I agree with “what Erik says”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/12/is_political_science_too_hard_.html below about the benefits of quantitative training for policy makers, but even without direct quantitative training, political science has a lot to offer. The “most pugnacious argument”:http://nationalinterest.org/blog/jacob-heilbrunn/policy-makers-should-avoid-academics-the-plague-4645 against political science in the debate that Erik links to is made by Jacob Heilbrunn.
bq. Should policymakers pay attention to academics? Should policy makers actually be academics? No and no. For the most part, policymakers should avoid them like the plague.
bq. I guess it depends on what kind of academics we’re talking about. Rice and Albright were more grounded in history than in the abstract theorizing beloved of many political science departments. Indeed, to sharpen the distinction more, I would say that SAIS, the Fletcher School, and other such finishing schools for foreign affairs mavens have supplanted traditional political science departments, which became enamored of game and rational-choice theory. The only truly serious discipline in political science is political theory–Aristotle to Weber to Rawls. Is there much in international relations, by the way, that has not already been discussed by Thucydides–a dip into the Sicilian Expedition might have served George W. Bush well before he headed into Iraq.
bq. One telling sign of the decline of political science, with its pretensions to scientific accuracy, is that Fareed Zakaria, a student of Samuel Huntington, did not pursue a career in the academy. It simply wasn’t that attractive. Are the best and brightest attracted to political science in the first place? I would wager not.
I like Jacob a lot – he was a year ahead of me in my MA program (in German and European Studies) and Ph.D. program, and his book on the neo-conservative movement is very good. But his argument is flat-out wrong. And I write this as someone who teaches both in a political science department and in a “finishing school for foreign affairs mavens” where one of my major teaching responsibilities is the cornerstone international affairs course for incoming MA students. I think (and the written comments on my teaching evaluations to date reflect this) that they get a lot from the more methodologically focused parts of the course.
Most importantly in my view, they get a reasonably thorough grounding in problems of selection bias. DC policy debates are riddled with selection effects. The standard way of making a policy argument is to figure out the conclusion that you want to reach, find an argument to support that conclusion, and find a case (or, if you are extraordinarily ambitious, a couple of cases) that can be squeezed until it appears to support that argument. This is obviously a problematic way to figure out how the real world works. But understanding _precisely why_ it is problematic, and how one should do things better, do not come naturally to most aspiring IR professionals. Nor, as best as I recall, are they mentioned in Thucydides. Ideally, a grounding in selection effects would go hand-in-hand with quantitative training. But it doesn’t have to. The basic logic applies equally happily to qualitative data too.
Nor, for that matter, are the intellectual consequences of game theoretic training as horrid as Jacob suggests. Certainly, there is a lot of inane work in political science that fetishizes game theoretic sophistication as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. But there is also a lot of value in game theory. Perhaps the most important book in international relations of the last century is Thomas Schelling’s _The Strategy of Conflict._ And even more technical treatments have direct policy applications. Non-political scientist Matthew Yglesias provided a convenient illustration of a “more general trend”:http://www.cjr.org/feature/embrace_the_wonk_1.php in “this post”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/models-for-congressional-reform/ last week.
bq. I think there’s a tragic neglect of comparative politics in the United States, and my favorite relevant model is the one presented in George Tsebelis’ Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. The key issues here are trying to understand who has agenda-setting powers, how many veto players are there, and who the veto players are. And the distressing development in American politics over the past 20 years has been the tendency of routinized filibustering plus growing party discipline to make the Senate Minority Leader into a veto player, especially on things that aren’t top-tier issues that dominate the public discussion.
Tsebelis’ book is notable both for its reliance on game theory and its clear exposition of the consequences that game theoretic arguments can have for real world politics. The proof of the pudding is in the eating thereof. And if policy wonks like Yglesias find game theoretic arguments useful, then it is hard to sustain the claim that they are as as isolating and intellectually pernicious as Jacob believes they are.
Finally, the Fareed-Zakaria-as-demonstration argument doesn’t really work. That one smart person decided not to be an academic surely does not invalidate an entire field (single cases – except under unusual circumstances – are not sturdy foundations for sweeping generalizations).[1] A more thoughtful application of methodology to public argument would make this clear. And that is the point I’m trying to make. Even without quantitative training, social science offers extremely useful skills for making sense of the world. These skills are obviously in short supply in the world of Washington debate, sometimes to dire effect. And if professional schools do not supply these skills (I suspect that most of them do, if only because they are usually staffed by IR academics), they are failing to do their job right.
fn1. For what it is worth, I think that Zakaria’s best book by far was his first one, which was the book of his dissertation. It was genuinely original in a way that his later books do not seem to me to be.