular, at the intersection of think tanks, advocacy, and journalism, so my advice is largely influenced by the world I now know. But with that caveat, here’s my basic advice for those who want to break into the DC policy world from academia.

The first thing to know is that, unlike the academic job market, there is nothing resembling a standard pathway. One has to improvise a little, finding opportunities where they lie, and sometimes creating them where they are possible. But skills matter, and in my experience, six skills have come in particularly handy, only one of which PhD students typically acquire in their coursework.

PUBLIC SPEAKING

Academics largely communicate their work through difficult-to-parse academic papers (see above) and the occasional awkward conference presentation that contains far too many slides with far too much text (“I see we’re almost out of time, so let me skip through these 10 slides and just conclude by saying…”).

The Washington policy world involves many presentations, panels, and broadcast interviews. For those who can take advantage, these are great opportunities. To convey your ideas in a lively and clear presentation is a tremendous advantage. Again, one must be willing to sacrifice a certain amount of “seriousness” and somewhat simplify ideas into accessible, digestible pieces.