“Ezra Klein thinks so”:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/10/column_the_five_people_obama_s.html#more.
In general, Washington is split between people who specialize in governing (most of them economists or lawyers or public policy graduates) and people who specialize in running elections. Political scientists, who study the history and run the numbers on both pursuits, are not invited to the table. Adding to the snub, the president has hosted at the White House groups of journalists, pundits and historians. Again, no political scientists.
That’s a shame, because the White House could use some political science. If the administration wanted out of the 24-hour news cycle that obsesses over who’s up and who’s down, it should’ve grabbed some of the people who’ve studied the waxing and waning of the liberal and conservative brands since the 1930s. … Pick an issue, or a political quandary, and odds are there’s a wealth of political science literature on the topic. The White House needs someone who can bring the profession’s best insights and evidence to the administration’s deliberations.
It’s worth noting though that the barriers to participation by political scientists aren’t all on the side of policy makers. One of the “major preoccupations of the current issue of “The Forum”:http://www.bepress.com/forum/ is the ways in which the discipline of political science sets up implicit or explicit barriers between its research and the world of policy makers. See here in particular the pieces by “Jacob Hacker”:http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol8/iss3/art8 and “Rogan Kersh”:http://www.bepress.com/forum/vol8/iss3/art9 (free reg. required to download) on the vexed relationship between political science and practical politics.
bq. The core problem, it seems to me, is that political science today–unlike political science of previous generations and unlike many quarters of economics today–is simply not all that interested in the substantive activities of governance (aka policy). In American politics research and, to a lesser but growing extent, other empirical subfields, the great bulk of research centers on public opinion and political behavior on the one hand, and models of basic decision-making action, such as roll-call votes, on the other (Hacker and Pierson 2009). The struggle to use the levers of public authority to change the economy and society in durable ways is almost entirely missing. Now it is certainly possible to have a discipline that studies public policy and produces no policy advocates or public intellectuals. Nonetheless, there does seem to be an elective affinity between research that engages with what government does and researchers who have a desire and willingness to wade into policy discussions. A discipline concerned with how policy is made and how it reshapes the economy, society, and polity is simply much better poised to produce scholars equipped to speak to fundamental questions about the allocation and use of public authority.
While I think that Hacker is right that there is far too little study of the politics of policy making, I’m not convinced that this is the only, or even the most important cause of the disconnect between political science and practical politics. As Klein makes clear, politicians could learn a lot from the work that political scientists do on elections. Still, there _are_ clear internal disciplinary barriers to political scientists weighing in on policy questions, even when their advice would be helpful and relevant. In many departments, they are likely to get funny looks from their colleagues, and perhaps their department chairs and their deans.[1] This is not a happy state of affairs for the discipline.
fn1. See Seth Masket’s article in this issue – “a tenured political scientist at a southern research university, shared a story about her involvement in local politics. She had taken the time to weigh in, via e-mail, on a policy issue being considered by her city, one that was well within her area of academic expertise. She was later rebuked by her dean for using university resources (her e-mail account) to influence a public policy debate.”