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The Professionalization of Political Science and the Margi Rigor Over Relevance: The Professionalization of Political Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies1 Michael Desch Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science University of Notre Dame [Second Draft – September 2013] I. Introduction. Columbia political scientist Robert Jervis observes that at one time “there were significant links between theory and U.S. policy.” 2 One of the most influential civilian academic strategic theorists, Harvard Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, agrees that “there was a wholly unprecedented ‘demand’ for the results of theoretical work: scholars had an audience and scholars had access to classified information. Unlike any other country … the United States had a government permeable not only to academic ideas but by academic people, especially under Democratic Party administrations.”3 But today, there is a broad consensus that the gap between scholars and policymakers has widened in recent years, particularly in the realm of national security affairs.4 The bridge between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway has become a one-way street, and an increasingly rickety one at that! 1 I am grateful for comments on this project to participants in seminars at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Buffet Center for International Studies at Northwestern University, the Security Studies Program at MIT, the Lone Star National Security Forum (Texas A&M, University of Texas Austin, and Southern Methodist), the University of Virginia’s International Security Colloquium, and The Program on International Security Policy (PISP) at the University of Chicago; for the generous financial support of the Earhart and Lounsbery Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation of New York; and especially for extensive discussions on the topic with John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and especially Stephen Van Evera. 2 Jervis, “Security Studies: Ideas, Policy, and Politics,”101. Also see, Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), 336. 3 Thomas Schelling, “Academics, Decision Makers, and Security Policy During the Cold War: A Comment on Jervis” in Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sisson, eds. The Evolution of Political Knowledge (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 137, 4 Alexander L. George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993); Phillip Zelikow, “Foreign Policy Engineering: From Theory to Practice and Back Again,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1984): 143-71; Joseph Kruzel, “Review: More of a Chasm Than a Gap, But Do Scholars Want to Bridge It?” Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1994): 179-81; Joseph Lepgold, “Is Anyone Listening? International Relations theory and the Problem of Policy Relevance,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 113, No. 1 (1998): 43-62; Peter D. Feaver, “The Theory-Policy Gap in Political Science and Nuclear Proliferation,” National Security Studies Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer 1999): 69-82; Joseph Lepgold and Miroslav Nincic, Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Bruce Jentleson, “The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In,” 1 This development is puzzling in many respects: It flies, for example, in the face of a wide-spread and long-standing optimism about the compatibility of social science and policy relevance that traces its origin back to the Progressive Era and the dawn of modern American social science.5 As historian Barry Karl remarks apropos of Charles Merriam, one of the founders of the modern discipline of political science, he “was an American activist of his generation before he was a political scientist; it was his reason for becoming a political scientist. He saw no conflict between activism and science. Indeed, he saw science as the essential precondition of useful activism.”6 Unfortunately, Merriam’s students did not share his dual commitment to balance the requirements of science with the exigencies of reform. Moreover, while not all scholars and policymakers agree that the two sides of this yawning Beltway- Ivory Tower chasm have had, or could have, much useful to say to each other in the realm of national security affairs, 7 the vast majority do. Former Ambassador David Newsom, for example, thinks that of all the various groups in American society that could shape U.S. foreign policy, “the free realm of academia – the 3,638 institutions of higher education and the persons associated with them – should have the most knowledge and insight to offer policymakers.”8 MIT Professor and long-term U.S. Government consultant Ithiel de Sola Pool argues that training in the social sciences constitutes a useful International Security, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Spring 2002): 169-83; Walt, “The Relationship Between Theory and Policy in International Relations,” 23-48; Kenneth Lieberthal, “Initiatives to Bridge the Gap,” Asia Policy, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2006): 7-15; Nye, “International Relations: The Relevance of Theory to Practice,” The Oxford Handbook of International Relations. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 648- 60; and Bruce W. Jentleson and Ely Ratner, “Bridging the Beltway-Ivory Tower Gap,” International Studies Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 2011): 6-11. 5 See, for example, Gene M. Lyons and Louis Morton, Schools for Strategy: Education and Research in National Security Affairs (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 4 and 69; and Ellen Herman, “The Career of Cold War Psychology,” Radical History Review Vol. 63, (Fall 1995): 62. 6 Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), x. 7 Skeptics include Paul Nitze, “The Role of the Learned Man in Government,” Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3 (July 1958): 275-88; Ezra F. Vogel, “Some reflections on Policy and Academics,” Asia Policy, Vol. 1 (2006): 31-34; Allen S. Whiting, “The Scholar and the Policymaker,” World Politics, vol. 24, (Spring 1972): 229-47; Marc Trachtenberg, “Social Scientists and National Security Policymaking,” (Unpublished paper for Notre Dame International security Program Conference, April 23, 2010); Stephen Krasner, “Garbage Cans and Policy Streams: How Academic Research Might Affect Foreign Policy,” Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations, 254- 74; and Ernest J. Wilson, III “Is There Really a Scholar-Practitioner Gap? An Institutional Analysis,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 40, (January 2007) 147-51. 8 David D. Newsome, “Foreign Policy and Academia,” Foreign Policy, No. 10 (Winter, 1995-96): 52. 2 tool for policymakers. 9 Nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie famously advocates making strategy into a “science,” and commends academic social science as the means to do it.10 But despite this general optimism, and the best of intentions among both scholars and policy- makers, “the relationship between the federal government and the social sciences generally and historically, while substantial in scope, has not been altogether harmonious.” 11 According to the most recent Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) survey, a regular poll of international relations scholars, very few of them believe they should not contribute to policy-making in some way. And yet, the majority of them also recognize that the state-of-the-art methodologies of academic social science constitute precisely those approaches that policymakers find least helpful.12 A recent related poll of senior national security decision-makers confirms that for the most part academic social science is not giving them what they need.13 In this essay, I want to explain this disconnect between our discipline’s self-image as balancing rigor with relevance and the reality of how we actually conduct our scholarship most of the time, which is to privilege the former, by answering the question of what explains variation in social scientists’ willingness to engage in policy-relevant scholarship over time? An answer to this question requires me to provide a more general theory explaining when and why academic social scientists have tried to influenced U.S. national security policy. 9 Ithiel de Sola Pool, “The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments,” BacKground, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Aug., 1966),” in Irving Louis Horowitz ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1967), 267. 10 Bernard Brodie, “Strategy As a Science,” World Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4 (July 1949): 467-88. 11 Advisory Committee on the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of Defense, Behavioral and Social Research in the Department of Defense: A FrameworK for Management (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), 2. 12 Paul C. Avey, Michael C. Desch, Daniel Maliniak, James D. Long, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, “The Beltway vs. the Ivory Tower: Why academics and policymakers don't get along.” Foreign Policy (JAN/FEB 2012) at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/03/the_beltway_vs_the_ivory_tower. 13 Paul C. Avey and Michael C. Desch, “What Do Policymakers Want From Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision-makers,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December 2014): [forthcoming]. 3 My theory, in a nutshell, is that social science, at least as it has been practiced in the United States since the early 20th Century, contains two contradictory impulses: To be a rigorous science and
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