
How Political Science Became Irrelevant - hhs
https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Political-Science-Became/245777
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inflatableDodo
"That increasing tendency to embrace methods and models for their own sake
rather than because they can help us answer substantively important questions
is, I believe, a misstep for the field. This trend is in part the result of
the otherwise normal and productive workings of science, but it is also
reinforced by less legitimate motives, particularly organizational self-
interest and the particularities of our intellectual culture."

Perhaps they are becoming another tribe of the Econ, as described by Dr.
Leijonhufvud is his 1973 essay 'Life among the Econ' \-
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1465-7295....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1973.tb01065.x)

edit - here's the full text, unpaywalled -
[https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/ax...](https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/axel_leijonhufv.html)

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jMyles
I received my political science degree from SUNY New Paltz (which has a killer
polysci program) in 2008. And I knew then (as did most of my theory,
comparative, and American professors I think) what the Chronicle of Higher Ed
seems to just be discovering:

> The problem, in a nutshell, is that scholars increasingly privilege rigor
> over relevance.

I distinctly remember (and often retell the story) of Jeff Miller responding
to a pragmatic observation by saying: "I understand how it works in practice -
what I want to know is how it works _in theory_ " \- and while he was
intentionally being funny, he wasn't kidding.

Now let me ask this - and I think it's notable that the article doesn't answer
this - even if a focus on rigor makes "the Beltway" less interested in
academic political science, how does that make the discipline "less relevant?"

Can you imagine a similar observation being made about another classic liberal
art (philosophy, psychology, music, art, physics, biology, etc)?

How did The Chronicle, of all publications, come to believe that relevance of
an academic field is to be gauged by government? And by one particular
government?

The whole point of liberal arts is to develop a capacity for independent and
critical thinking. If people are graduating with degrees in a liberal arts
field and complaining that they can't find a job in their field (let alone a
_government_ job in their field) then I want to suggest that they got into the
discipline for the wrong reasons.

As our species embarks on this beautiful and bizarre transition into life with
the internet, surely we need to accept that the impetus to seek education
purely for self improvement and happiness is ever _more_ relevant.

I don't particularly give a hoot what the US Government thinks about my
degree. In fact, if this ageing and increasingly useless entity thinks that my
field of study is less relevant, that is perhaps evidence that I'm on to
something.

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ddingus
You are. (And apparently are not alone. My conversations with poly-sci peers
has trodden similar ground.)

The field is as relevant as it ever has been. IMHO, money in politics, coupled
with mass media consolidation has created an environment where emphasis on
models is treated like a currency of sorts. Self reinforcing, regardless of
outcome.

Actually, outside observers keen on understanding this dynamic better will see
outcomes that do not align with models framed as "threats to Democracy" and
often conflated with other "bad elements."

From the insular point of view, in the beltway, that is a true statement.

In general, it is a "truthy" statement in the sense of control being validated
by models, actions planned and executed successfully then confirmed by outcome
and models, is breaking down.

(Whether that is a threat or more ordinary advancement in the body politic is
a matter of ones perspective.)

That all worked, until it didn't, and it didn't about the time digital natives
came of age and simply behaved differently. They are not the only ones, just
an easy to point to example.

Pre-Internet and post Internet politics are fascinating!

Sorry to ramble. Yeah, you are entirely relevant. This is a matter of not
being in the club, and said club panicking over what it sees as a serious and
growing threat to it's base political power of legitimacy, and relevancy as
more of the body politic becomes more distributed and difficult to manage.

>surely we need to accept that the impetus to seek education purely for self
improvement and happiness is ever more relevant.

Absolutely. And that is increasingly possible for people to do, either through
formal study to obtain a degree, or on their own terms as amateurs.

That clash is as interesting as the traditional politicking vs what I can only
describe as neo-politicking, increasingly seen with rapid adoption of Internet
and aging in of people native to it.

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rrggrr
Former political scientist here to simply say that Game Theory is immensely
useful in the real world IF you couple the calculus with real world
understanding of power politics and realpolitik. It's just that outside if
certain government and think tank circles the skills, underlying data, and
Intel product aren't there. For this reason the larger group of practicing
folks are flying blind and useless.

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reilly3000
How is the ‘scientific method’ that I was tough in grade school apply to
political science? Like, how do you conduct experiments when public policy
doesn’t really have room for control groups? Or is the reality of the practice
of poli-sci relegated to theory and modeling?

The concept of canary deployments in legal realm sounds fascinating to unpack.

~~~
bcbrown
That's one thing that the concept of federalism addresses. The ability for
cities and states to experiment with different policies allows the federal
government to wait and see which experiments bear fruit before rolling them
out nationwide.

~~~
reilly3000
That leaves a tremendous amount of variables to account for, but you make a
great point.

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cs702
TL;DR: As the discipline has become more and more rigorous, formal, and
mathematical in the academic world, it has become less and less relevant in
the real world.

Key quote: > When political scientists seek rigor, they increasingly conflate
it with the use of particular methods such as statistics or formal modeling...
The sociologist Leslie A. White captured that ethos as early as 1943: "We may
thus gauge the 'scientific-ness' of a study by observing the extent to which
it employs mathematics — the more mathematics the more scientific the study.
Physics is the most mature of the sciences, and it is also the most
mathematical. Sociology is the least mature of the sciences and uses very
little mathematics. To make sociology scientific, therefore, we should make it
mathematical. Relevance, in contrast, is gauged by whether scholarship
contributes to the making of policy decisions.

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codesushi42
Honest question, what does one do with a Political Science degree anyway?

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tdeck
Looks like it's pretty mixed; many go into finance:

[https://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/undergrad/majors/p...](https://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/undergrad/majors/psci.php)

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akhilcacharya
This says more about Penn than it does about Political Science graduates as a
whole...

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tdeck
Sure, but it was the first survey I could find after poking around for a bit.
I'd be interested in seeing something more extensive if you can find it.

