How Political Science Became Irrelevant | Hacker News Reader

How Political Science Became Irrelevant

chronicle.com

34 pointshhs23 comments

"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....

edit - here's the full text, unpaywalled - https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/ax...

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.

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.

In a vacuum, what you're saying sounds eminently reasonable and fair.

However, being familiar with other academic fields, it's my observation that these shifts toward "rigor over relevance" are generally less driven by the supposed pursuit of intellectual- or self-fulfillment and moreso by perverse career incentives in academia.

To be clear, this phenomenon is by no means limited to academia though.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The degree is fairly relevant for certain positions in government, NGOs, academia, national institutions, diplomacy think tanks, lobbies and more.

So you dispute the findings of the article then? If so, I think that a higher value comment is to explain why you disagree rather than to just say the opposite of what the article says.

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

https://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/undergrad/majors/p...

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

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.

I think most of us frame it and then let it sit in our parents' attic - just like anybody else with a degree, really. :-)

For real, though: I work in decentralized tech. I mean, a lot of people coming out of college work in some technology field, regardless of their degree.

I was seriously considering double majoring in it in undergrad and still toy with applying to grad programs.

For me, it’s just intense interest. I don’t really care what I’ll do with it.

I did just that and enjoyed the heck out of it. I found game theory to be fascinating from the perspective of a computer science student. I even managed to find a cross over grad class about using computational hardness to compare and prevent attacks on election systems.

I have a polisci degree. I help small and medium sized technology companies do business with various government agencies, primarily through relationship building, grants and proposal writing.

Being exposed to cutting edge technologies, and often surrounded by passionate and intelligent people, is a rewarding career for me.

And I’m self employed with several regular clients, so I have time to continue learning programming and other fun things.

I have a polisci degree. I write computer code for a living.

More seriously, most of my classmates have either gone on to law school or gotten jobs with political fundraising groups.

In my day (1970s), most PoliSci majors seemed to wish to go to law school. For that matter, I knew one who wished to go to grad school in the field, but settled for law school when a fellowship didn't come through.

The CIA hires them.

If you want to actually take part in something political, like a political assassination, that would be the way to do it and even get paid.

Heh. Maybe that is his real job. He wouldn't tell us, would he?

> what does one do with a Political Science degree anyway?

It's a pretty common undergraduate degree for people going into graduate/professional education in public policy, public administration, and law, and more generally for people seeking to work either in or for groups seeking to influence the political and policy organs of government.

Though some of us just build computing systems.

Graduate degrees in political science may be less immediately relevant outside of the academy, but that's not really a change: it's not a field where most new developments have ever been quickly reduced from theory to practical application (which is mostly done by people policy/admin folks—the engineers and mechanics of government to the polisci scientists—drawing on the work of academics, not by political scientists themselves.)

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