Introduction
In a 2014 New York Times op ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof drew numerous defensive responses when he criticized political science for having very little “practical impact” in “the real world of politics.” [1] Rather than exercising civic leadership, political science has been most noticeably AWOL from public policy debates since WWII, he claims. And, in his view, there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”
How does he account for this absence? Primarily, it is due to the academic interest in pursuing the quantitative approach in political science research. This kind of research is too often unintelligible to both the politically interested general public and the policy making community. Also, the “value neutrality” required for such studies prohibits advocacy.
The pattern persists, in part, because graduate students must conform to the expectations of their professors, as a requirement for a successful academic career. “Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.” Kristof quotes Will McCants, a Middle East specialist, as observing that, in addition, this “attitude affects tenure decisions.” According to McCants, it is widely understood that “academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”
Thus, concludes Kristof, political science remains an “academic” profession.
Counterfactuals
Among the many defensive reactions to Kristof’s criticisms of political science was a blog post from Tom Pepinsky. [2] “Kristof simply isn’t paying attention,” says Pepinsky. Just go on the Web.
“The rise of publicly engaged political science is one of the great stories of our discipline in the past decade. … like the Monkey Cage and the Duck of Minerva, [the] new media have shaped political science as a discipline.”
Pepinsky also dismisses those who complain about complex mathematical models. “They don’t want careful and considered, they want sharp and snappy.” So the problem, in his view, is really due to the simple-minded desires of the critics, not with the “sophisticated” science.
Concerned that public perceptions of political science’s irrelevance might negatively impact the amount of funds Congress allows for political science research, the APSA has formed committees to address the problem. For instance, the APSA Council Policy Committee on Public Engagement provides guidance on how members can help to amplify the public reach of political science. The APSA Advocacy Program lobbies Congress to tell law makers about political science’s contributions to society. APSA is a member of other lobbying organizations as well. [3]
All this “public engagement” by loquacious political scientists has not, so far, provided the public with the kind of civic education, even civic leadership, which Kristof sees as the profession’s rightful place. Despite all the efforts of the Monkey Cage (from behind a pay wall), the Duck of Minerva, the APSA, and Twitter academic celebrities with tens of thousands of followers, Kristof’s complaint has not been resolved.
The Cult of the Irrelevant
The problem being considered here is well stated by Michael Desch in an article he wrote summarizing his 2019 book, Cult of the Irrelevant. [4]
He reports that in a recent poll of IR scholars, a majority acknowledged “that the state-of-the-art approaches of academic social science are precisely those approaches that policy makers find least helpful.” Also, a “related poll of senior national-security decision-makers confirmed that, for the most part, academic social science is not giving them what they want.”
Desch adds that “While the use of statistics and formal models is not by definition irrelevant, their edging out of qualitative approaches has over time made the discipline less relevant to policy makers. [Indeed,] Qualitative case studies most often produce the research that policy makers need, and yet the field is moving away from them.”
In his view, the cause of this continuing, indeed,
increasing, self-inflicted damage in political science is “the cult of the
irrelevant.” While this “cult” is due in part to well-intended efforts at
becoming more “scientific … it is also reinforced by less legitimate motives,
particularly organizational self-interest.”
As I have argued in prior posts, I would specify that those “less legitimate motives” are the efforts of self-serving elites to entrench a paradigm in our profession in which their privileged position is maintained. And, like I have stated in my post on JETS, [5] Desch sees “peer review” as a principle strategy for the “cult” to maintain its dominance.
In sum, Desch agrees with David Ricci’s thesis about the “tragedy” of the political science profession. As Desch observes, in The Tragedy of Political Science, Ricci argues that as “the discipline sought to become more scientific, in part to better address society’s ills, it became less practically relevant.”
What is to be done?
A typical American pragmatic response to the problem of political science’s irrelevance would be to urge the profession to just get busy picking political problems and solving them, methodological niceties be damned. [6] But this “just do it” approach lacks any principled guide for research, and leaves the profession under the thumb of the positivist elites.
Complaints like that of Kristof and Desch have also been made by British commentators about the relation of political science to their government’s policy making process. In a 2011 report, the Institute for Government in the UK observed that the recent “attempts to improve policy making have all suffered from a gap between theory and practice.” [7] One reason for this is that the reformers have been working with “unrealistic models of policy making.” Consequently, governing officials must act on their own, in the absence of useful academic assistance, to “find ad hoc solutions to the problems that arise. But the lack of realistic [scholarly input] leaves too much in policy making to chance, personality, and individual skill.”
If willy-nilly “problem solving” is an unsatisfactory solution to the problem of irrelevance, then what is a better solution?
I share the desire of many political scientists to have our profession become a leader in providing solutions to the problems of political systems in the US, and around the world. Economics and public health science have helped improve human life, why can’t political science make at least an equal contribution to civilization?
I agree with Kristof that our profession ought to, and can, provide civic leadership to both policy makers and the public. This can be done without abandoning the commitment to science, as a rational, methodical approach to research. The aim of this Blog is to show how that can be done.
I’ll start by re-framing the problem in the terms of valuation.
Part 1: The Intrinsic Valuation of Political Actors
My thesis is that the key to the apparent irrelevance of political science output is the lack of capacity in positivism for the intrinsic valuation of the subject matter of political science – individuals and groups engaged in political behavior within a political system. To clarify what I mean, I will first define some key terms.
What does it mean to value?
As I use the term, “valuing” is an element of sentient beings. People, in particular, have a range of gut feelings, as well as intellectual opinions, about such matters as right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, or interesting and dull or tedious. Values, then, can be understood as interests and preferences, whether in the forms of thought or feeling.
What does “intrinsic valuation” mean?
As an interpretivist, I value political actors intrinsically. By that term I mean having an interest in, or preference for, and appreciation of, the subject matter of political science as active forms of life, acting on unique sets of meanings, and worthy of being known in themselves. Within my intrinsic valuation, I see each actor with an inner capacity for decision making and meaning making, often forming groups on the bases of their shared meanings and aims; then working within a political system towards the achievement of their shared goals.
To value political actors intrinsically entails the desire to understand them. My intrinsic valuation of political actors necessarily focuses my attention on their inner workings as manifested by their political behavior. Thus, when I observe political behavior, I want to understand what that behavior means to the actors engaged in it.
In contrast, when I observe objects, such as leaves blowing in the wind, I have no interest in their inner workings because I believe the causes of their movement is external to them, and there is no inner motivation moving them. They have no agency.
Extrinsic Valuations
Positivism necessarily values political actors in the same mode of understanding as they would take towards leaves blowing in the wind. This is an extrinsic form of valuation; the valuation of things, exterior to persons. Persons are necessarily objectified in positivism. Because positivism seeks to explain behavior in ways that are suitable for its hypothetical-deductive form of scientific method, its practitioners cannot do otherwise than to value political actors extrinsically, as things in motion, outside of, and unrelated to, the observer. By aping 19th century physics, they seek explanations suitable for the movement of things, that is, explanations based on mechanics rather than on meanings. [8] For example, many rational choice models assume that human beings pursue their self-interest with robotic-like regularity. But policy makers must deal with real people, who often do not act like that.
Part 2: How Values Shape Method in Political Science
These prior, often tacit, valuations of the subject matter of political science shape the methods for studying that subject matter; and, the methods used preserve that prior valuation in a self-reinforcing loop.
Thus, the main method of the positivist is the detached observation and description of behavior, but the key approach of the interpretivist is empathic understanding. Empathy is a method for acquiring knowledge about a subject matter. The interpretivist assumes that, “because, as sentient beings, the members of politically active groups are human like me, my first principle of understanding is empathy. Our common humanity enables me to understand what their actions mean to them.”
By projecting himself or herself into the position of the persons under study, the interpretivist enters into an intimate relationship with them. The positivist stands outside of the subjects, distant and aloof.
The exercise of empathy entails the effort to understand the feelings and meanings of the subjects. These can be perceived by an empathic participation with the subjects. A sensitive interpretivist can perceive feelings and meanings in subjects that some of them might not be aware of, even though these are their motivating factors. Asking other folks what they feel, or what a political activity means to them, is an additional, more overt, way to get to understand their behavior.
Indeed, survey responses and statistics can only be interpreted empathically; that is, by one human to another. The interpretivist understands this data as an expression of human meaning. That is why the so-called “Quant/Qual” distinction is misleading. Empathy plays a key role even in the initial design of a large-N research study. For example, the formation of survey questions requires one to anticipate the human qualities of imagined respondents. Respondents are not Pavlovian dogs, salivating at the sound of a bell. They are human beings, who understand the meanings of language, and who have the capacity to reflect upon questions, and to express meaningful responses. In practice, the premises necessary for surveys, and for focus groups, lie outside the positivist paradigm because they presuppose sentient human respondents.
The reasons why the 2016 presidential election polls were so wrong in failing to predict Trump's win, awaits an empathic interpretation.
I-Thou
Thus, interpretive political science flatly rejects the objectification of political actors. In this approach, actors are “persons,” a category that includes not only a certain type of biological organism, but which entails a sense of their uniqueness and intrinsic worth. Interpretive political science seeks to understand political actors as one person to another, not as an object devoid of personhood. The method of empathic interpretation presupposes, in the words of Martin Buber, an “I-Thou” relationship. [9]
Part 3: The Priority of Value in Political Science
While the positivist paradigm exalts “value neutrality,” it is hypocritical. It actually requires the valuation of political actors as objects, things in motion, items useful to the study of political science. It puts on a pedestal the mechanical theory of causation, which is appropriate only to the behavior of things. Its highest ideal is to discover “cover laws;” that is, general laws of causation that will explain much, if not all, political behavior.
When the wind has greater force than the leaves have resistance, the leaves will move about. But to see political actors as objectified objects of study, behaving on mechanical principles, and as responses to prior causes, is to dis-value such subjects as objects, or things.
Thus, a denigrating valuation of humanity is presupposed, and informs, positivism.
Positivism and interpretivism both assume a prior valuation of their subject matter which serves as a foundational premise for each. Because people are valued as things, the entire edifice of the positivist philosophy of political inquiry is possible. But that philosophy is NOT possible given the prior valuation of interpretive political science; namely, the intrinsic valuation of persons.
The objectification of human actors, required by positivism, is anathema to interpretivism. The intrinsic valuation of human actors by interpretism is beyond the capacities of positivism. To the positivist, the approach of the interpretivist appears as ridiculous “touchy-feely” romanticism, far from the required hard-headedness of their “science.” But, in fact, their idea of “science” blinds them to a vast dimension of human reality – namely, the mind and the meaningful intentions it freely shapes and upon which political actors act.
Understanding the role of valuations in political science helps illuminate why the work product of the profession is so often criticized as irrelevant and unhelpful to policy makers and political activists. The critics sense that the models, information, and advice based on the degrading of persons into mechanical actors is unrelated to the real people for whom policy is made, and by whom it is implemented. In other words, studies and information about the mechanical behavior of things is patently irrelevant to the task of understanding and explaining the political behavior of human beings.
Part 4: The Tragedy of Political Science
As Ricci understood, the central desire of positivist political science is to catch up with the contributions to society of the natural sciences by imitating their methods. [10]
But this aim, sometimes called “physics envy,” is the primary cause of the profession’s failure to become relevant, much less take the lead, in the policy making process. The main reason for this, as I have shown, is that the extrinsic valuation of its subject matter by the natural sciences is simply inappropriate to the subject matter of political science – human political behavior.
In my view, the key mistake of political science is not that it is striving for professionalization, or to become more scientific, but that it is doing so with the wrong conceptual framework. A change in valuation, as discussed here, would rectify the tragedy, and enable political science to reach its full potential for providing guidance to policy makers and public alike.
Conclusion
As we have seen, the way the subject matter is valued shapes the way it will be studied. Neither interpretive political science nor positivism is “value free.” However, political scientists are free to choose between the valuations described here.
Sadly, graduate students in political science cannot exercise that freedom. They are pressured by the dominant elites to value their subject matter in a dehumanizing, demeaning way, if they want to get ahead in their careers. Decades of experience shows that one of the social consequences of such valuation is that the work political scientists do in pursuit of their profession is all too often not regarded as useful or helpful by policy makers and political activists.
Thus does political science force its graduate students into a career of irrelevancy.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
@InterpretivePo1
Endnotes
[1] Nicholas Kristof. Professors, We Need You! New York
Times, Feb. 15, 2014
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html?_r=0
[2] https://tompepinsky.com/2014/02/16/that-kristof-column/
[3] See https://www.apsanet.org/publicengagement
and
https://www.apsanet.org/PROGRAMS/Advocacy-Program
[4] Desch, Michael. (2019) How Political Science Became
Irrelevant
https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-political-science-became-irrelevant/
Desch, M. (2019) Cult
of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security.
Princeton University Press.
[5] Desk Rejects and JETS in Political Science
https://interpretat.blogspot.com/2020/08/desk-rejects-and-jets-in-political.html
[6] Formal Axiology and the Phronetic Approach: A
FOOTNOTE William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
https://www.academia.edu/5195869/Formal_Axiology_and_the_Phronetic_Approach_A_FOOTNOTE
[7] Exec. Sum. Page 5. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Policy%20making%20in%20the%20real%20world.pdf
[8] See David Easton’s critique of Arthur Bentley pages 12f, at William J. Kelleher, Ph.D., David Easton as Interpretivist https://www.academia.edu/31337872/David_Easton_as_Interpretivist
[9] Martin Buber. (1962) I And Thou, 2d ed. Charles Scribner's Sons. Also see my essay, Respect
and Empathy as Method in the Social Science Writings of Michael Polanyi (2008) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1150941
[10] David M. Ricci. (1987) The Tragedy of Political Science. Yale University Press.
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