As conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have brought public attention to the problem of mass rapes, Dara Kay Cohen has fielded calls from the news media, advocacy groups, and think tanks about the policy implications of her research.
But public interest in her studies of sexual violence during war presents a challenge: Her research doesn’t offer the neat and tidy answers that policy makers and pundits seek.
“I’m trained to pitch a general argument on rape in wartime,” says Ms. Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “But I would be asked very specific questions on what happened last month in the DRC, and how does my research speak to that? I find that a very difficult divide to bridge.”
For guidance she turned to the International Policy Summer Institute, at American University. The institute is one of a growing number of projects designed to connect academics to policy makers and the public.
While some of the efforts focus on international affairs, they speak to a widely held belief in political science—and perhaps the social sciences broadly—that academics need to do better at making their research relevant to, and understood by, the public.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have put their support behind some of the programs, which include the Tobin Project, based in Cambridge, Mass., and the New Era Foreign Policy Conference, run out of American University.
The programs differ in structure and purpose, but all seek to open doors for academics interested in building a platform outside of academe. Underlying the efforts is a longstanding concern that the divide between policy makers and academics has become more difficult to cross. A seminal book by the late Alexander L. George, of Stanford University, published 20 years ago, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, described how policy makers dismissed academic theory as eye-glazingly dull, while scholars “exaggerate[d] the importance of analytic rationality” as the basis for policy.
To politicians, in short, statecraft was an art; to scholars, it was a science. Those perspectives have changed little since then.
“Advancement comes faster for those who develop mathematical models, new methodologies, or theories expressed in jargon that is unintelligible to policy makers,” wrote Joseph S. Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School, in a 2009 Washington Post op-ed essay scolding his peers in political science for ignoring the policy problems of the day.
He cited a survey of international-relations scholars by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy Project at the College of William & Mary. It found that only 39 percent of respondents believed that policy makers would find their case studies “useful.”
In the latest edition of the survey, released last year, 85 percent of American scholars thought the gap between what academics produce and what the policy community finds useful was larger than or the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago.
And 92 percent agreed that there needed to be more links between the two communities.
The lack of impact, in other words, is not for lack of interest.
Value of Expertise
Many political scientists say the culprit is a tenure-and-promotion system that values theoretical, mathematically based research, which few people understand. Given that the system is unlikely to change anytime soon, the bridging-the-gap crowd tries to teach scholars to work within it.
At the International Policy Summer Institute, where Ms. Cohen spent a week in June, scholars met people from Washington foundations, think tanks, federal agencies, Congress, and news media.
“There are three avenues we promote,” says James M. Goldgeier, dean of American University’s School of International Service, who helps lead the program. “One is what are the important questions? Second, what do policy makers need from academics? ... Third is how do you write for venues that policy makers might be reading?”
One point Mr. Goldgeier and the other speakers emphasized is how little time policy makers have to study the problems they are expected to solve: Scholarly journals simply are not on their reading lists.
A forthcoming paper in International Studies Quarterly, “What Do Policymakers Want From Us?,” illustrates the point. Surveying national-security “decision makers,” the authors found that research was useful largely as “intellectual background,” and that scholars could be most valuable as “informal advisers.”
On the bright side, “it’s clear there’s a potential market for the product that scholars produce,” says Michael C. Desch, chairman of the political-science department at the University of Notre Dame, a co-author of the paper.
Academic expertise is a valuable currency because what researchers may think is obvious—or, at least, well known—about, say, the effectiveness of sanctions may not be obvious to the people deciding whether or not to impose them. That’s something think tanks—whose Ph.D.-wielding experts have become the go-to intellectuals in Washington—learned long ago.
When it comes to getting policy makers’ attention, “networking and translating are in some ways more important than the research you’re doing,” says Brent Durbin, an associate professor of government at Smith College, who helps lead the summer institute. “Finding out who would want this and how to get to them is the fundamental problem that scholars often face.”
Another outreach project, the Scholars Strategy Network, was created “for academics who were not going to go to think tanks or to Washington or a state capital,” says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who directs the network.
Ms. Skocpol helps aspiring participants write a required two-page brief. “Believe me,” she says, “it’s not an easy thing for a professor to write two pages of plain English.”
She and the network’s paid staff of three also look for opportunities for scholars to write, speak, and network on issues important to them. In New Mexico, network members sponsored events with local groups on immigrant labor and on the Affordable Care Act. That opened doors to other community groups, newspaper editors, and state legislators.
Ms. Skocpol says the biggest concern about joining the network comes from younger scholars who “want to be assured that they’re not going to be violating what their mentors have told them: that they have to spend most of their time on their research.”
Her answer is simple: Take that journal article you just published and write a two-page brief that introduces your work to a broader audience. “Once people hear that, their eyes light up,” she says.
But even advocates of public outreach acknowledge skepticism in academe toward op-eds, blogging, and other consumer-friendly writing.
“The clear dividing line here is tenure,” says Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Diplomacy who blogs at Foreign Policy. “If you have tenure, none of this matters. You can write anything you want.”
Mr. Drezner used to teach at the University of Chicago, where anything he wrote for a general audience, he says, “would be met with studied silence.”
He was denied tenure there, and while he can’t blame it on his nascent blogging career, he knows it didn’t help.
Advise and Back Off
Will those programs have a substantial impact? Even some who believe that academics should be writing more policy-relevant material think it’s unlikely that doing so will result in tangible influence.
“I’m extremely skeptical of the notion that there’s some repository of wisdom residing in academia, which, if only policy makers paid attention, would provide us with a much more effective foreign policy,” says Stephen D. Krasner, a professor of international studies and deputy director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, at Stanford University.
Mr. Krasner has a special vantage point: From 2005 to 2007 he was director of policy planning at the State Department.
Scholars can do two things well, he says: Provide empirical evidence about what has happened, and offer a conceptual framework through which to understand it.
Back at the Kennedy School, Ms. Cohen has come to a similar conclusion about her work. She has learned how to finesse interviews so as not to be cornered into offering policy solutions she can’t give. And she knows she can provide the background that policy makers and the public lack.
For example, she says, the mass rapes in Rwanda and Bosnia were actually quite unusual: ordered from the top down and highly organized. “Most cases of rape in wartime don’t look like that,” she notes.
Those conclusions mirror what the survey of policy makers found: They want the advice and information that academics can supply. But leave it to them to make the policy decisions.
4 Efforts to ‘Bridge the Gap’
International Policy Summer Institute
Where: American University
Started: 2011
Purpose: A weeklong professional-development program for professors and postdocs in international affairs who want to “produce and disseminate policy-relevant research.”
Key supporters: School of International Service at American University, University of California at Berkeley, and Duke University, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
New Era Foreign Policy Conference
Where: American University
Started: 2006
Purpose: Two-day workshop for Ph.D. students in political science, postdocs, and foreign-policy experts to build networks and develop ideas for new research.
Key supporters: School of International Service at American University, University of California at Berkeley, and Duke University, with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Scholars Strategy Network
Where: Based in Cambridge, Mass., with regional networks
Started: 2009
Purpose: To bring together scholars to address “pressing public challenges” at the national, state, and local levels, through writing, speaking, and consultation.
Key supporters: Two members of the group’s steering committee provide financial support.
Tobin Project
Where: Based in Cambridge, Mass., but consists of a network of scholars at universities around the United States.
Started: 2005
Purpose: A nonprofit organization dedicated to “transformative research” that brings together policy makers and scholars across disciplines.
Key supporters: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York.
