The first involves what Joe Nye describes as the tendency for the work of academic political scientists to concentrate on “mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in jargon that is unintelligible to policymakers.” While this disqualifies such political scientists from any influence on public policy, as both Joe and Mark Katz observe, their place has been taken by people in think tanks, who produce policy-relevant research that is impressive in its quantity and (to a somewhat lesser but hardly negligible extent) quality, and who regularly shuttle in and out of government. The character of present-day political science penalizes not the foreign policy process but rather the unfortunate undergraduates whom academic political scientists teach, who are forced to read books and articles and listen to lectures in which few of them can have any interest and that contribute nothing to one of the purposes of the education they are supposed to be receiving: helping them become well-informed citizens.

The second aspect of the issue involves the imposition of a strident, misguided, anti-American political orthodoxy, which seems, from the evidence of Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand, to be a particular problem in the field of Middle East studies. Here, too, think tanks have begun to supply what the academy apparently will not: the evidence for this trend is the growing prominence of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (of whose Board of Advisors I am a member), the Middle East Forum, and the Saban Center.

The third aspect of the relationship between universities and the policy process concerns the fitness of people with professional training in international relations or area studies to serve as policymakers. This cannot, of course, be done by kibitzing from the academy: to shape a policy requires being in the room, or the building, or at least the organization in which that policy is being made. But some of the qualities that advanced academic training should and often does cultivate are useful in the policy world: knowledge of a particular country or region, or a subject such as nuclear proliferation, and the capacity to think analytically and write succinctly and clearly.

True, academics tend to take longer views and deal with broader subjects than do policymakers, but experience at thinking, as it were, strategically can surely be helpful in addressing the tactical maneuvers that are the stuff of day-to-day policy. On the other hand, successful policymakers must operate effectively in large organizations, and academics usually have little experience at this. Indeed, the academy can attract people precisely because they have no talent or taste for such activity.

In the end it is, I think, legitimate to wonder whether the presence or absence of a background in the scholarly study of the issues with which policymakers must grapple makes any difference at all. Consider that Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wolfowitz and Madeleine Albright all earned Ph.D.s in political science, while John Quincy Adams, William Seward, Edward Stettinius and Warren Christopher did not. If any systematic connection between skill at policymaking and the possession of a particular kind of academic credential emerges from that list, I cannot discern it.

Michael Mandelbaum is a member of MESH.

More importantly over the long run, there are generational issues at work. The newer generation of international relations scholars, especially, are increasingly interested in doing work that is both academically rigorous and policy relevant. This generation of scholars is comfortable both running regressions and stepping back from their statistical software to explain what their results suggest for the real world. In this regards, the initiative Bruce Jentleson mentioned in a previous comment seems quite promising indeed.

This also relates to the question of why is there a closer link between economics and policy than political science and policy. Josef Joffe posits that it is because political scientists are more wedded to their models than the economists:

In fact, more economists seem capable of jumping from academia to politics than political scientists. Why? Try this for an explanation: Economists have learned that their models and regressions don’t carry very far; the rage now is behavioral economics which relies not on models (and finding data that fit them), but on observation. Political science must yet loosen the apron strings. The paradigm remains rational choice, taken straight from 19th-century microeconomics, but with an admixture of high-speed computing.

Raj M. Desai and James Vreeland, professors at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, who posted on Dan Drezner’s Foreign Policy blog, have actually made the opposite argument, writing:

Staffers at the US Treasury, the Fed, the National Economic Council (to name a few places) are comfortable reading cutting-edge economic analyses because they have been trained to understand mathematical models and statistical results. If people at the State Department or the National Security Council have not been comparably trained, however, they will not understand contemporary political science or its capacity to inform policy. Academic political science can do a much better job of reaching out to policymakers. But governmental agencies need to focus some effort on recruiting individuals who have the background and skills needed to apply modern political science to their daily work. Both sides need to make an effort.

I think it is important to remember that rigor does not necessarily imply dogged adherence to rational choice principles. More generally, Desai and Vreeland argue that the links between economists and policy have flourished not due to a shift by economists away from rigor, but because economists in the government are more rigorous, in a relative sense, than their national security counterparts. This seems like a clear factual disagreement. Thoughts on who is right? I don’t know of any real data that would allow us to resolve this question, but hopefully someone else can shed light on this question.

Finally, Mark Katz is correct: an upswing in interest by political scientists in policy relevance and interest by the government in hearing from political scientists does not mean political scientists are giving good advice. Or bad advice, for that matter. But it does mean the opportunities for involvement are growing and very well may continue to grow over the next generation.

Michael Horowitz is a member of MESH.

And this gets at Joe’s second main point. Greater policy relevance in political science-IR is not some altruistic appeal. It’s in our self-interest as a subfield, as a discipline and as universities. That was also the main point of my 2002 International Security article, “The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In”—which was less a lament as Martin Kramer describes it in his post than a tough-love exhortation. Greater policy relevance makes for greater intellectual pluralism. It leads to the kind of research that can lead to theories that are more reliable, valid and resonant. It can enhance teaching of undergraduates in the best liberal arts traditions. It can strengthen and broaden the training of graduate students, all the more important in a world in which the academic job market is even more squeezed and Ph.D.s would do well to have skills that also fit policy track opportunities in government.

I’m not yet as optimistic as Mark Katz, but am hopeful. As 2009 Program Co-Chair for the American Political Science Association, I made policy relevance one of the themes for the Annual Meeting:

We are challenged by the era in which we live to bring our knowledge to bear beyond the academy. How do we encourage greater policy relevance in ways consistent with our scholarly roles? What can departments, universities and the APSA each do in this regard? More particularly, what do we as scholars have to contribute on such broad concerns as social justice, nonviolent political change, and international peace, as well as a host of more particular issues at the local, national and international levels?

Thomas Weiss, current president of the International Studies Association, is going even further with the ISA 2010 conference, making “Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners” the overarching program theme.

With the strong support of Steve del Rosso, who heads the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s International Peace and Security Program, my Berkeley colleague Steve Weber and I have a grant for helping foster “Next Generation Policy Relevant Political Scientists.” We’ve been running a number of initiatives. We’ll soon be launching a website for our overall project; I’ll post the link on MESH when we do. One of the main initiatives, now in its fourth year, is a conference designed to bring together and continue building a network of Political Science graduate students who are policy-oriented and interested in U.S. foreign policy and international politics. We ran this year’s conference last month at George Washington University’s Elliott School in collaboration with Jim Goldgeier. We had over 80 applicants from a number of the top Pol Sci Ph.D. programs in the country for about 15 slots. And the conference was run by Berkeley, Duke and GWU grad students and newly minted assistant profs.

I came back from those two days feeling inspired by these grad students, many of whom had some policy experience prior to coming back to grad school and who do want careers that have policy components but are primarily based in universities. I wished I could have been more bullish on how well this will work—and along with Joe Nye, some MESH colleagues and others will continue to try to be able to be so.

Bruce Jentleson is a member of MESH.

I believe that the concern expressed by Joe Nye and others about these matters may be overblown. While political science professors may not be getting many top-tier appointments, I know plenty of political science professors—some of whom are members of MESH—who consult for the U.S. Government. Nor is the U.S. Government shy about seeking out political science professors for advice. (And needless to say, many accept the call to be paid to pronounce, no matter how much they might criticize American foreign policy to their colleagues and students.) Nor have the modelers and theorizers been left out. Several offices in the Defense Department and other U.S. government agencies have paid them big bucks to develop models of various political phenomena for policymakers to make more informed policies.

Yes, think-tankers seem to be a lot more visible than they were in previous decades. On the other hand, there appear to be far more think-tanks than there used to be. And many of these think-tankers are…political scientists! And as annoying as this may be to those of us who are professors and not think-tankers, surely this is better than in previous decades when Washington sought advice more from lawyers whose training had less relevance than that of the modelers and theorizers for understanding contemporary international relations.

I have heard many complain that assistant professors are pushed to produce increasingly esoteric and inaccessible research in order to gain tenure and acceptance in the political science field. But are they really being forced to do this? I know of, or have heard of, several assistant professors who actively consult for the U.S. Government—and even corporations—while also having books accepted by respected university presses and well regarded journals. Indeed, I have heard tell that some assistant professors of political science have brazenly cited policymakers’ demand for their advice as an excuse for avoiding the mundane academic tasks of attending committee meetings, advising undergraduates, or even showing up for lectures.

Far from being increasingly divorced from the concerns of the U.S. Government, it seems to me that the period since 9/11 has marked an upsurge in opportunity for political science professors to advise the U.S. Government—if they want to do so. Just how valuable this advice has been, of course, is another matter altogether.

Mark N. Katz is a member of MESH.

The relationship is not illicit. Part of the problems is that the qualities needed for the study of foreign policy are not necessarily those required for its successful conduct. Furthermore, as has been so often noted, political science since the days of Elie Kedourie’s essay has been preoccupied more and more with topics which, however fascinating, are not those of foreign policy makers.

Students were advised to get familiar with Bayesian statistics and game theory, but how to quantify fears and ambitions, religion and nationalism—or, as Hans Morgenthau early noted, the struggle for power? When two people want the same country (such as in the case of Israel/Palestine), this is not a case of cognitive dissonance. Being engaged in theory-building (grand theory, middle-range theory, etc.), the nets were cast admirably widely. The innovators borrowed from social psychology (decision-making), management (operations research), communications theory, anthropology and even biology (general systems). They immersed themselves with enthusiasm in such classics as The Structure of Scientific Revolution, sabungan (Balinese cockfights), and “exit, voice and loyalty.” I shall not even mention the various sub-disciplines (such as postcolonial studies) of postmodernism and their impact on some political scientists.

All this intellectual curiosity was very admirable and certainly contributed to a broadening of cultural horizons. But the urgent problems facing us were on a different level: how to deal with the cold war, proliferation, China, Putin, Islamism, Africa or terrorism and so on. With only a little exaggeration, political science could say, paraphrasing Jesus Christ, “Our kingdom is not of this world…” Of course there were always individual scholars following different paths, and some of them found their way into the practice of politics, but these were the exceptions.

There was also the field of area studies; their expertise was certainly needed and they faced certain specific problems of their own. (I try to deal briefly with some of them in a forthcoming book Best of Times, Worst of Times.) Is there much point in calling on political science to become more relevant? This, I suspect, is bound to happen anyway, not as the result of intellectual debate but as a consequence of economic crisis.

Walter Laqueur is a member of MESH.

JFK took them all—economists, historians like Arthur Schlesinger, political scientists. But these would be people like, a bit later, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzeznski, who were first and foremost political, and not scientific. They had prepared all their academic lives for a public career. The more important point, though, is this: Political science in those days was a lot more politics and a lot less science. In fact, none of the social sciences were so number-crunchy and model-mad. In those days, this author could read the American Economic Review; today, he no longer can. Too much matrix math.

In other words, the gap between the public and the thinking life was a lot smaller then. And so, the complaint of Nye et al. should be directed not to Obama, who, by the way, has populated half his administration with luminaries large and small from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. The proper target is contemporary social and, above all, political science.

Henry Kissinger would never get tenure today, not with books like A World Restored or Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy or The Troubled Partnership. This blend of history, analytical thinking, political theory and readable English is “high-class journalism” today. If you want to move from assistant to tenured professor, you would have to write To Nuke or Not to Nuke: A Rational-Choice and Co-Variance Model of Soviet-American Behavior in the Age of Attriting Bipolarity.

Academics who aspire to science will by definition be unable to act as political advisers. In today’s political science, as practiced by the best universities, the “politics” has been taken out of the “science.” But unless our basic rat-choicer or multiple-regression maven can shed the role that made him full professor, he will not be able to advise. “Mr. President, I cannot tell you what to do. I can only tell you that Kim Jong Il’s aggressiveness rises with the number of slasher movies he has watched, with a correlation coefficient of .3.”

Larry Summers, a theoretical economist in his younger days, has bridged the gap. In fact, more economists seem capable of jumping from academia to politics than political scientists. Why? Try this for an explanation: Economists have learned that their models and regressions don’t carry very far; the rage now is behavioral economics which relies not on models (and finding data that fit them), but on observation. Political science must yet loosen the apron strings. The paradigm remains rational choice, taken straight from 19th-century microeconomics, but with an admixture of high-speed computing.

“Brother, can you paradigm?” is the motto. Try figuring out a policy on Iranian or North Korean nukes by laying out paradigms and factor analyses. Whatever you want to say today has to fit on a Blackberry screen.

Josef Joffe is a member of MESH.