After Trump’s Election, Political Scientists Feel New Urgency

Steffen Jänicke

Since Donald J. Trump was elected president, Yascha Mounk, a lecturer in political theory at Harvard University, has fielded calls from reporters, government officials, and think tanks.

Some callers are interested in the factors that fueled Mr. Trump’s victory, but most have a more existential concern: Is liberal democracy under threat?

Political scientists are in the midst of an important moment, he said. As people outside academe look to scholars for answers, it’s more important than ever for political scientists to rethink what questions their research seeks to answer. Questions that offer solutions to saving and understanding Western democracies, the type of work Mr. Mounk does, may become more valuable in the world of academe than they were before, he said.

Hopefully, the election will change scholarly priorities, he said, and more research will try to answer relevant and immediate questions. “The reason why I study political science is I want to make a contribution to saving liberal democracy,” Mr. Mounk said.

Corey L. Brettschneider, a political-science professor at Brown University, said that scholars who study democracies have a new obligation to not present research as too distant or abstract. He makes sure that when he writes op-eds or talks to reporters, students, and friends about his work, it’s applicable to today’s political problems.

For example, during a Trump presidency, scholars studying federalism might feel compelled to contextualize their work or expand on their research to illustrate how, for example, sanctuary cities may be resisting federal policies.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to politics in the digital age, said the field of political science was becoming too insular, and he’s already seeing a shift in direction. “When we’re in an unfamiliar situation,” he said, “we start to ask much bigger questions.”

As scholars sense an urgency to engage with standard questions in different ways, universities might be more open to rewarding that type of research, Mr. Drutman said.

Vanessa Williamson, a governance-studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank, said that during the presidential campaign, she noticed more conference sessions aimed at framing political-science research in light of current events.

Ms. Williams said her work at Brookings had accustomed her to conducting and presenting her research for the public, not academe, but now she hopes all political scientists can take advantage of the field’s heightened relevance.

Larger Questions

But changing age-old academic standards is a tough feat, Mr. Mounk said. Political science doesn’t always prioritize research the public may be concerned about, like larger questions about how government structures work and how to sustain them. “At the moment the field applies this uniform methodological bar by which it judges what’s good work,” Mr. Mounk said. “It’s led by methods rather than by important questions.”

For example, journals or academic programs don’t always value when scholars focus their work on research that addresses larger questions, like Americans’ support for liberal democracies, Mr. Mounk said. But such research is more important now than ever, even if there aren’t always professional rewards for it, he said.

Instead of focusing on questions like why a certain type of government exists or how it can survive, scholars fall into the pattern of adding incremental information to existing research, he said.

To change the field, more scholars and graduate students should focus on a range of issues and not be constrained by what other political scientists are doing, even though that range may not always be valued professionally, Mr. Mounk said. And to make changes in the field sustainable, universities need to prioritize research that differs from political-science standards.

As director of the Scholars Strategy Network, Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, has been trying to show the public how scholarly work can be relevant to questions or policies in neighborhoods and communities. In 2012, Ms. Skocpol also wrote a book with Ms. Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, that explains the Tea Party’s rise, effect on politics, and future.

November’s election has only further motivated her to try to figure out how Mr. Trump won, by using research methods that aren’t typically employed in political science, Ms. Skocpol said.

In a letter to about 700 scholars in the network calling for relevant postelection research, Ms. Skocpol wrote, “Our roles as public scholars, as influential citizens, and as mentors for civically engaged young adults have never been more important than they are right now.”

She is putting those words into action. Ms. Skocpol and Katherine Swartz, a professor of health policy and economics at Harvard, are working on a study of economic and policy changes after the election in counties in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that voted for Mr. Trump. They plan to use not just quantitative research, as so many scholars have before, but also more qualitative research.

“Political science is too invested in big national data sets where we try to track politics, for example, by looking at the characteristics of individual voters as if they were potatoes in a sack,” Ms. Skocpol said. “This election made it clear that those kinds of data sets in polls are not very helpful, and that what you need to do is understand more of what you might call the geography in politics.”

As for the assumption that some nonacademics may distrust what political scientists have to say, Ms. Skocpol isn’t too worried. Even when she studied the Tea Party, a group that has fought to discredit climate-change research, she said, members were always willing to engage with her and her work.

It’s not just her research that’s changing, Ms. Skocpol said. She expects people in the Scholars Strategy Network to rethink what they are studying, how they are studying it, and how it will better serve the American electorate.

“I sense a feeling of urgency, at least here at Harvard,” Ms. Skocpol said. “And the urgency is on two dimensions: one is to understand things better, communicate with citizens more effectively. And the other is, what do we do about potential threats to fundamental principles of American democracy?”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz is a web writer. Follow her on Twitter @FernandaZamudio, or email her at fzamudiosuarez@chronicle.com.