The Monkey Cage has just received what I believe to be its first mention in an academic article. Robert Adcock (a political theorist here at GWU) has an interesting piece (paywalled) in the new Journal of Theoretical Politics talking about whether political scientists are, or ought to be contributing to our practical understanding of politics.
A discussion that presumes or implies that political science does not currently matter starts off, I believe, on the wrong foot. … Hawkesworth thus singles out democratization studies and their relationship to transitions away from authoritarian rule which occurred in Latin America, Africa, and the former Soviet sphere in the 1980s and 1990s. Disciplinary knowledge production in this field supported political and economic policy prescriptions for democratizing states, and political scientists were, moreover, able to present these prescriptions to relevant actors through ‘consultancies as well as full-time employment in international agencies’ … Our last Secretary of State is, after all, a member of Stanford’s political science department. And, for a perhaps less controversial example, we can point to the service at the United Nations of Harvard’s John Ruggie, who is currently the Secretary General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights … readers might read James Fearon’s congressional testimony applying social science findings about civil wars to the case of Iraq.
Scholars of American politics are, for the most part, keen to stay at some remove from partisan politics, but they often do respond to media requests to comment on current events. In doing so these political scientists hope, I would suspect, to do what they can to improve public discourse, though they are far from naive about the difficulties involved. This interest has, more recently, led some scholars to take a more proactive role as contributors to the blogosphere (see, for example, www.themonkeycage.com (sic) started by several political scientists at the George Washington University).
This raises some interesting questions. When John wrote the initial launch post for the Monkey Cage, the clear emphasis, as I read it, was not on changing political science to make it more relevant to the world, so much as changing the public debate on politics to make it more evidence-focused. Hence, for example, John’s disgruntlement as expressed below. But the two, to some extent, go hand-in-hand. One of the things that’s become clearer to us over the last year and a bit is that it’s not always easy to translate between political science and political commentary. Terminology and concepts that seem clear to us as political scientists don’t necessarily translate that well into public debate. The topics that are most important to the broader public debate are often the most difficult to write about as political scientists [1] because they are the most contested, and hence the most sensitive. Hence, it’s necessary to change the ways in which political scientists write (at least for a public audience) if they want to contribute to public debates.
I don’t have any immediate answers as to how precisely they should do this, except to highlight Robert’s suggestion that there are many possible avenue, perhaps of varying efficacy, through which political scientists can speak to broader audiences.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) stands out as an example credentialed as phronetic by Flyvbjerg (2006) himself. But the kind of work I have in mind is also exemplified in Samuel Huntington’s best-selling Clash of Civilizations (1996), and his more recent Who Are We? (2004). Further examples include Theda Skocpol’s Boomerang (1997) and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Off Center (2005). And, as a variation on the genre, we could also consider the American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality report collectively produced by the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy (2004), which Skopcol established during her term as APSA President.
These are only suggestive, not exhaustive, examples. But they suffice to ground some key take-home observations. First, phronetic inquiry is not alien to contemporary American political science or welcome only in the discipline’s margins. Prominent political scientists housed in prestigious departments have been involved in such work in recent years, either as individuals or as task-force participants. Second, phronetic work presupposes no particular political alignment. If Huntington is conservative, Pierson and Hacker are progressive liberals, and APSA’s Task Force carried a torch for that venerable old social science ideal of non-partisan expertise. Third, as I have stressed, aspiring to engage nonacademic audiences is different from actually doing so. My few examples vary quite dramatically in their success in finding a reception outside (or, for that matter, inside) the academy. The APSA Task Force’s report fell far short of being the hit among the chattering classes that Clash of Civilizations was. We cannot begin to think clearly about the promise and pitfalls of phronetic inquiry
if we do not frankly recognize that there is only a partial and contingent overlap between phronetic political science and political science that matters.
While I think that Robert is a bit harsh on the APSA Taskforce Report (which I suspect has had a significant indirect effect in encouraging political scientists to work on issues of inequality), there’s some interesting suggestions here. I’ll try to talk through them in a later post.
[1] Of course, cheerfully partial writing with a added dash of political science (a practice which I indulge in myself elsewhere) is a lot easier to carry off.
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Maybe people are over thinking this. It seems that the a major contribution that poli sci folks could make to politics is simple…do politics. I mean, people who are not political scientists do not get bent out of shape trying to think about the existential questions of what it means to do politics (well, not in this way at least) with what skills they have, they just ask folks that need help and/or just do it. The same goes for helping people with a practical understanding politics. Is this hang up because, as Patrick Kittenboo Jackson confesses in his essay (co-authored)(http://kittenboo.com/blog/about/ptj-publications/) about “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy,” that people are worried about some sort of, I don’t honestly know what actually, contamination? Or loss of respect by peers that do not share your politics? I guess you could do it in your free time if there are professional constraints, but otherwise, I don’t see what the fuss is about. Is this making sense?
I guess I look more towards Wittgenstein’s atttitude on helping people explore clarity in their analysis than Flyvbjerg’s work which makes strawmen out of traditional analysis, which is really not all that bad and very useful in the right hands.
Regarding the APSA Taskforce: If their work didn’t amount to much (and I don’t know if it did or did not), then it was because they didn’t do it well; maybe timidity has something to do with it; or maybe studying politics is to doing politics like studying nutrition and food science is to cooking.
-Doug
Another possibility, is that people forgo trying to be the next Big Author, and just include in some of their work analysis that is revelant to reformers and actors. Many of the chapters in “Democracy in the States: Experiments in Election Reform” Cain, Donovan and Tolbert (eds.) for instance, fall into this category. However, such documents are not likely get work their way around to all the people that need them (even if the publisher, in this case Brookings, puts media staff on it). So there is still some “communicating” researchers could do to make sure folks who may need or want the results of the researchers’ labor hear about it.
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