{"id":19288,"date":"2013-02-18T18:41:14","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T18:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=19288"},"modified":"2013-02-18T18:41:39","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T18:41:39","slug":"elkus-on-policy-relevance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=19288","title":{"rendered":"Elkus on Policy Relevance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intriguing and vigorously argued piece by Adam<\/strong> over at Abu Muqawama<\/strong><\/p>\n

Relevant to Policy?<\/a><\/h4>\n

Are we in a\u00a01914 scenario<\/a>\u00a0in East Asia? How\u00a0often do guerrillas succeed<\/a>? Did\u00a0counterterrorism law erode national sovereignty<\/a>? These are just a few of the important questions that political science has some bearing on. Yet barely a couple months goes by without an op-ed decrying political science’s alleged lack of relevance to the outside world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Political scientists are frequently told their research is too arcane, mathematical, and self-involved to be of possible value to anyone in Washington dealing with real-world policy problems. There’s a grain of truth here. As international political economy whiz Kindred Winecoff\u00a0observes<\/a>, political scientists need to make a better \u201celevator pitch.” But here’s the problem: at the end of the day, there is a difference between what Max Weber dubbed\u00a0science as a vocation<\/a>\u00a0and the subjective\u00a0policy lessons<\/em>\u00a0we can take from our study. Part of that gap is reflected in the\u00a0difficulties<\/a>\u00a0that people with purely policy interests inevitably encounter in PhD programs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

From my own (minor) experience so far, it is grueling, necessitates the assimilation of difficult methodologies, and involves having to think about intellectual questions that many people would regard as hopelessly arcane. Even a good PhD program that directly tackles policy questions will likely demand the student grapple with questions of esoteric theory and method. And not all research that tackles highly abstract questions is policy-irrelevant.\u00a0Highly technical analysis of game theory and economics<\/a>\u00a0generated useful policy applications form the World War II convoy system to nuclear strategy and wargaming.<\/strong><\/p>\n

All of these advances began from the desire to grapple with difficult questions to produce knowledge, something many critics of political science research do not acknowledge. Take Greg Ferenstein,\u00a0who penned an article supporting Eric Cantor’s call to defund the NSF<\/a>. His gripe is familiar. Political science is obscuratist, hyper-mathematical, and disconnected from the policy world. Political scientists don’t do enough to make their research accessible to policymakers. Ferenstein wants a political science that his\u00a0mother-in-law can understand<\/a>, and he thinks starving academia of resources will motivate hungry researchers to do better. So is modern political science irrelevant to policy needs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Contra Ferenstein, policymakers have thrown substantial $$ at the kind of research he regards as navel-gazing arcana. The RAND Corporation got a lot of mileage using what Ferenstein derides as “clever mathematical models” during the Cold War.\u00a0 I’m not sure that\u00a0Jay Ulfelder<\/a>, who worked for the intelligence community-funded Political Instability Task Force, would agree that his quantitative forecasting methodologies must pass a mother-in-law test to be valuable. And when New York University’s game theory guru Bruce Bueno De Mesquita\u00a0speaks,<\/a>\u00a0the CIA listens.\u00a0Drew Conway<\/a>, a man that could easily teach a\u00a0computer programming\u00a0<\/em>course just as well as poli-sci 101, gives invited talks at West Point on analyzing terrorist networks. I don’t think Ulfelder, Mesquita, or Conway have sleepless nights pondering the relevance of their research to the govermment!<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

As an aside, I have found Ulfelder’s posts on his research or comments on the field at Dart Throwing Chimp<\/a><\/strong> to be very useful and worth reading.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intriguing and vigorously argued piece by Adam over at Abu Muqawama Relevant to Policy? Are we in a\u00a01914 scenario\u00a0in East Asia? How\u00a0often do guerrillas succeed? Did\u00a0counterterrorism law erode national sovereignty? These are just a few of the important questions that political science has some bearing on. Yet barely a couple months goes by without an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[516,216,662,129,321,601,651,425,78,336,270,187,558,381,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ae","category-academia","category-blog-friends","category-blogging","category-blogosphere","category-cnas","category-debate","category-government","category-ideas","category-intellectuals","category-national-security","category-politics","category-social-science","category-society","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19288"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19290,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19288\/revisions\/19290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}