In Defense of Political Science

Ned Resnikoff, in an opinion piece for NYU Local, writes:

I used to be a Politics major, and it took only one class to change that: Power and Politics in America. What I discovered from taking that class and talking to my adviser was that the Politics department didn’t spend a whole lot of time addressing what I thought was really relevant: politics not as an abstract, but as a tangible force. Instead of attempting to explain politics in the context of actual policy or recent American history, we spent a lot of time learning about theoretical models for how people vote, along with a couple units on procedural stuff. It was all about how things happen with no focus on why, and the models we were using were far too abstract to make any sense in a system as eccentric as ours.

As a political science Ph.D. student at another fine New York City institution of higher education, I’m of course inclined to see things a little differently. Obviously it could have just been a mediocre class — I came across a two year old syllabus (.pdf) for your referencing pleasure — but the critique sounds familiarly like one of the standard critiques of political science as a discipline. Something along the lines of:

Political science isn’t about real politics; it’s just a bunch of overly formal modeling and statistical analysis of obscure elements of the political system. It doesn’t have any real, applicable political value.

This of course can be true. Plenty of political scientists conduct utterly boring and meaningless research. But I think research on public opinion and voting — my main interest within the field, which is why I’m discussing it specifically, although I don’t think it’s somehow the only example — can be very pragmatically applicable to the real force of American politics, as Resnikoff terms it. Because ultimately, if you’re advocating for Policy X or Candidate Y, you need to know how to change public opinion on certain policies, or shift voting habits in the appropriate manner to elect your preferred candidate. All that nerdy political science research can be pretty valuable here, because often the way people make their voting decisions isn’t as obvious at it might seem, and heavily quantitative analysis can often bring about insights not obvious before the regressions are run.

The line about how “the models we were using were far too abstract to make any sense in a system as eccentric as ours” is particularly interesting in this sense. In a system so eccentric, I’d argue the models in fact have to be abstract to make any sense of it. In other words, “abstract” and “eccentric” are probably more synonyms than opposites in this example.

I do think the case for political science, as presented to people interested in the lived realities of politics writ large, would be easier to make if more political scientists made an effort to make their research socially relevant. Publishing thoughtful articles for larger audiences, for instance, or writing books (like this and this) that appeal to broader audiences without sacrificing analytical soundness would be the ideal way to go about that.

There’s also a secondary point here as well, which is that it’s possible that the standard introduction to American politics classes need to be restructured and made more interesting and relevant. Too much focus on models and theoretical frameworks in an introductory class can have the downside of simply turning young people interested in politics off from political science. I of course agree that the two are, in a sense, different things, but I wouldn’t mind seeing at least a little more overlap at times.