I just returned from a week long program at American University called Bridging the Gap: the International Policy Summer Institute (IPSI). Organized by the new Dean of AU’s School of International Service Jim Goldgeier, Duke’s Bruce Jentleson, Berkeley’s Steve Weber, and Smith College’s Brent Durbin, this was the faculty complement to the New Era program for graduate students that initially started at Berkeley several years ago by Steve, Brent, Ely Ratner, and Naazneen Barma.
For those who haven’t had a chance to participate in either program, I highly recommend them both. While the New Era conference focuses on a policy simulation, the IPSI program was all about skills building so that academics can learn how to publish and participate in policy-relevant venues with briefings from bloggers, journal and newspaper editors, media consultants, in-and- outers from the academic world, and practitioners. As in many of these intensive institutes, the best part was the amazing cohort of fellow participants. *See below the fold for a full list of this year’s participants.
In this post, I thought I’d explore the core substantive question at the heart of the IPSI program. Can policymakers learn from political scientists?
The recent efforts by the U.S. House to defund the NSF political science programs make these concerns all the more salient (for brilliant coverage, see the Monkey Cage blog here, here among a number of other posts).
How wide is the policy-academia gap?
The conventional wisdom is that the gap between academia and policy is wide and possibly getting wider. Scholars like Mike Desch and Steven Van Evera lament the “cult of the irrelevant,” in part driven by disciplinary pressures, methods fetishism, and the rise of think tanks.
From the academic perspective, some survey evidence suggests more desire for policy-relevant work and perceptions of a stable gap. The recent 2012 TRIPS study from William and Mary suggests that the perception by scholars is mixed. 39% of scholars surveys suggested that the gap is not any wider that in was 20-30 years ago. 23% said it was shrinking while 37% said the gap was growing (q. 58). Scholars also expressed strong support for policy relevant work (q. 59).
It’s unclear what policymakers think of political science. In some circles, “professor” is a term of derision. That said, scholars like Peter Feaver and Colin Kahl (both of whom briefed us last week at IPSI), among others, have had an opportunity to serve in important positions, many of them gaining their exposure through fellowships like the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship (IAF).
What can we offer?
At IPSI, we concluded that academics are good at context and analysis but are less equipped, given their distance from the policy process, to provide specific policy recommendations. Our work may lead us to conclude support this kind of policy rather than that one, but rarely are we able to offer policymakers what they really want — specific advice like spend X million dollars by that agency on Y policy. Because of information asymmetries and habit, we don’t know enough about particular policy instruments. We may be able to identify patterns that suggest democracies don’t fight wars with each other and elaborate a set of arguments about why this is so, but we are not well placed to tell the policymaking community what steps are needed to instantiate new democracies.
For someone sympathetic to the bridging the policy-academe gap, you might expect me to defend what contributions we can make. As Bob Jervis (who delivered the IPSI keynote) argued, I do think that our training may help us resist the temptations of bias, particularly the inappropriate use of decision short-cuts like historical analogies. In the best of circumstances, our critical thinking skills force us entertain alternative explanations and to look for observable implications of our argument. Those kinds of approaches may be useful in policymaking forcing decisionmakers to surface their assumptions about the likely consequences of their actions, “and then what?”
Not much?
However, while we may be able to offer policymakers some habits and methods that are healthy, we should be modest in our expectations of what influence any of us individually will likely have. There are many reasons to think that most of our work, even if framed as policy relevant, will never be read by anyone with influence on policy.
Too long. While academic work tends to be long, most policy writing is short. By short, I mean one to two pages.
Too much jargon. Moreover, we all know that academic writing favors jargon. We make a living coining neologisms. Formal and quantitative work were singled out for being less accessible than other political science, but other scholarship is hardly immune from being unintelligible.
Too far away and far removed. Furthermore, a whole cadre of PhD-bearing experts now exists as a transmission belt between the academy and policy: think tankers. They are in Washington. They can be called on at short notice to prepare remarks across town on the Hill. These folks know the latest lingo of organizational acronyms. They know how to write for policy audiences.
Steve Krasner, who served as Director of Policy Planning in the George W. Bush Administration, also downplayed the potential policy-relevance of our work. Referencing Fearon and Laitin’s findings on the contributions of mountainous terrain to civil war, he wrote that such structural factors are “not something policymakers can do much about.”
Moreover, Krasner noted the challenges for policymakers to know how to deal with central tendencies in particular circumstances: “A statistically significant general finding, may often be of little help for a policymaker dealing with a specific problem.”
A way forward?
In a recent Carnegie Foundation piece, my colleague Frank Gavin and former Dean (and former Obama Deputy Secretary of State) Jim Steinberg cautioned that scholars may also have difficulties providing practical advice to policymakers. Thinking about possible scenarios with respect to Iran and its nuclear program, they wrote:
…we simply cannot know ahead of time, with any usable degree of certainty, what the answers to these questions will be, and therefore what optimal policy will turn out to be. Why? The answer is that none of the tools that social science academics labor so assiduously to develop and refine are capable of providing predictive outcomes with a usable degree of certainty.
They suggest that the absence of responsibility may encourage academics to be in Tetlock’s terminology “hedgehogs” who know one big thing. There is no price for scholars of being wrong, and big bold singular predictions driven by general models tend to get attention:
Indeed, their ability to command the precious geography of the op-ed page usually turns on the ability to make categorical, rather than contingent assertions.
They suggest a more productive way forward to bring academic expertise to bear on policy would involve the revival of Eisenhower’s Solarium exercise, where different rival theories are discussed and debated in a more staid comparison of alternative scenarios. Leaving aside what contributions academics can make to policy, can we profit by spending some time in the policy world?
Scholars who have an opportunity to see how the policy process actually works will likely be better scholars for it. That may not be true of every scholar, but certainly scholars who study the policy process will learn a tremendous amount.
I also think our students will also profit from the experience by our ability to connect concepts from class to events we have experience firsthand, though the temptation might be to turn classes into policy war stories rather than theoretically relevant anecdotes that illuminate broader processes.
Should we engage policy?
There are still dangers for scholars trying to engage the policy world. The obvious challenge is time management and whether colleagues will appreciate your efforts. Certainly, the judgment of the institute was that doing policy relevant work is an “in addition to” complement to peer-reviewed scholarship rather than an “instead of” substitute.
Moreover, people seeking to engage the policy world need to be mindful of their aims. Are they seeking headlines or hits, or is policy work part of a higher calling for public service that we should be doing as citizens? Pursuing policy relevant work merely to advance oneself is akin to being a celebrity fame seeker. Doing this kind of work for the right reasons may allow us to resist the temptation of saying things just to get in the paper or on the Internet. Editors have a preference for declarative statements that squeeze the nuance out of complex issues, potentially leading scholars to get far ahead of what their evidence shows. If you can’t come back to what you said or wrote and remain proud about the quality of your work or judgment, then your longevity and influence on the discipline and policy will likely be limited.
Another risk for scholars is the temptation to tailor research to fit the preferences of the policy community. While adjusting scholarship to be more policy relevant is the point, scholars may compromise their objectivity and rigor by saying what they think policymakers want to hear. There is no easy solution to prevent scholars from becoming guns for hire, other than the realization that each of us will be judged by our peers on the quality of our work. I doubt that scholars can retain their credibility in either camp if they cultivate schizophrenic personas, saying one thing in the academic world and writing something quite different for policy. That just seems like a bad idea.
I entered political science with normative aspirations for addressing the great problems of our age. I grew to appreciate the benefits of an academic perch for being able to study the issues I cared about. Ultimately, I don’t think we have to give up our aspirations for making the world a better place, and I would feel diminished as a person if my work was cut off from that wellspring of inspiration that got me interested in international relations in the first place.
* This year’s IPSI participants included:
Séverine Autesserre, Sarah Bush, Jeff Colgan, Courtenay Conrad, Martin Edwards, Tanisha Fazal, Ryan Grauer, Seva Gunitskiy, Caroline Hartzell, Nathan Paxton, Robert Reardon, Elizabeth Saunders, and Jeff Taliaferro.
Great post Josh. I would just add that another avenue by which academics can play a role in the policy process is to serve as critical evaluators of policy assumptions, rationales, and logics. Decisionmakers may not look to academics for the reasons you list, but they are often influenced by the wide range of outputs produced by think tanks, policy institutes, media outlets, and political discourse within the beltway. Even if we are not in a position to provide specific policy guidance in a one-page memo, we can, and should, provide critical analysis of the ideas circulating within the policy debates. Colin’s recent writings on Iran is a great illustration of using theory and practice to inform the policy space.
Jon,
Thanks for your comment. I absolutely agree, and that’s the point I was trying to make (perhaps not quite as artfully as I would have liked!) when I wrote about our critical thinking skills, alternative explanations, and thinking through the consequences of actions. I agree that Colin’s interventions of late have been especially helpful. Hard for me to disentangle how much his observations are shaped by his academic work and how much is a function of having just served in government. He said his new piece for CNAS does have a lot of more academic citations on deterrence theory and the like so there may be more scholarly influence that is feeding into the policy process.
I certainly think academics are part of the mix, but in general, the conduit may be more like Colin’s, where someone has a seat at least for a while at the policy table. I’d be interested to hear how much of our work shapes the shapers in the think tank realm. Perhaps the TRIPS survey ought to ask think tankers who are the top 25 to 50 people that influence their thinking and seeing how many academics make the list!
Great Post!
This has shown me a whole new side to politics. While I always have thought politics were just some crazy arguing kind of debate, I now realized that it is an art, where people speaks out their minds and say what they believe with confedience and bravery. I do agree with you Josh, academics isn’t the main source of these debates, but just a minor thing part of debates that will affect the debate. Like Jon has said, “Colin’s recent writings on Iran is a great illustration of using theory and practice to inform the policy space.” :)
I have a confession to make. I left the University of Michigan PhD program as an ABD , served as a foreign service officer for a number of years, and then came back and finished my dissertation and am now an academic. When I was serving in a tough embassy assignment and got nostalgic for grad school, I used to go to our American library overseas, borrow a copy of the APSR, leaf through it — and I always found that my nostalgia subsided and my appreciation of my “exciting” embassy work increased.
I tell this anecdote because it illustrates the vast divide between the quantitative study of IR vs. actually being involved in IR on a daily basis. And I don’t think it was just the jargon or the math that was off-putting to the diplomats — Rather, it’s that practitioners are a lot less likely to look for generalizable laws and much more likely to think of whatever it is that they’re doing as an idiosyncratic, unique case. Perhaps that’s why large N datasets appear to them to be of only limited utility.
Mary,
Thanks for your comment. I think academics are useful in identifying major patterns, correlations and causal mechanisms. While most of my work is qualitative or uses mostly descriptive statistics, I think it is useful to look for generalizable claims, if only to be able to ask, “what is this a case of?” and then see if the case at hand shares the characteristics of the paradigmatic case. I don’t believe every case is unique, and even policymakers have intuitive theories of how the world works or analogies in their heads. I think academics can help surface those assumptions and ensure that people don’t just say, “This is appeasement. We all know what happens when you appease…”
In any case, your comments echo Krasner’s concerns and certainly in the thick of things, people tend to muddle through, which may be better than trying to impose one’s ideology of the world on a situation that is much messier.
Best,
Josh
I hope I don’t come off as too critical, but I’m confused. You say academic studies don’t influence policy much, but then say think tanks, which use such research, do influence policy. Furthermore, you caution political scientists from engaging policy too much, but if research doesn’t influence policy, how can this be an issue? Lastly, your comment that ” I don’t think we have to give up our aspirations for making the world a better place” seems to conflict with your earlier statement that “most of our work, even if framed as policy relevant, will never be read by anyone with influence on policy.” While discovering things is important, it’s ultimately useless if it doesn’t result in a material change somewhere down the road. Overall, I’m puzzled on whether political science work influences policy or not. Could you help clarify?
Kyle,
To your confusion, academics may aspire to have direct influence on policy unmediated by think tanks. There are challenges since we tend not to write pithy accessible prose and are often located far away from DC so we’re less likely to be read or called upon directly by policymakers. We may try to engage the policy process by publishing in policy outlets or think tanks. In the process, we might alter our work in ways that we think will be more appealing to policymakers but could make claims beyond what the evidence of our work suggests. There are strong editorial pressures in such outlets to make big bold claims that may not be supported by messy empirical data.
With these cautions, for me it is still worth it to try to influence policy outcomes because that’s what inspired me to get into this line of work. There is no contradiction. It’s an awareness of the challenges and pitfalls that can help scholars avoid being both disappointed that their influence is less than thought it might be and to avoid trying to hard to please in ways that ultimately undermines one’s credibility. Does that help?
Yes, thank you very much for your response.