Agatha Christie’s murder mystery The Mousetrap is the longest running play in history. Its first run began in 1952, and it hasn’t stopped since. Another perennial whodunnit — “Who Murdered Political Science” — is mounting a strong challenge for the runner up. Regularly repeated performances haven’t stopped audiences from enjoying the traditional denouement, in which the detective accuses Quantitative Methods and Game Theory of conspiring to bash the victim’s head in.
Discerning critics were unimpressed with Michael Desch’s recent “cult of the irrelevant” production, which played recently in this magazine. They found it too reminiscent of past stagings — all recycled quotes and stale nostalgia — and would have preferred a more novel interpretation. Even so, like Christie’s play, it’s a traditional crowd-pleaser.
All the old favorites are there for the audience to hiss at. Political scientists choosing rigor over relevance due to organizational self-interest. A spurned heroine: poor, ignored qualitative methods, that can provide the “research that policy makers need.” The embrace of sophisticated models “for their own sake rather than because they can help us answer substantively important questions.” Dogma. Value-free science at the cost of policy engagement. Incomprehensible jargon. A Gradgrindian system of peer review which mills the seeds of intellectual curiosity and engagement into a gray and finely powdered homogeneity.
The actual argument is not over whether political science ought to be useful: It is over how best it can be useful.
While most spectators will fail to understand the play within the play, cognoscenti will know that the public drama conceals a private dispute in international relations, where “rigor” and “relevance” have become the banners of two clashing approaches, one of which prizes hypothesis testing and specifically focused theories, while the other emphasizes grand strategy and big paradigms.
Desch is mistaken to suggest that the scholars whom he opposes, such as Jeffry Frieden and David Lake, equate science with pure research for its own sake. When Frieden and Lake can speak for themselves, they do not pursue science for the sake of science. Instead, they argue that political science will be more policy relevant if it is more rigorous. Lake furthermore insists that we need multiple disciplined perspectives on international problems because the costs of getting it wrong are too high in a world where “the human condition is precarious.” Tanisha Fazal finds substantial circumstantial evidence that quantitative scholars are engaging with and being engaged by the policy world. The actual disciplinary argument is not over whether political science ought to be useful: It is over how best it can be useful.
Desch’s understanding of relevance is also too narrow. He measures it by asking “whether scholarship contributes to the making of policy decisions,” and his major evidence of the field’s irrelevance is a poll of senior national-security policy makers who tend to think that academic social science is mostly not giving them what they want.
Political science is better than Desch thinks at communicating with policy makers, thanks in part to projects such as Bridging the Gap, which helps train scholars in how to find audiences for their work. Yet this is only one form of engagement. Another is exemplified by a classic of international relations: Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s Activists Beyond Borders (Cornell University Press, 1998). Keck and Sikkink are neither disinterested nor disengaged — rather, they want to change the world. However, the way that they help people work toward that change is through explaining how non-state activists can coordinate across national boundaries, to put indirect pressure on state policy makers who would otherwise ignore local human-rights groups. Keck and Sikkink’s book is qualitative, but it has received over 14,000 citations on Google Scholar.
While it is useful, in a self-interested way, for traditionalist national-security scholars to measure relevance as engagement with policy makers, there are other, and more important forms of relevance (as Robert Putnam suggests in an address that Desch mentions). Political science will never again be a finishing school for foreign-policy grandees, nor should it be (the end results were never that great). But it can, and should, engage in genuine dialogue with the public.
This would start by building on what is already there. Political science, far from lapsing into a cult of irrelevance, is arguably more directly engaged with the public than it has been in generations. The stigma attached to writing for a broader public is falling away. Senior faculty are unlikely to punish junior scholars’ tenure chances when they and their colleagues are publishing in the same public venues.
Thus, for example, via The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, a blog that one of us helps edit, nearly 3,500 political scientists have had articles published in a major national newspaper. Many of these articles are based on quantitative research, or present quantitative findings. The public don’t seem particularly perturbed by this. Indeed, anecdotal experience would suggest that no article is more likely to demonstrate public interest than a well-timed quantitative finding that’s directly relevant to public debate.
As program chairs of the 2018 American Political Science Association (APSA) annual convention, which focused on “Democracy and Its Discontents,” Anna Grzymala-Busse and Farrell deliberately set out to create panels that brought political science together with broader public arguments about the state of democracy. The response was enormous support from academics who wanted to engage. We live in difficult times for democracy, and scholars are citizens too.
Academic work can have relevance without any obvious policy consequences at all. Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues are painstakingly compiling records of protest activities during the Trump administration. These records have great quantitative value, creating a research resource that will be useful to scholars for decades to come. Yet they also have a more immediate political impact, even if they don’t have any obvious policy lessons. They help protesters to understand the size and momentum of their protests, potentially creating a feedback loop between organizing activities and visibility.
Chenoweth’s work speaks to the real challenge that confronts political science: engaging with the public. It is not difficult for political scientists to present research in policy-relevant ways, once they learn how. Polling of Monkey Cage authors finds that a high percentage of them report interest from policy makers and journalists in their articles. Working with the public is a far harder challenge, especially since the dialogue needs to go two ways.
In an often-misunderstood metaphor, the philosopher John Dewey called for a continued and lively conversation between social scientists and the general public, saying the shoe maker knows how to make a shoe, but it is the public who knows where the shoe pinches. Dewey did not mean that we should abandon expertise and embrace the public wisdom as a substitute. Instead, he meant that the two need to be in dialogue with each other. Social scientists can uncover the complex causal relationships behind the problems that afflict the public, but they need to know what these problems are. The public understands how the problem pinches, even if they do not always understand how the problem came to be.
This kind of dialogue is hard to create, but it is vital. Today’s challenges go far beyond the foreign-policy questions that vex Desch and others. They encompass the failings of democracy, the problems of globalization, and a myriad of other urgent issues.
Jessica Green, for example, argues that political scientists need to recognize that they are in a “unique position to participate in political debates” on global warming, laying bare the “entrenched economic interests” that prevent concerted action, and engaging with the public about the power asymmetries that stymie mass politics. Green acknowledges how hard real public engagement is — “making complex ideas readily digestible for a lay audience is perhaps the most difficult kind of teaching.” But she also emphasizes the urgency of the challenge. Global warming is coming. The politics are going to be awful. And political scientists have a role to play in preparing the public for them.
Addressing such challenges is excruciatingly hard. It would be far easier to mount yet another production of academic melodrama, updated perhaps with new examples of out-of-touch research and dismissive quotes from policy makers. The intra-disciplinary rewards — cheers from supporters; a couple of points scored against adversaries — are modest but predictable. But if political science really wants to be as relevant as it needs to be, it must move beyond the public dramatization of internal feuds. The real problems that political science needs to engage are in the street outside the theater.
Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is on Twitter at @henryfarrell . Jack Knight is a professor of law and political science at Duke University.
