Can policymakers learn from political scientists?

Bridging theory with practice is one of the main challenges faced by scholars and practitioners alike. The following is an extract from John Busby's blog post. His feedback is based on a week based programme held at the International Policy Summer Institute in July 2012. I am highlighting some parts which I consider food for thought.

 

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. Scholars also expressed strong support for policy relevant work.

 

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.

A Century of Nixon

Wednesday 9^th January 2013 marked the centennial of Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37^th President of the United States. He is the only candidate to have run for the Presidency five times being successful in four (two terms as Vice President). Hundreds of books and scholarly articles have been written about him, perhaps, still not enough to decipher the real significance of what he meant for American and international politics. But almost two decades after his demise, students of politics and international relations still refer back to his persona, his decisions, and his era, to discern the complexities of political behaviour.  

Richard Nixon represents the quintessential candidate that thrives and survives the political game. Spectacular wins, drama, defeat and comebacks. When talking to David Frost, Nixon recalled his meeting with Mao Zedong wherein the Chairman notified him that he had read his book Six Crises. According to Nixon, Chairman Mao admired the comebacks more than the triumphs. Nixon’s life is the story of a man with modest origins, plagued by poverty and disease, who laboured the political circuit without family connections, climbed the ladder, held the most prestigious office in the world and then relinquished it in what became a national tragedy. In his poignant speech on the last day at the White House, he gave his vision of greatness and philosophy of life – ‘only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.’

Hailing from the farming town of Yorba Linda, Nixon grew up crippled by the death of his two brothers, wrestling the notion of rejection by joining student organizations and running for any post within reach. An excellent debater from a young age, he studied law, served in the Pacific as a Lieutenant in the Navy, and captured the attention of the Republican Party who wanted to field a candidate for Congress in 1946. Young, smart and tenacious, Richard Nixon campaigned hard beating Jerry Voorhis for Congress and Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate in 1950. The latter would coin him the nickname ‘Tricky Dick’, accusing him of resorting to bogus issues (Nixon called her ‘pink right to her underwear’ for her left sympathies) to demolish his adversaries.

After two successive tenures as Vice President to Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon ran for President in 1960 against John F. Kennedy. The Vice Presidency was more than an apprenticeship for Nixon. It heralded him as a prominent leader on the world stage visiting countries and leaders tirelessly, with highs and lows. In Caracas his car was pelted with stones whilst in Moscow he staged the famous ‘kitchen debate’ with Nikita Khrushchev. The race with Kennedy was fiercely fought and the TV debate, apart from being the first in Presidential history, brought to light the importance of appearance. Nixon appeared pale (after refusing make-up) and withdrawn as opposed to an energetic and vibrant Kennedy. He suffered a narrow defeat. From then on, candidates had to factor in the impact of TV and subsequently, campaigning changed forever. Following the California gubernatorial defeat in 1962, his political career seemed over. It was not.    

  

Nixon played a marginal role in politics dispensing advice and supporting his party through various guest speeches. He muscled for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and regained nomination in 1968 campaigning for Law and Order. The assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, the quagmire in Vietnam and the protests in 1968 descended the country into chaos and discontent. The verdict against Humphrey was a narrow one again, but this time he prevailed. In his inaugural address, he coined what would later be his epitaph: ‘the greatest honour history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.’ Nixon would take office, appeal to the ‘great silent majority’ to quell protests, expand the war in Vietnam by attacking sanctuaries in Cambodia, create the Environmental Protection Agency, dismantle racial subjugation in Southern schools, launch programmes to fight cancer and initiate various domestic reforms. But he would mostly be remembered for his foreign policy conquests. As Biographer Roger Morris argued, Nixon (together with Kissinger) shaped history. In trying to diffuse the Cold War, he acted ahead of his time.

Nixon, after a series of secret talks (triangulating with Pakistan) made a visit to China in 1972 opening diplomatic relations for the first time. The China connection served to bring the Soviet Union to the table and sign the first Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Détente was initiated and tension between the two superpowers relaxed. Nixon was living up to his ideals by becoming an architect of world peace. His landslide in 1972 against McGovern could only be savoured for a few months. Nixon’s failure to shut down ‘the plumbers’ operation led to what became known as the Watergate scandal. Nixon, convinced he would have the upper hand once again, was compromised by the very taping system he installed to monitor potential leaks from the White House. Leaks in fact became an obsession ever since Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

After the House Judiciary Committee voted in favour of Articles of Impeachment, Nixon resigned the Presidency on 9 August 1973. Resignation is ‘abhorrent to every instinct in my body’ he claimed, but it was the only option left. He would be pardoned by Gerald Ford and would advice successors, write books and act as an elder statesman until he passed away on 22 April 1994. His book In the Arena is probably one of the best for would-be politicians. As hardships descend on political leaders, and new challenges loom, many still ask ‘What would Nixon do?’ And his legacy lives on.