How Political Science Became Irrelevant

David Cutler for The Chronicle

In a 2008 speech to the Association of American Universities, the former Texas A&M University president and then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates declared that “we must again embrace eggheads and ideas.” He went on to recall the role of universities as “vital centers of new research” during the Cold War. The late Thomas Schelling would have agreed. The Harvard economist and Nobel laureate once described “a wholly unprecedented ‘demand’ for the results of theoretical work. … Unlike any other country … the United States had a government permeable not only by academic ideas but by academic people.”

Gates’s efforts to bridge the gap between Beltway and ivory tower came at a time when it was growing wider, and indeed, that gap has continued to grow in the years since. According to a Teaching, Research & International Policy Project survey, a regular poll of international-relations scholars, very few believe they should not contribute to policy making in some way. Yet a majority also recognize that the state-of-the-art approaches of academic social science are precisely those approaches that policy makers find least helpful. A related poll of senior national-security decision-makers confirmed that, for the most part, academic social science is not giving them what they want.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that scholars increasingly privilege rigor over relevance. That has become strikingly apparent in the subfield of international security (the part of political science that once most successfully balanced those tensions), and has now fully permeated political science as a whole. This skewed set of intellectual priorities — and the field’s transition into a cult of the irrelevant — is the unintended result of disciplinary professionalization.

The decreasing relevance of political science flies in the face of a widespread and longstanding optimism about the compatibility of rigorous social science and policy relevance that goes back to the Progressive Era and the very dawn of modern American social science. One of the most important figures in the early development of political science, the University of Chicago’s Charles Merriam, epitomized the ambivalence among political scientists as to whether what they did was “social science as activism or technique,” as the American-studies scholar Mark C. Smith put it. Later, the growing tension between rigor and relevance would lead to what David M. Ricci termed the “tragedy of political science": As the discipline sought to become more scientific, in part to better address society’s ills, it became less practically relevant.

When political scientists seek rigor, they increasingly conflate it with the use of particular methods such as statistics or formal modeling. The sociologist Leslie A. White captured that ethos as early as 1943:

We may thus gauge the ‘scientific-ness’ of a study by observing the extent to which it employs mathematics — the more mathematics the more scientific the study. Physics is the most mature of the sciences, and it is also the most mathematical. Sociology is the least mature of the sciences and uses very little mathematics. To make sociology scientific, therefore, we should make it mathematical.

Relevance, in contrast, is gauged by whether scholarship contributes to the making of policy decisions.

That increasing tendency to embrace methods and models for their own sake rather than because they can help us answer substantively important questions is, I believe, a misstep for the field. This trend is in part the result of the otherwise normal and productive workings of science, but it is also reinforced by less legitimate motives, particularly organizational self-interest and the particularities of our intellectual culture.

While the use of statistics and formal models is not by definition irrelevant, their edging out of qualitative approaches has over time made the discipline less relevant to policy makers. Many pressing policy questions are not readily amenable to the preferred methodological tools of political scientists. Qualitative case studies most often produce the research that policy makers need, and yet the field is moving away from them.

In addition to the growing dogma among many political scientists that scholars can achieve rigor only by using a narrow set of techniques, other factors compound today’s cult of the irrelevant. For instance, many social scientists eschew policy relevance on the grounds that it is incompatible with scientific objectivity. Objectivity, for them, means that social-science research has to be “value-free,” concerning itself only with establishing and analyzing the facts about what “is” and avoiding any discussion of what “ought” to be. A social-scientific consensus has emerged: Objectivity precludes policy engagement because the latter is inextricably linked with questions of value.

Imitating the natural sciences, the social sciences have increasingly equated “science” with pure research, or knowledge for its own sake. The political scientists Jeffry Frieden and David Lake declare that “only when international relations brings science to the discussion does it have anything of enduring value to offer, beyond informed opinion.” Others, such as Andrew Bennett and John Ikenberry, remain optimistic that the pursuit of pure research will nevertheless produce applied knowledge through some unspecified “trickle-down” process. But their confidence is based more on faith than on any evidence that basic research flows to policy makers so smoothly.

Concern that social science has disengaged from practical affairs is not new. Books like Robert Staughton Lynd’s 1939 Knowledge for What? and Ian Shapiro’s 2005 Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences sounded the alarm. And yet, left to their own devices, professors tend to resolve tensions between rigor and relevance by favoring the former. In an influential book on research design, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba stipulate that “a proposed topic that cannot be refined into a specific research project permitting valid descriptive or causal inference should be modified along the way or abandoned.” When faced with tensions between the demands of science and “mere relevance” (in John Gerring’s phrase), political scientists tend to bow before the demands of method rather than accede to the importance of the question itself. Why?

One reason, as Emile Durkheim famously argued, is that the division of labor is a fundamental fact of modern life because it is an efficient way to accomplish a variety of complex tasks. This growing specialization advances science through deeper investigations focused on increasingly narrow questions.

Such progress, however, comes at the cost of isolating various specialties from one another and from society as a whole. Friedrich Nietzsche elaborated: “A specialist in science gets to resemble nothing so much as a factory workman who spends his whole life in turning one particular screw or handle on a certain instrument or machine, at which occupation he acquires the most consummate skill.” The result is a hyperfragmentation of knowledge that now makes it difficult for even scholars in different disciplines to understand one another, much less policy makers and the public. We have become those Nietzschean factory workers, hammering away on our particular parts, while our factories as a whole produce less and less of use to society.

Another of the hallmarks of professionalism is “corporateness,” which Samuel Huntington defined as “a sense of organic unity and consciousness of themselves as a group apart from laymen.” Universities, like most other complex organizations, seek autonomy, reduction of uncertainty, and more resources. When those goals conflict, organizations almost always prefer autonomy. The desire to remain independent — above politics and the policy fray — reinforces irrelevance.

Organizational interest also encourages scholars to separate themselves from nonspecialists by using jargon and other modes of discourse that are incomprehensible to the public. Sophisticated social-science methods, often accompanied by abstruse jargon, offer an ideal barrier to entry for the nonprofessional because they take considerable investment in time and effort to learn. Speaking within the guild helps make the university more distinct from, and hence independent of, the rest of society. One does not have to be as cynical as George Bernard Shaw, who quipped that “all professions are conspiracies against the laity,” to believe that the social-scientific withdrawal from relevance is fostered by disciplinary self-interest.

The key mechanism through which social science has become homogenous, and often less concerned with issues of broader concern, is peer review. The former American Political Science Review editor Lee Sigelman assembled data showing that the policy relevance of articles published in the APSR declined precipitously after peer review was introduced. He lamented that, “by the early 1960s, prescription had almost entirely vanished from the Review. If ‘speaking truth to power’ and contributing directly to public dialogue about the merits and demerits of various courses of action were still numbered among the functions of the profession, one would not have known it from leafing through its leading journal.”

I am not arguing that quantitative scholarship is by definition irrelevant. And yet, the increasing tendency to equate rigor with particular techniques imposes real costs on the rest of society as well as on the discipline. As a society, we run into trouble when we lack policy-relevant academic perspectives. Indeed, there are instances — the war in Vietnam, the recent Iraq War — in which, had the majority consensus of scholars influenced policy, the country’s national interest would have been better served. Social science has a role to play in the most important policy debates regardless of whether it happens to use the most scientific methodology.

Greater attention to policy relevance also produces better scholarship. For one thing, it leads to more realistic theorizing. It also helps social scientists focus on things that human agency can change, which ensures greater variation in variables, and in turn makes it easier to understand their relationships. A deeper and more regular engagement between the ivory tower and the Beltway will be mutually beneficial for both.

Greater relevance is also in our discipline’s interest, as even the most rigorous social science will ultimately be judged by what it tells us about things that affect the lives of large numbers of people. An article in Science in the late 1960s cautioned that “to the extent that the research community disdains work on major national missions or behaves self-servingly in mission-oriented work, anti-intellectualism will increase its influence on the fate of American science.” More recently, congressional reservations about National Science Foundation funding for political science highlighted the direct costs to the field for not being able to justify itself in terms of broader societal impact.

Last but not least, we should recognize political science’s ethical obligation to address problems of concern to the rest of society. Harvard’s Robert Putnam stated this eloquently in his 2002 American Political Science Association presidential address: “I believe that attending to the concerns of our fellow citizens is not just an optional add-on for the profession of political science, but an obligation as fundamental as our pursuit of scientific truth.” It is well past time for the rest of the discipline to follow his lead.

Michael C. Desch is a professor of international relations at the University of Notre Dame. This essay is adapted from his new book, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press).