The Relevance of Political Science 9780333786949, 9780333945063, 9780230201088, 9780230201095

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Political Analysis

Series Editors: B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre and Gerry Stoker Political science today is a dynamic discipline. Its substance, theory and methods have all changed radically in recent decades. It is much expanded in range and scope and in the variety of new perspectives – and new variants of old ones – that it encompasses.The sheer volume of work being published, and the increasing degree of its specialization, however, make it difficult for political scientists to maintain a clear grasp of the state of debate beyond their own particular subdisciplines. The Political Analysis series is intended to provide a channel for different parts of the discipline to talk to one another and to new generations of students. Our aim is to publish books that provide introductions to, and exemplars of, the best work in various areas of the discipline.Written in an accessible style, they provide a ‘launching-pad’ for students and others seeking a clear grasp of the key methodological, theoretical and empirical issues, and the main areas of debate, in the complex and fragmented world of political science.

A particular priority is to facilitate intellectual exchange between academic communities in different parts of the world. Although frequently addressing the same intellectual issues, research agendas and literatures in North America, Europe and elsewhere have often tended to develop in relative isolation from one another. This series is designed to provide a framework for dialogue and debate which, rather than advocacy of one regional approach or another, is the key to progress.

The series reflects our view that the core values of political science should be coherent and logically constructed theory, matched by carefully constructed and exhaustive empirical investigation. The key challenge is to ensure quality and integrity in what is produced rather than to constrain diversity in methods and approaches.The series is intended as a showcase for the best of political science in all its variety, and demonstrates how nurturing that variety can further improve the discipline. Political Analysis Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–78694–9 hardback Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–94506–3 paperback (outside North America only)

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England, UK

Political Analysis

Series Editors: B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre and Gerry Stoker Editorial Advisory Group: Frank R. Baumgartner, Donatella Della Porta, Scott Fritzen, Robert E. Goodin, Colin Hay, Alan M. Jacobs, Eliza W.Y. Lee, Jonathon W. Moses, Craig Parsons, Mitchell A. Seligson and Margit Travits Published

David Beetham The Legitimation of Power (2nd edition)

Peter Burnham, Karin Gilland,Wyn Grant and Zig Layton-Henry Research Methods in Politics (2nd edition)

Lina Eriksson Rational Choice Theory: Potential Limits Jean Grugel and Matthew Louis Bishop Democratization: A Critical Introduction (2nd edition)

Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics

Gerry Stoker, B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre (eds) The Relevance of Political Science Martin Smith Power, Politics and the State

Cees van der Eijk and Mark Franklin Elections and Voters

Colin Hay Political Analysis

Forthcoming

Andrew Hindmoor Rational Choice

Alan Finlayson and James Martin Interpretive Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction

Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh (eds) The State: Theories and Issues Vivien Lowndes and Mark Roberts Why Institutions Matter

David Marsh and Gerry Stoker (eds) Theory and Methods in Political Science (3rd edition)

Keith Dowding The Philosophy and Methods of Political Science

Colin Hay Globalization and the State

Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo Gender and Political Analysis

Ioannis Papadopoulos Democracy in Crisis? Politics, Governance and Policy

William Maloney and Jan van Deth Political Participation and Democratic Politics

Jon Pierre and B. Guy Peters Governance, Politics and the State

Karen Mossberger and Mark Cassell The Policy Process: Ideas, Interests and Institutions

B. Guy Peters Strategies for Comparative Research in Political Science Heather Savigny and Lee Marsden Doing Political Science and International Relations

David Marsh Political Behaviour

Dimiter Toshkov Research Design in Political Science

The Relevance of Political Science

Edited by

Gerry Stoker B. Guy Peters and

Jon Pierre

Selection, editorial matter, Introduction and Conclusion © Gerry Stoker, B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre 2015 Individual chapters in order © Gerry Stoker; John Gerring; Colin Hay; Matthew Flinders; Bo Rothstein; Graham Wilson; Sarah Giest; Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee; Thom Brookes; Craig Parsons; B. Guy Peters; Jon Pierre; Helen Margetts 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE Palgrave in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global imprint of the above companies and is represented throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-20108-8 hardback ISBN 978-0-230-20109-5 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey, England, UK Printed in China

Contents

List of tables and figures Notes on the editors and contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction

ix x xiv 1

Gerry Stoker, B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre Tensions over relevance Relevance: the standard lines of defence Three lines of vulnerability The developing argument of the book PART I

2 5 7 11

PERSPECTIVES ON RELEVANCE

1 Challenging three blockages to relevance and political science: the obvious, the avoidable and the thorny Gerry Stoker Politics and evidence: a difficult relationship Incentive structures in academia limit the pursuit of relevance Doubts about the intellectual case for relevance undermine its practice Designing a solution Conclusions 2 The relevance of relevance John Gerring

19 20 23 26 30 34 36

Causal and descriptive knowledge The science of social science Engagement and objectivity Are there other possible foundations for social science? A pragmatic inquiry v

37 39 43 45 46

vi

Contents

3 Relevant to whom? Relevant for what? The role and public responsibility of the political analyst Colin Hay Introduction: relevance – divided by a common language? The private language of political science Relevance and rationality: between perestroika and glasnost? Relevance: deserved or attained? Diagnosing and resolving the crisis 4 The rediscovery of the political imagination Matthew Flinders

50

51 53 55 58 61 65

The road(s) to irrelevance The political imagination A rallying cry to the university professors of politics

67 71 79

5 Guilty as charged? Human well-being and the unsung relevance of political science Bo Rothstein

84

Variations of relevance Does democracy produce human well-being? State capacity, quality of government and human well-being Poverty, state capacity and quality of government Does democracy generate political legitimacy? What does political science want to explain? Political theory, state capacity and quality of government Empirical measures of the relevance problem in political science Theory: why state capacity and quality of government generate human well-being Quality of government, social trust and human well-being Conclusions: the seven sins depriving political science of its potential for being relevant to human well-being

84 86 88 91 92 93 94 96 99 100

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6 Why did nobody warn us? Political science and the crisis 104 Graham Wilson Ideas Institutions Interests What did political science get right? Conclusion PART II

106 108 110 115 115

RELEVANCE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF SUB-DISCIPLINES AND DIVERSE APPROACHES

7 The relevance of the academic study of public policy Sarah Giest, Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee Introduction: linking policy research to policy practice The contribution of political science: reconciling knowledge and power in public policy-making Concerns for relevance and the two-communities metaphor of policy knowledge utilization Moving beyond the two-communities model: knowledge brokerage Conclusion: research relevance in policy studies – an ongoing research agenda in political science 8 Why political theory matters Thom Brooks Introduction A chequered past? Political thought: creating an impact The challenge of demonstrating an impact Bright future 9 Constructivism and interpretive approaches: especially relevant or especially not? Craig Parsons Of gadflies and journalists: problems with postmodern and interpretivist claims to specific and direct relevance Constructivism as eye-opener for policy-makers and especially students Conclusion

121 121 122 124 128 134 136 136 137 139 143 146 148

152 161 168

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10 Is comparative politics useful? If so, for what? B. Guy Peters Varieties of relevance The contributions of comparative politics Challenges to the relevance of comparative politics The limits of relevance in comparative politics Conclusion 11 Can political science address the puzzles of global governance? Jon Pierre

169 171 172 180 186 188

190

Towards global governance? Enter the scholar: The political science contribution Discussion Conclusions

193 194 199 201

12 Maximizing the relevance of political science for public policy in the era of big data Helen Margetts

203

Citizens, social media and big data Governments, digital technologies and the promise of big data for policy-making Big data challenges Maintaining relevance Public policy pay-offs

204 208 210 212 217

Conclusion Gerry Stoker, B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre

220

The case for relevance Why is relevance difficult to deliver? A manifesto for relevance

220 222 225

Bibliography Index

227 263

List of tables and figures

Table 1.1

Varieties of policy input provided by academics

22

Figures 5.1 5.2

Healthy life years vs level of democracy Healthy life years vs control of corruption

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89 90

Notes on the editors and contributors

Thom Brooks is Professor of Law and Government at Durham University’s Law School and an Associate Member of the Philosophy Department. He was previously Reader in Political and Legal Philosophy at the Politics Department of Newcastle University with past visiting appointments at Oxford, St Andrews and Uppsala. His recent books include Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Edinbugh Univesity Press, second edition 2013) and Punishment (Routledge, 2012). Brooks is the founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy and is Director of the Centre for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. Matthew Flinders is Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. He became the chair of the Political Studies Association of the UK in 2014. John Gerring is Professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he teaches courses on methodology and comparative politics. His books include Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Sarah Giest is Assistant Professor of Public Administration at the University of Leiden. Her current research comparatively analyses the interplay of academia, industry and government in the fields of environmental and innovation policy. She also has a strong interest in networks and network management in relation to government performance.

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Colin Hay is Professor of Political Sciences at Sciences Po, Paris, and an Affiliate Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he co-founded the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. He is the author of a number of books including, most recently, The Legacy of Thatcherism (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Stephen Farrall), The Failure of Anglo-Liberal Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and The Political Economy of European Welfare Capitalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, with Daniel Wincott). He is the lead editor of New Political Economy and a founding co-editor of Comparative European Politics and British Politics. Michael Howlett is Burnaby Mountain Chair in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University and Yong Pung How Chair Professor in the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in public policy analysis, political economy, and resource and environmental policy. Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet, a professorial fellow at Mansfield College and Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, all at the University of Oxford, before which she was Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy, UCL. She is a political scientist specializing in the relationship between digital technologies, government and politics. Books and reports include: a series of studies on government on the Internet for the UK National Audit Office (1999, 2002, 2007, 2009, co-authored with Patrick Dunleavy); Digital Era Governance (Oxford University Press, 2008, with Patrick Dunleavy); The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, with Christopher Hood); Paradoxes of Modernization (Oxford University Press, 2010, with Christopher Hood and Perri 6); and Chaotic Pluralism: Social Media and Collective Action (Princeton University Press forthcoming, with Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri). Ishani Mukherjee is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Public Policy in 2013, which was awarded the World Future Foundation PhD Prize in Environmental and Sustainability Research in 2014. Her research interests combine policy design and policy formulation, with a

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thematic focus on environmental sustainability, renewable energy and energy efficiency, particularly in South East Asia. She has worked previously at the World Bank’s Energy Practice in Washington, DC, and obtained her BSc degree (2004) and MSc degree (2006) in Natural Resources and Environmental Economics from Cornell University. Craig Parsons is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, USA. His award-winning books include: A Certain Idea of Europe (Cornell University Press, 2003) and How to Map Arguments in Political Science (Oxford University Press, 2007). B. Guy Peters is Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He is a prolific author and his most recent works include Strategies for Comparative Research in Political Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Jon Pierre is Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg and Professor of Public Governance at the Melbourne School of Government, University of Melbourne. His research interest is focused on governance, public administration, public management and urban politics. His latest books include The Oxford Handbook on Swedish Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015, editor), Governing the Embedded State (Oxford University Press, 2015, with Bengt Jacobsson and Göran Sundström), Globalization and Governance (Edward Elgar, 2013), Interactive Governance (Oxford University Press, 2012, with Jacob Torfing, Guy Peters and Eva Sörensen) and The Politics of Urban Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Bo Rothstein holds the August Röhss Chair in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg where he is also head of the Quality of Government Institute. He was recently awarded an Advanced Research Grant by the European Research Council for a five-year project entitled ‘The Performance of Democracies’. Gerry Stoker is Professor of Politics and Governance at the University of Southampton, UK, and also Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia. In 2001 he was designated Economic and Social Research Council (UK) Hero of Dissemination; in 2004 he received a ‘Making a Difference’ Award

Notes on the editors and contributors

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from the UK Political Studies Association for the impact of his work on local governance; and in 2006 he was given the ‘Best Politics Book of the Year’ award for Why Politics Matters by the UK Political Studies Association. Graham Wilson joined Boston University in 2007 having taught previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Essex in the UK. In 2012 he published his book, The Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis: The Rhetoric of Reform and Regulation (Oxford University Press, with Wyn Grant). In 2012 he was also awarded the Ulrich Kloti Award for Lifetime Achievement from the ‘Structure and Organization of Government Research Committee’ of the International Political Science Association.

Acknowledgements

This book has taken longer to produce than we originally hoped and that reflects the busy lives that all of our contributors lead. We thank them all for their efforts. In the final stages of producing the book Michael Elliott, having just successfully completed his PhD at the University of Southampton, did sterling work in improving the typescript and chasing down references. Thanks again to Keith Povey Editorial Services for excellent work in preparing the final text. This book is the last of our series that will be produced directly under the control of the wonderful Steven Kennedy. The book has been improved greatly, as ever, by Steven’s insights and finally delivered not least because of his unwillingness to let it drift on and on. GERRY STOKER B. GUY PETERS JON PIERRE

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Introduction GERRY STOKER, B. GUY PETERS AND JON PIERRE

As editors we should start this book by stating that we think that political science produces much work that is relevant but that it could do more to enhance the relevance of its work to policymakers, think tanks, non-governmental organizations and citizens. In 2010 we published a joint chapter on the issue (Peters et al. 2010), which developed that argument, and followed that by organizing a session at the American Political Science Association meetings that year on the topic of relevance. Here is a report on that session from a journalist (Jaschik 2010) who was present: Gerry Stoker shared ‘a wicked thought’ he had when planning a session held on Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. What if he called as many senior figures in political science as he could reach and asked them ‘if they had ever said anything relevant in their entire careers’? Stoker, professor of politics and governance at Britain’s University of Southampton, didn’t embarrass his discipline’s luminaries by asking them one by one for any examples of relevance. (The laughter in the room, however, suggested that some might not have fared well if asked.) The laughter in the room, we would like to think, also reflected the wit with which Stoker presented the issue; but there is undoubtedly a sense of unease when it comes to the issue of relevance both among American and other political scientists worldwide. This book aims to understand, analyse and address that sense of unease about relevance. We need to move beyond a debate about whether political science is relevant since the subject matter of the discipline manifestly makes it germane to the challenges facing our societies. The challenge for this book is to show the variety of ways that political science is relevant and how it could be more relevant. The issue that needs to be addressed is not so 1

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much whether practising politicians or the media judge political science to be relevant (see for example the exchange between Kristof 2014 and Fearon 2014). Rather, for this book, the key agenda is how best to understand the obstacles that need to be resolved in achieving relevance and the potential for relevance that could thereby be realized. There might be good reasons why there are blockages on the road to relevance for political science (Stoker 2010a). We will continue this introduction by noting the variety of tensions raised by the issue of relevance. We then go on to examine three of the standard narratives of defence used by those who want to claim relevance for political science and three points of vulnerability identified by those who call for a greater gearing up towards relevance by the profession. We then move on to look at the contributions from our authors in the light of these reflections. The standard lines of attack and defence over the issue hardly close the debate. There are many subtleties, nuances and frankly new insights that we think that our contributors provide in this book. So our introduction closes with a review of the chapters in the book and highlights the developments in the debate which they offer.

Tensions over relevance As political scientists we can offer one immediate explanation for the discomfort felt by political scientists about the topic of relevance which is a familiar feature of other areas of political tension: debate over relevance threatens interests and reflects conflicting visions of how actors should behave. The political science profession employs thousands of people around the world and its work is engaged with, and read by, millions either directly or indirectly. The question of its relevance goes to the heart of the interests of the profession and brings to the fore a different set of divisions from those that already plague a fragmented profession with competing sub-disciplinary foci and methodological preferences (Almond 1990; Sigelman 2006). Relevance brings into play three types of conflict. The first and most familiar to political scientists is a conflict over access to resources. Judgements about relevance from policy-makers and others can lead to threats to research funding or the marginalization of political science in teaching programmes. The former threat moved from the abstract to the concrete for American political science when its

Introduction

3

access to National Sciences Foundation research funding was threatened by moves in the US congress in 2012/13; and the danger to the sustainability of political science teaching is experienced in different ways in different countries in the light of concerns about its virtues as a discipline and its value in terms of employability for students. If political science is irrelevant why should it be part of the curriculum in our colleges and universities? In short, queasiness about relevance reflects awareness within the profession that getting on the wrong side of the argument might lead to a squeeze on resources for the discipline. But the debate over relevance also has within it conflicts over values. Political science is a complex activity and within that world as Isaac (2013: 207) points out some ‘will advocate for relevance, and will be relevant, in a range of different and sometimes even competing ways. And they will do so in a disciplinary environment in which many of their colleagues will resist “relevance” in the name of “scientific objectivity” or “basic knowledge” or even “truth seeking” … Each of us has our own answers to these questions’. Relevance can be advocated and opposed on different grounds and it would be naïve to imagine there is ever going to be anything other than a plurality of views on the topic. It appears that relevance reflects for some a mid-life crisis. A repeated pattern is one where academics spend their early careers publishing and researching and when their career reaches some level of maturity move on to reflect on issues of relevance. For example, Harold Lasswell (1956; see also Lerner and Lasswell 1951) used his presidential address to the American Political Science Association to advocate that political scientists turn their knowledge much more explicitly and effectively to address issues of practice, although his advocacy of ‘a policy science of democracy’ had a largely sceptical reception (Farr et al. 2006). Robert Putnam (2003) used his presidential address to call to attention the public role of political science, drawing on his own substantive contribution around issues of social capital and political disengagement. In the case of international relations, Alexander George (1993) stands out as one among a number of advocates for a stronger connection between theory and practice (Walt 2005). Joseph Nye (2009: 252) uses his contribution to 100 perspectives on The Future of Political Science to suggest that political scientists ‘should devote more attention to unanswered questions about how our work relates to the policy world we are in’ (see also in the same volume Prewitt 2009).

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Notwithstanding these pleas from leaders in the profession it is clear that large numbers are not moved by the call to arms for relevance. The third aspect of the conflict over relevance goes deeper still and adds to the sense of unease around the issue: relevance is ultimately about the identity of the profession (Stoker 2010a; 2012). As political scientists know, divisions and conflicts over identity create challenging problems for politics to resolve, as they are not so amenable to a ‘more or less’ compromise between competing sides that might be available in a conflict over resources. Disagreements, say over which research to fund, can often be resolved by agreeing that different interests can access at least some of the funds, but when it comes to conflicts over identity it is less easy to get different actors to agree to a compromise. Value- or identitybased conflicts may create divisions that are unbridgeable between students of politics that claim a humanist perspective and those who emphasize a scientific perspective. Bernard Crick (1959), for example, was very concerned that the technical and methodological fixation dominant in American political science would encourage a way of studying politics that would see political science become disengaged from the practice of politics. The top American journals all appear to prize methodological advance above substantive contribution to the understanding of politics. One of the top-selling books about methods in political science shows how in many branches of the science this orientation has become an all-pervading mantra, exactly as Crick feared. Kellstedt and Whitten (2009: 15–18) offer general rules of the road to ‘scientific knowledge about politics’ and conclude: ‘whereas politicians make or break their political careers with normative statements, political scientists need to avoid them at all cost’. Academics should argue so ‘that it is impossible for the reader to tell what your values are or what your normative preferences about the world are’. When another group makes a claim that political science should adopt a humanist tradition and has a moral responsibility to put its work at the service of citizens it is difficult for those that argue for a strict separation of the personal and political science to find common ground with them. Relevance creates tension because it can lead into discussions which are about the soul of the profession. So far we have offered little insight into the substance of the debate about relevance, preferring to establish instead that there are good reasons, grounded in the nature of the divisions and conflicts at stake,

Introduction

5

for the political science profession to be concerned with the topic. Relevance is a sensitive topic for political science: answering its challenges therefore matters. In the next section we begin to set out some of the standard lines of defence used within the profession.

Relevance: the standard lines of defence The first line of defence in the debate about relevance can be summed up as: all knowledge is relevant and that since political science produces knowledge that is uniquely robust it is relevant. This argument can be developed further by recognizing that what constitutes relevance is not fixed. It can vary according to time, circumstance and indeed the standpoint of the observer. Something that might appear irrelevant can, after a political crisis or turn of events, have a pressing relevance. Think of colleagues toiling away on some obscure part of a constitution or a country that is not a normal focus of attention and then something happens and all of a sudden that work is relevant. If relevance is the production of rigorous and unique knowledge it seems difficult to see how any academic could object to the idea of relevance or deny that they might be relevant. Peter John (2013) takes this line of argument further still by suggesting that academics simply need to be more confident about their claims of relevance: Academics should stand their ground and have more confidence in their intellectual project. They can claim that the systemic study of politics adds value in a way that the methods of other knowledge professionals cannot. To be craven to the practitioner world makes academics too similar to other knowledge providers so they cannot claim comparative advantage. In this way, academics are bound to be less influential as politicians and policy makers can get that kind of expertise more easily elsewhere. If academics stick to the production of knowledge, which may involve the use of technical terms and complex models and methods, in the end the policy makers will come to them, rather than the other way round. (Ibid.: 172) His point finds many echoes in the commentary of others (Isaac 2013; Lupia 2000). Political science delivers robust knowledge which is communicated in a way that those who take the time to

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consume it can do so. Indeed John (2013: 172–3) claims that ‘academics are good at disseminating their work across networks, establishing their reputations and ensuring the acceptance of complex ideas and findings’ and that the new world of social media makes this ‘lateral form of influence even easier’. The second line of defence is that there is a lot of political science that has shown a capacity for engagement and has made an impact. That argument might be nuanced further by claiming political science has traded its early, slightly more extensive, interaction with the world of policy for a stronger focus on rigour and method which may mean the quantity of directly relevant work has gone down but its quality has gone up. In the early decades of the journal, the American Political Science Review articles dealing with issues of policy advocacy or criticism were by no means dominant but were not uncommon, reflecting perhaps an easier period of exchange between academics and elites. But by the early 1960s, ‘prescription had almost entirely vanished from the Review’ (Sigelman 2006); a reflection not only of change in the profession but also in the complexities of accessing policy-makers. In the case of international relations the idea of relevance was at the very heart of its foundation (Brown and Ainley 2005) – to grapple with issues of sustaining peace between nations – but a substantial and growing gap has been identified as characterizing the relationship between theory and practice for several decades (Walt 2005). Again complex forces are at play that could explain this increased specialization and separation. The idea of relevance may have drifted down the profession’s agenda but it has not lacked powerful exemplars. In Stoker’s chapter in this volume, the example of the work of democratic designers and governance scholars such as the Nobel prize winning Elinor Ostrom is lauded. Other chapters are replete with examples of political science that has had an impact. It may be that for some scholars, more than others, the ‘impact imperative’ exerts a stronger pull. For example, Campbell and Childs (2013: 185) rightly claim that ‘feminist political science, and gender and politics scholars, offer useful and longstanding examples of best practice when it comes to dissemination, engagement and impact’. Some parts of the discipline or related fields may lead the way but political science has enough of its output on the stocks to justify the claim that it is relevant. The third line of defence reads more like a form of attack in the hands of some of its advocates. The argument is that policy-makers and politicians ignore evidence they do not find agreeable and to

Introduction

7

cover their tracks falsely accuse political science of lacking relevance. Here is a particularly spirited riposte, to the claim that political science fails the relevance test, from Ronald Rogowski (2013: 216): Contemporary political science suffers from too much policy relevance, not too little. Politicians simply do not like the policies that scholarly research supports, prefer policies (often put forward by charlatans) that better suit their interests, and seek to suppress or ignore evidence-based research that contradicts their own, or their ‘base’ voters’, ideologies. When these same politicians assert piously that political science offers no policy-relevant research, what they really mean is that it offers no research that supports their own biases. Rogowski goes on to identify diverse areas of policy over immigration, electoral rules and issues of redistribution where well founded insights are simply not taken up. As several authors in this volume note, the tendency for policy to seek supportive evidence rather than for evidence to drive policy appears to be a commonplace feature of contemporary democracies. As Wildavsky (1979) argued decades ago, speaking truth to power is a far from easy task. None of these lines of defence deny directly the relevance of trying to achieve relevance. They argue rather that relevance of evidence is difficult to judge straightforwardly. That rigour in the production of knowledge is what really matters. Political scientists are using in increasing numbers the options provided by social media and other outlets to share their findings. The blockages are not with them but rather with powerful policy-makers who look for evidence to match their preferences rather than use evidence to drive their choices.

Three lines of vulnerability So how is the defensive fortress assembled by political science to be challenged? What are the vulnerabilities identified by those who argue that more attention needs to be paid to relevance? The weakness they identify in the case for the relevance of political science mixes concerns about its agenda, with worries about its methods, to concern with the manner of its outputs.

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The first argument is captured by a simple and telling question: is it the case that political science can show how its agenda matches the major concerns of the citizens of the world? There are hidden factors at work that encourage political science to explore issues of importance to their world view but which would not be considered matters of great salience by those outside of the political science community. Albert Hirschman (1981) comments that one of the challenges for social science is that as people live in society they not unreasonably think that they know a thing or two about it. So there is a particular premium on evidence and argument generated from within the social sciences that confounds common-sense assumptions. As Hirschman (1981: 298) puts it: ‘important social science discoveries are therefore typically counterintuitive, shocking and concerned with unintended and unexpected consequences of human action’. Here we might have an initial clue as to why political science has a tendency to head off in a direction away from everyday – perhaps the most obviously relevant – aspects of political activity; or, when investigating that activity, concentrates a lot of effort on discovering something a little bit different or unique. Political science, in order to differentiate its findings from the common sense of the age, is constantly searching for surprises, idiosyncrasies or a finding that is counterintuitive. There is nothing inherently inappropriate about these lines of enquiry, but it means that as a result political scientists can stumble into being irrelevant. Specialized research topics meet only indifference from the inner circle of politicos – the politicians and the journalists that report on them – for much of the time. This inner circle may recognize the need for occasional engagement with, for example, experts on the details of elections and complicated constitutional issues, but beyond that there is no need for regular engagement. When it comes to most aspects of politics there is a standing assumption on the part of these politicos that there is little need for the expertise of political science. In the case of politics those that are the foremost among its practitioners, the elected representatives and the political journalists, often give the impression that they do not need political science, at least when it comes to understanding how politics works or what we can reasonably expect from politics. The tendency to develop specialized knowledge has created a sense that political science is only on the margins of the daily agenda of politics. It is also possible to identify a more radical version of this argument: the myopia of political science has meant that its work fails to

Introduction

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grapple with the big human and therefore political issues. There have been recurring moments in the history of political science when political scientists have stepped forward to say that big things are happening in the world – and that political science needs to be grappling with them. An excellent and powerful example of this message is provided by David Easton in his Presidential Address to the American Political Studies Associations in 1969. A little scene setting would seem appropriate. Easton was at that time a leading advocate for the scientific behavioural revolution in political science but appears in his speech to be strongly affected by the social and political turmoil of the times: with its new environmental and feminist movements, its antiwar perspective, its civil rights concerns and so on. His speech is about trying to reconcile two forces: making political science more rigorous, and making it more relevant. Faced with a world confronting nuclear war, environmental disaster and huge levels of social injustice Easton (1969: 1057) argues: ‘there can be little doubt that political science as an enterprise has failed to anticipate the crises that are upon us’. Its agenda needs to be set to a much greater degree by the pressing problems in the world around it. Easton goes on to outline a ‘credo of relevance’ with seven key points: • Substance must dominate over technique. What is studied matters more than how it is studied. • To claim simply to study empirically politics as it exists lends itself to a conservative outlook as it tends to focus on what is rather than what might be. • Too much sophistication in method obscures the brutal reality of much of politics and prevents political science from addressing pressing human needs. • Science cannot be neutral: what you choose to study is driven by value judgements, and how that work is used should be steered by values. • The role of intellectuals is to promote the ‘humane values of civilization’. • To know is to bear the responsibility to act; scientists have a special obligation to put their knowledge to work. • This commitment to engage should be institutionalized and expressed through associations of scholars and universities. They cannot stand aside: politicization of the professions is inescapable as well as desirable.

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There can be little doubt about the radicalism of the message that Easton was trying to convey. Equally it is clear that political scientists have largely ignored it. The article in the American Political Science Review that captures Easton’s presidential address has a mere 343 (in June 2014) citations compared with 5,453 given to a book published by him that has become a political science classic: A Systems Analysis of Political Life (Easton 1979). The revolution in orientation that Easton was arguing for failed to materialize. So the challenge remains: is political science grappling with the issues that matter? A second line of vulnerability builds on the first, but its focus is more about the doing of political science rather than its agenda. Its driving question is: does political science have a sufficient breadth of method and approaches to enable it to be relevant? The strongest carrier of this message in recent decades has been the group of scholars that challenged both the approach of the American Political Science Association and its journals and which became known as the ‘Perestroika Movement’ (Monroe 2005; Schram and Caterino 2006). The movement is mixed in its focus and depth of analysis, but one of the essential points to emerge is its critique of mainstream political science for having too great a reliance on highly sophisticated quantitative methods, rational choice modelling and game theory that neglects those qualitative traditions of study that might have a more direct engagement with those involved in politics as policy-makers and citizens. While part of the objection to this perceived state of affairs is the way it closed down job opportunities and careers for those who were not prepared to follow a few narrow prescribed methodological paths, a strong secondary theme in the challenge from the Perestroika Movement was that because of its obsession with highly technical methods political science has become irrelevant to the politics of the real world. A political science that is entirely dominated by esoteric presentations and technical disputes makes its work inaccessible and therefore unusable by ordinary citizens. A wider range of methods with a greater capacity to engage in critical reflection about what should be done as well as what is would help to lead political science down the path towards relevance. Another issue might be that the things that are easiest to measure (e.g. votes) may actually be the least relevant for solving problems. In other words, political science can tend to go where the data is, not where the major issues actually are.

Introduction

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While the second line of challenge over relevance reflects a more internal dispute within political science, the emerging prominence of the third line of vulnerability again reflects the impact of external forces. The third question posed by the doubters of political science’s claims to relevance is this: you may do good political science but can you communicate it? The resources and commitment of the profession comparatively speaking go into the production of the research and not its delivery. In the world where many actors and institutions face greater calls for accountability, a failure to share and show the value of work funded by taxpayers puts political science in a vulnerable position. The focus for this challenge is on communication. Matt Flinders, both in this volume and elsewhere, has led this line of attack: ‘it is not therefore that political science has become irrelevant, but that it has generally failed to promote and communicate the social value and benefit of the discipline in an accessible manner’ (Flinders 2013a: 164). Resolving the situation requires more ‘political imagination’ and for political scientists to become better at the arts of translation – that will require the acquisition of some new skills as well as a rebalancing of where the effort is put within the profession. What Flinders refers to as triple writing – a scholarly first piece, followed by a short more popular summary, then a more journalistic short blog or media story to bring the study to life and gain attention for it – is the order of what is required to a much greater degree for the future.

The developing argument of the book The book is constructed in two parts. In the first part the chapters are largely concerned with some of the general issues raised by relevance. In the second part of the book the authors turn their attention to the contribution of sub-disciplines or particular approaches to meeting the challenge of relevance. Stoker launches the first part of the book by developing some of the themes touched on in this introductory chapter by exploring three blockages to relevance. The first blockage has already been hinted at and considers how power rather than evidence is the determining factor in politically driven policy-making. The second focuses on the lack of incentives and professional encouragement for political scientists to make their work obviously and directly relevant. Both the first two blockages can be met to some degree by

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changes in the practice of political science by accepting that, although limited, an important role for evidence remains and that it is up to political science to make its work accessible. The third blockage raises the trickiest issues in that it is about whether political scientists can offer evidence-based solutions and advice rather than explanations of ‘what is’. However, even this blockage could be addressed if as Stoker argues political science developed a stronger design arm to its way of working. The debate about the relevance of political science is, of course, part of a broader consideration of the purpose and value of social science, and in Gerring’s chapter we are offered a review of the alternative claims that might limit the search for relevance among social science. But in the end we get a strong statement made for the utility of social science to be a key objective and an argument that academic curiosity is a good but not sufficient justification for social science. The two might indeed coexist, of course, with curiosity driving scholars to a consideration of issues that have relevance, even if the answers are not straightforward or easily agreed upon. As Hay argues in his chapter, relevance, like beauty, is to some degree in the eye of the beholder. He argues that much of what is done in research in political science is indeed relevant – even work that does not appear to address immediately or obviously contemporary issues. So the challenge is how to explain better the relevance of the topics and methods used by political science. The responsibility of political scientists is less to deliver different work with a more palpable application, but rather to take the trouble and effort to a much greater degree to explain the relevance of their work and their choice of topic. Flinders takes on this theme but is perhaps more critical of the current output of political science. He argues for a more developed political imagination in the choice of research topics and writing to ensure that it does bridge the academic–practitioner divide and is accessible to a wider audience than a few academic colleagues. He makes a number of practical suggestions about how greater accessibility in research might be delivered. A more critical note is sounded in the chapters by Rothstein and Wilson. They take the argument about the political imagination and apply it in two areas: welfare and the economy. Rothstein argues that political science could make itself more relevant if it focused less on providing advice to policy-makers or offering ‘public intellectual’ guidance to citizens and instead conducted high

Introduction

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quality comparative research about the core outputs of the political system. What non-academics really need to know from academic science is: does it have an answer to what makes for good outputs from political systems that improve human well-being? It would seem that being better able to answer that question would end doubts about the relevance issue once and for all. Bad government and corruption are the cause of misery and suffering for many populations around the world and political science needs to focus more of its fire power on those issues and the determinants of good governance. Wilson is critical of the failure of political science to grapple with another important output from politics: the stability and viability of the economic and financial systems. More generally he argues that too little political science was willing to grapple with issues of inequality and too often that political science came up with arguments that suggested the extraordinary power of some organized interests – especially those around finance – was not a problem because of the matching power of other forces. Political science has not taken so much of the blame as the discipline of economics for failing to foresee the crisis of 2007/08 onwards, as experienced by many Western societies, but, argues Wilson, it should and could have done better. Political science, perhaps, in that sense needs to give itself a broader political economy focus in order to improve its chances of being relevant. Part II of the book explores the issue of relevance through the eyes of various sub-disciplines or approaches within political science. It starts with a chapter by Giest, Howlett and Mukherjee on the policy sciences which by reason of its subject matter would seem to have relevance as a focus. Yet even in the world of policy studies relevance is only achieved through constant vigilance and care taken, both over the way that research is selected and conducted, and over the commitment given to not only transferring knowledge but also to understanding its complex dynamics. Policy research is relevant in two ways, this chapter argues; first by directly engaging with policy-makers through the provision of evidence, and second by working through knowledge brokers, policy advisers and designers who make up the ‘third community’ of a policy system. The next chapter reviews work that at first glance would appear to be a much less likely source of relevant political science: namely political theory. But Brooks puts up a spirited defence of the

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achievements of political theory in terms of relevance. The chapter provides several examples of political theorists engaging and making a difference and Brooks argues that, far from being a threat, the relevance or impact agenda is one of great promise for political theorists. If they embrace the challenge, as some have before them, then political theorists have nothing to lose and everything to gain if relevance becomes a more important criterion in driving the dynamic of political studies. Parsons explores the prospects for another approach to political studies – the constructivist paradigm – that would seem not to be the most obvious carrier of the flag of relevance. Again the message of the chapter is more positive than negative. The chapter directly takes on some of the claims of the Perestroika Movement and the broader group of postmodern constructivists and those that make the case for a more relevant form of political studies such as Flyvbjerg (2001). The gist of Parsons’s challenge is that the arguments put forward may provide a path to relevance but at the cost of producing work that has a distinctive social science offering. If political science is politics what does it offer that is different from journalism or politicians’ speeches in terms of understanding? It is only by showing how constructivism offers insights and understanding of issues that other approaches fail to illuminate so effectively that a better answer to the relevance question can be addressed. Engagements of that sort might at times be fed directly to policy-makers, but the more likely route is through teaching and training future policy-makers, knowledge brokers, analysts and journalists to think critically using the tools of constructivism. In his chapter on comparative politics, Peters does point to some of the accomplishments of this sub-discipline in addressing major political issues such as democratization and conflict management. That said, however, he also points to the many challenges facing comparative politics and the declining relevance of much of the research. Pierre in his chapter identifies a limiting case for achieving relevance and shows that in the world of global governance our underdeveloped understanding and the modest nature of practice on the ground makes a claim for relevance difficult to sustain. However, as Pierre argues, too much literature appears happy to sustain itself through internal theoretical debates rather than to grapple with the task of understanding the complexity of global politics.

Introduction

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Finally, Margetts makes a case for political science to achieve relevance by exploiting the possibilities created by big data. While recognizing the challenges that surround the approach, Margetts argues that, by moving on from an initial rather slow embrace, political science could, if big data analysis was adopted to a greater degree, open up exciting areas for itself and styles of analysis that are more immediate, more comprehensive and more rigorous. However, a core prerequisite for undertaking this big data journey to greater relevance would be a willingness to embrace working in larger and cross-disciplinary teams. The book then aims to provide both a more nuanced set of arguments around the issue of the relevance of political science and a tentative assessment of its achievements in some of its sub-disciplines. There may be areas, such as the study of electoral systems or campaigning techniques, which are not covered in detail in this book, where relevance claims could be more easily established. Equally we have not touched in depth on arenas of political science where relevance is not really a viable objective, such as histories of the discipline or studies that provide a backcloth theory or methodology for the advancement of the discipline. Our aim is to move the debate forward by giving the reader more food for thought.

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PART I

PERSPECTIVES ON RELEVANCE

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Chapter 1

Challenging three blockages to relevance and political science: the obvious, the avoidable and the thorny GERRY STOKER

This chapter explores three blockages to relevance. The first argument rests on the observation that the use of research in the world of policy is prone to the play of politics and power and that the windows of opportunity for political science to demonstrate its relevance may therefore be relatively narrow and infrequent. This first blockage will come as no surprise to anyone in political science or in politics. The play of power in decision-making is a central feature in our mutual understanding of politics. The second explanation focuses more on the lack of incentives and organizational blockages experienced by those that prioritize relevance within the profession of political science, which in turn limit the numbers of those academics that seek to make their work obviously and directly relevant. This blockage is a product of the intended and unintended consequences of institutional and individual decisions made over the last few decades and which could be addressed by a different set of choices being made. It is, therefore, an avoidable blockage. The third blockage rests on thorny issues raised by the advocacy of relevance. These include the difficult issues of untangling matters of fact and value and more generally whether political scientists can offer evidence-based solutions and advice rather than explanations of ‘what is’. The first obstacle is something that has to be worked around, the second has to be confronted and the third puzzled about and hopefully addressed by new cadres of work that build on some pioneering examples. 19

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Politics and evidence: a difficult relationship The essence of politics is to decide in the context of conflict and disagreement what, if anything, should be done, and, given time constraints and the limited attention that policy-makers can devote to one among a multitude of potential issues, political scientists like other players have to find their ‘window of opportunity’ (Kingdon 1995). Policy decisions as Weiss (1993: 94–5) argues emerge ‘from the rough and tumble of political support, opposition, and bargaining’. When political scientists go down the road of relevance they enter the world of politics and its play of power. For scientists from other disciplines the brutishness and otherness of this world of politics can come as a shock (Stoker 2006: 63–5), but it would be surprising if many political scientists overlooked the most obvious characteristics of that world. The use of research is not directly in the control of researchers and it is naïve not to recognize that research can become a weapon in an ongoing political battle. Studies can be misused by political interests, the media can over-simplify complex research and the political leaning of the researchers may inappropriately colour the findings of the research. There may be dark forces at work. The relationship of social science and policy-making is governed by an ironic dynamic, argues Boswell (2009). Governments can hand over lots of money for evidence-collecting and analysis and largely ignore it. Evidence is hardly ever used to improve policy but rather just to lend authority to the preferences of policy-makers or even more generally to demonstrate the rationality of decision-making processes. The decisions of government are sound if they also pay for lots of evidence collecting even if they rarely use the evidence. Policy-makers move to the dynamics of power, which means that often evidence is unwanted or only used if supportive, in some way, of the preferred option. Beyond these issues of politics and power the policy process has a temporal dynamic that means that research findings can find it difficult to find the right opening. As political scientists we would view as naïve an understanding of the policy process driven by the rational decision-making model. The policy process does not follow the linear process of conceptualizing the problem, designing intervention, providing solutions and evaluating that intervention. As all the established policy-making models tells us, from the multiple streams framework to punctuated-equilibrium models (for a review

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see Sabatier 2007), the policy process involves a complex set of elements that interact over time. Problems, solutions and political opportunities may all become prominent at different times. It is clear that researchers hardly ever find themselves in the position of problem solving where there is an agreed view of a challenge and a consensus that something should be done about it. Only rarely will the conditions emerge for a pure problem-solving model: a clear and shared definition of the problem, timely and appropriate research answers, political actors willing to listen and the absence of strong opposing forces. Much more often political scientists like many other policy players, struggle to find the appropriate window of opportunity in which to make their impact. Policy-making and academic work, moreover, operate with different understandings of time constraints. As Walt (2005: 35) argues: ‘scholars want to make their work as accurate as possible, even if this takes longer, but policy makers rarely have the luxury of waiting’. Political science research operates with an elastic view of time, but this may as a result find itself losing the battle for relevance by failing to produce results in a timely way if the right ‘window of opportunity’ is open. As Carol Weiss (1979: 431) argued over three decades ago, ‘there has been much glib rhetoric about the vast benefits that social science can offer if only policy makers paid attention. Perhaps it is time for social scientists to pay attention to the imperatives of policy-making systems and to consider soberly what they can do, not necessarily to increase the use of research, but to improve the contribution that research makes to the wisdom of social policy’. At the same time Wildavsky (1979) captured the challenge of speaking truth to power as an art or craft that required not only rigorous evidence-based knowledge but also an understanding of the complexities and realities of the policy process and the social dynamics of working with politicians and policy-makers. The policy process is not generally a context where a linear connection can be made between the identification of a problem and the production of a solution. A standard but naïve understanding of the way policy impact works for academic research assumes a starting point of blue skies research, followed by applied development, after which comes the identification of a problem that is ultimately met by the design of a solution informed by the research. As Pollitt (2006: 259) comments: ‘in the real worlds of public policy and management such simple transactions do occasionally occur, but they are unrepresentative of academic advice-giving as a

22 Table 1.1 Varieties of policy input provided by academics Type of advice

Description

Example from political science

Agenda-setting and reframing.

Identification of coming issues or new ways of looking at challenges.

Work on governance and the understanding of the fragmented complexity of the policy process has informed the understanding of policy-makers (Rhodes 2007).

Expert moderation of inter-party and inter-institutional discussion.

Helping to clarify options and enabling the different sides to come to an agreement.

The role of political science advice in conflict management or resolving settings (Reynolds 2011).

Conceptual clarification.

Clarifying definitions and helping policy-makers to understand more clearly the problems they face.

The role of various scholars on the democratic deficit facing the European Union (Follesdal and Hix 2006).

Questioning false assumptions.

The advice provided here is challenging. It questions underlying assumptions. It asks what might be missing from the decision frame. It identifies what might be lost if a particular path is followed even when that path may lead to gains.

Debate about whether reducing the voting age to 16 is a good idea or not (Cowley and Denver 2004).

Advising about how best to collect data.

Here a key role could be about how to design research so that results can feed into the policy process.

Work using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to look at how to increase turnout or more civic behaviour (Green and Gerber 2008).

Guidance on how best to structure a decision.

Here the advice is not about what decision to take but how to organize a process that would enable a decision to be made.

Advice on the conduct of a citizens’ jury, referenda or people’s panel (Smith 2009).

Substantive advice about how to address a problem.

Drawing on generalizations Advice on how best to respond to made from the established issues of gender inequality in body of research work this political systems (Squires 2007). form of advice looks at what to do but considers how best to respond in the context.

Technical tips based on previous experience.

Here the essence of the advice is to capture past on lessons what to do or what not to do.

Advice provided on the implications of changing to a different electoral system (Bowler and Donovan 2013).

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whole’. There are perhaps more windows of opportunity than is commonly assumed. Table 1.1 captures the main types of advice that could be offered, drawing on and developing Pollitt’s work (2006). The difficulties presented by the play of power are substantial but opportunities for engagement still abound.

Incentive structures in academia limit the pursuit of relevance Stephen Walt argues that for academic scholars the incentive structure to engage in the world of politics and policy is conspicuously absent. His argument is developed in the context of international relations (IR) theory but could equally be applied across political science. The modest impact of contemporary IR theory on policy makers is no accident, because the creation of IR theory conforms to the norms and incentives of the academic profession rather than the needs of policy. IR scholarship is often impenetrable to outsiders, largely because it is not intended for their consumption; it is written primarily to appeal to other members of the profession … This is not a new phenomenon; both scholars and policy makers have been complaining about it for decades … It is a direct consequence of the professionalization of the academic world and the specific incentives that scholars within the academy have established for themselves. The academic field of IR is a self-regulating enterprise, and success in the profession depends almost entirely on one’s reputation among one’s peers. There is therefore a large incentive to conform to the norms of the discipline and write primarily for other academics. (Walt 2005: 38) New career scholars know that publishing in good quality journals is their ticket to a successful career. Making an effort to promote the relevance of their work could seem a potentially unproductive waste of time. General theory and ground-breaking work that heads off in novel directions is valued over applied theory. Empirical work is more likely to be assessed according to the virtuosity or novelty of its methodology rather than the relevance of its topic or findings to external observers.

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The emphasis on a particular scholarship practice is no accident: ‘the discipline has tended to valorise highly specialized research (as opposed to teaching or public service) because that is what most members of the field want to do’ (ibid.). There are not many academics that spend much time in the world of government or policy advice and the numbers that have taken up that role in recent years has probably declined. Even in the United States, where an extensive system of appointments gives greater scope for scholars to move from academia to government and vice versa, the tendency has been for the traffic to diminish. As Nye (2008: 594) comments: ‘the United States has a tradition of political appointments that is amenable to “in and out” circulation between government and academia. While a number of important American scholars such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have entered high-level foreign policy positions in the past, that path has tended to become a one-way street. Not many top-ranked scholars are currently going into government, and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory.’ If you enter the world of government from the academy, the chances are you will never find your way back. One reason why it is so difficult to work across the divide is that academic work is becoming increasingly specialized and it is difficult to keep up to date unless you are a full-time academic. In his review of 100 years of political science publishing and the evolution of the profession in the United States, Lee Sigelman (2006) points out that the dominant leitmotif has been fragmentation, or perhaps more neutrally specialization, within the discipline. That specialization has brought some advances, it could be argued, and could in theory have better equipped academics to offer policy-relevant work, given the enhanced intensity and focus of their expertise. But in practice it has tended to widen the gap between policy and academics as the latter have become more specialized and less accessible with regard to their knowledge production. The resultant growth and specialization of knowledge means that no one – least of all time-poor policy-makers – can keep up with the subfields of political science (Nye 2008). Specialization has also taken a hold on the very process of transferring knowledge from outside government to the inside. Think tanks, the media, public intellectuals, professional associations, non-governmental organizations and other bodies now play a stronger role in linking to policy-makers than universities or academics more generally. Universities are no longer at the fore in

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the transmission of ideas to the world of policy. They have been crowded out and out-competed. As a result, the idea that has comforted some academics – that their ‘big ideas eventually dripdown to the policy world, perhaps via their students – may not hold true. As Walt (2005: 40) comments: This is a comforting view insofar as it places academic theorists at the pinnacle of the status hierarchy, leaves scholars free to do whatever they want, and assumes that their efforts will eventually be of value. There is also much to be said for allowing scholars to pursue ideas that are not tied to specific policy problems, because wide-ranging inquiry sometimes yields unexpected payoffs. But there are also grounds for questioning whether the current division of labor is optimal. The trickle-down theory only holds good if it is assumed that there are channels for the ideas to travel down. But the evidence suggests that the world of policy advice has become crowded with actors that have the communication skills, a commitment to provide immediate expertise at a moment’s notice and a zeal for engagement that is not observable in the academic world. ‘The problem is further compounded by the use of academic jargon and the lack of interest in communicating in plain language to a policy public (Nye 2008: 599). Although the specialists in universities’ media departments do their best to overcome the resistance or disinterest of many academics there can be little doubt that many disciplines – political science included – are simply not geared up to compete at making an impact in the crowded world of policy advocacy that has been established in most advanced democracies. The structure of academia and the structure of the world of policy advice may have led to a greater separation of academics from policy relevance but there is no necessary reason to believe that the trend could not be reversed. Universities are beginning to gear up to extend their capacity for policy relevant work and impact. The world of policy advice is crowded but universities have tremendous advantages in terms of long-term institutional funding and access to knowledge that could challenge the limited staffing and short-termed resourcing of think tanks. As the formal advice from within the civil service comes under pressure too, because of funding concerns at local, national and international government

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levels, again universities are in a position to step into the vacuum that is being created. Changing the incentive structures of academics to encourage a greater focus on relevance is likely to be a hard task but there are signs that incentives and practices are shifting among early career researchers. Professional and institutional decision-making has helped to make the situation of relative disengagement among many political scientists, but this could, given the right alliance for change and a favourable context, be turned towards a drive to greater engagement and relevance. Given the autonomy of the profession the opportunity to do political science differently is always there.

Doubts about the intellectual case for relevance undermine its practice In a broad sense all social scientists have something to say about the societies they live in. Moreover, what constitutes relevance is not fixed. It can vary according to time, circumstance and indeed the standpoint of the observer (Gerring 2001). Expressed in this way it seems difficult to see how any academic could object to the idea of relevance or deny that they might be relevant. The rub comes not necessarily when the discussion moves on to policy relevance but more when the focus moves generally to the question of ‘what to do?’. Describing and explaining an issue, event or context may offer relatively comfortable territory for most academics. Even a more specific diagnosis of a problem or policy challenge might be acceptable terrain for many. But queasiness can begin to set in when it comes to the next stages in the potential exchange between academics and the world of relevance. Here the basis of the exchange is premised on prediction, prescription or evaluation (Walt 2005). It is when moving towards these activities that doubts about the soundness of the intellectual case for relevance begin to surface and hold back engagement. For many academics it is at these stages that they start to think they are glad to be irrelevant or at least express a sense of being uncertain about the extent of engagement that is desirable and appropriate. These doubts are not without foundation and reflect on the problematic of relevance. Before looking at some of the relevance challenges that have come to grip attention, let me consider one objection that I find less

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convincing. One proffered reason to object to relevance is that when political scientists have pursued relevance they have often ended up putting their research into the hands of established power holders and simply acted to provide so-called expert judgement to underwrite partisan policy-making (Norton 2004; Piven 2004). There is a kernel of truth in this observation, as an engaged political scientist is inherently connected to the play of power. The political scientist in pursuit of relevance, however, does not need to be a technician of the state working for power and against the powerless. There are some cases where political scientists have sided with power and some where they have not. A careful and detailed empirical study by a variety of American academics (Macedo 2005) into the failings of the political system of the United States – a study under the auspices of the American Political Science Association – has produced a set of reform measures that are sufficiently radical not to be seen as a defence of the status quo. There are difficulties and challenges that social scientists have dealing with power. Political scientists, in particular, should be sensitive to these issues, though this objection to relevance is not one of the strongest. There are, however, several difficulties confronting the intellectual case for relevance that have a greater traction. The first is that the uneasy relationship between ‘facts and values’ comes more sharply into focus as you enter the world of prediction, prescription and evaluation. There are at least three types of objection that come to the fore. The first is to claim that the empirical and the normative need to be kept separate for effective science and that any blurring of the boundaries in pursuit of relevance is undesirable. A second line of attack accepts that empirical and normative theorizing are intertwined to such an extent that they cannot be separated, so that when social scientists move into the world of relevance they should not seek any special status borne out of their expertise. At most, they can claim that their knowledge is only a particular organized form of opinion, as valid – but no more so – as others that might stem from direct experience, craft practice and so on. The third objection is that claims made for any guiding framework that academics might use to steer their predictions, prescriptions and evaluations are likely to prove to be untenable. In political science’s reaction to Harold Lasswell’s advocacy of a science of democracy you can observe all three of these elements in the challenges from academics to Lasswell’s vision of a political science engaged with policy advice and debates (Farr et al. 2006).

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‘To scientific ears’, Heinz Eulau explained, the policy sciences sounded ‘tantalizingly ideological . . . serving the parochial values of democracy rather than . . . the values of science and knowledge which are presumably universal’ (quoted in ibid.: 584). To others the problem was the claim to special expertise and status for political scientists. Many objected to the scientific pretensions of Lasswell’s vision and its elitist implications that debate would be led by expert political scientists. Finally the unifying principle of the pursuit of ‘dignity’ that Lasswell proposed as a guiding value for the science of democracy was derided as vague and incapable of providing a strong basis for making choices between policy options. For these and other reasons, including the ‘quietism, resignation, and intellectual conservatism’ (ibid.: 586) of the profession, Lasswell’s vision of a political science community committed to a science of democracy fell on stony ground. Lasswell predicted in 1963 that ‘political scientists whose advisory roles are negligible … would be as rare as unicorns’, but, as Farr et al. (2006: 584, 585) go on to comment, ‘political scientists were not generally convinced; the unicorns multiplied’. Some, however, did detect in Lasswell’s work a latent commitment to active citizenship and engaged politics that required a more explicit citizen involvement and education, and a stronger development of devices to support deliberation and public discussion – what might be called ‘a policy science of participatory democracy’ (Dryzek 1989: 118). This theme of developing a political science more accessible to laypeople and non-specialists was taken further by some in the so-called Perestroika Movement at the beginning of the twenty-first century that argued for a different way of doing political science (Monroe 2005; Schram and Caterino 2006). There are other doubts that have been raised about the intellectual case for relevance. One objection to the pursuit of relevance is that in many areas the evidence may not be clear enough to allow for clear and workable solutions to be identified. Claims to be able to establish causality that could in turn guide a claim to provide solutions should be treated with scepticism. Those who are inclined to see political science as an attempt to develop causal statements about general features of society may nevertheless hold the view that these statements at best can come in a probabilistic form. As Walt (2005: 37) notes, ‘a scholar might be delighted by a theory predicting that, on average, a 20% increase in X would produce a 25% decrease in Y, but a policy maker will ask whether

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the problem now occupying his inbox is an outlier or an exception to this general tendency’. One response might be to develop a more contextual, middle-range theory (George 1993). Although this approach can have advantages for the policy-maker in that it is sensitive to his or her situation, it can also lead to a highly contingent form of advice: ‘if you do X, then Y will occur, assuming conditions a, b, c, and q all hold, and assuming you do X in just the right way’ (Walt 2005: 36). Some policy-makers might wonder about the value of such circumscribed advice. Advice might be easier to give in stable settings but it is more often asked for in situations of uncertainty and change where making claims about the special knowledge of political science might be more problematic. Some social scientists, of course, hold that the pursuit of scientific-style knowledge is pointless. Piven (2004) argues that attempts to identify linear cause-and-effect dynamics when examining a problem leads to the attempt to build policy on fictitious grounds as realities are always more complex than any simple model can capture. There is a general argument that can be made for relevance of disciplines such as political science that look at particular aspects of the working of society. Most political scientists are comfortable with the idea that their work could inform and enlighten; they are less comfortable when their role is pushed towards prediction, prescription and evaluation. Political scientists appear hesitant about how to manage the relationship between normative and empirical theorizing – indeed a common response is an ostrich-like refusal to confront the issue – and they are unclear about the quality and capacity of their theories and evidence to carry the burden of solution-seeking rather than, at best, diagnosis. Dealing with the interface of normative and empirical theorizing is not made easier by the gap in the discipline between those that deal with normative theories and seek to argue about how political arrangements should be, and those that deal in empirical theory and try to account for how politics works in practice (Shapiro 2003; Smith 2009). The two sides of the discipline are often uninformed about each other’s positions and the result is doubly unfortunate ‘because speculation about what ought to be is likely to be more useful when informed by relevant knowledge and … because explanatory theory too easily becomes banal and method-driven when isolated from the pressing normative concerns’ (Shapiro 2003: 2). The range of intellectual doubts about achieving relevance leads to a conservative response among many academics that they should

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stand back from the turmoil of politics and describe and explain how and why politics is as it is. To try to offer solutions is a mistake. This point is developed by Bruce Miller when he argues that the political scientist may offer advice but cannot be the purpose of the study. The advice ‘may not be taken’ or may indeed be brushed aside by the forces of politics. The study of politics would indeed be brought into contempt if its solutions ‘are treated as irrelevant by the people to whom they are offered’ (Miller 1962: 274). With the exception of a few technical issues around, for example, the details of voting systems, political science cannot offer advice that will be viewed as neutral. The nature of politics is such that it is driven by differences over values and interests. There can be no claim to the common good or efficiency. Offering solutions inevitably drifts into taking sides, and that is not appropriate. How disabling should we let this fear become? Is it right that our science enables us to analyse problems, but not engage in the search for solutions? A halfway house in responding to the empirical– normative divide might be to call for political science to move to a problem-oriented focus in order to unify and share insights from various parts of the discipline, not least normative and empirical theorists. The argument is that there should be a relationship between the world of political analysis and the practice of politics in the world. Political science should, as part of its vocation, seek not to pursue an agenda driven by its own theories or methods, as if it were in a separate world, sealed off from the concern of its fellow citizens. As Shapiro (2004: 40) puts it: the problems addressed by the profession need to be ‘theoretically illuminating and convincingly intelligible to outsiders’. If the discipline were reoriented in this manner it would enliven both normative and empirical theorizing by bringing into focus new and challenging agendas and also provide a more powerful claim to relevance on the part of the discipline (Prewitt 2009).

Designing a solution My argument (developed more fully elsewhere, see Stoker 2010a; 2012; 2013) is not just for a problem-oriented political science; it is for a solution-seeking political science that takes as its challenge the designing of politics. Herbert Simon (1996) argues that in the sciences there are two great traditions: the science of nature and the

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science of the artificial. The former focuses on what is and the latter on things that are created by human beings. As Simon points out, the science of the artificial is not a simple derivative of pure science, it is a neglected pathway. It is a different, equally valid and demanding way of looking at the challenge of academic understanding. Engineering, the medical sciences and other disciplines embrace the challenge of the sciences of the artificial and in doing so have focused on the issue of design: how to achieve intentional change. Design thinking can be applied to all institutions, products and systems that are created by human beings. Political systems are not natural and so they could be viewed as artificial, with functions, goals and the capacity for adaptation. Political systems exist for a purpose and so are open to design thinking. As Simon (1996: 111) puts it: ‘everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into the preferred ones’. The classic focus of design thinking is on intentional change. Design develops around three moments. The first moment involves an inquiry about how best to represent the problem or issue at hand. To explore these issues can reveal not only what is wrong but also the direction of change that might improve things. The second moment is about reviewing available tools and options of change. This search is not comprehensive but instead is bounded and looks towards existing practices to see how they could be adopted or adapted to achieve the desired change. The third phase is prototyping, testing ideas in an interactive and learning context to develop the solution and to maximize its beneficial impact and limit any negative features. At this abstract level a design approach can be observed in operation in building, road systems, gadget development, web science, medicine, robotic machines and many other fields. Some argue you can imagine applying such thinking to businesses and their functioning (Brown 2008) or to the refinement of public services (Bason 2010). My argument is that it is an arena that political science and international relations should be willing to step into as well. It is possible to identify some pioneering work in this style. Reynolds’s (2011) work on Designing Democracy in a Dangerous World provides an example of this kind of design thinking in practice. Reynolds reviews a range of options for intervention but argues that those interventions need to be understood in terms of the context, history and institutional environment in which they are being applied. He develops a complex diagnostic tool kit drawn

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from a careful synthesis of existing knowledge in order to judge what intervention might work and then applies that thinking in examples as diverse as Iraq, Burma, Sudan and Afghanistan. The intervention models that emerge have a mixed track record in application, reflecting the wider play of power and complexity of issues in real cases – nevertheless, they show the value of design thinking. The late Elinor Ostrom’s work (1990) is worthy of celebration and is highly prized as her Nobel award indicates and is a rare example of explicit design focus. Ostrom identifies at least eight design principles. These include identifying who key stakeholders are and giving them rights to participate in the setting up of any system of management. She argues for graduated sanctions against rule breakers and a nested capacity for governance in larger, more complex, settings. Underlying the overall approach is a focus on the importance of norm-building for successful collective action. Ostrom’s work starts from value propositions about the nature of good governance which stresses the degree to which higher levels of government should not crowd out self-organization at lower levels; equally, though, it does not argue that allocation decisions should be left to the market – rather its focus is on designing the capacity for stakeholder-based collective action. The design and research work is on how to support collective action among stakeholders, particularly in common-pool resource settings where access to a valued good (water, fisheries) needs to be managed to sustain the resource. The design approach to political science might in many settings then embrace the growing trend towards using randomized control trials as part of the research paraphernalia available (Stoker 2010a; 2010b). An example here is provided by the work on nudge interventions by John and colleagues (John et al. 2011). Design solutions that take the form of a nudge to shift existing patterns of behaviour may be more feasible than those that involve complex forms of institutional redesign. Nudge involves changing the presentation of information to citizens or placing choices in the context of social norms. Testing using randomized control trials can reveal what interventions are likely to work and to what extent. The thinking of the design political scientist is oriented towards drawing lessons and requires flexibility in the use of analogies and in approaches to categorization and conceptualization. Generally in mainstream political science when developing concepts you are discouraged from changing the category of something and actively

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advised to avoid concept stretching (Sartori 1991). If you observe a cat and a dog you are not allowed to invent a new category of a ‘catdog’ but rather you are required to move up the ladder of abstraction to the category of animal. But the designer actively engages in a process akin to concept stretching to see if a solution that is understood to work in one setting can be made to fit a problem in another setting. You may have identified a set of design devices about what works, derived from empirical observation, and then you try to stretch those devices to suit the context or environment that you are trying to apply them to. This kind of thinking underlies much of the work on democratic innovations captured by Graham Smith (2009) referred to in his Democratic Innovations as ‘designing institutions for citizen participation’. If part of Ostrom’s message is for government to step back to let citizens self-organize, then part of the focus of this work is on how to deepen democratic engagement in the decision-making and practice of government. The focus is on giving citizens more control over the decisions and choices made by the state, stretching from participatory budgeting to community control of policing. The empirical and theoretical foundations in this area are very rich and will provide a strong basis for illustrating what a design approach could look like (Geissel and Newton 2012). The end goal of the designer is to offer a solution, whereas the end goal of the mainstream political scientist is to offer an explanation. The designer can only rest when a solution has been offered and that which is offered appears to work. There are others in political science that have led the way in taking a step towards solution seeking. A solution focus can be observed in how feminists and others have sought to understand the biases and prejudices of the way that politics works in order to address gender imbalances (Squires 2007). It then asks if those insights might be applied more generally in the design of more equal access to democratic governance. Interventions in the form of quotas, mainstreaming and policy agencies have been examined in detail. For feminists simply to analyse the failings of the political system was never enough on its own: they wanted to explore solutions but use the same tools of evidence and reasoned argument to explore both problems and answers. One of the main messages in Crick’s In Defence of Politics to those who study politics as academics was that their work should be purposive rather than driven by claims to scientific neutrality, unvarnished empiricism or abstract self-referential theoretical

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exchanges. For Crick, politics is about a system that delivers an ordered capacity to reconcile interests and engage in collective action, and so political science should be focused on the working of that system and whether it is achieving the purposes that citizens demand of it. Purpose is the point of the subject matter of political science since, through politics, citizens ‘strive to realize public purposes realistically’ (Crick 2000: 155). The empirical–normative divide needs to be breached because political scientists do and should care about their society; but it is a divide made false by the nature of politics as a subject matter. We require a political science where moral considerations are not repressed or kept apart but are commingled with analytical argument in a challenging manner. It means rediscovering the humanist tradition where social study is about the education of judgement, where judgement concerns what one does, how one does it and to what ends (Hirschman 1981).

Conclusions The blockages to achieving relevance for political science are considerable. Can the obstacles be overcome? In terms of engagement with the policy process it would seem that political science could create windows of opportunity. In so doing, it could play a greater role, although it cannot of course overturn – nor should it want to (Dryzek 1989) – the essentially political nature of that process. Our expertise should be at the service of democracy, not above it. The inward-looking orientation of agenda-setting within the academic profession may prove a harder obstacle to overcome. As Nye (2009: 253) advises younger scholars not to ‘hold their breath’ when waiting for a reorientation towards a stronger focus on questions of relevance, ‘the trends in academic life appear to be headed in the opposite direction’. However, a changing context may have an impact. First, the Internet lowers the barriers to engagement (Gibson 2009) not only to citizens but also to academics. Second, an internal focus might have seemed appropriate and easier to defend under the relatively benign conditions for advanced liberal democracies in the second half of the twentieth century. Given the threats to democracy, the challenges of globalization and the scale of environmental and climate change that are emerging in the twenty-first century, a more compelling case can be made for reorganization towards an external focus. The intellectual doubts

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about an enterprise of relevance can be addressed, especially if the challenges of a design approach are embraced. We need more work building on that of pioneers that show what a solution-seeking political science could deliver. The challenge rests on a reorientation of the focus of the discipline and then much greater effort in communication. The blockages to relevance have substance but they are far from being insurmountable.

Chapter 2

The relevance of relevance JOHN GERRING

Social science is a species of practical knowledge. ‘Any problem of scientific inquiry that does not grow out of actual (or “practical”) social conditions is factitious’, Dewey writes: All the techniques of observation employed in the advanced sciences may be conformed to, including the use of the best statistical methods to calculate probable errors, etc., and yet the material ascertained be scientifically ‘dead’, i.e. irrelevant to a genuine issue, so that concern with it is hardly more than a form of intellectual busy work. (1938: 499) If social scientists cannot tell us something relevant about the world then they (we) are serving very little purpose at all (Adcock 2009; Bloch 1941/1953; Bok 1982; Haan et al. 1983; Lerner and Lasswell 1951; Lindblom and Cohen 1979; McCall and Weber 1984; Mills 1959; Myrdal 1970: 258; Popper 1936/1957: 56; Rule 1997; Shapiro 2007; Simon 1982; Smith 2003; Wilensky 1997; Zald 1990; see also the symposium in Political Science and Politics 43(4) (October 2010), with contributions by Amitai Etzioni, Jacob Hacker, Gary Orfield, Lorenzo Morris and Theodore Lowi). Relevance in its narrow sense means addressing issues that lay citizens care about, or should care about. Unfortunately, in academic work one finds that writers sometimes confuse the notion of statistical significance with real-life significance. In a wide-ranging review of economics studies, McCloskey and Ziliak refer to this as the ‘standard error of regressions’ (McCloskey and Ziliak 1996; Ziliak and McCloskey 2008). Relevance in its broader sense means bringing new and useful knowledge to a problem that citizens care about. Here, I am using 36

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the term as a synonym for social utility. And it is here that relevance brings its full weight to bear on methodological questions in the social sciences. This point may not be fully apparent to readers, so I shall discuss several examples. The first is the debate between causal and descriptive knowledge. The second is the debate over the naturalist model of social science. Other examples might be chosen, but these will be sufficient, I think, to prove the relevance of relevance. It will be seen that both sides in these debates defend their position – implicitly, if not explicitly – by an appeal to relevance. Indeed, I shall argue (later on) that there is virtually nowhere else for them to appeal. In this sense, appeals to relevance are dispositive in arguments about social science methodology.

Causal and descriptive knowledge A long-standing debate continues over whether, or to what extent, social science should be oriented around causal, as opposed to descriptive, questions (Gerring 2010). A parallel debate has surfaced over how causality should be defined, e.g. as potential outcomes, counterfactuals, mechanisms, regularity or some other model (Brady 2002). Perhaps the key argument in favour of causal knowledge and in favour of a potential outcomes approach to causality is that this form of knowledge and this way of understanding causality is most relevant to social concerns. As many authors have pointed out, it is only through causal knowledge that we can intervene rationally in the world. And the potential outcomes framework is perhaps the most useful framework for crafting specific policy interventions (Woodward 2005). Likewise, within a given study, relevance often plays a role in distinguishing among various causal factors. Consider the classic question of war, as elucidated by Patrick Gardiner: When the causes of war are being investigated, it may be decided that both economic factors and human psychology are relevant to its outbreak; yet since we deem it to be within our power to influence or alter the economic system of a society, whereas the control of human psychology seems, at least at present, to be beyond our capacity, we are likely to regard the economic rather than the psychological factors as the ‘cause’ of war. (1952/1961: 12)

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By a similar logic, in discussions of social policy, causal arguments that rest upon deep-seated political-cultural factors are in some respects less interesting than arguments resting on policy design. The latter can be redesigned, while the former are presumably longenduring, and hence less relevant to contemporary policy discussions (except as boundary conditions). Relevant causes tend to be manipulable (Woodward 2005). At the same time, those who argue against the dominance of causality in the social sciences, and those who argue against a narrowly focused potential-outcomes approach to causality, also couch their position in terms of relevance. They point out that not all causal knowledge that we regard as useful and informative has direct policy ramifications. Some studies pertain to things that happened long ago and could never be repeated. For example, the causal effect of colonialism on long-term patterns of development in the global South does not provide policy prescriptions for the present. The usefulness of this knowledge falls under the rubric of understanding and explanation rather than intervention. Knowing something about the impact of colonialism helps us to understand the world we live in – and, arguably, helps us to understand ourselves. In this very diffuse sense it might lead to better policy prescriptions. But even in the absence of policy prescriptions, self-knowledge is important and may have enormous impact on a society. The case of colonialism is especially relevant to countries with a recent colonial past, where it remains a vituperative subject. Similar arguments might be mustered in defence of the relevance of descriptive knowledge. It is relevant how many Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust and how many Tutsis and Hutus were killed in the Rwandan genocide, and in what proportion (Des Forges 1999). And it is relevant who did the killing, and with what motives (Goldhagen 1997; Waller 2002). These are not causal arguments, at least not in the usual sense. But they help us to understand something that we want desperately to understand – partly because it is so awful and partly because we wish to know more about what might be called (to use an old-fashioned term) ‘human nature’. Likewise, a good deal of knowledge garnered from the field of psychology is more properly classified as descriptive rather than causal. Thus, both sides in the causal/descriptive debate lean heavily on relevance as a justification for their endeavours.

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The science of social science Since the birth of social science, these loosely defined disciplines have debated how scientific they could be (or ought to be), and whether the natural-science (‘naturalist’ or ‘positivist’) model is appropriately applied to decisional elements of human behaviour. A key issue in this debate is whether the study of society is more – or less – relevant when assuming the garb of science. Those who are dubious of the naturalist model fear that it might prevent us from writing about things that matter. Too preoccupied with its status as a science, Barrington Moore thought: social science overlooks more important and pressing tasks. The main structural features of what society can be like in the next generation are already given by trends at work now. Humanity’s freedom of maneuver lies within the framework created by its history. Social scientists and allied scholars could help to widen the area of choice by analyzing the historical trends that now limit it. They could show, impartially, honestly, and free from the special pleadings of governments and vested interests, the range of possible alternatives and the potentialities for effective action. Such has been, after all, the aim of inquiry into human affairs in free societies since the Greeks. (1958: 159; see also Adcock 2009; Flyvbjerg 2001; Mead 2010; Shapiro 2007; Smith 2003; Wolin 1969) A similar critique stems from the tradition of social thought known as critical theory. Brian Fay suggests that social science should lead the way for future transformations in society by assuming a particular form, namely, one that isolates in the lives of a group of people those causal conditions that depend for their power on the ignorance of those people as to the nature of their collective existence, and that are frustrating them. The intention here is to enlighten this group of people about these causal conditions and the ways in which they are oppressive, so that, being enlightened, these people might change these conditions and so transform their lives (and, coincidentally, transcend the original theory). (1983/1994: 108)

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It is in this spirit that Howard Zinn used to refer to himself as a professor of political silence. More radical critiques, questioning the very possibility of understanding society, stem from intellectual traditions known variously as post-modernist or post-structuralist (Rosenau 1992) or interpretivist (Winch 1958). Although arguments for relevance are rarely stated explicitly, it seems clear that writers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Slavoj Ziˇzek view the scientific pretensions of social science as not merely false but also damaging to society. Their war against social science is correctly viewed as an attempt to liberate society from a false idol. It is not – at least not usually – waged with a Dionysian intent simply to amuse and distract. It is decentring, deconstructing with a purpose, albeit one that is rarely explicitly defined. Thus, for the anti-science camp, concerns for relevance are very much front and centre. Likewise, I would argue, for the pro-science camp. (I am of course speaking in very broad terms.) Here, the argument may be less apparent, so I will sketch it out in greater detail. There is no doubt that most of our knowledge about society (by which I mean to include the realms of politics, culture and the economy) is gained from non-academic venues, e.g. news media, books written by non-academics, and word of mouth. Society is a popular topic, and one with few barriers to entry. We all have something to say about it. Consequently, those who study society scientifically are consigned to play second fiddle to journalists, politicos, religious leaders, social movement activists and the proverbial man/woman in the street. By dropping any pretence of science, members of the social science academy could more readily join this fray, addressing issues of pressing concern in the vernacular. This would qualify as relevant in the first sense of the term. But it might not qualify as relevant in the second, and more important, sense. The question to ask is whether a non-scientific approach to society adds value to what we already learn about these topics from other sources. Defenders of social science would argue that it would not, or would add very little. Note that we have plenty of news about politics emanating from mainstream media organizations. We have commentary on that news, including a strong dose of critique, from many angles, emanating from countless magazines, books, blogs and cable news shows. Some of it is highbrow and most of it lowbrow. The point is,

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there is plenty to go around. Would society be served by adding one more layer of commentary on issues of the day, or fundamental social critiques of the sort envisioned by Moore, Fay and Zinn? A simple answer to this question hinges on how cogent the additional layer of commentary might be. If there are talents of the order of Edmund Wilson or Christopher Lasch lurking within the academy today by all rights they ought to come forth from the ivory tower as public intellectuals. Howard Zinn was such a talent, and he exercised it regularly, refusing to be confined to the ivory tower. However, I suspect that talents of this stature are relatively rare in social science departments today. To be sure, one could argue that this is a product of an overly scientific style of graduate education, which squeezes the life out of subjects in the service of dry, academic prose and hypotheses that can be proven with 95 per cent certitude. However, even if we refused to adopt those scientific standards, adhering to an earlier standard of general scholarship on the model of Oxford and Cambridge (until quite recently), I wonder if society would be well-served. This comes back to the point about value-added. Most of what such generalists would think about and write about is already being thought about and written about by non-academics. We do not need more of what we already have. Moreover, since humanities departments across the world continue to provide an education focused on language, literature, history and the arts, there is little value-added in a social science academy that mimics a classical Bildung. What we lack, from the humanities and from non-academic commentators, is social science. There is virtually no one outside of university social science departments asking big questions – theoretical questions – and bringing evidence to bear on those questions in a rigorous fashion. This is not something that everyday folks have much interest in or the skills to achieve. Science – even social science (which is not, after all, rocket science) – requires a degree of training and perseverance that is out of keeping with the relentless ‘now’ of television, blogs and other media. Occasionally, this produces insights not available from these other sources. Here, it becomes relevant in the first sense of the word. Consider the question of how, and whether, to foster democracy around the world, a current issue in foreign policy and international development. One type of knowledge is heavily contextual – about specific countries, their histories, apparent trajectories and possible responses to various policy initiatives. This sort of knowledge is not

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scientific in the usual sense, though it is not simple-minded and is certainly highly relevant to any initiatives that policy-makers might adopt. Proper nouns are important. However, what political science has to offer this policy debate is probably more focused on theoretical knowledge about democratization and democratic consolidation – its causes, processes and effects in general (for a recent review of democracy as a dependent variable, see Coppedge, forthcoming. For discussion of democracy as an independent variable, see Coppedge 2012). One would not want to overplay the precision or informativeness of this knowledge. However, there are some generalizable conclusions and policy-makers ignore these conclusions at their peril. Thus, while we shall continue to learn most of what we know about society from other sources, this does not mean that anthropology, economics, political science and sociology (and their various offshoots) should cease practising science – including the rather arcane elements of that science such as formal models, simulation models and advanced statistical methods for causal inference. An argument can therefore be constructed such that the work of social science is best carried forth by adhering to a distinctive set of (‘scientific’) standards, rather than collapsing the boundaries between science and non-science (Eckstein 1992: ch. 2 invokes Weber in support of this limited and differentiated role for social science visà-vis the public sphere). This argument points out that it will not aid citizens and policy-makers to have a field of anthropology undifferentiable from theology, or a field of political science indistinguishable from party ideology. If Christopher Jencks, a noted social policy expert, approached problems in the same manner as Edward Kennedy – or Ronald Reagan, for that matter – then we would have no need whatsoever to consult the views of Professor Jencks. What academics like Jencks have to add to the political debate is premised on their expertise. And what are the grounds for expertise, if not the practice of good social science? There is some utility to good social science, and none at all to bad social science. Arguably, the wilful avoidance of scientific norms has doleful long-term consequences for social science, and for those who would see social science playing a role in the transformation of society. To the extent that social scientists forego systematic analysis in favour of polemic, they compromise the legitimacy of the enterprise of which they are a part and from which they gain whatever prominence they currently enjoy. As judges walk a fine line between their

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assigned constitutional roles and their desire to affect public policy, so must social scientists walk a fine line between science and society. The day when this line disappears is the day when social science no longer has a calling. All of this is not to say that social scientists cannot also serve society in other capacities – as voters, activists, polemicists and so forth. The key point, from this perspective, is that this adjunct capacity be clearly differentiated from our roles as social scientists. We cannot help but play multiple roles. But playing these roles well, without causing confusion and misrepresentation, depends upon wearing different hats – openly, so that all can see. A speech before a political rally should be clearly differentiated from a classroom lecture.

Engagement and objectivity Being relevant (in the first and second senses of the term) does not imply a social science composed of zealous advocacy, where writers embrace particular policies or draw moral/ethical conclusions about historical actors and actions: where the past becomes, in Michael Oakeshott’s apt phrase, ‘a field in which we exercise our moral and political opinions, like whippets in a meadow on Sunday afternoon’ (quoted in Fischer 1970: 78). By the same token, it seems fruitless to insist that social science should entirely eschew opinionizing, for ‘normative’ concerns are often difficult to avoid. Imagine writing about the Holocaust or slavery in a wholly dispassionate manner. What would an evenhanded treatment of these subjects look like? Everyday language is not morally neutral, and social science must accept this affectively charged vocabulary as a condition of doing business (Collier 1998; Freeden 1996; Gallie 1956; Hollis and Lukes 1982; MacIntyre 1971; Pitkin 1972; Searle 1969; Strauss 1953/1963; Taylor 1967/1994). Leaving aside such extreme examples, it is difficult to conceive of important statements about human actions and human institutions that do not carry some normative freight. At the very least, one’s choice of subject is likely to be guided by some sense of what is right and wrong. ‘In theory’, writes E. H. Carr: the distinction may … be drawn between the role of the investigator who establishes the facts and the role of the practitioner

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I cannot fathom why anyone would choose to invest years (typically decades) researching a subject if it did not have some normative importance to him or her. Arguably, truth claims are enhanced when a writer frankly proclaims his or her preferences at the outset of the work. This way, possible inaccuracies in evidence or presentation are easier to detect, and to evaluate. Hidden prejudices probably do more harm than those that are openly avowed. Yet, it must be stressed again that the value of a work of social science derives from its valueadded, not its normative point of view. To say ‘Y is good’ or ‘We should do Y’ is to say extraordinarily little. Few are likely to be persuaded by such a statement, unless it is simply by virtue of the authority of the writer. And what authority do members of the social science caste possess, aside from the authority of social science? Generally, social science is most powerful when the normative angle of a work is handled delicately. The most compelling arguments for social welfare, for example, are those that demonstrate causal relationships, e.g. that particular programmes aid in alleviating conditions of poverty and do not have negative externalities. Such studies do not proclaim baldly ‘Poverty is bad’ or ‘We should increase social welfare spending’, although there is no question that these views undergird most research on poverty and social policy. So long as the author’s research is sound, one is unconcerned with his or her normative position on the matter. Otherwise put: the persuasiveness of any normative argument is itself dependent on the persuasiveness of whatever descriptive and causal propositions comprise that argument. Descriptive and causal propositions serve as the meat of any prescriptive statement. Whether or not the researcher is motivated by some vision of a better society, or only by personal or material interests, is rightly immaterial to our judgement of the quality of his or her work. There are idiots and geniuses of every persuasion. One would prefer to read the geniuses and leave the idiots alone, leaving aside their personal views and ethical codes. Finally, it seems appropriate to observe that the vast majority of social science analysis has little to do with what is good or bad. No one – or virtually no one – argues against the virtues of peace, prosperity, democracy and self-fulfilment. What is relevant is any

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knowledge that might help us to achieve these desiderata (Friedman 1953a). Here is where social science matters, or ought to matter.

Are there other possible foundations for social science? In asserting that relevance forms the foundation – i.e. the ultimate justification – for the activity known as social science we must also consider the alternatives. What are these alternatives? One alternative is grounded in science, as a concept and as a practical activity. This is the topic of philosophy of science, a vast body of literature (for a practical, rather unphilosophical, treatment, see Ziman 2002). The trouble is that science is difficult to define. One can list attributes commonly associated with scientific work, e.g. systematic, rigorous, evidence-based, falsifiable, replicable, generalizable, non-subjective, transparent, sceptical, rational, causal, cumulative and so forth. But this is not very coherent, and is in any case subject to considerable debate. One can approach science as an activity. But in this approach the definition is entirely circular – science is what scientists do. And there is considerable disagreement over what it is that natural scientists do, and whether they are engaged in a common enterprise (for a compendium of definitions from prominent writers, see www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/1122 sciencedefns.html). In the case of social science both the concept and the associated activities are considerably more variegated. So problems of definition and sociology of knowledge become even more acute. Consider the number and diversity of disciplines that are often encompassed by this term: anthropology, archaeology, business, communications, demography, economics, education, environmental design, geography, law, political science, psychology, public administration, public health, public policy, social work, sociology and urban planning, along with various offshoots of these disciplines. Perhaps some order could be found by scoping down – from social science to an individual discipline, such as political science. Even so, one finds a good deal of diversity in the views of disciplines and the practices contained therein. And in the more coherent disciplines, such as economics, the greater degree of coherence one finds cannot be regarded as self-justifying. Just because economists have a stronger sense of unity than

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most social sciences does not, in and of itself, serve as a grounds for justification for their approach to social science. One might also appeal to the fecundity of a scientific paradigm. To a large extent, scientific activity is self-governing, as scientists work within a well-defined theoretical framework – one whose fecundity seems beyond doubt. Novel findings are their own justification (Lakatos 1978). Some areas of research attract attention and others do not as the sense of advance or wider pay-off to society is less obvious and so you could argue that biology is hot and physics is not, or at least certain aspects of physics like string theory are not. This seems self-evident to scientists. However, this line of justification depends upon another premise – that when science follows its hunches society is well-served. This premise is rarely doubted in the natural sciences, where the payoff from scientific discoveries in the twentieth century has been enormous. The point, then, is that natural science can define and redefine the direction of scientific research because progress, and social utility, are easily demonstrated. So a Lakatosian approach to natural science does not really contradict the gist of my argument; it merely treats the social utility of scientific endeavour as an unstated assumption. In any case, demonstrating progress in the social sciences is much more difficult. Although there are ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ areas of research in every field one suspects that this may have as much to do with academic fads as with demonstrable scientific progress. And the payoff for society is less certain. And this is why a Lakatosian approach to social science is harder to define and harder to defend. Explicit attention to relevance is therefore more necessary in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. One might add that most social science payoffs are fairly proximate because the topic itself is relevant – or at least, most topics are. If one finds something important about the causes of civil war this can be immediately applied. By contrast, in the natural sciences most work that takes place within the academy is ‘basic research’ with few immediate payoffs for society. This, too, serves to detach natural science from questions of relevance.

A pragmatic inquiry By way of summary, let us return to the broader argument. I have argued that social science, like other realms of human activity, is

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rightly judged by its contribution to society. How social science should be organized, what sort of methods it should employ, and what sort of subjects it should investigate is therefore dependent upon judgements about which directions will provide the greatest value-added for society. This question may be posed of any discipline, or of any human activity where the consequences of human action may reasonably be assessed. If, let us say, one is investigating the stock market to see how its operations could be improved one might begin by asking what ‘improvement’ would mean. What functions does one expect a stock market to perform? What would a ‘good’ stock market look like? The pragmatist’s line of inquiry can also be posed in the form of a counterfactual: where would we be without it? Implied in this question are the following additional questions. Is there another institution that might perform these functions more effectively? Do its costs outweigh its benefits? In the case of the stock market I imagine an inquiry such as this leading fairly quickly to several conclusions: (a) its main purpose is to reduce transaction costs between investors and firms, i.e. to raise capital; (b) no other institution that we are aware of does this as effectively; (c) its relative success in doing so can be judged, among other things, by the amount of money that it raises and the stability of stock prices over the long haul. The purpose of social science, I would maintain, is to help citizens and policy-makers to understand the world better, with an eye to changing that world. Social science ought to provide useful answers to useful questions. Robert Lynd made this argument many decades ago, and the words still ring true. Social science, he writes: is not a scholarly arcanum, but an organized part of the culture which exists to help man in continually understanding and rebuilding his culture. And it is the precise character of a culture and the problems it presents as an instrument for furthering men’s purposes that should determine the problems and, to some extent, the balance of methods of social science research. (Lynd 1939/1964: ix) Many others have echoed the same general sentiment, before and since (Adcock 2009; Bloch 1941/1953; Bok 1982; Gerring and Yesnowitz 2006; Haan et al. 1983; Lerner and Lasswell 1951; Lindblom and Cohen 1979; McCall and Weber 1984; Mills 1959;

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Myrdal 1970: 258; Popper 1936/1957: 56; Rule 1997; Simon 1982; Wilensky 1997; Zald 1990). Indeed, the presumed connection between social science and social progress has been present from the very beginning of the disciplines we now label social science. The Statistical Society of London, one of the first organized attempts to develop the method and employment of statistics, proposed in 1835 to direct their attention to the following question: ‘What has been the effect of the extension of education on the habits of the People? Have they become more orderly, abstemious, contented, or the reverse?’ (quoted in Turner 1997: 25–6; originally quoted in Porter 1986: 33; see also Collins 1985: 19). Whatever one might think about the perspectives embedded in this research question, it is clear that early statisticians were interested in the role that knowledge might play in social change. To paraphrase Marx (several decades later): the point of scholarly reflection is not merely to interpret the world, but also to reform it – perhaps even to revolutionize it. Methodologists have not fully grasped the potential deliverance that this simple thesis presents. Bluntly put, whatever species of social science methodology seems most likely to produce useful knowledge ought to be embraced; whatever does not should be eschewed (Rule 1997 argues along similar lines; see also Rescher 1977). In this way, pragmatism provides a philosophical ground for adjudicating methodological debates and allows us to move beyond sterile and essentially irresolvable debates between different philosophical camps (‘culturalist’, ‘interpretivist’, ‘rationalist’, ‘positivist’, ‘poststructuralist’ and so forth). Rather than choosing camps, we might ask what specific tasks, strategies and criteria each camp entails. We can then ask the pragmatic question: Would the social sciences, thus oriented, tell us about things that we want to know? Would this methodology allow us to reach societal consensus on important problems? Could it be integrated into a democratic politics? Which vision of social science is likely to prove, in the long run, most useful to society? These counterfactuals, while difficult, provide some bearing on meta-methodological debates. Granted, ‘usefulness’ is not always self-evident, as the preceding discussion suggests. There are grounds for embracing causality and grounds for resisting this embrace. There are grounds for embracing a naturalist vision of social science and grounds for resisting this embrace. A vulgar version of pragmatism implies that a single telos, universally agreed upon, should guide all our actions. For Dewey,

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however, pragmatism meant ‘that it is good to reflect upon an act in terms of its consequences and to act upon the reflection. For the consequences disclosed will make possible a better judgment of good’ (in Rorty 1966: 283–4). In this spirit, it is more important to ask the question of social science’s purpose, in a serious and conscientious way, than to provide a very specific answer. The answers will surely vary from place to place, from time to time, and from person to person. What does seem certain is that if one ignores the question entirely – hunkering down in our insulated academic bunkers to perform our own (possibly quite idiosyncratic) genres of research – one is likely to fall far from the mark. Simple intellectual curiosity is insufficient to provide a grounding for social science (though it is a good start).

Chapter 3

Relevant to whom? Relevant for what? The role and public responsibility of the political analyst COLIN HAY

Like most bons mots, relevance is a seemingly unimpeachable virtue, an attribute one would like conferred upon one’s work, and something only others lack. Yet it is not always clear what relevance actually is; nor, relatedly, what might make a work of political analysis irrelevant. In this chapter I reflect on the question of relevance/irrelevance, considering what it might mean for political analysis to be seen or judged relevant – noting, in the process, both that relevance is a property or attribute that can really only be bestowed by others and that it tends to be task or, at least, contextspecific. I will consider how a political science more clearly oriented to the attainment of relevance might differ from the one we have today. In the process I consider whether political science requires a paradigm shift in order to enhance its capacity to attain relevance, reflecting on the implied identification by its critics of a ‘crisis of irrelevance’ associated with the old paradigm. I look at how political science might engage better with its current audiences, extend the range of audiences with which it engages and, in the process, change at least some of its content and form. Yet I will suggest that, in the end, this entails no paradigm shift: that little if any contemporary political science is irrelevant – but that most of it could be made both more relevant and relevant to many more. As this suggests, relevance itself may not be the issue – since most of what we do has the potential to be deemed relevant. Rather, it is about 50

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making the case for the relevance of our work. As political analysts, I suggest, we need to become better public advocates of the work that we already do. That, in turn, implies a clearer sense of our individual and collective responsibility to those for whom we write, to those for whom we might write and, above all, towards our subject matter.

Introduction: relevance – divided by a common language? If we are to believe what we read, political science is currently mired in a crisis and a crisis of perhaps a rather unfamiliar kind – a crisis of relevance. The charge, quite simply, is that we political scientists fail to produce work that engages either those for whom it is intended or those for whom it should be intended. We fail, in short, to provide – or, in stronger versions of the thesis, to be capable of providing – a credible ‘public interest’ defence of the work we do. As such we fail in our public duty to act collectively as public goods providers. Needless to say, that is quite a serious charge – not least as it comes from political scientists themselves. And it needs to be taken very seriously indeed. If it is warranted much contemporary political science is irrelevant – and perhaps does not deserve the public investment on which it typically depends. Though the auto-critique echoes earlier auto-critiques of other disciplines, most notably perhaps C. Wright Mills’s call for sociologists to discover (or discover again) their ‘sociological imagination’ (see especially Flinders 2013a; 2013b), this crisis discourse is new. Political scientists have, depending on the critic, either previously not regarded relevance as a criterion pertinent to the evaluation of their research or have had no need to worry about the relevance of their work since their almost natural ‘political imagination’ led them to explore and express themselves publicly on issues of wider societal concern. In fact, in most accounts, some combination of the two is responsible for our current predicament: relevance was not a concern for so long as relevance was almost guaranteed by the natural (or at least naturalized) curiosity of political analysts to interrogate the political world politically – to hold it to account and potentially to change it (or at least to inform the conduct of those who might). So what has changed? Well, there is surely something of a clue in the rather uneven distribution of concern about relevance. This is,

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by and large, an Anglophone preoccupation and, as noted above, a recent one at that. Indeed, it is predominantly a British and American preoccupation. But although they are typically lumped together and assumed to arise out of the identification of ostensibly similar pathologies, a moment’s reflection reveals there to be rather different reasons for the current Anglophone anxiety over relevance on each side of the Atlantic. In the US, lack of relevance is typically a charge levelled at what is perceived, by its critics, to be a highly and artificially stylized, standardized and technicized mainstream political science orthodoxy. Crucially, ‘relevance’ (more specifically, the need to develop a political science more attuned to the attainment of relevance) is the clarion call of the Perestroika Movement. Its advocates promote a more modest, more open-ended, less technical and more accessible political science capable of communicating to a wider audience, and not just a largely self-appointed technical elite (fluent in the private language games and proficient in the modelling techniques which have come to characterize the mainstream). As this suggests, lack of relevance is, in the US context, quite a specific concern directed at a subset of political analytical techniques which, though prevalent in the US, are somewhat less dominant elsewhere. In Britain, by contrast, concerns about the relevance of political science are far more general – relating to the entire discipline and not just to specific parts of it. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly still, it is difficult not to see such concerns as having a particular resonance and purchase at a time when the public funding and evaluation of research (both by the research councils and the Higher Education Funding Council for England) has become explicitly linked to the (adjudged) influence or ‘impact’ of research in non-academic contexts (Flinders 2013a; 2013b). Though impact and relevance are by no means interchangeable terms, they are certainly synonyms, and it is clear that the current preoccupation and associated concern with relevance amongst British political scientists is in no small measure a response to the increasing incentivization of demonstrable research impact in non-academic contexts. This suggests two things. First, that a greater attentiveness to and concern with relevance is a rather rational, perhaps even a narrowly instrumental, response to a reconfiguration of institutional incentives. Second, and no less significantly, it suggests that British political scientists, or at least those articulating publicly an anxiety about the relevance of their discipline (our discipline),

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would almost certainly worry just as much about the potential lack of relevance of the Perestroikans themselves. There are undoubtedly some ironies here. These typically manifest themselves in the tensions which so often characterize the ‘relevance debate’ (if we can call it that) as anxious proponents of (greater) relevance typically target different and contradictory things as means to attain the (greater) relevance they would have us strive for. In a sense, then, we are divided by the common language of relevance – even more so that of a ‘crisis of relevance’ – and we mean rather different things by it. To understand this better it is useful to return to the definition of the term itself. But before doing so it is perhaps important first to establish some of these tensions.

The private language of political science The first of these relates to the private language games to which political scientists are sometimes prone. Much of the relevance debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, targets what it sees as the unnecessary technicization of the content of academic political science and the associated impenetrability of the prose in which much of it is conducted and expressed. But even this critique takes, essentially, one of two different forms – on different sides of the Atlantic. The US interpretation of such matters, as expressed most eloquently in the Perestroika Movement for the reform and broadening of the American political science mainstream, is perhaps less concerned than its British counterpart with technical specialization and inaccessibility per se. Its concern is rather more with the nature (and limits) of the analytical assumptions that make this kind of formalism possible. The algebraic modelling of political systems, the Perestroikans argue, entails an analytical commitment to a set of ontological assumptions (about the nature of political actors and their motives) which is profoundly limiting. Put simply, mathematical formalism of this kind may well allow us to produce something resembling the elegant parsimony of mainstream neoclassical economic models, but it comes at a very high price in terms of the credibility and realism of the assumptions on which it is predicated. In short, to make political systems amenable to this kind of modelling entails a commitment to analytical assumptions which are, at best, crassly distorting simplifications and at worst demonstrably

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false. The price of formalism, they contend, is irrelevance – in the sense that the resulting models, however elegant and neat, bear little or no credible link to the ‘real’ world of politics. Policy-makers (and other political actors), in this view, would be deeply misguided to use such models to inform their strategic deliberations on how to act politically. But this is already a very different sense of relevance from that exhibited in the British debate. Here, as expressed most succinctly and clearly by Matthew Flinders (2013a; 2013b; and in this volume) and Peter Riddell (2011), it is not the accuracy, realism or credibility of the analytical assumptions underpinning technical formalism in political science that is the problem. Rather, it is the impenetrability and inaccessibility to a wider audience that comes with such assumptions, whatever they are and however credible or incredible they may happen to be. Whilst formalism may well render impenetrability and inaccessibility more likely (at times it seems – or is seen – almost to guarantee it), it is by no means the only path to it. Indeed, or so it is argued, there is certainly plenty more of the latter (inaccessibility and obscurantism) in British political science than the former (formalism) – and, as such, it is obscurantism that is the problem here, not formalism. It is for precisely this reason that the principal target of the British champions of greater relevance is the increasing professionalism of the discipline and not the preference within it for certain analytical strategies over others. There are certainly problems with this at times rather stylized account of the (highly professionalized) condition of contemporary political science (and its associated pathologies) in Britain, or elsewhere for that matter. We will come to these presently. But, for now, it is perhaps most important simply to establish the very different understanding of relevance (more accurately, irrelevance) at work here. Contemporary political science, in this the British variant of the auto-critique, stands accused of irrelevance not because it has nothing useful to say to policy-makers (since its analytical assumptions render its models unrealistic and hence irrelevant) but because its unnecessary obscurantism and professional isolation renders it incapable of communicating whatever it might have to say to such audiences. Contemporary political science, in other words, is irrelevant in the US critique because it is poor political science (political science of the wrong kind); contemporary political science is irrelevant in the British critique because

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it is poorly communicated political science written for and disseminated to the wrong audience in the wrong way.

Relevance and rationality: between perestroika and glasnost? Yet this is not the only tension that we can identify between these ostensibly parallel, but in fact rather different, critiques of contemporary (Anglophone) political science. A second tension in fact arises fairly directly from the first. For what is in effect dismissed in one discourse (the US) as irrelevant is, when recast in terms of the other (the British), perhaps the clearest example of relevance. The irony here is palpable and is perhaps clearest to see if we focus the discussion a little more precisely on rational choice theory – the proverbial elephant in the room for much of the debate. For although the status and place of rational choice theory within the discipline lies at the heart of the relevance/irrelevance debate, it is invariably present in the discussion only in a rather implicit way. As is so often the case, it helps to seek to render explicit what is invariably left implicit. Whilst perestroika is not only a rejection of rational choice (and is typically not cast in such terms), it is certainly a rejection of the hallowed status of rational choice within the US political science mainstream – and it is important to remember this (rational choice scholarship is, in effect, the clearest target of the Perestroikan critique). For Perestroikans, to put things starkly, US political science is irrelevant to the extent to which it is dominated by perspectives, like rational choice theory, which rely on foundational ontological assumptions chosen for their analytical convenience (in the case of rational choice, to render possible the retroductive modelling of political outcomes); and it is also irrelevant, to the extent to which this is the case, because such analytical assumptions are distorting simplifications which ensure that the models to which they give rise are of no genuine value in the ‘real’ world of political practice. This is, in a sense, a normative critique leading to a rejection of rational choice theory – or, at least, the initiating analytical move (the choice of assumptions on the basis of their analytical utility rather than their credibility) that makes it possible. Rational choice is, in short, bad political science (indeed, its claim to offer a science of politics is spurious); as such, rational choice is irrelevant

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political science because bad political science is irrelevant and rational choice is bad political science. Whether or not one agrees with it, there is a clear logic and consistency to such a view – and that logic, I would argue, lies at the heart of the Perestroika Movement. Accept the logic and one is a Perestroikan; reject it and one is not. But the point is that, insofar as an equivalent logic can be identified in the British critique – the Glasnost Movement, perhaps – it is very different. For the relevance–irrelevance distinction is deployed here in a way that makes it not in any sense synonymous with the good political science–bad political science distinction so integral to the Perestroika critique. Arguably the Glasnost usage of the distinction is rather more semantically precise. But, whatever its terminological pedigree, it sees relevance as a judgement conferred by others, agonizing less about whether contemporary political science deserves to be adjudged relevant than whether it is adjudged relevant by those who use or might use it. This brings us back to rational choice theory. And here, it strikes me, there is a clear inconsistency in the Glasnost position, at least as it is expressed by the likes of Matthew Flinders and Peter Riddell. For their argument, in essence, is that the tragedy of contemporary political science is its professionalization – and its professionalization as a science in particular. For, they suggest, it is this ‘road to irrelevance’ (Flinders 2013b: 2) that has led it to conduct more and more of its business in a private language which is dry and decidedly unengaging, impenetrable, elitist, exclusionary and, above all, inaccessible to those not trained in it. Political science, they suggest, cannot expect to be adjudged relevant by those who might benefit from the insights it offers for as long as this remains the language in which such insights are principally communicated. Professionalization has promoted and rewarded obscurantism and obscurantism precludes relevance. This is a neat and at least superficially attractive thesis. But there are at least two profound objections to it. The first, in a way, is an empirical one – and it comes in two parts. The kind of research that authors like Riddell and Flinders have in mind when they castigate contemporary political science for its obscurantism and associated irrelevance is very clear. Their call for relevance is, in effect, an unapologetic extension and updating of Bernard Crick’s coruscating critique of The American Science of Politics (1959). But the point is that, certainly outside of the US, very little published polit-

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ical science conforms readily to the image they present of a highly professionalized elite removing itself from the political world which ostensibly forms the subject of its analyses to communicate to itself in private and in semaphore (or, worse still, algebra). And, what is more, despite the association they draw between such algebraic obscurantism on the one hand and irrelevance on the other, the irony is that it is precisely work of this kind that invariably has the strongest claim to have proven influential – certainly amongst policy-makers. For, insofar as any political science might stake a claim to have informed the content of the politics in and through which we are governed, it is surely – for good or ill – rational/public choice theory. Whether it be central bank independence or the introduction of quasi-market mechanisms in public health care systems, there can surely be no denying that rational and public choice theoretical models typically expressed in formal terms have made it through the veil of algebraic notification and off the page into the minds of policy-makers in a way that the more intuitively accessible ideas of others have not (Hay 2007). And arguably they have done so precisely because of the scientific mystique associated with their algebraic and formal character. One might worry about that – for what it is worth, I do – but it does not help us to deny it. The second objection to the Glasnost thesis follows in a sense from the first. If it is rational/public choice theory that has perhaps the greatest claim amongst existing political science perspectives to demonstrable relevance (in the sense that its ideas have most consistently informed public policy-making), then the highly technical character of some political science cannot be the impediment to relevance it is presumed to be. This is a crucial point. Authors like Peter Riddell in particular are vociferous in their objection to what they see as the jargon-laden insularity and almost wilful obscurantism of academic political science, attributing the latter’s failure to influence the conduct of politics to this above all else. He argues for a jargon-free political science that can be communicated directly to a wider audience, and he sees this as the solution to the crisis of irrelevance that he detects. But there is an obvious and significant problem with such a view. Were jargon and algebra-laden peerreviewed academic papers the only output of researching political scientists, then Riddell, Flinders and others might well have a very good point. But quite simply they are not. Indeed, the unquestionable influence and reach of public choice is surely the best possible

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testimony to the diverse array of mechanisms in and through which it has come to influence policy elites, political parties and the like. As Peter John explains, ‘technical terms do appear in journals because they explain what common language would itself obscure, such as the language of methodology or statistics’ (2012). Indeed, one could go further. Academic peer review is a collective public good in that it ensures (for the most part) that those claiming, in the wider dissemination of their research and its implications for others, a scientific licence do so having first had to earn it. This may well necessitate the use of seemingly obscure phrases and conventions that are inaccessible and impenetrable to the ultimate users of the research. But if that is the price that is paid for ensuring that public policy, for instance, is informed by research that is wellconducted and independently scrutinized, then that is surely a price worth paying.

Relevance: deserved or attained? This brings us to a final irony. Flinders (2012b), in particular, clearly fears the development – through ever greater professionalization and its institutionalization and embedding in the incentive structures of higher education funding and promotion – of a political science which ever more closely resembles the discipline of economics. Indeed, he clearly sees political scientists as following a path long travelled by economists. That path, he fears, will lead them, if it has not already led them, just as it led economists before them, to a form of intellectual ‘autism’. In so doing he echoes the critique of mainstream neo-classical economics offered by the selfstyled ‘post-autistic economics movement’ (see for instance Fullbrook 2003; 2007) – fearing the parallel (if belated) development of a similarly autistic political science of abstract model building. But whatever sympathy one might have with such a critique (and, for what it is worth, I have plenty), he commits himself in the process to a very different conception of relevance to the one with which he started. For, judged in terms of attained relevance, as it were, there is no social science discipline that has proved more successful than economics. As a discipline it might not have seen the global financial crisis coming for reasons intimately associated with its preference and penchant for stylized equilibrium models (and the

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algebraic notification in and through which these are conventionally expressed). But this certainly did not come at the price of perceived irrelevance – certainly amongst policy-making elites. For mainstream neo-classical economics shapes directly the conduct of economic policy-making (and much else besides) in a way that relevance-minded political scientists (proponents of Glasnost) can scarcely dream about. And however much neo-classical economics may be implicated in the present crisis, there is no sign of this influence waning in the wake of the crisis. If this is autism (and there are some pretty good reasons for thinking that it might be), then autism has proved no impediment to its perceived relevance amongst those responsible for economic decision-making. But this is, of course, not an argument for autism in political science. In a sense, my point is to show the potential dangers of fetishizing attained relevance. Mainstream economics is attractive to policy-makers because it both claims to be and ‘looks’ very scientific. It is neat and reproducible and its models lead typically to clear policy inferences. It does what policy-makers want and it has the added attraction of doing so in a way that is largely immune to critique from those not fluent in the private language in which it is conducted. In short, it depoliticizes and technicizes economics – and that is precisely what makes it attractive (and hence relevant) to political elites. We might well contest the foundational ontological assumptions which make this kind of modelling possible, noting (with Nobel Prize Winners like Milton Friedman or Douglass North) that they are chosen for their analytical convenience not their credibility or realism (Friedman 1953b; North 1990; see also Hay 2004). But to do so is either not to make an argument about relevance at all or to make an argument about deserved relevance rather than attained relevance. It is, in effect, to change discourse – to move from Glasnost to Perestroika. For what the Perestroika Movement in the US does is to argue that the mainstream political science orthodoxy does not deserve to be seen as relevant by virtue of the epistemological and analytical choices it makes – in effect, its core premises preclude genuine relevance, even if they facilitate a spurious relevance. That might well be our view of mainstream economics too; that, if we understand the distorting/simplifying analytical moves that make possible most neo-classical economic theory, we will see its claim to genuine relevance to be spurious. But the language of relevance is actually a distraction and an unnecessary complication here, leading us to some of the confusions I have sought to describe above.

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We would do better, I contend, to reserve the term ‘relevance’ for judgements bestowed by others on our work, rather than to venture on to the inherently difficult terrain of adjudicating deserved relevance ourselves. That is not to say that we should avoid passing a normative judgement on the analytical strategies employed in political and economic analysis, nor that we should avoid seeking to persuade others that they are mistaken to take cognizance (or so much cognizance) of perspectives predicated on what we regard to be dubious assumptions. But we risk conflating the normative and the analytical if we couch such critiques in the language of relevance. Relevance is an attribute or property bestowed (rightly or wrongly) by others. As such, whether research is judged relevant or not is an empirical question; whether it should be judged relevant is a normative question – and it is important that we preserve the distinction between the two. In sum, then, in the preceding sections I hope to have established that although the Perestroikans and their British counterparts in promoting relevance speak an ostensibly similar language (albeit with different accents), they have drawn their sense of relevance from very different sources. Ultimately, and although I have considerable sympathy with the normative critique of the limitations of much mainstream US political science on which it draws, I think the Perestroikan debate on relevance is, at least in this context, a distraction. For, properly understood, the critique it presents of the US mainstream is not about relevance/irrelevance (in the dictionary sense) but about good and bad political science and the extent to which the latter might crowd out the space for the former in certain institutionalized academic environments. That is a crucial debate and one that at times might even touch on this one. But it not central to the subject of this volume – which I take to be whether and how political science should strive to attain greater demonstrable relevance. But the Glasnost view, as I have termed it, is certainly no less problematic. It may very well get relevance right semantically. But, ironically, it does so whilst getting the admittedly complex lessons for relevance of rational choice profoundly wrong and, in the process, falsely demonizing the collective public goods of professionalism, technical proficiency and perhaps even academic peer review.

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Diagnosing and resolving the crisis So, where does all of this lead us? Having sorted out what we might mean by relevance, is it credible to think that we suffer from a contemporary crisis of irrelevance and, if so, what should we do about it? Here, as elsewhere, the semantics are important. What we call things matters. And there is scarcely a concept that is more politically and rhetorically significant than that of crisis. To call this a crisis of irrelevance is, then, to engage in a certain politics. It is, in essence, a call to action – a call for us to mend our broken ways and to do political science differently in a way better capable of attaining the relevance we seek or should be seeking. For crises, certainly acknowledged crises, present opportunities. They are, as the etymology of the term suggests, not just moments of failure but just as crucially moments of decisive intervention. So acknowledging or convincing us that we have a crisis may well be the key thing here – a necessary if not perhaps sufficient condition for resolving our problem. On such a reading, then, we might have already turned the corner. This volume might even be seen as an indication of that. But I suspect things are not quite so simple. They seldom are. In this case my reasons for scepticism relate just as much to the diagnosis of the affliction itself as they do to any optimism for the proposed path to greater relevance put forward by those convinced of such a crisis diagnosis – though clearly the two are closely linked. Yet to profess a certain scepticism about whether we face a crisis of irrelevance or not is in no sense to dismiss the relevance agenda. I very much welcome the debate – indeed, any debate – about the public role of political science; though I fear that this is perhaps not the best way to have that debate. But the debate is an opportunity and the opportunity is a good one. So what does the crisis diagnosis look like? Clearly there are different variants of the thesis, but rather than attempt to draw together a general sense of the crisis narrative I will simply summarize what I take to be its most cogent and eloquent expression to date – that by the editors of this collection (Peters et al. 2010). Their short essay, published in the latest edition of David Marsh and Gerry Stoker’s (2010) highly (and rightly) influential text, Theory and Methods in Political Science, is an extremely important intervention – and might perhaps be seen as the originating contribution to what has now become the relevance debate.

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In it they provocatively assert that the lack of relevance of the discipline is a major cause of legitimate anxiety. Any sustained reflection on the collective capacity of the community of political scientists to offer anything of value to the wider society, they contend, can hardly but fail to paint a ‘rather dismal picture’ of a discipline largely unable to produce workable solutions to policy problems (2010: 341; see also 328). They argue that ‘a discipline that studied politics but had nothing to say to those involved in politics or [to those] who might be involved is somehow failing’ (326). The use of the conditional tense is, of course, important here. Their comment is teasingly hypothetical. But, we can only assume that the discipline they describe here has more than a passing resemblance to our own. Developing their point, they suggest that the agenda of political analysis should be – and yet remains insufficiently – set by real world political concerns and real world political actors – their concerns should be our concerns, not our concerns theirs (327; see also Shapiro 2004). As they explain, ‘political science should, as part of its vocation, seek not to pursue an agenda driven by its own theories and methods, as if it were in a separate world, sealed off from the concerns of its fellow citizens … we should be asking questions to which others outside the profession want to know the answer’ (328). This has important implications for what we study and how we should study it. As they suggest, if we are to respond to the challenge the crisis presents, we must acknowledge that ‘the best of political science should have a problem-solving attitude: identifying a question thrown up in the world, illuminating its dimensions through systematic study and seeking to ask what could be done to improve the situation in the service of humankind’ (330). There is undoubtedly much to commend in this and I have very little objection to a political science that is problem-oriented and which seeks to identify and respond directly to ‘real world’ political challenges (i.e. to concerns identified by non-political scientists). But there are real dangers here too, and it is just as important that we avoid these as that we fashion, in the mirror image of Peters et al.’s critique, a pared down political science better attuned to the maximization of relevance. For we might just find that, were we to do this, we would have thrown the baby out with the proverbial bath water. A number of points might here be made. First, though perhaps least significantly, I think Peters et al., and others besides them, are in danger of underselling, in effect, what

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we already do as political scientists. Frankly, I do not share the view that an audit of the contribution of academic political science to the public debate and the provision of public goods would paint as ‘dismal’ a picture as they suggest. This, I think, is the hyperbole of crisis talk – and it is not very helpful. I genuinely believe that the vast majority of the practising researchers in political science that I know do seek to address in their work concerns which are not purely academic; and, moreover, that they do so precisely in the hope that their research will lead to substantive changes in the ways policy and politics is conducted. Indeed, that I think is the principal motive informing the research they do. They might not always be very good at it and they certainly might not be very good at communicating that rationale publicly (a far from trivial failing to which I will return presently). But it is simply wrong, in my judgement, to see them as motivated by narrowly academic or professional considerations in their choice of research question. Second, and rather more significantly, problem-oriented political science, though extremely valuable, is unlikely on its own to prove self-sustaining in the long term and a privileging of it over purer more theoretically driven work may well ultimately undermine our capacity to generate relevant insights (by which I mean insights seen as relevant by others). This may well sound perverse, but the logic is a simple one. Problem-oriented political science is invariably parasitic on theoretical perspectives and traditions typically developed over long periods of time through primary research and theoretical elaboration and not, by and large, through attempts to resolve practical political or policy puzzles. It would be rather tragic to wait until an imminent meteor strike before deciding that it would be useful to invest in research on the movement of large objects in gravitational fields, even if at the time it were difficult to envisage the practical problem that such knowledge might help us resolve. The same is true in political analysis – theory and applied theory develop best in parallel, feeding off one another in a symbiotic manner. Thus, even if we were to convince ourselves that we were suffering today a profound crisis of irrelevance, the solution would not be to abandon pure theory in favour of a problemoriented political science. There is and must always be a place for both. Third, and relatedly, we cannot allow the agenda of academic political science to be shaped entirely by the concerns of those who might benefit from the research we conduct or might conduct.

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Political science is not, and cannot be allowed to become, a response-mode discipline. There is absolutely nothing wrong with our work responding to the concerns and challenges of citizens and policy-makers. And, as I have argued, I think rather more of our work is of that kind than Peters et al. give us credit for. But it can never be all that we do, not least because political scientists are citizens too and they have political concerns. Much much better, I think, is to argue that, where political analysts seek to design research to address issues which do not reflect current societal or political concerns, they take some responsibility for explaining to the wider community their rationale for conducting such research. And that, in the end, is the key point for me. From my perspective, little if any contemporary political science is irrelevant – in the sense that a case could not be made for the public value (however limited) of the research, thinking and analysis in and through which it might develop. But, crucially, most of it could be made both more relevant and relevant to many more. As this suggests, relevance itself may not be the issue – since most of what we do has the potential to be deemed relevant or to become relevant at some later point, if only we were more willing to make the case for it. That is the challenge that relevance poses to us. Our challenge, it strikes me, is not by and large to do different things but to make rather better the case for the relevance of the things we already do – to explain a little more our hunches, to communicate our choices and above all to defend the independent conduct of political science as a core collective public good in any open and democratic society. As political analysts, I suggest, we need to become better public advocates of the work that we already do. That, in turn, implies a clearer sense of our individual and collective responsibility to those for whom we write, to those for whom we might write and, above all, towards our subject matter.

Chapter 4

The rediscovery of the political imagination MATTHEW FLINDERS

‘Just now, amongst social and political scientists, there is widespread uneasiness, both intellectual and moral, about the direction their chosen studies seem to be taking’ – so wrote C. Wright Mills over 50 years ago. ‘This uneasiness, as well as the unfortunate tendencies that contribute to it, is, I suppose, part of a general malaise of contemporary intellectual life. Yet perhaps this malaise is more acute amongst social scientists, if only because of the larger promise that has guided much earlier work in their fields’ (1959: 19). But what is ‘the promise’ of the political and social sciences and how can such a quality of scholarship be rediscovered in the twenty-first century in a way that responds to the current debate about the relevance of political science? The aim of engaging with this core question is not to contribute to the fashionable flaying of political science but to chart a more positive and optimistic ‘road to relevance’ through which to emphasize just why the study of politics matters. The central argument of this chapter is therefore that the discipline needs to rediscover its political imagination, by which I mean an approach to scholarship that emphasizes bridging (i.e. the formation and cultivation of relationships within and beyond academe), accessibility (i.e. an approach to writing that defines the use of obscure, pretentious or trendy language as a sign of indecision, inability and deceit) and morality (in the sense of writing with a sense of social purpose and explicit relevance). Political science is not alone in facing severe external challenges and internal schisms – the ‘public sociology wars’ and the ‘postautistic economics movement’ make this clear – but its position as the ‘master science’ arguably makes its perceived decline (in terms 65

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of both intellectual standards and social impact) a more pressing matter. In essence, the challenges that political science currently faces in terms of demonstrating various forms of ‘impact’, ‘relevance’ and ‘engagement’ are unlikely to diminish in the coming decades and, if we are honest, they are likely to increase as a pressure that shapes the nature of higher education from North America to Australasia and all points in between (see Flinders 2013b). My argument is therefore that what we might call ‘the impact agenda’ represents an opportunity, carefully managed, to redefine the discipline in a way that talks to ‘multiple publics in multiple ways’, to borrow Michael Burawoy’s (2005) phrase. My argument is not that political scientists should become public intellectuals, nor is it necessary for scholars to compromise their independence or integrity. There is no need for critical approaches to be tempered and much to be gained by political theorists who can trespass across boundaries and who understand ‘the art of translation’. There are – as with day-to-day politics – no easy or pain-free solutions to complex problems, and the politics of impact for political science has many dimensions that have not yet been fully explored (the gendered dimensions and the risks of locking in pre-existing disciplinary inequalities, the risks posed by the co-production of knowledge or what might be termed ‘activist scholarship’, the dangers of intellectual exhaustion caused by the heaping of ever greater and diverse expectations on the shoulders of academics, etc.) – but my sense is that political science is currently caught somewhere between ignoring the challenge and half-heartedly responding to the new agenda. It would achieve far more by seizing the initiative and seeking to define the agenda itself through a more coherent and deeper response to its critics by outlining exactly why and how the study of politics matters. In some ways those who study politics and who profess to be experts need to be far smarter in how they strategically manoeuvre the discipline in terms of (internal) endeavour work and (external) branding. The simple argument of this chapter is that these internal and external components must be driven by a rediscovery of the political imagination. In order to make this argument this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section reflects upon the past of the discipline by identifying what are termed as ‘roads to irrelevance’. The aim of this section is really to challenge those observers who would draw great delight in placing the failings of the discipline at the door of

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those scholars who have emphasized a scientific episteme and therefore generally quantitative techniques. The blame for the ‘tragedy of political science’ must be accepted by the discipline in toto if it is to move towards a more vibrant model of engaged scholarship. Having briefly set out the historical foundations the second and most substantive section of this chapter teases apart this concept of ‘the political imagination’. Here I make the rather rash and bold statement – many will inevitably disagree – that whether we like it or not to be a university professor of politics is to be a political actor. I also argue that political scientists possess a professional responsibility or obligation to engage with the public. Such arguments may well be heretical to many but maybe this just reflects their lack of political imagination. The final section then looks to the future and suggests that political science needs to become more amateur (or more specifically, more ‘wobbly’), more optimistic and more daring.

The road(s) to irrelevance The first ‘road to irrelevance’ is closely associated with the emergence of modern political or social science (as opposed to political or social studies) in the second half of the twentieth century. The attempt to model the study of politics upon the natural sciences was forged upon the belief that it was not only possible but also desirable to isolate ‘facts’ from ‘values’ and, through this, to depoliticize essentially the study of politics. It was therefore concerned with disconnecting the social dimension of the study of politics, in terms of values and morality, from the science of political inquiry, in terms of data and knowledge. It was for exactly this reason that Mills used his The Sociological Imagination (1959) to ridicule the rise of ‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ as ‘parasites living off the classic social science tradition’. Scholars were, in Mills’s argument, being corrupted by a false bureaucratic ethos that was turning them into ‘mere technicians’ at a time when the public was desperately in need of help to understand the changing times in which they lived. In The American Science of Politics (1959) Crick warned similarly against the potentially insulating implications of viewing the study of politics as a ‘hard’ (i.e. natural-scientific) science. To push the discipline in that direction was, he argued, to risk robbing it of its passion, its emotion and its capacity to play a

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broader social role. In this regard Crick’s position dovetailed with the concerns of several American scholars at the time, like Thomas Cook (1960) and Philip Moneypenny (1960), and was therefore not so much anti-American as anti-scientism. To accept the view that the behavioural turn sought to depoliticize the study of politics in order to isolate certain facts, patterns or rules in a pseudo-scientific manner arguably risks missing the more sinister manner in which political science actually cultivated antipolitics. The depoliticization of political science is therefore a myth that in many circumstances veils the imposition of a highly political set of values about human nature and collective action that could only ever fuel distrust in politicians and public servants. This is because if the baseline assumption of political science is that human beings are interested solely in maximizing their own selfish utility then the discipline can only ever breed cynicism, distrust and negativity. Rational choice theory in particular became less of a predictive science of politics or deductive method and more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is for exactly this reason that Colin Hay (2009: 587) argues that ‘political scientists have contributed significantly to the demonization of politics … They trained us, in effect, to be cynical. And in that respect at least, we have been excellent students’. The point I am trying to make is that if political scientists have engaged in promoting a message about politics, if they have been influential and relevant, then it has been in promoting what I would term ‘the bad faith model of politics’ (see Flinders 2012b). In this model politicians are inevitably linked to squabbling, self-interest, short-termism, corruption and sleaze; they are, in short, not to be trusted. If politicians represent the epitome of evil then all contact and cooperation with them by academics must be avoided. The dominant intellectual shift within political science from the 1950s and 1960s onwards was therefore a rejection in the progressive social tradition that had shaped the discipline from its inception. This is a tradition that was defined by the work of A. Lawrence Lowell, Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, Albert Bushnell Hart and Charles Beard in the United States; and in which the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, R. H. Tawney and Harold Laski was steeped in the UK. This was also the ‘classic tradition’ that Mills and Crick sought to defend against what they saw as the pro-market and anti-political values that were concealed beneath the claims to ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ of modern political science. With this in mind it is possible to pinpoint both the passive

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and active contributions of political science to the rise in political disengagement and apathy. In an active sense political science’s core values taught us that politicians and bureaucrats were not to be trusted. Indeed, arguably the most influential strand of political science in recent years has been that community of scholars which has advocated the ‘logic of discipline’ and the depoliticization of democratic politics (for a review and critique of this field, see Roberts 2010). This logic, simply put, defines politicians as too easily tempted to interfere in ‘rational’ policy-making due to the pressures of democratic politics and has therefore fuelled the mass transfer of functions from elected politicians to a new cadre of experts, specialists, scientists, ethicists, judges and accountants. The active ‘road to irrelevance’ is therefore tied to a normative form of anti-politics that advocates the hollowing out of the architecture of democracy due to the ‘bad faith model of politics’. The vast majority of political scientists, however, were not swept up in the behavioural revolution; many retained a commitment to a pluralistic methodology and a humanistic set of values. For the most part, therefore, the culpability of most social and political scientists relates more to a sin of omission than to the existence of anti-political sentiment. The passive ‘road to irrelevance’ is therefore concerned with the evolution of a discipline in which certain activities are prioritized and incentivized far above all others. The dominant interpretation of ‘professionalism’ in the social sciences, in general, and in all facets of political science, in particular, has therefore become tied to a culture of ‘publish or perish’ in which few incentives exist for broader social engagement. The ‘tragedy of political science’, as David Ricci (1984) argued three decades ago, is therefore that as the study of politics became more ‘professional’ and ‘scientific’, the weaker it became in terms of both its social relevance and accessibility and as a social force supportive of democracy and democratic values. In a sense the social and political relevance of the study of politics simply melted away and was replaced with a malignant (and to some extent embarrassing) preoccupation with methodological masturbation, theoretical fetishism, sub-disciplinary Balkanization and the development of esoteric discourses. (Mick Billig’s Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences (2013) offers a particularly devastating critique of this latter feature of modern scholarship.) And in making such strident accusations I am by no means a lone scholar. Theda Skocpol, for example, has underlined the need for

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ambition, energy and fresh-thinking within the disciple and has defined the current state of the art as being defined by ‘navel gazing and talking to ourselves’ (see Flinders 2013a). Robert Putnam has similarly highlighted the need for the discipline to reconnect and to ‘focus on things that the rest of the citizens of our country are concerned about’ (quoted in Jaschik 2010). The problem is, however, that the dominant scholarly tradition of political science – and I mean of the whole discipline – rejects such an emphasis and as a result, as Joseph Nye (2009) has argued, ‘the danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less’. And the fact that Nye made these comments not in an academic journal or professional magazine but in the New York Times (20 October 2009) illustrates the manner in which the issue of relevance has mutated from a disciplinary sideshow to a very public debate (quoted in Cohen 2009). Peter Riddell, the former political commentator for The Times and currently Director of the Institute for Government, wrote in 2010 that: to read many political science journals is to enter an enclosed and often narcissistic world of academics writing for each other. It is self-referential as well as self-reverential, and often unreadable to anyone but a specialist. Real politicians seldom feature in these articles. Indeed the authors seem to feel they would be corrupted by contact with politicians. But politics is not, or should not be, about mathematics or neo-Marxist jargon. Some political scientists do try to bridge the gap with the world of politics. But they are a minority. (2010: 551) The intellectual origins of what I have termed ‘the road to irrelevance’, or what Mills described with his typical flourish as ‘the entrance into fruitlessness’ (1959: 74), are both complex and longstanding and to some extent this is a path that has been trodden by a range of social sciences. It is for exactly this reason that Shapiro uses the metaphor of flying to describe a common sense of disconnectedness across the social sciences in general, and within political science in particular. To fly is therefore to feel a heady sort of freedom and manoeuvrability, a feeling that what you write actually matters and a belief in your capacity to take risks, challenge established idioms and reach out to new audiences. The metaphor of flying is therefore intimately entwined with the political imagination. Too many academics have become scared of flying for fear of

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being ridiculed for being insufficiently specific or rigorous, or rejected by the intellectual gatekeepers who have built their careers on a specific approach to the discipline and now edit journals or chair selection panels. The tragedy of political science is therefore that it has lost its political imagination.

The political imagination When did you last read a piece of political science that filled you with what the Greeks called entheos – that is a sense of inspiration, release or connection with the text? Some professors might argue that as a scholarly endeavour concerned with the pursuit of pure and detached knowledge political science should not be concerned with inspiring, releasing or connecting; and if they hold this position they have surely lost their political imagination: they are dead in intellectual terms and have become little more than (naive and misguided) technicians. At best we have embraced relevance halfheartedly and even begrudgingly, but we need to make it fuel our imaginations. The arguments of Wright Mills’s seminal work The Sociological Imagination (1959) matter more today than they did when the book was first published over half a century ago, and they matter most to political science. They demand of it three things: 1. the task and the promise of the political imagination is to form and sustain social and political relationships (i.e. bridging); 2. the political imagination therefore demands that political scientists talk and write in ‘human’ (i.e. accessibility); 3. the political imagination is both optimistic and relevant (i.e. morality). What mattered then was the idea that social scientists had a moral and political obligation to society at large; an obligation to help people make sense of an increasingly complex world. This was both the promise and the task of the political imagination.

The task and the promise (i.e. bridging) The central role and value of the political imagination rests in its capacity to help both the governors and the governed to understand the broader social and political milieu. It is therefore concerned not

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with necessarily providing simple solutions to complex problems but in helping individuals to make sense of their position in the world and the nature of the challenges that confront them in a way that forges some form of reconnection. Scholarly knowledge, from this perspective, has academic value in its own right, but it also has (or should have) a social value in the sense of a meaningful relevance, demonstrable impact or simply some visibility beyond academe. It is exactly this broader visibility, and the skills (both intellectual and professional) that are necessary to achieve it, that the ‘road to irrelevance’ has destroyed. Let me inject a little story to burnish this point. During 2009 and 2010 I wrote and presented a series of programmes for the BBC that sought to explain both the challenges of governing in the twentyfirst century and also the reasons for the rise in political apathy and disengagement amongst the public (see www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b015fb6c). As part of this project I interviewed former presidents and prime ministers from all over the world, a vast number of serving politicians and senior officials, a broad sweep of social commentators, comedians, satirists, interest group representatives and journalists and – last but not least – a significant number of members of the public. My set of interview questions initially included one about the relevance of political science with the aim of gauging how relevant or visible any particular professor, book or piece of research about politics had been to the day-to-day activities of any of the interviewees. With almost perfect consistency this question received the following responses: blank bewilderment (from the public); polite embarrassment (from serving officials and politicians); and a mixture of laughter and ridicule for even asking the question (from all other social commentators). The question was quickly dropped. Mills (1959) begins The Sociological Imagination with the statement that ‘nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps’ because they exist in a period of far-reaching social, political and economic change but lack the means and resources to understand how and why these changes affect their lives and what might be done. Fifty years later and with the benefit of hindsight Mills’s ‘earthquakes of change’ appear almost insignificant when set against the challenges that will define the twenty-first century (resource depletion, over-population, climate change, bio-politics, economic crisis, etc.); and this is reflected in the fact that the analysis of risk and what might be termed ‘the politics of crisis’ have

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evolved to become almost self-standing disciplines in their own right. In this context Bauman’s (e.g. 2006, 2007) work on liquidity and Giddens’s (2002) work on a ‘runaway world’ with their converging foci on the erosion of once solid points of social anchorage takes on added import as both a form of contextual shorthand and as a point of departure into the political imagination. A point of departure in the sense that encourages – even forces us – to fly (to return to Shapiro’s powerful metaphor). To possess and display the political imagination is therefore to combine the very highest standards of scholarship with the ability to demonstrate why it matters in social terms. Not necessarily why it matters in the instrumental sense of having the capacity to change government policy or produce profit, but why it matters in the sense of being in some way relevant to the ordinary lives of men and women. Those who possess the political imagination are therefore able to see the bigger picture in terms of structural transformations in society (political, economic, technological, psychological, etc.) but who are then able to use this knowledge not only as a contribution to academic knowledge but as a contribution to society in the sense of being able to help the public make sense of the world around them and to understand their position within the broader social milieu. ‘For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another … it is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two’ (Mills 1959: 7). In this sense the political imagination cannot promise to give individuals greater control over their lives but it does offer a form of linkage and a way of cultivating social understanding and political literacy. Put slightly differently, it enables the university professor of politics to help the individual grasp his or her place in the world and through this ‘the indifference of publics’ might be ‘transformed into involvement with public issues’ (ibid.: 5). The political imagination is therefore structured around a twin commitment to the very highest standards of scholarship (in terms of rigour, ambition and creativity) and an equally robust commitment to demonstrating the relevance of that scholarship across society. As mentioned before, the paradox of our time and the tragedy of political science is that it has honoured neither of these commitments. If the content of our leading journals really does reflect the highest standards of scholarship then we are in trouble; and at the

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same time repeated public demands that political scientists learn to ‘talk human’ reflects the triumph of what Mills called ‘socspeak’ (i.e. opaque, indigestible syntactical and semantic sludge) over clear English. It is this focus on the use of English that brings us to shift our attention from bridging to accessibility.

Political and social engagement (i.e. accessibility) I want to return to how social and political scientists interpret the world in the next sub-section but here I simply want to focus on the issue of communication and accessibility because there is no sense in promoting the theme of bridging or linkage or emphasizing the professional obligations of university professors of politics to the public if what flows along that bridge is incomprehensible. This is a point I have already made, but its importance cannot be overstated: there are two major hurdles that political science must clear if it is to develop a greater relevance and social impact. The first of these revolves around the issues of language, clarity and deceit. Albert Einstein famously suggested that ‘any fool can make the simple complex but it takes a real genius to discuss complex issues in simple terms’. If this is true then political science urgently needs more geniuses. This point, of course, takes us back to the history and ‘professionalization’ of the discipline, but I fear I must ask of much modern political science whether there is actually any fire beneath the smoke? Is much of our scholarship simply confused verbiage or is there, after all, something there? The answer, I think, is: something is there but it is buried so deep and it demands so much in terms of translation that what that germ of relevance actually is or why it matters is rarely uncovered. Smoke without fire; topics without argument; irrelevant ponderosity; methodological introductions to methodology; theoretical introductions to theory; and neologisms aplenty. These are quite indispensable to the writing of books by men or women without ideas. As is a lack of intelligibility. The ultimate web of deceit is to veil one’s intellectual impotence through the use of jargon and verbiage in the hope that the reader will interpret their failure to penetrate the book as evidence of their own intellectual weakness, rather than that of the authors. The complexity of the language used to study and write about politics is, from this interpretation, rarely related to the complexity of the phenomenon or topic of analysis. In this regard Mills’s translation of segments of Talcott

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Parsons’s The Social System (1951) into plain English provided a devastating insight into the art of abstraction. Sixty years later the direction of travel of much academic writing has been towards far greater jargon-spew, even in those sub-disciplines, like public administration, legislative studies and comparative government, that traditionally enjoyed a far closer relationship with practitioners and plain English. Critics of my position will undoubtedly argue that political science, as a professional discipline, will inevitably require the use of certain technical terms or phrases that are understandably not within the mainstream public vocabulary. This, again, is rarely more than a smokescreen. Technical terms will, of course, have to be used from time to time, but ‘technical’ does not necessarily mean difficult, and certainly does not mean jargon. Political science has become a discipline built on jargon; and if technical terms are really necessary and also clear and precise, it is not difficult to use them in the context of plain English and thus introduce them meaningfully to the reader. Critics may at this point engage in a far more sinister and hurtful form of criticism and accuse me of advocating the demotion of academic scholarship into little more than pseudojournalism. This sideswipe will be couched upon the implicit suggestion that I am obviously unable to grasp the intellectual magnitude of their work and am therefore trying to lower the standard of political science towards my own inferior level. The curse of political science, a curse that both Mills and Crick endured, is to become identified as a ‘mere literary man’ or, worse still, to have their work defined as ‘mere journalism’. Any academic who dares to write in a widely intelligible way, let alone engages with television or radio, is liable to be condemned in this manner. This reflects a rather superficial logic. Accessibility and scholarly quality do not exist in a zero-sum relationship whereby an increase in one inevitably leads to a reduction in the other. Has nobody noticed that the most influential and enduring works of political science – from Machiavelli’s The Prince to Crick’s Defence – are generally short, concise and accessible? Readable does not mean superficial and those that belittle such works are really demonstrating their own lack of a political imagination. A lack of ready intelligibility rarely has anything to do with the complexity of the subject matter and very rarely anything to do with the profundity of thought at play. It has, as Mills argued, to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer

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about his or her own status and intellectual insecurity around those less conventional scholars who might dare to reveal that the Emperor has no new clothes. To define academic work that is both scholarly and accessible to a wide audience as ‘journalistic’ is akin to the academic closing of ranks on the part of the mediocre who understandably wish to exclude those who possess the ability to talk to both ‘kings and publics’. In any case the broader pressure to tie the public funding of the social sciences to clearer outputs in terms of relevance and impact requires political science to move far beyond its historical pretensions and aversions and instead learn to diversify in terms of its research outputs. Political science needs to work not harder but smarter; smarter in the sense of recognizing that the next generation of political scientists will have to master the art of triple-writing (a technique of writing and dissemination that cascades the outputs of any research project along a three-part process): • Phase 1: research results, findings and implications are written up into traditional academic outputs like books and articles (i.e. single-writing). • Phase 2: the same research then forms the basis of a short research note that is intended to be both accessible and of value to a range of user-groups (i.e. double-writing). • Phase 3: in the final stage the research forms the focus of a number of succinct, pithy and even controversial articles for newspapers, magazines or popular websites (i.e. triple-writing). Triple-writing therefore provides a way of bridging the academic and public spheres without diluting academic standards. The challenge stems from the fact that the professional incentives of the discipline still reflect the centrality of single-writing but that situation is slowly changing as funding, and to a lesser extent student recruitment, become linked to demonstrable impact, relevance and public visibility. The climate is therefore one that will increasingly reward those who possess the political imagination because double and triple-writing demands creativity, vision, the capacity to take risks and even a certain playfulness of mind. The real challenge of triple-writing, however, is that it requires skills and attributes – ways of looking at the world – that established political scientists have either lost or never had and that new entrants to the profession are rarely encouraged to develop at the beginning of their careers. It

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also demands that scholars understand the notion of intellectual craftsmanship and the need to approach their political writing in terms of it being an art as well as a science. Those interested in the notion of political writing as an art form would do well to read George Orwell’s Why I Write or Politics and the English Language (both first published in 1946). ‘What I have most wanted to do’, Orwell wrote, ‘is to make political writing into an art’. The link with the contemporary state of political science flows out of his following comment that ‘looking back through my work, I see that is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally’. Orwell, like Bernard Crick and C. Wright Mills, understood the notion of entheos; and this existed at the root of his approach to writing but it also depended on having some broader sense of political purpose. It is for exactly this reason that the third and final argument concerning the political imagination focuses on political morality and values vis-à-vis political science.

Optimistic and relevant (i.e. morality) 1. Political science needs to dare to engage with ‘the political’ in the sense of engaging with relevant norms, values and debates in the public sphere. 2. This is quite different to suggesting that political scientists should become partisan political actors. 3. A deep cloud of depression and irrelevance has settled upon large sections of the discipline and this will only be cast off by focusing not on problems and ‘end times’ but on solutions and ‘new beginnings’. The first argument takes us back to the ‘road(s) to irrelevance’ that was mapped out in the previous section. This suggested that political science had grown increasingly detached, isolated and irrelevant due to a disciplinary attempt to separate ‘facts’ and ‘values’. This allowed me to suggest that an attempt had been made to take ‘the politics’ out of the study of politics. Although this trend was initially interpreted as a form of depoliticization this was quickly rejected, by scholars such as Ian Shaprio (1996), in favour of an argument that identified the imposition of an implicitly pro-market and anti-political set of values beneath a veneer of objective and

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value-free research. At the same time those who rejected the ontological and epistemological claims of behaviouralism are guilty of their own sins of omission in the sense that they allowed themselves to become invisible political actors at a time when democratic politics needed them. They were invisible because political scientists retreated into their offices and abdicated their professional (and professorial) responsibilities to the public. The vehicle of their abdication was, as Mills and Crick both stressed, an increased emphasis on cloudy obscurantism, empty ingenuity and the production of millions of words about nothing or, at best, very little. As a result, political science drifted towards irrelevance because it had very little that actually mattered to say. It had no message and it had no soul. If a connection exists between the health of democratic politics and the health of political science it follows that the latter must have something of value to say about the former. Political scientists must play a more active and visible role in major debates about the nature of society, the distribution of scarce resources, the need for reforms or the challenges ahead. They must, in a sense, stand up and be counted as political actors. And yet many political scientists would baulk at the suggestion that they possessed a moral and political obligation to society at large. Many would hide behind the shield that to make such an argument risked politicizing the profession. To raise this shield would, however, be to fall into a trap that has held political science back from realizing its potential for at least 50 years. A university professor of politics is a political actor. No research or writing is genuinely free from political bias, and even the idea that political science should have nothing to do with values, or that it is necessary to separate ‘knowledge’ from ‘action’, is itself a political attitude. Gabriel Almond (1988) was undoubtedly correct when he wrote that ‘the uneasiness in the political science profession is not of the body but of soul’, though he was undoubtedly wrong when he conflated all political action and engagement as partisan political engagement. Arguing in favour of political scientists playing an active role in day-to-day political debates was, for Almond, the intellectual equivalent of ‘throwing in the sponge’ for a discipline that was (or should be) focused on ‘objectivity’. Moreover, anyone who challenged this position must not only be ‘anti-professional’ but also ‘in doubt as to whether they are scholars or politicians’. Although such simplis-

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tic assumptions may have held sway in the twentieth century they hold little value in the twenty-first. The political imagination is not interested in big ‘P’ party politics and is concerned with defending not specific politicians, decisions or arguments but the process and values of democratic politics. It is concerned with the promotion of democratic values, with social understanding and political literacy and with the encouragement of democratic engagement. Defending politics is therefore very different from defending specific politicians or parties, just as defending the role of politicians (an essentially invidious and painful profession) is quite different from having any obligation to defend the specific behaviour of any specific politician. Almond’s arguments therefore risk conflating a number of issues that urgently need to be teased apart. This, in turn, leaves us with a sudden sense that maybe political science does have a responsibility to its subject matter that it has largely neglected. To make this argument deliver is to place this essay firmly and finally within the contours of Bernard Crick’s classic Defence of Politics.

A rallying cry to the university professors of politics In this essay I have made an argument of almost primitive simplicity: if political science is to grow and flourish in the twenty-first century it urgently needs to rediscover its political imagination. In order to make this argument previous sections have charted both the ‘road(s) to irrelevance’ and the three main elements of the political imagination (i.e. bridging, accessibility and morality). In this regard I hope to have at least provided some food for thought that may help you nourish a more positive and constructive approach to the study of politics. The rest of this chapter is dedicated to fleshing out these points in just a little more detail. For those too tired or too full to take any more nourishment, I thank you for your time and hope that you do not think ill of me for what I have sought to say within these pages (and let me reassure you that Herod is not in my heart). For those with the space for just a little more food for thought let me conclude this essay by seeking to engage with the scholarship of Bernard Crick as a way of driving home my argument concerning the political imagination. If C. Wright Mills possessed the sociological imagination then Bernard Crick undoubtedly possessed the political imagination; and to flow from the work of the former to the latter is to develop a

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certain natural currency or flow. Both men were intellectuals who were frequently sceptical of intellectuals; both were vigorous pessimists and despairing optimists; both were polemicists who engaged in political debates; both were polymaths in terms of their intellectual breadth; both were mavericks who relished in maintaining something of an ‘outsider’ (or what Mills described as ‘outlander’) status; both were radicals with conservative tendencies; and both were huge fans of George Orwell’s writing. The central element of Crick’s scholarship that really interests me in this essay is his views on the responsibilities of political scientists to promote the public understanding of politics. Crick’s was therefore a career that hinged upon the notions of bridging, accessibility and morality. Indeed, it was Crick’s commitment to these qualities that led directly to the introduction of compulsory citizenship education in the UK (and a knighthood for services to political studies). He therefore maintained throughout his career a distinctive responsibility towards the academic community to bring illumination, via engagement, to the process and thinking that politics requires. So let me plunder both his values and scholarship (particularly his ‘A Rallying Cry to the University Professors of Politics’ that was published as an appendix to the second edition of his In Defence of Politics in 1964) in order to underscore my argument about the relationship between the health of democratic politics and the health of political science. Could it be that political science is in poor health because it failed to nourish and sustain democratic politics in the public sphere? Surely it cannot be long before Crick’s Defence of Politics and Riddell’s Defence of Politicians are joined by a Defence of Political Science? It would take a braver (or more foolish) man or woman than me to try and defend political science as it has been undertaken in recent decades. As the end result would probably be both slim in form and weak in content, let me use Crick’s ‘rallying cry’ and his emphasis on political understanding as a way of rediscovering the soul of the discipline. In short, let me sign off by making three provocative arguments: 1. Political Science needs to become more amateur (or ‘wobbly’). 2. Political Science needs to become more optimistic. 3. Political Science needs to become more daring. The study of politics has, in recent decades, become gripped by the pathology of rampant professionalization. Indeed the mantra of almost every sub-disciplinary association or group has generally

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been wrapped around a commitment to ‘greater professionalization’. For example, Michael Freeden’s (2008) call for political theorists to step away from the kinds of ‘public intellectual’ stance that Crick and others have played and to pursue a more analytical approach to everyday politics can be seen as signalling a retreat from the sense of public responsibility which Crick urged upon the scholarly community. Jeff Gill and Kenneth Meier (2000: 195) have similarly set forth what they call a ‘methodological manifesto’ for the field of public administration and have suggested the field has ‘fallen behind related fields in terms of methodological sophistication’ and what is needed is ‘a greatly enhanced focus on empiricism and rigorous quantitative approaches’. The concept of ‘professionalization’ has therefore become tied to a certain idiom that arguably grates, without careful management, against the demands of the political imagination. It is an idiom that tends to promote quantification, specialization, jargon, distance and a faux form of depoliticization that leaves me with the inevitable conclusion that if this is professionalization then political science needs a large and urgent dose of amateurism. Amateurism not in a pejorative sense, however, but in the sense of returning to a proud social science tradition in which the gap between political science and political reality is less wide; amateur in the sense of a form of political writing that is widely accessible; and amateur in the sense of possibly possessing more drive, ambition and creativity than those who have been tightly schooled within a rather dry and lifeless academic tradition. It was exactly this sense of ‘flying’ that Crick appealed to in his ‘rallying cry’ and that Mills referred to when he defined himself as being personally and intellectually ‘wobbly’. In my interpretation of taking pride in being ‘an amateur’ is to rejoice in Mills’s commitment to being ‘wobbly’ in the sense of refusing to be bound by academic or professional dogma. ‘I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help’ (Mills 2000: 252). Where are those young political scientists that are willing to exist ‘outside the whale’? Where are those young scholars who exist to inject colour into what has become a very grey discipline? To suggest that political science has become a rather grey discipline is surely beyond dispute and flows into my second concluding argument concerning optimism. The discipline has become not just a dismal science but also a very depressing science in the sense that

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it has become imbued, as Andrew Gamble (2000) has argued, not only with a deep pessimism but also with a focus on ‘endism’ in all its forms (‘the end of politics’, ‘the end of authority’, ‘the end of history’, etc.). Although much of this literature highlights important social, economic or political trends in the starkest of terms it does little in terms of identifying solutions or promoting confidence in the capacity of collective democratic engagement to respond. Fate and our future have acquired an unfortunate association with death, destruction and impotence that for some reason completely overlooks the massive achievements of democratic politics during the twentieth century. A new political science for the twenty-first century might therefore adopt a more optimistic – or, at the very least, a more balanced and solution focused – account of the relationship between politics and fate. The question for political science is whether it has the strength of nerve and purpose to play a public role in explaining why politics matters, how it can and does shape people’s lives, and how democratic politics can be viewed as a counterweight to the vicissitudes of fate. Most of all political science needs more individuals that ‘dare to be a Daniel’ and ‘dare to stand alone’. It takes great courage and conviction to stand alone and swim against the current of professional academic opinion, but to some extent the political and social sciences needs characters, like Mills and Crick, who are willing to put their heads above the parapet and explain to the public why politics – and therefore the study of politics – matters. The twenty-first century will belong to those disciplines that are willing to respond to the world as it changes, to modernize and adapt and see the loss of once fixed reference points as an opportunity rather than a threat. The intellectual craftsman displays a commitment to understanding, challenging and changing both his or her discipline and the world in equal measure. The craftsman’s work must be critical and it must make a difference in the sense of holding on to a belief that the study of politics can make a difference. It needs to dare to believe in itself. To advocate such a radical shift in the nature and scope of political science is not to promote a form of ‘punk politics’ but it is to bring this chapter full circle and back to where it started and the conclusion that it remains a discipline in search of its soul. With this in mind it is a great shame that the American Political Science Association’s task force on political science in the twenty-first century managed to isolate the responsibility of political scientists to helping the public make sense of the world around them – ‘arguably

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the heart and soul of political science’ – but then proceeded to bury its head in the professional sand by focusing solely on issues within the profession rather than the link between the profession and the wider world. The task force therefore suggests the existence of a discipline that remains adrift and that urgently needs to rediscover its political imagination.

Chapter 5

Guilty as charged? Human well-being and the unsung relevance of political science BO ROTHSTEIN

Variations of relevance The chapters in this volume clearly show that finding an answer to the question ‘Is political science relevant?’ demands that a more basic question is solved, namely ‘Relevant for what?’ Many different answers could be given to this question. Political science could be relevant for giving advice on how to win election campaigns, how politicians should best act so as to get enough support for their policies in legislative assemblies, when and if state leaders should go to war or how they should act in international negotiations for best furthering the interests of their countries, to name a few. In this approach to the issue of relevance, political scientists are seen as consultants or advisers to politicians in power who are ‘speaking truth to power’, to use Aaron Wildavsky’s famous phrase (1987). The level of the relevance of political science would then be determined by how successful the policies coming out from this type of advice are. I do not know of any systematic study of the success rate for this way of making political science relevant, but if we compare with our sister discipline, economics, our expectations should be modest (cf. Krugman 2009; Rodrik 2000, 2013). Another idea of how to make political science more relevant is based not on informing the political elite, but the general public. This is the political scientist as the public intellectual writing op-ed articles, giving public lectures and commenting upon current political affairs in the media. The number of political events that deserve 84

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comments are in principle endless. Was it a good idea to invade country X? Why is party Y now changing its rhetorical repertoire? Why is nation Z having such a huge welfare state? What explains declining trust in government? Here, the level of relevance would be determined by the question if political scientists can offer something more, deeper or qualitatively different from what we get from the astute political journalist or pundit. Since I have ventured (or sinned?) in this business myself quite a lot, I will refrain from making any statement about how useful this approach is to making political science relevant. Both these (and perhaps several other) approaches to the issue of the relevance of the discipline have their pros and cons. According to Mark Lilla (2001), Plato deeply regretted his three journeys to Syracuse and became convinced that his advice to King (and later tyrant) Dionysius was completely in vain. My impression is that many, not least our colleagues in neighbouring subjects, are quite sceptical about what political scientists have to offer as advice to political elites or to the general public. Be that as it may, as an alternative I would like to offer another idea of what should count as relevance, namely in what way the discipline can contribute to overall human well-being. This idea is based on the increasing availability of what has become known as ‘big data’ that can be seen as measures of various aspects of human well-being, including poverty. Much of this data comes in the form of ‘one figure per country’, which is an advantage for political scientists since the nation state is one of its prime units of analysis. This idea, which actually goes back to Aristotle’s studies of the 158 city states that he and his students collected information about, is centred on the idea that there may be a causal link between how a state is governed and the well-being of its citizens (or their ‘virtue’ to use Aristotelian terminology). The standard measures of well-being are of course various so-called objective measures, such as population health, levels of poverty, infant mortality and literacy. In addition, a number of interesting socalled subjective measures are now also available, such as perceptions of the level of corruption in one’s country, of social trust, and of whether people report they are satisfied with their lives (aka ‘happiness’). In addition, there are now also a number of other rankings of countries concerning respect for human rights, gender equality, innovativeness and competitiveness, to name a few. As mentioned, these measures come in the form of averages and can therefore disclose huge variations, not only between individuals

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and social groups, but also between regions and sectors within a country. How well they actually measure human well-being can of course be discussed at length. However, most of us would prefer to live in a country where few newborns die, most children survive their fifth birthday, almost all ten-year-olds can read, where people live a long and reasonably healthy life, where child deprivation is low, where few women die when giving birth, where the percentage of people living in severe poverty is low, and where many report they are reasonably satisfied with their lives (Holmberg 2007). We may also like to live in a society of which people think the morality is reasonably high, implying that they perceive corruption to be fairly uncommon and that ‘most people in general’ can be trusted (Rothstein 2005b). If that is the case, then the question of whether political science can be relevant becomes different from the consultant and public intellectual approaches mentioned above. Instead, it becomes a question of the extent to which the discipline can contribute to increased human well-being, or to take a lead from a recent book on this approach: can the discipline contribute to our understanding of why some societies are more successful than others (Hall and Lamont 2009)? My first argument is that the increased focus on the importance of institutions in general and on government institutions in particular, not only in political science but also in economics (especially development and environmental economics), economic history and sociology, dramatically increases the potential for political science to be of relevance for explaining the huge differences in human well-being that we can observe (Holmberg and Rothstein 2012). My second main argument is that this hugely increased potential for relevance is under-utilized because of a misdirected focus on what should be the main things that we as political scientists should try to explain.

Does democracy produce human well-being? Research about democratization has been a huge enterprise in the discipline with numerous studies of how, when and why countries shift from various forms of authoritarian rule to electoral representative democracies. There has also been a lot to study since the waves of democracy that have swept over the globe have brought representative democracy to places where it seemed inconceivable

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50 or 30 or even 10 years ago. More countries than ever are now, by the most sophisticated measures used, classified as being democratic, and more people than ever live in democracies (Teorell 2010). This is certainly something to celebrate, but there are also reasons to be disappointed. One example is South Africa that miraculously managed to end apartheid in 1994, without falling into a full scale civil war. As Nelson Mandela said in one of his speeches, ‘the introduction of democracy would not only liberate people but also greatly improve their social and economic situation’ (Mandela 1994: 414). The available statistics give a surprisingly bleak picture of this promise. Since 1994, South Africa has not managed to improve the length of time that children on average go to school by one single month; economic inequality is as high as in 1994, which means that it remains at a world record level; lifeexpectancy is down by almost six years; and the number of women that die when they give birth has more than doubled (data from Teorell et al. 2013). Simply put, for many central measures of human well-being, the South African democracy has not delivered any positive results. Another example has been provided by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in an article comparing ‘quality of life’ in China and India. His disappointing conclusion is that on most standard measures of human well-being, the communist-autocratic Peoples’ Republic of China now clearly outperforms liberal and democratically governed India (Sen 2011). Using a set of 30 standard measures of national levels of human well-being as well as some variables known to be related to human well-being such as capacity for taxation, and including between 75 and 169 countries, Holmberg and Rothstein (2011b) find only weak, or no, or sometimes even negative, correlations between these standard measures and the level of democracy as defined above. Maybe the most compelling evidence about the lack of positive effects of democracy on human wellbeing comes from a recent study on child deprivation by Halleröd et al. (2013) using data measuring seven aspects of child poverty (access to safe water, food, sanitation, shelter, education, health care and information) from 68 low and middle income countries for no less than 2,120,734 cases (children). The result of this large study is that there is no positive effect of democracy on the level of child deprivation for any of the seven indicators. This bleak picture of the effect of democratization on economic prosperity and other aspects of human well-being is confirmed by several other recent

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studies (Doucouliagos and Ulubasoglu 2008; Norris 2012). In sum, the picture given by available measures is this: representative democracy is not a safeguard against severe poverty, child deprivation, huge economic inequality, illiteracy, being unhappy or not satisfied with one’s life, infant mortality, short life expectancy, maternal mortality, access to safe water or sanitation, gender inequality, low school attendance for girls, low interpersonal trust or low trust in Parliament. Why does democratization not produce better outcomes? One explanation was given by Larry Diamond in a paper presented when the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States celebrated its first 25 years of operations: There is a specter haunting democracy in the world today. It is bad governance – governance that serves only the interests of a narrow ruling elite. Governance that is drenched in corruption, patronage, favoritism, and abuse of power. Governance that is not responding to the massive and long-deferred social agenda of reducing inequality and unemployment and fighting against dehumanizing poverty. Governance that is not delivering broad improvement in people’s lives because it is stealing, squandering, or skewing the available resources. (Diamond 2007: 19) What Diamond is saying is that democracy is not enough – without control of corruption and better governance, the life situation for citizens will not improve. Needless to say, neither Diamond’s nor my argument is that we should not care about democracy which, and I’m sure Diamond agrees, is absolutely indispensable. The argument is that democratization is not enough for increasing human well-being: without a reasonably high level of administrative capacity in the state, democracy will not deliver.

State capacity, quality of government and human well-being If we follow Diamond’s idea about the importance of ‘bad governance’ and, instead of having the degree of democracy as an explanatory variable, turn to measures of a state’s administrative capacity, quality of government or good governance, the picture of what public policies can do for human well-being changes dramatically. For

Figure 5.1

Healthy life years vs level of democracy

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Israel

Japan Sweden Norway USA

Singapore South Korea Cuba Kuwait Croatia Bosnia and Herzegovina China Bahrain Brunei Malaysia Georgia Argentina S. Arabia Syria Macedonia Belarus Lebanon Armenia Egypt Russia Maldives Iran Honduras Azerbaijan Mongolia Tajikistan Turkmenistan Bangladesh Tuvalu Pakistan Papua New Guinea Iraq Gambia Cambodia Senegal Laos Djibouti Haiti Kenya South Africa Equatorial Guinea Nigeria Ethiopia Chad Cameroon Tanzania Mali Rwanda Mozambique Afghanistan Botswana Liberia Burundi Zimbabwe Swaziland Angola Lesotho Sierra Leone 0 Low

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R2 = 0.01. Sources: World Health Organization; Freedom House/Polity; data runs by Richard Svensson.

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Figure 5.2 High 80

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1 Control of Corruption

= 0.44. Sources: World Health Organization; World Bank; data runs by Richard Svensson.

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example, the above mentioned study on child deprivation finds strong effects of measures of quality of government on four out of seven indicators on child deprivation (lack of safe water, malnutrition, lack of access to health care and lack of access to information), when controlling for GDP per capita and a number of basic individual-level variables (Halleröd et al. 2013). A study of how corruption impacts five different measures of population health finds similar strong effects, also when controlling for economic prosperity and democracy (Holmberg and Rothstein 2011b). Other studies largely confirm that various measures of a state’s administrative capacity, quality of government, levels of corruption and other measures of ‘good governance’ have strong effects on almost all standard measures of human well-being, including subjective measures of life satisfaction (happiness) and social trust (Holmberg et al. 2009; Norris 2012; Ott 2010). Recent studies also find that absence of violence in the form of interstate and civil wars are strongly affected by measures of quality of government and more so than by the level of democracy (Lapuente and Rothstein 2014; Norris 2012; Öberg and Melander 2005). Figures 5.1 and 5.2 show two simple scatterplots that illustrate the huge variation in correlations between a measure of democracy and a measure of ‘bad governance’ for one central aspect of human well-being, namely expected years of healthy life. As can be seen, the correlation between this measure of human well-being and the level of democracy is zero, while the correlation with ‘control of corruption’ is substantial. This result is shown to be repeated for a large set of other measures of human well-being and what should generally count as ‘successful societies’ (Holmberg and Rothstein 2011a; 2011b; Rothstein and Holmberg 2011). It may be added that the result is also valid for indicators that measure whether states are able to handle their public finances in a responsible way. While the correlation between Standard & Poor’s credit ranking of countries and democracy is negligible, the correlation with levels of corruption is substantial.

Poverty, state capacity and quality of government As mentioned above, the average measures used in the ranking of countries can certainly disguise huge internal differences. The issue of social and economic inequalities has been high on the agenda in

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political science, not least in studies of the welfare state and in political economy. However, also in this area, focus has been almost completely centred on variables that relate to the ‘input’ side of the political system, such as the electoral success or failures of left (right) political parties or different party systems (Iversen and Soskice 2006; Korpi and Palme 2003). Little attention has been paid to the quality of the state machinery that is supposed to handle the often demanding and complicated tasks of implementing social insurance systems. An example of the importance of this comes from a recent study by Svallfors (2012). Using survey data for 29 European countries that include questions about the fairness of public authorities (health sector and tax authorities) as well as questions about ideological leanings and policy preferences, this study has shown the following. Citizens in Europe who have a preference for more economic equality, but who live in a country where they perceive that the quality of government institutions is low, will in the same survey indicate that they prefer lower taxes and less social spending. However, the same ‘ideological type’ of respondent, who happens to live in a European country where he or she believes that the authorities implementing policies are basically just and fair, will answer that he or she is willing to pay higher taxes for more social spending. To summarize: citizens who live in a country, where they perceive that corruption or other forms of unfairness in the public administration is common, are likely to be less supportive of the idea that the state should take responsibility for policies for increased social justice, even if they ideologically support such policies. Given this, it is noteworthy that the Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State does not have index entries for terms like ‘bureaucracy’, ‘administration’, ‘implementation’, ‘public administration’ or ‘corruption’ (Castles 2010).

Does democracy generate political legitimacy? Some may argue that the normative reasons for representative democracy should not be performance measures like the ones mentioned above, but political legitimacy. If people have the right to change their government through ‘free and fair elections’, they will find their system of rule legitimate. In regard to this, empirical research shows even more surprising results, namely that democratic rights or the feeling of being adequately represented by

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elected officials does not seem to be the most important cause behind people’s perception of political legitimacy. Based on comparative survey data, several recent studies show that ‘performance’ or ‘output’ measures, such as control of corruption, government effectiveness and the rule of law, trumps democratic rights in explaining political legitimacy (Gilley 2006; 2009; Gjefsen 2012). As stated by Bruce Gilley, ‘this clashes with standard liberal treatments of legitimacy that give overall priority to democratic rights’ (2006: 58). Using a different comparative survey dataset, Dahlberg and Holmberg (2014) conclude in a similar vein that ‘government effectiveness is of greater importance for citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy functions, as compared with factors such as ideological congruence on the input side. Impartial and effective bureaucracies matter more than representational devices’. Thus, if the relevance of political science is about understanding the causes of political legitimacy, most researchers in this discipline have studied the parts of the political system that are less relevant.

What does political science want to explain? The relevance problem of political science can readily be seen from this ‘input–output’ perspective of the state. First, remarkably, political science seems uninterested in having measures of human wellbeing as the main dependent variable. Instead, the main part of the discipline is interested in explaining politics, rather than what the political machine (i.e. the state) can do (or in many cases is doing) for people. Thus, most political science tries to explain things like ‘Who wins elections?’, ‘When and why are countries democratizing?’, ‘Why do parties change their strategy?’ or ‘How do states negotiate international agreements?’ As recently argued by Fukuyama (2013), the discipline has paid little attention to the capacity of the state to do things that actually improve human wellbeing. Second, if the relevance of research in political science is understood in terms of how it may improve human well-being and/or improve political legitimacy, then political scientists have to a large extent been focusing on the least important part of the political system, namely how the access to power is organized (that is, electoral and representative democracy and democratization), ignoring the more important part of the state machinery – how power is exercised, or, in other words, the quality of how the state

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manages to govern society. As argued by Fukuyama (2013), this seems to have been driven by an underlying ideological view inspired by neo-classical economics, particularly strong in the United States, which emphasizes the need to limit, check and control (and also minimize) the state, which is basically seen as a ‘predatory’ organization. In other words, how to tame the beast has the central focus, not what the animal can achieve. The result is that the quality of the administrative part of the state, which we now know is of the utmost importance for increasing human well-being, has been severely under-studied, under-theorized and under-measured in political science. It is also (and maybe even more) surprising that public administration scholars have largely ignored this comparative ‘human well-being’ aspect of their enterprise (cf. Pierre and Peters 2009). In sum, a political science that ignores empirical studies and that lacks a sound theoretical conception of the part of the state that is most important for delivering human well-being (and political legitimacy!) may very well deserve at least some of the critique of its irrelevance that has lately been launched against the discipline (Cohen 2009). This should be seen in light of the fact that most human misery in today’s world is in all likelihood not caused by a lack of medical technology or treatments, a lack of economic resources or a lack of technical devices. We have the resources and knowledge for what is needed to create reasonably good human well-being for the world’s population. The reason for the massive amounts of social and human misery that exist today is in all likelihood related to the fact that a majority of the world’s population lives under dysfunctional government institutions. Thus, if political science could produce knowledge that would improve the quality of government, minimize corruption and increase the state’s administrative capacity, the discipline would become more relevant to the lives of real existing people and societies.

Political theory, state capacity and quality of government This neglect of the importance of states’ administrative capacity and the quality of government institutions in general can also be seen in political theory. One example comes from Richard Arneson who discusses the issue of whether welfare distribution should be

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tailored to people’s preferences. First, he recognizes that this would perhaps be impossible because we could not imagine public authorities with the capacity to collect and use the amount of information necessary to accomplish such a task. Nevertheless, he states that he will ‘ignore these practical feasibility problems’ and instead ‘assume that correct and full information regarding people’s preferences is available at no cost whatsoever to whatever institutions we establish to implement the principles of distributive justice that we accept’ (Arneson 1990: 158f.; see also Cohen 1989). Although such reasoning may be justified as interesting thought experiments, they are by these political philosophers launched as policy devices. In general, political philosophers have been remarkably uninterested in and unaware of the political importance of the administrative and institutional sides of politics. When they deal with the question of what the (democratic) state ought to do to increase social justice, they ignore the problem of what this state is capable of doing. David Estlund even claims that political philosophy is easily distorted by an ‘ever present thought that it might be of practical importance’ (Estlund 2008: 1). As Wolff states: philosophers tend to ‘fall short of taking up the challenge of thinking hard about questions of the process and, even more importantly, consequences of implementation’ (Wolff 2011: 192). One example comes from an important approach in political theory known as ‘luck egalitarianism’. Scholars in this approach argue that citizens should only be compensated by the state for problems in their lives that they themselves cannot be held responsible for. This main idea is that the differential impact of circumstances for which an individual cannot reasonably be held responsible (‘brute luck’) are to be neutralized, by some type of public policy, whereas consequences due to the different choices people make (‘option luck’) are to be left intact. A typical case is John Roemer’s idea that, when deciding whether people who have contracted lung cancer should get medical treatment through a public programme, patients should be divided into classes according to whether their smoking was their own responsibility or not. He argues that the choice to smoke is ‘determined’ by a person’s social circumstances, such as his or her class, ethnicity, gender, education, etc. Thus a steel worker would have a much greater chance of getting his lung cancer treated by society than a female college professor who, because of her circumstances, decided to

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smoke – she would have to take full financial responsibility for getting medical treatment (Roemer 1995; 1996; 1998). The problem with this approach is that anyone with the slightest knowledge in research about implementation problems in public policy would realize that having a bureaucracy that would (a) collect all this information about citizens and (b) make decisions based on this mountain of information would create an administrative Leviathan that would severely delegitimize any public health care insurance system (Rothstein and Uslaner 2005). How could the information and integrity problems for solving the problem of personal responsibility for issues like obesity, venereal diseases and injuries from dangerous sport activities be solved? What type of administration could handle the issue of whether unemployment is due to ‘brute luck’, for which the individual has the right to receive unemployment insurance, or as a result of choices, for which the individual should be held responsible, such as not showing enough effort in acquiring new skills, following the changes in the global economy (Risse 2002)? I wish the ‘luck egalitarians’ the best of luck with solving these issues because they will certainly need it. In sum, the policies that would follow from luck egalitarians, such as Arneson, Cohen and Roemer, are likely to result in implementation nightmares that, from what is very well known from empirical research, would create a political majority against increased efforts for social justice. The ethics of disregarding this knowledge is comparable to medical researchers who would ignore well-known dangerous side effects when they prescribe new drugs or treatments. To paraphrase the noted Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer, the troublesome issue is whether political science (and other academic disciplines) is still ‘producing technically competent barbarians’ (Rothstein 2005a).

Empirical measures of the relevance problem in political science Can this neglect in large parts of political science of issues relating to the output side of the political machinery be empirically verified? The answer is yes. I have looked at two sources that should capture what political scientists are interested in. The first is the article database Thomson’s Web of Science. I searched for articles published during the last 20 years (since 1993) that have the term ‘corruption’

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as a keyword in the title or in the abstract. This produced more than 8,000 articles which I then sorted by the number of times they had been cited. The highest cited article published in a political science journal is placed as no. 42. Higher up on the list, the dominance of articles published in economic journals is overwhelming. The picture that comes out of this search is that economics completely dominates the field of corruption research, with 33 articles scoring higher than the most cited article by political scientists. This is also seen from the fact that, during the two decades 1990–2010, the flagship journal of the discipline, the American Political Science Review (APSR), published only six articles about corruption out of a total of 904. Another quite telling example is that, out of the 211 articles published by the APSR during the last five years (2009–13), only one has the term ‘poverty’ in the abstract, as a keyword or in the title. The same surprisingly low result goes for the terms ‘human welfare’, ‘human development’ and ‘infant mortality’. The scores for ‘literacy’ and ‘life satisfaction’ are zero (data from the author’s own search of Thomson’s Web of Science, 10 December 2013). Obviously, these central measures of human welfare are issues that the leading journal in the discipline, and those who publish in it, find uninteresting and/or irrelevant. It should be added that it was economists and not political scientists who in the late 1990s gave attention to the devastating effects that ‘bad governance’ had on development (La Porta et al. 1999; North 1990; Rodrik 2000). On the one hand political science should be grateful and applaud the interests economists now put on the importance of political institutions and good governance for development (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Rodrik et al. 2004). On the other hand, I would argue that leaving the issue of what should count as ‘good government’ to economists is a little like giving the full responsibility of how to conduct wars to the generals. I believe the historical record shows this has turned out to be a bad idea. The second source for the argument that political science has neglected issues about a state’s administrative capacity and the quality of government are the many ‘handbooks’ that have been published during the last decade in various fields of the discipline. In the following list, none of the ten such handbooks includes a chapter or even a section of a chapter that deals with issues of how a state’s administrative capacity and the quality of government relate to human well-being. However, the Handbook of

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Comparative Politics does have a chapter that to some extent deals with this issue (entitled ‘The Poor Performance of Poor Democracies’), but it is, symptomatically, written by an economist. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Science The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics

Eight of these huge volumes do not even have an index entry for the term ‘corruption’ (the exceptions are the Political Economy and the Political Behavior handbooks). The Oxford Handbook of Political Science does have two index entries on ‘poverty’ but over 50 for ‘participation’ and more than a hundred that begins with the term ‘party’. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics also has two entries for ‘poverty’ but over 50 for ‘preferences’ and not a single entry for ‘corruption’. Since American political science, at least quantitatively, is so dominant in the discipline, it is noteworthy that, according to Michael Johnston, ‘American political science as an institutionalized discipline has remained steadfastly uninterested in corruption for generations’ (Johnston 2006: 809). Given the detrimental effects that corruption has on all standard measures of human well-being, including poverty, and how prevalent corruption, according to all standard measures, is in most countries in the world, this ignorance is nothing less than astonishing. This is all the more surprising since three of the most acclaimed books in the field during the last 25 years have put forward the importance of state capacity. In Protecting Mothers and Soldiers, Theda Skocpol (1992) explained why the United States failed to develop a northern European type of welfare state by emphasizing the corruption and other forms of malpractices that tainted the implementation of the war veterans’ pensions scheme after the Civil War. In Making Democracy Work, when measuring the quality of democracy in Italy’s regions, half of the indicators Robert Putnam (1993) used were about administrative capacity. Also, in her

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‘modern classic’ Governing the Commons, Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (1990) placed much emphasis on the relation between high levels of social trust in the local communities she analysed and their ability to create legitimate administrative arrangements for preventing the overuse of their common natural resources. Interestingly, the newly published Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics has about 50 entries for corruption in its index. It should also be added that political scientists have been interested in ‘clientelism’; however, this is usually understood as various forms of vote-buying and not related to issues about a state’s administrative capacity or quality of government (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes 2007). In sum, the picture that comes out of these handbooks, which in total amounts to around 7,000 pages, is clear. Political scientists are very interested in ‘politics’ but they are not that interested in what politics implies for the well-being of citizens. Secondly, political science is dominated by scholars who are interested in the ‘input’ side of the political system but largely ignorant of the part that has to make sure that whatever policies decided upon are also implemented in an orderly, fair, efficient and impartial manner. Since the quality of the latter, as shown above, has very important implications, not only for human well-being as such, but also for the possibility of obtaining broad-based political support for policies that may increase human well-being, this indicates that those who have argued that the discipline lacks relevance may be, at least partly, right.

Theory: why state capacity and quality of government generate human well-being The argument that a state’s administrative capacity, control of corruption and quality of government is central for development and human well-being is certainly not just based on empirical findings. What can be seen as the ‘institutional turn’ in the social sciences gives ample theoretical support for the existence of a strong causal link between ‘good’ administrative institutions and human well-being. The central idea is that, in order to be ‘successful’ in producing high levels of human well-being, societies need a much larger pool of public goods than has generally been understood in neo-classical economics and rational choice oriented political science (Hall and Lamont 2009). As argued by North et al. (2009:

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11), this does not only include things like the rule of law, secure property rights and physical infrastructure. In addition, they argue that goods like education, public health and social insurance programmes should be added to the list of public goods that societies need in order to prosper. Moreover, they also argue that successful societies have much larger governments (as seen as the percentage of GDP that is public spending) than the less successful societies. As Rodrik et al. have argued, developing countries lack a large set of good public institutions ‘that economists usually take for granted, but which are conspicuous by their absence in poor countries’ (Rodrik et al. 2000: 4). This is not only a problem for developing or former communist countries. Available measures of corruption and quality of government show huge variation within Europe. Moreover, countries like Greece and Italy now score lower than several African countries. The causal link between quality of government and human wellbeing can be thought of as follows. Creating and maintaining a large enough supply of public goods is by and large a ‘trust game’. First, since public goods usually have to be paid for by taxes, citizens must trust that most other citizens are actually paying their taxes. Second, they must also trust that most other citizens will not overuse or abuse the public goods in question. Third, they must also trust that those in charge of managing the public goods can be trusted not to subvert them to private goods (that is, engage in corruption). Social (or generalized) trust is thus the key, and here the empirical evidence is for once clear. Societies that have higher levels of social trust also have higher levels of human well-being (Healy et al. 2001).

Quality of government, social trust and human well-being The central question then is what generates high levels of social trust in a society? The most widespread idea has been that social trust is generated ‘from below’ by people being active in voluntary associations (Putnam 2000). In this Tocquevillian approach, the capacity of a society to produce social trust depends on citizens’ willingness to become active in broad based, non-exclusionary, voluntary organizations. However, the evidence that associational membership of adults creates social trust has not survived empirical

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testing (Armony 2004; Claiborn and Martin 2000; Delhey and Newton 2003; Dinesen 2013; Herreros 2004; Robbins 2011; Wollebæck and Selle 2003). To take one example, one large-scale empirical study aimed at explaining variations in social trust based on the World Values Study surveys and covering no less than 60 countries concludes that ‘perhaps most important and most surprising, none of the four measures of voluntary activity stood up to statistical tests, in spite of the importance attached to them in a large body of writing, from de Tocqueville onwards’ (Delhey and Newton 2004: 27). As a response to the failure of the society-centred approach to produce good empirical indicators for its claims about how the causal mechanisms generating social trust operates, the institutioncentred approach claims that for social trust to flourish it needs to be embedded in and linked to the political context as well as formal political and legal institutions. According to this approach, it is trustworthy, uncorrupt, honest, impartial government institutions that exercise public power and implement policies in a fair manner that create social trust and social capital (Rothstein 2005b). For example, Delhey and Newton concluded from their above mentioned study that ‘government, especially corruption free and democratic government, seems to set a structure in which individuals are able to act in a trustworthy manner and not suffer, and in which they can reasonably expect that most others will generally do the same’ (2004: 28). Using survey data from 29 European countries, Bjørnskov (2004) concluded that a high level of social trust is strongly correlated with a low level of corruption. Another study, also based on comparative survey data, concludes that ‘the central contention … is that political institutions that support norms of fairness, universality, and the division of power, contribute to the formation of inter-personal trust’ (Freitag and Buhlmann 2005). Using scenario experiments in low trust/high corruption Romania and in high trust/low corruption Sweden, Rothstein and Eek (2009) found that persons in both these countries, who experience corruption among public health-care workers or the local police, when travelling in an ‘unknown city in and unfamiliar country’, do not only lose trust in these authorities, but also in other people in general in that ‘unknown’ society. Another recent largescale survey, consisting of 84,000 citizens/respondents in 212 regions within 25 European countries, gives strong support to the theory that high levels of corruption and low levels of quality of

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government are important causal factors behind low social trust. In addition to the standard question about social trust, this survey had detailed questions about both perceptions and experiences of the extent to which three regional public services (policy, health care, education) were seen as impartial, of high quality and free from corruption. Taking advantage of the extreme variation among European countries and regions in both levels of social trust and quality of government (QoG), this study shows evidence of the impact of QoG on variations in social trust in European regions, and when controlling for wealth. The effects of civic engagement, income inequality and ethnic diversity (as measured by the percentage of citizens in each region that were born outside the European Union) are negligible, while the effects of QoG are robust and strong (Charron and Rothstein 2014). In sum, what comes out of this research is that the major source of variations in generalized trust is to be found at the output side of the state machinery, namely the legal and administrative branches of the state, that are responsible for the implementation of public policies. Thus, the theory that high levels of a state’s administrative capacity and quality of government generate social trust, which makes it easier to create large sets of public goods in a society, and that explains why such societies are more successful than their opposites in fostering human well-being, is currently supported by extensive empirical research.

Conclusions: the seven sins depriving political science of its potential for being relevant to human well-being 1. When thinking about the relevance of what they do, most political scientists think about being advisers either to the political elites or to inform the general public. These are aspects of relevance with limited importance. 2. Most political scientists are uninterested in explaining what the ‘political machine’ (that is, the state) can do for improving human well-being, broadly defined. There is a lack of understanding that a very large part of human misery in today’s world is caused by the fact that a majority of the world’s population live under deeply dysfunctional government institutions.

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3. Most political scientists, especially the American branch, have for ideological reasons concentrated their thinking about the state on how to tame and limit its power and therefore been less interested in issues about a state’s administrative capacity and the quality of government. 4. Most political scientists take for granted that democracy is the main source of political legitimacy, which seems not to be the case. 5. Issues of ‘bad governance’, especially corruption in public administration, have largely been ignored by political scientists. 6. The detrimental effects of ‘bad governance’ upon political legitimacy, prosperity and human well-being are mostly unknown to political scientists. 7. Normative efforts in political theory about how to increase social justice have ignored problems about implementation and governance that are empirically and theoretically well established.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sheri Berman, Sören Holmberg, Desmond King, Sven Steinmo as well as the editors of this volume for many valuable comments.

Chapter 6

Why did nobody warn us? Political science and the crisis GRAHAM WILSON

In 2008, Queen Elizabeth II went to the London School of Economics and Political Science to open a new economics building. To the consternation of the British economics profession, she took the opportunity to ask of it why nobody had warned us of the danger of a global financial crisis (Pierce 2008). The suffering the crisis brought her people may well have prompted Her Majesty’s question; in the first 18 months of the crisis, the British economy contracted by 7 per cent, a faster rate of decline than in the notorious Great Depression of the 1930s. Her question also prompted unusual soul searching within the economics profession and articles about a ‘shamed subject’ (discipline) (Skidelsky 2009). It is of course tempting for political scientists to gloat over any adverse development affecting the economics profession, which it might be said shows more than a little hubris. Before gloating too much, however, political scientists might also reflect on whether their discipline showed any greater percipience in relation to the crisis than economics. This is not an easy question to answer, in part because political science is a much more intellectually, methodologically and even ideologically varied discipline than economics. Large parts of the discipline continued their established research agendas as if blissfully unaware of unfolding events, somewhat in the manner of a lovable but eccentric classics professor continuing to read Latin poetry while the bombs of the blitz fall around him. This is perhaps understandable for the thousands of political scientists who focus 104

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on public opinion, political behaviour and the actions of individual citizens and elections. It is less understandable for others, including the specialist in comparative political economy who continued to debate pressing questions such as exactly how many varieties of capitalism there are while capitalism itself almost foundered. As we often say, negative findings are important, and it says much about the practice of political science today that, four years after the crash, almost nothing has appeared in any of the most prestigious political science journals relating to it. Indeed many political scientists would not see these comments as criticism; they might reply that political science should be a rigorous discipline whose agenda is set by academic controversies rather than events and whose rigour in research is more important than relevance to current events. A second difficult and more important question asks what the causes of the global financial crisis were (Baily et al. 2008). Clearly, there are many possible explanations, some of which involve phenomena like trading in over the counter derivatives of which few political scientists have much expertise. There is probably some linkage between the global imbalances in trade, such as the surpluses China accumulated but was eager not to bring into its domestic economy and the crisis (Obstfeld and Rogoff 2009). At a less abstract level, the greed of many in the financial sector induced by incentives to maximize short not long term gains also clearly played a part. Again, political scientists are not by and large renowned for their insights into behaviour in financial markets. However, many of the explanations offered for the crisis do include phenomena dear to the hearts of at least some political scientists, such as the behaviour of regulatory agencies. In the words of the US inquiry into the origins of the crisis, ‘we conclude widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the nation’s financial markets’ (US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission 2011: xviii). The Commission went on to list factors that had produced this failure of regulation, including the growth of policy beliefs inimical to regulation and actions by Congress and successive administrations pressured by the financial industry that had produced this regulatory failure. It is harder to imagine a list closer to the topics that political scientists claim as their special expertise – the establishment of policy paradigms and their persistence, the biases of institutions and the influence of interest groups. Moreover, at a deeper level, political scientists can or

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perhaps should be able to comment on the creation and maintenance of the legal/institutional order that produced irresponsible behaviour in the financial sector. As is often remarked, neither markets nor the corporations that operate in them (least of all, financial institutions) are naturally occurring phenomena. Laws and regulations, not nature, create markets and corporations. It is therefore reasonable to assume that political science would contribute to understanding the reasons why financial markets became so unstable and perhaps remain so. A few political scientists to their great credit did so, Andrew Gamble (2009) being one of the most notable. Mark Blyth (2013) has made a fascinating attempt to explain the reasons why reactions to the crisis have been surprisingly conservative, leaving open the possibility for future crises. One of the best of the attempts by political scientists to synthesize the causes from an American perspective is McCarty et al. in Political Bubbles (2013). Apart from the interesting arguments they provide, McCarty et al. also provide the useful framework for analysing the origins of the crisis using the categories of ideas, institutions and interests, a framework adopted here.

Ideas Many economists adhered to an extreme faith in the efficacy and self-regulating character of markets. Markets always priced assets correctly and government regulation of them was at best ineffective, at worst damaging. In spite of the crash, many economists still adhere to this faith; indeed one who was recently awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, Peter Fama, has declared that he does not believe that ‘bubbles’ in asset prices exist, as assets are always priced correctly. For such economists, the global financial crisis was all the fault of governments which had pushed banks to give mortgages to undeserving lower income applicants. These economists’ faith in markets prompted them to oppose the calls for more regulation in trading in derivatives when this was proposed in the last years of the twentieth century. Few political scientists have such an exalted view of markets. They did, however, have their own beliefs that discouraged regulation. It is fair to say that in the two decades leading up to the crisis, political scientists were more likely to stress the failings than the

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successes of traditional ‘command and control’ regulation. An old tradition in the discipline had argued that regulators inevitably became the servant of the regulated, not the public interest (Huntington 1953; Kolko 1965). This tradition might be seen as part of a broader trend in the discipline to be sceptical of governmental institutions and the efficacy of public policy. Although there were important exceptions, political scientists stressed the fallibility of government. Policy as a field within political science was characterized more by an emphasis on flawed implementation and deleterious, unintended consequences than on the successful use of governmental power to improve society. Public servants were in fact merely self-interested actors focused on maintaining their hold on power or on maximizing power, budgets and salaries. Although presenting itself as hard headed social science, this perspective was no more empirically grounded than had been the Progressives’ belief in the benign intentions of government officials. True or false, however, this perspective discouraged further regulation. New regulations would have perverse, unintended consequences or would be used by politicians to reward friends and punish enemies. Better, therefore, not to try. Again, however, the heterogeneity of political science resulted in there being important exceptions. Schwartz (1983) resisted the easy assumption that public policies always failed, revealingly entitling his book America’s Hidden Success: A Re-assessment of Twenty Years of Public Policy. Although talk of regulatory capture persists to the present, the livelier discussion of regulation focused on its reinvention. There was considerable discussion of reinventing many aspects of government in the 1990s and early years of the twentieth century. This produced initiatives such as the executive agencies in the UK and the contracting out of policy implementation or even policy development in many countries including the USA. Reinvention in the regulatory sphere focused on moving away from traditional ‘command and control’ regulations that specified the required behaviour in detail and towards a variety of strategies intended to secure voluntary, ‘beyond compliance’ behaviour by the regulated (Kettl 2000). Examples include corporate social responsibility reporting and attempts to leverage good corporate behaviour through awarding certification, as in the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, to those complying with recommended practices. This new approach on the one hand freed businesses from struggling to

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comply with overly cumbersome regulations that achieved little good while motivating corporations to do the best they can, rather than the minimum required to comply with the law. Private sector or self-regulation can achieve good results, though mainly in stable situations in which the same corporations, communities, NGOs and government agencies are part of a continuing network. This has not been the situation in finance, however. New players such as Deutsche Bank emerged rapidly in both New York and London, while important trades made for long established players were made by offices outside their home country. AIG was brought down by a relatively small office based in London; and the ‘London Whale’, whose behaviour cost J. P. Morgan a very large fine again, as the name implies, was in London, not New York. The rapidly evolving, global financial industry was not a good candidate for self or private sector regulation. However, the spirit of the times in regulation suggested that attempts to impose additional ‘command and control’ regulation were based on outdated attitudes and approaches. As Carrigan and Coglianesi (2012) note, these attitudes were to change rapidly in the twentyfirst century as the global financial crisis and a series of major accidents, such as a mine disaster, seemed to demonstrate the need for stricter regulation. Back in the twentieth century, the climate of opinion on regulation was more sceptical; had not even a Democratic President declared that the era of big government was over?

Institutions The key institutions involved in the global financial crisis operate largely outside the purview of most political scientists. It is true that there have been some good studies of the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States (Kettl 1986; Woolley 1986), but most of the focus was on the role of central banks in either macro-economic management or exchange rate management. The role of central banks in insuring systemic financial stability was discussed as little by political scientists as by policy-makers. Even less attention was paid to the alphabet soup of the numerous different financial regulatory agencies in the USA – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Office of the Controller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange

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Commission (SEC), and so on almost ad infinitum. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK was even more obscure, existing in territory that British political scientists began to explore only in the last years of the twentieth century (Rhodes 1997). This territory is inhabited by agencies that, contrary to the Whitehall model, are not accountable to any minister and hence are only distantly accountable to Parliament. Thus the FSA operated outside the conceptual framework of most political scientists writing on Britain. When its failure to prevent a catastrophic financial crisis resulted in its demise, its work was transferred to the now highly autonomous Bank of England. If American political scientists had been forced to focus on the FDIC, SEC, etc., they most probably would have reached for the principal–agent model popularized by writers such as Weingast (1984). This model would have suggested that these agencies would be responsive to political principals, just as, in Weingast’s account, the SEC was responsive to the changing political balance in Congress. This hypothetical principal–agent model would in fact have misidentified the principal. Most of these agencies received their funding not from Congress but in ‘user fees’ from the businesses they regulated. This therefore produced competition among regulatory agencies for ‘customers’ in the financial sector, competition that was waged by offering less stringent regulation. Financial institutions could change from one regulator to another by making modest changes in the legal definition of their business or articles of incorporation. Detailed oversight by Congressional or parliamentary committees was unlikely. As Kaiser (2013) describes it, most members of the House Finance Committee have little grasp of the financial system that their Committee supposedly helps control. The Committee has grown considerably in size, however, necessitating a redesign of its meeting room to accommodate the extra members. These members have been added not because they increase the Committee’s understanding of admittedly complex issues but because both the Democratic and Republican parties have placed new Congressional members – freshmen – on the Committee so that these more electorally vulnerable legislators (as they lack incumbency advantage) can raise money from the financial industry to fight future elections. The most relevant agency in the executive branch, the Treasury Department, usually has leaders from the financial sector. Bush’s last Secretary of the Treasury was Hank

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Paulson, formerly CEO of Goldman Sachs. His successor, Timothy Geitner, had previously been at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Unfortunately, political science says little about the workings of the Treasury. Contemporary political scientists would be unlikely to write a book on the Treasury Department or indeed on the most prestigious Cabinet positions in general. (The excellent studies of the federal executive by Aberbach and Rockman (2000) are of a different genre, exploring broader samples of political appointees and civil servants. Studies of agencies within the Presidency are of course more common.) Indeed there would be significant professional disincentives to writing such a study as it would necessarily be qualitative rather than quantitative and based on small numbers. In consequence, only journalists give us any insight into the world of the top policy-makers in the Treasury and its Secretaries. Mutatis mutandis, much can be said of the extent of our knowledge of the UK Treasury; Heclo and Wildavsky’s (1974) wonderful study is now four decades old. The global financial crisis also raised a question about institutions that is considered to be on the fringes of political science: what is the relative strength of political and societal institutions? One of the peculiarities of the crisis was the imbalance between the size of banks and the size and strength of the state in which they were embedded. Put simply, some countries were massively overshadowed by their financial sectors. The most extreme example was Iceland, but similar stories could be told of Ireland and Spain. States were responsible for banks – and were forced to guarantee their depositors – even though their banking sectors were far too large for them to bear this burden.

Interests Many Americans are worried about the role of money in the politics and the power of organized interests more generally. Over the years, to a remarkable degree, American political scientists have reassured the public that their fears are exaggerated or groundless. This was of course true of the pluralist tradition that dominated American political science in the 1950s and 1960s. Power, the pluralists reassured people, was multifaceted and widely dispersed. Some organized interests had power because they had a lot of money, others because they had a lot of members. Almost all groups

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enjoyed some significant power, however. In the most comprehensive empirical study of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bauer et al. (1963) also argued that organized interests were generally poorly funded, poorly staffed and not the instruments of power. It became apparent that the account provided by Bauer et al. was not an accurate portrayal of interest group politics from roughly the mid-1970s onwards. There had been a massive increase in interest group activity, in the number of organizations represented in Washington, in the number and quality of staff they employed, and in campaign contributions by these interests (Wilson 1981). This was in effect an arms race, as increased spending by one organized interest prompted increased spending by the others. The comforting pluralist conclusion was undisturbed by these developments for several reasons. First, one of the striking aspects of the explosion in interest group activity was that it included, perhaps was even driven by, interests previously under-represented; in fact interests that a prestigious political scientist had suggested (Olson 1965) were unlikely to be represented. These interests were diffuse or were public interests in the environment, good government and consumer concerns. Although it was obvious that the interest group system still does not represent all interests (the poor being an obvious omission), it was fair to say that it was much more inclusive than in the past. Second, studies of the political action committees (PACs) created post-Watergate supported the conclusion that there was no relationship between their receiving donations and voting in Congress (Wright 1990). This was often translated into a broader claim there was no relationship between campaign contributions and legislative behaviour. Thus in the critical years when the policies that caused the crash were being put in place, the prevailing view in political science was that fears of excessive interest group power were over-rated. These comforting arguments were open to criticism. The argument that the interest group explosion of the 1970s had produced a much more pluralist system tended to obscure the very real differences between the two types of organizations involved in terms of their staffing and financing. As anyone who has visited both will have seen, there is a substantial difference between the often lush, well-staffed offices of major corporations in Washington DC and the usually over-crowded frenetic, intern-dependent world of public interest groups.

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Comforting conclusions about PACs were also possibly misleading. Indeed, PAC studies were arguably a major setback to understanding the links between money and politics. Arguably driven by the appeal of the ease of acquiring data on PAC contributions from the Federal Election Commission, PAC studies both oversimplified the legislative process and ignored the alternative routes for money into politics. As all experts on Congress have noted, studies of votes in Congress or even in Committees do not capture the full picture of decision-making. In particular, such studies cannot capture the degree to which informal bargaining on detailed, often-complicated issues results in decisions of great significance to many organized interests. While floor votes provide the drama, what happens elsewhere in the Capitol can be critical for organized interests. PAC contributions were also quickly supplemented or even displaced as channels for money into politics. Organized interests could make ‘soft money’ contributions to candidates via their political parties that were much larger than the mere $5,000 permitted under PAC regulations. Similarly, ‘bundlers’ could collect cheques from individuals such as corporate executives and hand them to politicians that were much more in total than the corporation’s PAC could contribute. While Senator Obama could claim in the 2008 campaign that he would never accept money from PACs, he was receiving large amounts of money from organizations with a large stake in public policy. For example, Obama received over $1.3 million from the executives of Goldman Sachs while high-mindedly rejecting the $5,000 its PAC could have contributed (data from www.Open secrets.org). Two major studies broadened the focus beyond the sterile focus on PACs. Schlozman et al.’s (2012) study of inequality provided very clear evidence of the differences in groups’ resources. Their analysis provided a major challenge to comforting conclusions that the interest group system had attained pluralism. However, their challenge was countered by another major empirical study by Baumgartner et al. (2009). This study argued that changes in public policy were not determined by the inequality of resources between groups. They argued that there were always two organized sides to public policy debates and that each side was a coalition of different groups, some with few and others with considerable resources. Baumgartner et al. therefore argued that resources are not decisive in American politics.

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Whatever the merits of the arguments advanced by Baumgartner et al. in general, there are significant problems in applying them to policy-making in the financial industry. It cannot be argued convincingly that there were two well organized sides in the debate in the late 1990s about whether to regulate trading in derivatives. One brave regulator, Sheila Bair of the FDIC, did argue presciently for more regulation. However, a bipartisan consensus, led by Democrats such as Charles Schumer, speedily saw off the challenge. There was no organized coalition in support of what at the time would have been seen as a highly technical, obscure proposed policy change. No public interest group had the staff and resources required to grasp the significance of the issues involved. As we have seen, the financial sector has been a major contributor to politicians of both the major parties, a fact that most people would consider relevant to its influence. Not only Senator Schumer but also key figures in the Clinton Administration, such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, actively imposed reforms that might have prevented the crisis, while the anti-governmentalism of the Republicans inclined them similarly to oppose reform (Sorkin 2009). In general, therefore, we can conclude that political scientists, with very honourable exceptions (such as Schlozman et al. 2012), supported reassuring arguments about the power of organized interests, thereby reducing concerns that the gods of finance were out of control. We know less about the relationship between money and politics in other advanced democracies than we do in the USA. Comforted by the fact that nowhere else are huge sums required to buy TV time to promote political parties during elections, political scientists have paid comparatively little attention to politicians’ quests for money for other purposes. The rise of ‘capital intensive’ campaigning dependent on consultants, focus groups and opinion polls has increased politicians’ needs for money, irrespective of their ability to use free TV time. State support of political parties also helps to contain this need but is clearly not regarded as adequate in countries such as the UK. New Labour’s solicitude towards financial interests was perhaps influenced by a hope for contributions, though two further factors were perhaps more important. First, the British economy and the Treasury became dependent on the success of the City of London, which was responsible for generating a significant proportion of British GDP and tax receipts. Second, British policy-makers were aware that the City of London would

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not succeed in a globalized financial system if it were regulated more restrictively than competing centres such as New York. Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer took a deliberate ‘hands off’ approach to the financial sector; as long as the money and taxes flowed in, why worry? While few other countries could hope to compete with financial centres such as New York or London, the appeal of jobs, income and taxes from successful financial institutions discouraged governments in countries such as Iceland, Ireland and Spain from asking probing questions of their banks. While in retrospect there is something a little odd about Banco Santander buying up American banks in places such as Boston, this structural dependence discouraged inquiry. Political scientists had been largely but not exclusively sceptical of the consequences of globalization. Experts on regulation such as Vogel (1995) emphasized that, contrary to fears of a ‘race to the bottom’, no country had repealed environmental regulations in order to attract investment. Linda Weiss (1995) argued that the capacity of the state to regulate was undiminished. There was contrary evidence that might have been considered, such as the international trend towards lowering corporation tax, probably (as in Ireland) as a strategy for encouraging direct inward investment. Again, however, whatever the validity of the arguments in general, it is highly likely that, in the perhaps unusual case of the financial industry, globalization did exert a significant depressing effect on proposals for stricter regulation. We might argue, therefore, that the tendency in political science to assert that globalization did not in practice prevent stricter regulation provided false comfort. Globalization or widespread beliefs about the consequences of globalization discouraged policy-makers from imposing stricter standards on their own financial centres or institutions for fear of making them less competitive with those in other countries. Whether or not this constraint is objectively true may be debated. We know, however, that this argument was advanced at critical moments when regulations on the finance industry might have been tightened. That was the case in the late 1990s; it remains the case today. The British and other members of the EU have argued over measures that, depending on one’s point of view, are essential reforms or are measures that damage London as a major financial centre, perhaps to the advantage of Frankfurt or Paris.

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What did political science get right? The verdict so far might be that while political science as a discipline has less to answer for than economics in creating or defending ideas and practices that facilitated the global financial crisis it was to some degree complicit. Can anything be said in its defence before sentence is passed? First, as we have seen in passing, prominent political scientists resisted the spirit of the age and adhered to traditions underpinning the discipline. Long before it became fashionable, Verba et al. (1995) and Schlozman et al. (2012) were studying the relationship between social inequality and our politics. As the title of one of their books, echoing Schattschneider’s famous comment, reminds us, this concern has been the bedrock of our discipline. In politics, worrying about inequality was regarded as passé in the 1990s and early years of this century. In political science it was not. Second, and similarly, many political scientists retained faith in a positive role for the state. This was evident in Vogel’s defence of command and control regulations; in comparative political economists’ admiration of countries in which the state played a stronger role in economic management; and in defences of strong welfare states. In important respects, these political scientists went against the grain of current politics and indeed of their own profession. The heterodoxy of political science in assumptions, methods and therefore conclusions meant that their voices rose to criticize the dominant view in the discipline and in policy-making circles.

Conclusion Political science as a discipline contributed little to warn Queen Elizabeth II or anyone else that a catastrophic financial crisis was a real danger. Having done little to warn, the discipline has done less than might be expected to analyse the crisis ex post facto. It is a sad commentary on the discipline that, although many have pointed to causes such as poor regulation or the excessive influence of the financial industry that might have seemed to be its core expertise, in fact it had and continues to have little to say. While not as culpable as economics for the crisis, what political scientists did have to say of relevance tended to discourage effective regulation to prevent it.

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It is, however, the silence of the discipline that is most striking. This is not unprecedented. Similarly, after the Word Bank and other international organizations said that good governance was key to economic development, political science studiously ignored the chance to be central to a major global issue. Two aspects of the contemporary discipline help explain this. First, contemporary political science is heavily weighted towards the study of politics, not government. Implicitly, the majority of political scientists, at least in the United States, consider the thinking and actions of individual citizens more important than the inner workings of institutions or how policy-makers grapple with problems. This weighting towards politics rather than government might be appropriate but it is a weighting that is little considered. Second, the discipline’s appropriate concern for scholarly excellence has encouraged it to distance itself from major current events. The story is told of a reporter, after the announcement of a record US trade deficit, phoning the chair of a major economics department and asking which of his colleagues had expertise on trade balances who might comment. ‘Oh!’ replied the chair with pride, we don’t have anyone who studies that sort of thing!’ Political science is not dissimilar. Yet is this distancing really a mark of scholarly rectitude? Are seismologists equally indifferent to massive earthquakes? One rather doubts it. Surely a discipline with more knowledge and understanding of the underlying issues and problems could have said something of value before and, even more, after the global financial crisis broke? Fortunately, some scholars are intent on reconnecting the discipline (and other social sciences) with politics and government. Andrew Gamble has noted considerable activity in this regard in the UK. Not only are sessions at conferences on the financial crisis well attended (for one example see: http://www.britac.ac.uk/events/ archive/forum-economy.cfm) but there is also a less visible buzz of activity, such as involvement in the Policy Centre at the British Academy (Gamble 2012). In the United States, Theda Skocpol has organized the Scholars Strategy Network which seeks to connect the expertise of scholars and their research to policy-makers, the media and citizens’ associations. These initiatives show a confidence that scholars can make useful contributions based on their expertise which goes beyond the role of advocate or of informed commentator on current events. Such involvement can benefit both society and the academy. Scholars’ knowledge and expertise can

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contribute to making better public policy. Involvement with policymakers and policy problems brings scholars insights, perspectives and ideas that improve their research. The question that arises is what the incentives or disincentives will be for scholars to engage in this. In some circles in political science today any contact with politics or government is considered suspect; at least one expert on Congress took pride in never going to Washington DC, an extraordinary wilful denial of the benefits that flow from the direct observation of people, institutions and events. Going the extra step of contributing to public debates – for those who favour a monastic form of political science cut off from earthly political temptations – at present brings political scientists no career rewards and probably lowers their prestige in the eyes of profession. Few if any would want political science to be driven by current events or political debates or to stop rewarding careful rigorous scholarship. In the context of mounting public criticism of the academy in general and political science in particular (Kristoff 2014), surely deans, chairs and promotion committees should take a positive view of contributions to public debates and policy development by political scientists.

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PART II

RELEVANCE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF SUB-DISCIPLINES AND DIVERSE APPROACHES

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Chapter 7

The relevance of the academic study of public policy SARAH GIEST, MICHAEL HOWLETT AND ISHANI MUKHERJEE

Introduction: linking policy research to policy practice The field of policy studies is an interdisciplinary one that has evolved out of political science, public administration, economics, law and sociology, among other fields. As the primary academic discipline involved in the study of the exercise of power in society, political science has much to contribute to policy studies, and many policy theories and concepts owe their origin or substance to inquiry in political science. Policy-making is a central activity of governments and the study of policy processes, tools and outcomes, and the forces and variables which determine and affect them, and is an essential part of political science. But policy-making is also an exercise in the application of knowledge about policy problems and solutions to their resolution, and how to integrate knowledge and power successfully in policy-making processes is and has been an ongoing concern in the discipline. This is an issue and subject of much research in itself in the policy sciences, going back well over 50 years (see, for example, Caplan and Weiss 1977; Wildavsky 1979). Policy studies as a whole is very much concerned with the relevance of its research and theorization since, as Harold Lasswell (1956; 1963) pointed out in his pioneering works in the field, policy scholars want to generate knowledge which is useful to practitioners and helps to improve public policy outcomes. 121

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Although political science has been less involved in the study of knowledge processes in society and other fields have contributed extensively to empirical studies and conceptual development in this area, its focus on governmental decision-making and its exploration of the politics of public policy-making has made a major contribution to the policy sciences and to its desire to remain relevant.

The contribution of political science: reconciling knowledge and power in public policy-making In his foundational work on the ‘policy science’, Harold Lasswell (1970; 1971) derived several key precepts for policy studies which he expected would help it remain relevant. These included adopting an explicitly multi-disciplinary orientation, a clear focus on policy problems and possible solutions, and the need to consider both normative and empirical aspects of problems and solutions in proposing and enacting alternative policy measures. For Lasswell, being multi-disciplinary meant breaking away from narrow study legal institutions and structures of government and embracing the work and findings of such fields as sociology and economics, law and politics. Being ‘problem-solving’ meant adhering strictly to the canon of relevance, with the field orienting itself towards the solution of real-world problems rather than engaging in purely the theoretical or philosophical debates that, for example, often characterized the interpretation of classical texts on government. Finally, by being explicitly normative, Lasswell meant a policy science should also not be cloaked in the guise of ‘scientific objectivity’, but should recognize the impossibility of separating goals and means, or values and techniques, in the study of government actions (Torgerson 1985). He expected policy analysts to say clearly which solution would be better than others when two options were compared, and to be able to communicate this to decision-makers. This general orientation towards the policy sciences remains with us along with the desire that policy science must remain relevant in the sense of providing insights and solutions to real-world problems. Although some efforts to create a new policy discipline altogether or to restrict the study of public policy to single fields such as economics or political science, or the desire on the part of some analysts to avoid normative discussions occasionally chal-

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lenge aspects of these foundational canons, for the most part they have been upheld in the half century since Lasswell set them down. Researchers interested in policy-making and the work of governmental and non-governmental actors in such processes were thus, from the outset of the field, very much concerned with the activities of knowledge generation, transfer and utilization, and how these activities informed the content of the various levels or elements (regime, programme and mechanism) which comprise a policy (Howlett et al. 2009). These activities typically involve the effort to promote better knowledge use or ‘policy learning’ in order to avoid policy failures. This involves the attempt to integrate better policy knowledge with political calculations and ideas about both the desirability of certain goals and means, and their feasibility (Howlett 2012). Each stage of policy activity, from agenda-setting to policy evaluation – entails different constellations of policy researchers, advisers and actors interacting with each other, using their knowledge and power to create policies. Understanding how these knowledge mobilization efforts operate at different stages of the policy-making process – agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation and evaluation – has been a central concern of policy scholars, and political science has contributed in many ways to this endeavour. Studies of activities such as policy formulation and decisionmaking undertaken by political scientists and others have shown, for example, that attaining and communicating policy knowledge which is ‘relevant’ to practice does not occur naturally or on its own in policy-making but rather requires dedicated effort on the part of policy researchers and policy-makers if it is to happen (Grimshaw et al. 2012). As Carol Weiss (1995) pointed out in her studies of efforts to better systematize policy evaluations in government, if evaluation is to fulfil its potential for driving policy learning, it must be fully integrated into the ongoing discourse and help policy-makers think ‘more intelligently’ about the domain in which they work. Political science is well suited to the study of many of these activities and Lasswell highlighted the role it had played in helping to develop and inform the problem-solving orientation of policy studies (Lasswell 1956; 1963). Political science, he argued, enjoyed a strong tradition of ‘distinguished achievement in many areas of problemsolving importance’ (Lasswell 1963: 4). As others such as David Webber (1986a) later put it, the contributions of political science to policy-making involved knowledge of problem identification and

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especially the consideration of the ‘feasibility’ of policy alternatives designed to address those problems, along with the improved understanding of the role and practices played by authoritative government institutions and social actors in policy creation and execution. The study of political science hence has been and remains significant to policy studies and policy practice through the insights it brings to the study of how governments and societal actors interact in the exercise of power and authority. It helps further the understanding of how these actors constantly engage in the activity of defining and redefining socially imperative problems and goals and presenting possible alternatives for addressing them. It also provides detailed insight into how governments decide on policy content and how administrators and the judiciary, among others, implement them. In an excellent example of disciplinary cross-fertilization, policy scholars have also developed detailed models and explanations of policy processes which have helped inform political science research into areas such as public opinion, media studies, and aspects of party and government behaviour (see, for example, Kingdon 1995).

Concerns for relevance and the two-communities metaphor of policy knowledge utilization The main purpose of policy research in the Lasswellian conceptualization has always been the pursuit of knowledge and its transmission to decision-makers. This is understood as the action of amassing ‘intelligence’ and scrutinizing the results of policy ‘appraisal’ in order to further the ‘intelligence of government’ and promote better policies – that is, those more likely to attain their goals (Lasswell 1975). It should not be surprising then that the goal of making and ensuring that knowledge gained in the policy sciences remains relevant to policy-makers has itself been a major subject of investigation and analysis in the field. This work has contributed many insights into the impact of policy research on policy practice, and vice versa. These insights have had practical consequences for how policy research is mobilized and used in government – to which political science has also contributed significantly. Since the 1960s and 1970s this question has been approached in policy studies through the lens of ‘knowledge utilization’, that

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is the study of how policy-makers actually use knowledge of all kinds in their day-to-day practices, including knowledge derived from policy studies (Huberman 1990; Oh 1997; Oh and Rich 1996; Rich 1979). Policy researchers have examined many aspects of knowledge utilization processes in government, including whether or not patterns exist in the use of scientific versus social scientific research (Rich 1981; Weiss 1977a); who utilizes knowledge and in what ways (Landry et al. 2003; Ouimet et al. 2009; Weiss and Bulmer 1987; Whiteman 1985a; 1985b); whether such knowledge serves an enlightenment function or more ‘instrumental’ or ‘strategic’ uses (Weiss 1986); what constitutes ‘useable evidence’ (Nutley et al. 2007; Pawson 2006); and whether more evidence equals better policies (Tenbensel 2004). In addition, many studies have also been conducted into topics such as the sources of knowledge and the kinds of techniques used to measure and evaluate policy knowledge (Howlett and Wellstead 2011); the role of specific knowledge communities and the ideas they hold in policy formulation (Haas 1992); and the mechanics and content of the provision of policy advice (Halligan 1995). Political science and political scientists have contributed to these studies along with researchers in fields such as sociology, education and many others. Although it was often initially assumed by policy scholars such as Lasswell that policy knowledge would be relevant more or less by definition, a pivotal finding in studies undertaken by researchers in the 1960s and 1970s into the use of policy research by policymakers was that little of the large volume of output emanating from formal policy analysis and research was in fact being used to inform policy decisions directly (Caplan 1979; Caplan et al. 1975; Weiss 1976). Decision-makers were shown to seldom directly use policy research results, and it was also shown that there was a strong political motivation in the use which did occur. Studies showed how policy-makers deliberately often scoped and used evidence that supported their pre-existing standpoints and strengthened their desired interactions and associations in policy subsystems rather than created or challenged them (Weiss 1986; Whiteman 1985a; 1985b). As Caplan noted very early on in his analysis of information use by senior US policy-makers in the 1970s: Only rarely is policy formulation guided by concrete, point-bypoint reliance on empirically grounded information alone. This

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is not to deny that many respondents cited the use of specific social science research studies in discussing important decisions, but such information was usually only one of many sources used. Rather than relying upon any single piece of information, the final policy decision was likely to depend upon an appraisal of scientific (hard) and extra-scientific (soft) knowledge from a variety of sources. Both types of knowledge are combined conceptually, resulting in a judgment or a perspective which is then applied broadly to decisions involving problems at the meta-level range. (1979: 464) Such results were repeated again and again over the next several decades (see for example, Landry et al. 2003; Shulock 1999). Scientific evidence, for example, was found to be assessed differently by researchers and policy-makers. As Sebba (2013: 395) noted, ‘decision makers view evidence colloquially and define it by its relevance’, while researchers took a scientific approach and defined evidence by its methodology. The idea of a sizable gap existing between policy researchers and policy-makers, and between policy research and use, soon became a well entrenched one in the field: the so-called ‘two communities’ model of policy research utilization. Although the questions they examined were different, the central problematic in all of the studies mentioned above was concern for a gap in the supply and demand for information in the policy process, or between knowledge generation and utilization, which undermined notions in the policy sciences of the relevance of policy research to decisionmaking and other policy practices. Given these findings, researchers quickly assumed the stance that policy-making shared many similar knowledge utilization characteristics as the situation which existed between scientific researchers and those involved in the humanities within university settings. This was a relationship which C. P. Snow (1959) had referred to as involving ‘two cultures’ which spoke to each other but rarely if ever understood what each other said. By analogy policy-makers and analysts were also considered to be divided into ‘two communities’ of knowledge producers and consumers whose relationship was fraught with the potential for misunderstandings and missed opportunities (Caplan 1979; Dunn 1980; Glaser and Taylor 1973; Havelock 1971; Tenbensel 2004). This was soon seen as a fundamental, structural problem built into policy-making in the situation

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in which different sets of actors produced knowledge and consumed it. In the ‘pure’ two-communities argument, modelled on Snow’s (1959) insights into science communication patterns, the concern was always that communications were infrequent or non-existent; that the information communicated and/or received was poor or inaccurate; and that the impact of these communications was either weak or, in the event of poor information, ineffective. These circumstances could exist either as a general pattern across government, or in specific areas or agencies. This work was updated in the 1980s and applied to the policy sphere by political scientists such as William Dunn (1980). Like Snow, Dunn argued policy-making was an activity characterized by a ‘community’ of producers located in places such as universities, think tanks and research institutes, statistical agencies and elsewhere, and a group of consumers located in political institutions such as parliaments and legislatures as well as administrators and managers in government agencies. Given their separate locations, a significant issue was always the extent to which the two communicated, what they communicated and the impact these communications had. Knowledge utilization, and the attainment of the goal of policy relevance, thus came to be seen as a much more complex subject than initially assumed and one which required specific dedicated study and action in order to be overcome. But it also suggested that conscious action on the part of either community could contribute to overcoming these gaps in knowledge utilization. As shall be discussed below, the desire to ensure that the research generated by policy scholars remains relevant – that is, incorporated into policy-making – has led to the development of more complex knowledge mobilization ecosystems including the creation of ‘third’ and ‘fourth communities’ of policy brokers and specialized bodies and agencies whose sole purpose is to facilitate better exchange of knowledge between these two principal sets of knowledge producers and consumers (Knight and Lyall 2013; Lindquist 1990; Lomas 2007; Oliver et al. 2013). This area remains one of ongoing research interest and one the analysis of which political scientists have and are contributing their expertise and knowledge. In the process they ensure the continual relevance of policy research to policy practice and political science research to public policy studies.

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Moving beyond the two-communities model: knowledge brokerage The two-communities model represented a significant advance on earlier thinking about the ‘naturalness’ or ‘automaticity’ of policy advice. However, many observers argued that a pure ‘two community’ structure either had never actually existed in policy-making circumstances or, that if it had once accurately characterized policymaking. This was was no longer accurate precisely because of significant and dedicated efforts made on the part of both communities to bridge any gaps which might exist. The political scientist David Webber, for example, noted ‘if left to policymakers and policy researchers, there is little reason to expect the use of policy research to increase in the future’ (Webber 1983: 558). However, he also noted a lack of homogeneity within the two communities in a policy context and that, in order to foster more use of policy research, policy researchers often assumed multiple roles as advisers, lobbyists and brokers in the policy process (Webber 1983; 1986a; 1986b; 1991). This suggestion that other communities of knowledge-relevant actors existed beyond the two initially posited by Caplan (1979) implied that the boundaries between the knowledge suppliers and producers were more open and flexible than in the case of the university-based knowledge communities first examined by Snow (1959). And, more importantly, it also implied that the mechanisms which could be employed to overcome the gaps between the communities could extend well beyond simply improving communications. Recommendations for bridging this perceived gap, or what Weiss (1977a) calls the ‘great divide’, initially involved largely suggestions for the deliberate design of collaborative arrangements between the two communities (Caplan 1979), improved communication and better dissemination of innovative ideas (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers and Schumacher 1971). As Caplan had noted as early as 1979 (461), however, more specialized mechanisms are also available to fill the gaps between knowledge users and producers in the policy area. He argued simple solutions such as increasing contacts between the two groups were unlikely to be sufficient in bridging the two communities: It does not follow from our data, however, that an alliance of social scientists and policy makers is the panacea which will

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produce relevant research and allow translation of the results of scholarly analysis into terms of practical politics. The notion that more and better contact may result in improved understanding and greater utilization may be true, but there are also conditions where familiarity might well breed contempt rather than admiration. The need for reciprocal relations between knowledge producers and knowledge users in policy-making positions is clear, but the problem of achieving effective interaction of this sort necessarily involves value and ideological dimensions as well as technical ones. Contemporary research and empirical studies by political scientists into knowledge creation and use for policy-making have pursued this line of thinking over the past three decades and have moved well beyond the two-communities metaphor. Knowledge utilization in policy contexts, for example, is now typically discussed in terms of the interactions between at least three communities –of consumers, producers and knowledge ‘brokers’ arranged in complex ‘policy advisory systems’ (Halligan 1995; Lindquist 1990). These systems represent ‘interlocking sets of actors, with a unique configuration in each sector and jurisdiction, who provide information, knowledge and recommendations for action to policymakers’ (Craft and Howlett 2012: 80). Their function, to a very great extent, is to overcome the two-communities problem and ensure policy-making remains relevant by ensuring accurate and up-to-date knowledge of real world events and activities serves as the basis for policy deliberations and the formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation of policy actions. Brokerage mechanisms to facilitate the activities of these different kinds of policy advisers and knowledge brokers create multiple alternative paths in which information can flow (James 1993; Knight and Lyall 2013; Phipps and Morton 2013). Several mechanisms exist which are used to encourage or facilitate brokerage. The main characteristic of such mechanisms is their position in-between the worlds of research and policy-making (Lightowler and Knight 2013; Ward et al. 2009). Or, as Meyer (2010) puts it, as ‘bridging’ the gap between the research and policy communities (Lightowler and Knight 2013; Nutley et al. 2007). The term ‘mediation’ is sometimes used to highlight the translation function played by these mechanisms and acknowledges the facilitative role that policy brokers play, both of which can contribute to greater research use

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in policy-making (Ward et al. 2009). Overall, brokerage involves all the activities that bring together decision-makers and researchers, facilitating their interaction and ultimately influencing each other’s work as well as promoting the use of research-based evidence in policy (Lightowler and Knight 2013; Lomas 2007). Brokers engage in three kinds of activities which help translate research into applicable lessons for policy-makers. The first includes diffusion of knowledge, which is essentially passive and unplanned, leaving the user to seek out information. The second activity is knowledge dissemination, which is a more active process of communication of findings that involves customizing evidence for a particular target audience. The third is knowledge implementation, which is an active process that ‘involves systematic efforts to encourage adoption of the evidence’ (Sebba 2013: 396). These activities can also be framed as ‘push’ and ‘pull’ efforts, where brokers disseminate or push information out in the hope of its usage by other stakeholders, or where stakeholders pull and a demand is created for such information as filled by brokers. These knowledge brokers serve as ‘intermediaries between the knowledge generators and proximate decision-makers, repackaging data and information into usable form’ (Howlett 2011: 33). And the tasks which knowledge brokers typically perform include knowledge management or finding, packaging and disseminating information; linkage and exchange or facilitating discussions between researchers and decision-makers; and capacity building, or developing capacity for future knowledge exchange (Lightowler and Knight 2013: 319). As Kammen et al. (2006) point out, this means brokerage is not just about the direct transfer of results of research, but also about organizing the interactive processes of knowledge and exchange. In fact, Sebba (2013) argues that often knowledge brokers not only link researchers and decision-makers, but are in many situations also able to enhance communication among policy-makers and therefore become in themselves integral parts of the decision-making process (Kirst 2000; Sebba 2013). Knowledge about brokers and brokerage activities has gained importance in response to the increased complexity of policymaking, as the amount of information policy-makers must absorb and master increases and as the fast pace of problems and public demands has heightened. Another development which has enhanced their role is ‘the decentralization of much delivery and decision-making, and the pressure to devolve delivery and/or

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decision-making to local and regional government and to the notfor-profit sector’ (Eichbaum 2007: 465). This takes direct leverage out of the hands of policy-makers and enhances the role brokers play in policy-making as their connecting role becomes more vital. Research has recently highlighted this aspect of knowledge brokerage after analyses from many countries, such as Australia, UK, the US and Canada, revealed that decision-makers are often still not efficiently using research evidence in domains like education, health, criminal justice and social care (Lomas et al. 2005; Nutley et al. 2007; Sebba 2013; Stevens et al. 2009). Policy mediators tackle this low uptake by moving beyond mere access to information and towards: helping define the problem; challenging existing programmes; expanding the public debate based on, for example, public outreach; innovating through policy research; and collaborating with various stakeholders (McNutt and Marchildon 2009; Sebba 2013). Research mediators ‘build on existing networks of users in research designs, improve clarity of communication, gain key contacts including funders, and develop media “savvy” timeliness which anticipates future policy interests’ (Sebba 2013: 405), which ultimately makes them valuable assets in the policy-making process. Details on some of the more prominent and well-known specific techniques or mechanisms identified by policy researchers to enhance the interactions between policy knowledge producers and consumers are set out below. These include specialized advisory boards and commissions (Brown 1955; 1972; Howlett et al. 2009; B. Smith 1977; T. Smith 1977) and think tanks and research institutes (Haas 2007; McNutt and Marchildon 2009; Towne et al. 2005; Wilson 2008). Much of this research has been pioneered by political scientists.

Specialized advisers and advisory boards and commissions Policy-makers often follows the advice provided by ‘civil servants and others whom they trust or rely upon to consolidate policy alternatives into more or less coherent designs and provide them with expert opinion on the merits and demerits of the proposal’ (Howlett 2011: 32). Policy advisers in particular can be part of government or non-governmental organizations or current or former colleagues (Dobuzinskis et al. 2007; Eichbaum and Shaw 2008; Howlett 2011; Maley 2000; Peled 2002).

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This is true for individual advisers, while advisory committees mostly involve officially selected representatives that sit on temporary or permanent bodies. Howlett et al. (2009) list the characteristics of this type of knowledge broker as: • advisory bodies that are closer to societal actors than to the formal government; • they are working with a specific focus; • they engage in dialogues that seek to build consensus; • they are not created to develop new knowledge, but are a venue for different interests and framing issues. Ideally, a good advice system contains all of these elements by combining in-house advisory service with specialized political units and third-opinion options (Halligan 1995; Howlett and Newman 2010). Policy advisers, for example, take on a brokering position beyond the minister–department relationship to address policy overlap or conflict and resolve differences (Dunn 1997; Maley 2000). Complex issues which span multiple levels of government require customized advice structures to cope with the mass of information and localized expectations (Howlett and Newman 2010).

Think tanks and research institutes As a subset of knowledge brokers, think tanks are defined as ‘organizations that have significant autonomy from governmental interests and that synthesize, create, or disseminate information, research, ideas or advice to the public, policy makers, other organizations (both private and governmental), and the press’ (Haas 2007: 68; see also Sebba 2013). Think tanks are intellectually independent from government, but their output is geared towards government needs (James 1993). This implies that researchers in think tanks strategize about the timing of their advice and who the recipient is. Second, they undertake public interest and strategic research. Thus, they focus on pressing issues in the public realm, but also take on projects that are financed by other groups. And finally, most think tanks are politically partisan. This characteristic is common, but manifests itself in varying degrees depending on the political system and the issue at hand (James 1993). Based on these elements of their work, think

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tanks also serve as ‘mediators’ between research and policy (McGann and Johnson 2005; Smith et al. 2013; Taylor 2011; Worpole 1998). However, there is an ongoing discussion in the literature in terms of their independence and usefulness for policy-making. As Smith et al. (2013) point out, that there is no accepted definition of precisely what think tanks do or should be doing. Another issue which is a subject of current research is related to how independent these brokers are. There is also a lack of empirical studies that assess the extent to which think tanks have been successful in influencing policy (Sherrington 2000; Smith et al. 2013). Think tank reports have to be treated with caution as they are often not as independent as they are sometimes portrayed (Evans and Lewis 1993; Smith et al. 2013). Clients of think tanks can play a role in shaping the outputs – this is true for political parties and industry funding alike. Ultimately, the discussion has led to a distinction between independent research-based think tanks and advocacy-based think tanks with vested interests – defining varying degrees of independence from sponsors and government (McNutt and Marchildon 2009). The influence of knowledge brokers, such as think tanks, on policy-making and their ability to cross over community boundaries and enhance the relevance of policy research and results is clear. However, it is difficult to measure this influence accurately. Researchers point out that ‘the boundary between university or research institute and think tanks’ in many countries has become blurred, making the ‘bridge’ analogy somewhat misleading (Sebba 2013: 400). Also some brokers create policy ideas that provide apparent solutions and store them until a window of opportunity opens up for them to be retrieved and used reminiscent of Kingdon’s (1995) work in which ‘policy entrepreneurs’ seize a window of opportunity. This situation makes it harder to evaluate the contribution of this knowledge during specific time periods (Sebba 2013) and confuses roles as ‘brokers’ and ‘entrepreneurs’. The same applies to research mediators and policy advisers. Looking at the relationships existing between expert ideas and policy decisions, Lindvall (2009) point out the literature has rarely distinguished between the effects of knowledge brokerage on policy objectives and its effect on policy content or output.

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Conclusion: research relevance in policy studies – an ongoing research agenda in political science Constant attention is required to ensure the academic study of public policy led by policy scholars, political scientists and others remains relevant to policy-making through its influence on the creation and mobilization of knowledge used in, and about, the policy process and policy outcomes. Much research into these questions by political scientists has shown that ‘eternal vigilance’ and dedicated institutional engineering is required to overcome a problem built into the nature of policy-making, which can feature a sharp division of labour between different communities of knowledge producers and consumers. The two-communities view of the problem of translating research into policy has often depicted the world of researchers and policy decision-makers as a disconnected one. This stems from an assumption that policy researchers work outside of the policymaking process and that policy-makers occupy the policy-making core within it (Caplan 1979; Caplan et al. 1975; Weiss 1977a). However, policy studies have seen a revitalized interest in better understanding the role of policy analysis and re-exploring the relevance of policy research in policy-making, and in moving beyond the two-communities metaphor as the borders between these two groups have blurred. Specific techniques are now used in policy-making in the effort to overcome gaps between theory and practice and to promote better policies and policy outcomes (Meadowcroft and Steurer 2014), such as think tanks and research institutions. However, not all techniques are used by all governments and the question of what kind, and how many mechanisms are required to overcome gaps between theory and practice, and knowledge and power, are ongoing ones with which policy scholars continue to grapple in their work. Just as they have in the past, political scientists are contributing to these inquiries and helping to provide answers to these questions. For example, as Sanderson (2002) noted, the relationship between evaluative techniques in government and their effects on outcomes is not straightforward and such mechanisms need ‘to be conceived as instances of practical reason rather than solely technical exercises’. And political scientists have developed a wide spectrum of concepts and definitions of policy behaviour in the effort to address the political aspects of these questions (Bennett and Howlett 1992;

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Dunlop and Radaelli 2011; Radaelli 2007). Recent forays into explaining scientific expertise and the formation of learning relations using network analysis, for example, have confirmed that ties forming between policy actors based on substantive instrumentlevel learning need not be the same as those that form based on political knowledge (Bernstein 2001; Cashore et al. 2013; Delmas and Young 2009; Leifeld and Schneider 2012; May 1992). Such findings underline the significant role continuing to be played by political scientists in furthering the understanding of knowledge processes in government and hence in continuing to augment the relevance of policy research to practitioners and to the public.

Chapter 8

Why political theory matters THOM BROOKS

Introduction Political theory matters. But why? Unfortunately, this simple claim about the importance of political theory may be controversial. This is because it runs contrary to what we might call a common misconception dominant in many informal circles that real world impact is the stuff of other sub-disciplines in political science and not made to order for political theorists. If we search for examples of politics as practised, then too often an orthodox perspective for many political scientists is that theorists are expected to always come up short. One implication is that this orthodox view favours those sub-disciplines believed to offer some contribution to politics as practised above the perceived importance of political theorists to politics as understood. This contributes to a significant challenge for political theory. The perceived inability to contribute substantially to politics as practised and our collective political lives is not only a belief about political theory’s failure to engage with politics on the ground, but it can undermine the one domain theorists are thought to have relevance, namely, to our understanding of politics if only abstractly. Some might argue: if political theorists cannot engage with the world and change it, then does political theory even matter? This exceptionalism about political theory has additional negative effects. The concern is that political theory is by its nature abstract and often thought to be substantially impractical. Political theorists more readily apply themselves to the consideration of ideas, but not always their relation to practices. The problem is that it has become more common to require evidence of research impact in funding applications and research assessments of departments. 136

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Political theorists are disadvantaged by this development and the impact agenda developed in the UK and the concern about relevance expressed in North America and elsewhere may threaten its future. In fact, this orthodox view is not only shared widely by most non-political theorists, but even by many political theorists, too. There is a danger that this orthodoxy might exercise dominance to the point of becoming a truism for too many people. The orthodox view rests on a deep misunderstanding about the relation between ideas and practices. Political theorists can – and often do – affect practice. I offer a defence of political theory and its impact in this chapter. I will argue that the primary obstacle for political theorists is overcoming scepticism about the kind of impact theorists may offer. The issue is not about whether political theorists create impact, but rather the kinds of impact we should expect from political theorists. I will make the case for the impact that political theory has made and the opportunities for future work. I will consider the contributions made by leading political theorists to policy debates, the lessons learned from their successes, and how political theorists might further pursue existing and new opportunities to develop impact. The discussion will close with consideration of several potential threats that theorists should become more aware of in order to avoid them. Political theorists should welcome – and not oppose – recent trends towards demonstrating impact because they (and perhaps the wider discipline of political science) can benefit.

A chequered past? It is curious that any misperception about the impact of political theory has taken hold given the long history of impact-rich political engagement by theorists over the centuries. Examples abound of such cases. Several political theorists from antiquity had influence that many today might only dream of. Consider Aristotle and his famous pupil Alexander the Great with his later empire. Or think of Seneca and Imperial Rome with its powerful legacy. We owe much today to these figures from antiquity. Not only were philosophers at the heart of some of the most significant political developments in Western history, but their ideas have lived far beyond their political empires. Seneca’s claim that he was a citizen of the world remains the centrepiece of contemporary cosmopolitanism. Furthermore,

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his embrace of freedom as a form of non-domination has reemerged in new work bringing back to life this (Roman) republican theory of freedom (Pettit 1997). The influence of political theorists continues in modern history, too. For example, John Locke’s (2004) Second Treatise of Government had a particularly profound impact on the founders of the United States, such as Thomas Jefferson, and was a cornerstone for much natural rights jurisprudence. Where it was once controversial to argue that every individual possessed rights to life, liberty and property, this has now become more commonplace. Or consider Immanuel Kant’s (1957) Perpetual Peace and its contributing to the establishing of the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations. My brief, historical survey is not meant to claim that the only impact we should expect from political theorists must be at the level of Aristotle, Seneca, Locke or Kant. Instead, my discussion should make clear that, yes, political theorists have exercised a profound impact on both our understanding about political science and its practice. Our question is not whether political theorists can create and deliver real world impact; but, instead, we should ask what kinds of impact we might expect. So we should not ask if political theory matters, but how it matters. Many political theorists have contributed to a chequered history that may have led to scepticism about the value of their impact. Again, there is little disagreement about the fact of impact: the issue is about the kinds of impact we find. For example, the great majority of canonical figures in political theory – including Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and many others – did not defend democracy as the most superior form of government (Brooks 2006a). While Aristotle taught a young Alexander the Great, Plato’s students included the future tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. Plato’s powerful arguments in support of a government ruled by philosopher-kings and not elected leaders is more often cited as evidence for the danger of his ideas rather than as a case of promising future impact (see Brooks 2006b; 2008). Plato along with Hegel and Marx has also been (falsely) accused of providing philosophical justification for totalitarianism (Popper 1945; see Brooks 2012a). It is perhaps one of the more startling facts about political theory’s leading figures that so few supported democratic governance (Brooks 2006a). This may be one source of scepticism about the value of political theory – if so many

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key figures supported regimes contrary to what most might endorse today, then this could lead some to question the value of their contributions with regard to how we think about political issues today. Scepticism about the value of political theory’s impact is perhaps exacerbated by other high profile cases. One important illustration is Niccolo Machiavelli (1995) and his brilliant treatise, The Prince. This work exhibits a wide range of political insight and critical perspective, but it is too often associated with the ‘dark arts’ of politics, a tome rendered both illuminating and almost dangerous at once (see Powell 2011). So we might accept his work produces impact that may have real practical usefulness, but some may still question whether its advice lies beyond the horizon of acceptable modern politics. To be clear, such critics profoundly misunderstand Machiavelli’s work (Viroli 2013). Nonetheless, the point this raises is that it is perhaps not enough that political theorists demonstrate impact because they face an additional hurdle about the value of their impact. If their leading figures support objectionable (and perhaps odious) political institutions, then what useful practical instruction might contemporary political theorists still provide? We might clarify existing norms that guide the conduct of combatants in just wars (McMahan 2009) or provide a new understanding about punishment that illuminates a new approach to modern sentencing (Brooks 2012b), but there will still remain this deeper, ethical question about its value – that is, the value of political theory – for many in light of the popular scepticism arising from political theory’s chequered past. Political theory has a long and controversial record of genuinely substantial and significant contributions to politics and public policy of lasting merit. But what is the state of play today? I will now turn our attention to how many political theorists have been creating impact and the value this work has for politics and public policy – and why it should be celebrated.

Political thought: creating an impact Political theorists generate impact in three broad ways: through our thinking about politics, through our thinking about public policy more broadly, and through public engagement. I shall address each in turn.

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First, political theorists create impact on our thinking about politics. This impact is found across several levels. One level is the realm of political decision-making. Several significant political theorists of distinction have become Members of the House of Lords, including Onora O’Neill, Raymond Plant and Bhikhu Parekh. Each has a voice in Parliamentary affairs where their political expertise may more directly impact on government policies. Furthermore, each has contributed enormously to the intellectual tenor of Parliamentary debates – consider O’Neill’s speeches on autonomy, consent and education as well as Parekh’s speeches on community, multiculturalism and political justice – and beyond to issues of medical ethics and religious toleration (Manson and O’Neill 2007; Parekh 2005; 2008; Plant 2001). Of course, other theorists provide significant contributions as well, helping to clarify and reconfigure our understanding about autonomy and consent, the nature of democratic governance, the foundations of our multiple identities and issues pertaining to political authority, as well as religious toleration and reasonable difference amongst others (Brooks and Nussbaum 2014; Miller and Wertheimer 2009; Modood 2009; Nussbaum 2000; Rawls 1996; Weale 2007). The field of political theory is rich and its contributions are diverse, including from within Parliamentary government. It is interesting to reflect on how much different – and improved – American political discourse on Capital Hill might be if it provided a space for carefully selected, but unelected, appointments like the many distinguished academics that have served in the House of Lords. Political theorists can and do benefit political debate at its coalface. The second broad way in which political theory creates an impact is related to the first and concerns our thinking about public policy more broadly (Smits 2009; Wolff 2011). Distinctive contributions include work on ethics and public health policy, including issues concerning the challenges posed by the great disparities in global health inequalities (Lenard and Straehle 2012). Climate scientists help us understand the evidence for climate change, but not the normative justification for choosing particular policy solutions. Political theorists have helped lead the way in creative practical work as to how we should understand the challenges presented by climate change and what future policies are most preferable (Brooks 2012c; Giddens 2009; McKinnon 2012; Stern 2010). There is also significant work in the area of criminal justice and punishment where political theorists have made important contributions to the

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importance of restorative justice in reforming sentencing practices (Brooks 2012b; Mills 2003). These first two ways in which political theorists create an impact has real value for how we understand politics and may improve public policies. The tools of the political theorists’ trade are rich conceptual analysis and analytical rigour that illuminate the grammar of our political understandings and draw greater attention to inconsistencies of both practice and principle. Political theorists perform more roles than simply helping us to understand politics and public policy, but they do actively contribute to improving our knowledge about how institutions and policies work and how they might be improved. Thus, contemporary political theorists promise both impact and practical value that should overcome the popular scepticism which owes far more to disagreement with the past than the present. One illustration is my work on immigration policy, specifically relating to British citizenship. Individuals that want to become UK citizens are required to satisfy several criteria, including passing the ‘Life in the United Kingdom’ citizenship test. This test has been used to confirm that applicants possess a sufficient grasp about the country; the questions are designed to ensure that only persons with a satisfactory level of English language proficiency should pass. It is possible to sit the test in languages other than English, although this is restricted to Scots Gaelic and Welsh. Of course, the idea of ‘citizenship’ is a contested concept that has received significant examination from political theorists from Plato’s discussion of the good citizen in a just city-state to Rousseau’s reflections on the good of active citizenship (Brooks 2013a; Plato 1997; Rousseau 1997). A citizenship test is one of several possible instruments for concretizing this often abstract political concept. Political theorists are in a strong position to evaluate the coherence of a test’s conception about citizenship and how well it connects this in the practical application of a test. I launched a report, The ‘Life in the United Kingdom’ Citizenship Test: Is It Unfit for Purpose?, that is an example of how political theorists can impact on practices (Brooks 2013b). The report is the only comprehensive examination of the test across all three editions of the test. Over one million tests have been sat since it was launched in 2005 and over 150,000 people took it in 2012: this is not some negligible area of public policy that affects only a few. Most popular commentary looking at the new third edition

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appearing in 2013 highlighted the ‘inclusion’ of British history and culture in the test, but all failed to notice several striking facts. The first is that some element of British history and culture has always been incorporated in previous editions of the test’s official handbook – and so this was an error that could have been addressed through better research. The second and more pressing problem is that all attention was directed to the question of whether to be ‘British’ it was necessary to know certain historical facts listed in an early chapter of the test handbook without any notice about more serious omissions, such as the removal of information about how to contact emergency services, how to register with a local doctor, how to report a crime, and one’s rights when under arrest. These facts about practical life were overlooked, in my view, precisely because commentators failed to examine the test from the perspective of identifying the concept of citizenship and testing whether it is applied satisfactorily. If they had done so, they would have taken more seriously the test handbook’s claim – on its cover – to be ‘a guide for new residents’ and where we are told on its first page that it is designed to assist new migrants ‘integrate into society and play a full role in your local community’, advocating a positive, constructive role of active citizenship (Home Office 2013). These claims lack any clear substance given the absence of information about how potentially new citizens might engage given the wide range of omissions which render the test ‘unfit for purpose’ and more like a poorly designed ‘pub quiz’ (Brooks 2013b). Knowing something about what citizenship can and should be about helps us pinpoint the connection between theory and practice. This perspective can reveal problems too quickly overlooked – and may help point the way to future solutions. My report was covered in over 300 media outlets worldwide including all major UK newspapers and was the subject of over a dozen interviews across the country. The report has also been cited at least six times in Parliamentary debates in the Hansard, including written questions to government. My report concludes with 12 recommendations on how the Life in the United Kingdom citizenship test should be revised and improved in a new, fourth edition. Political theorists can provide a critical insight on policy, revealing problems that others have overlooked. Finally, political theorists create an impact through forms of public engagement. Perhaps the most widely recognized illustration is the widely popular lectures on justice by Michael Sandel. His

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later Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? has exposed substantial research into the idea of political justice and what it means for most citizens to new audiences (Sandel 2010). Similarly, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge has caught the imagination of the public and influential policy-makers while rekindling interest in the potential promise of applying insights from behavioural economics to everything from government policy to everyday life (Thaler and Sunstein 2009). These examples of public engagement are perhaps few and high profile, but others are no less important. For example, there is a real and growing appetite for engagement with ethics and political ideas that should be welcome – and where political theorists have helped play an active role. Groups, such as the Café Philosophique and Sceptics Clubs, have sprung up across many parts of the United Kingdom and elsewhere, bringing together leading figures in political theory with a popular audience to address critically pressing issues of common concern. In 2012 the city of Newcastle upon Tyne hosted its second annual Festival of Philosophy with academic talks open to the public over two weeks. Such activities are often overlooked in favour of other engagement activities, such as public policy think tanks and political party conferences, where political theorists also actively contribute, but not exclusively so. My purpose is to draw greater attention to wider spheres of engagement where political theorists create an impact beyond the so-called ‘usual suspects’ of seminar rooms and policy-maker boardrooms. Political theorists generate an impact across several areas. They help us think more sharply about politics and public policy as well as to contribute to public engagement. The ability to grasp political concepts better is not merely doing good philosophy, though this can have a genuine practical application across a wide range of policy areas, such as the idea of citizenship or the use of citizenship tests.

The challenge of demonstrating an impact So it is clear that political theory has an impact across the several different areas highlighted above, though it has not always been easy to demonstrate it on the basis of experiences in the UK. That country’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 programme includes an assessment of research ‘impact’. This is to be assessed

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through narrative case studies describing impacts made during the period 1 January 2008 to 31 July 2013. Each case study is limited to a maximum of 750 words that must refer to at least one or two ‘outputs’ (including, but not limited to, academic publications) produced by the submitting department (or ‘units of assessment’). Departments must produce roughly one impact case study for every ten full-time academic staff (REF2013 2011). This timeframe may appear too brief, but it reflects the start of the current assessment period. Now that ‘impact’ is a part of research assessment for the foreseeable future it would be surprising if the timeframe were not extended much further in future. This might have been unfair to implement now because previous research assessments did not require evidence of research impact. The crucial distinctions concern how ‘impact’ is defined and applied. The REF2014 considered ‘impact’ in terms of many geographical types (local, regional, national, international) and beneficiaries, such as the community, the environment, individuals and organizations (REF2013 2012: 68). Each is to have an equal status, so that impact on a local community is not necessarily inferior to impact on international organizations. Evidence had to be provided in the form of: citations in public consultation documents or journals; citation by international bodies such as the UN or UNESCO; citation in policy documentation; public debate in the media; media reviews; measures of improved welfare or equality; or documented evidence of influence on guidelines, legislation, policy or standards (REF2013 2012: 72). Impact is divided into several spheres. The first concerns impacts on creativity, culture and society. This includes the production of television programmes, shaping public or political debate, improved access to justice and equal opportunities, enhanced understanding of issues informing public attitudes or values, and influential contributions to campaigns for social, political and/or legal change. Examples from political theory are Michael Sandel’s popular book and television programmes on justice and important work on social justice, Archon Fung’s influential research on public policy and transparency, and Martha Nussbaum’s illuminating work on lesbian and gay rights (Fung et al. 2007; Nussbaum 2010; Sandel 2010). The second sphere is economic, commercial and organizational impacts including improvements in business governance and corporate social responsibility policies such as Will Hutton’s well-known

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contributions on stakeholding and economic justice (Hutton 1999; 2011). A third sphere concerns impacts on the environment, which include improved management or conservation of natural resources or environmental risk, and improved design or implementation of environmental policy. Political theorists have made numerous contributions in this area, including critical examinations about carbon trading and the ‘polluter pays’ principle (Gardiner 2011; Singer 2002). One further sphere worth highlighting concerns impacts on public policy, law and services. This includes changes to legislation or legislative practices, influence on regulation or access to justice, shaping or influencing policy made by government or private organizations, impact on democratic participation and ‘enabling a challenge to conventional wisdom’ (REF2013 2012). This sphere of impact captures perhaps the more traditional understanding of impact – and in the wide sense of including challenges to received public understandings that might accommodate work focused on our knowledge about intellectual history (Skinner 1997), contemporary policy debates (Sen 1999) or immigration policy (Brooks 2013b). The impact agenda of UK higher education policy is not a threat to the future of political theory in the United Kingdom. First, the policy’s understanding of ‘impact’ across multiple spheres captures much, if not all, of the areas where political theory has had an impact. Some spheres, such as impact on public policy or political debates, may be more readily achieved than others. But political theory has impact and the forms it might take are captured by the diverse ways in which it will be assessed. Secondly, impact is appropriate for all political theory. One possible concern is that the new importance of it for research assessment will incentivize less ‘blue skies’ research and more short-term impact work. For example, blue skies research may often require more time to generate an impact. John Rawls’s landmark A Theory of Justice was celebrated shortly after publication, but its lasting impact grew for many years afterwards, leading to this work being understood today as one of the most important texts in political philosophy that continues to influence public policy debates (Rawls 1971). The timeframe for the REF2013 impact case studies is relatively brief, but again this is because there has not been a previous requirement for researchers to consider more centrally the potential impact of their work. Now that impact has become embedded in

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research assessment expectations we should expect the horizon to expand and cover a larger timeframe in future. The impact agenda need not demand all research to demonstrate immediate impacts because the timeframe will likely change. A second potential worry is that the impact agenda will favour some forms of political theory and not others. Political theorists are sometimes divided between those engaged in the history of political ideas and others focused on contemporary debates. The concern is that ‘impact’ will promote the latter at the expense of the former. So it is clear that the impact agenda may benefit contemporary political theory focused on current problems, such as climate change or the ‘just war’. Historians of political thought might also clearly benefit from this agenda. Note that ‘impact’ includes challenges to conventional wisdom, such as our common view about the influences on contemporary customs and practices, and also media presence. These are areas where intellectual historians may readily engage and create an impact, too.

Bright future I have rejected the idea that political theory has something to fear from the impact agenda. In fact, this is something that all political theorists would do well to embrace. Critical engagement with practice is what much political theory is about at its heart. The big challenge for political theorists is not whether they have an impact, but to overcome the traditional popular scepticism about the value of the impact that they might offer. Political theory is about much more than hypothetical thought experiments for people that have never existed. On the contrary, it is a rich subfield of our discipline, not unlike others where impact is created for practical and popular benefit. This fact – that political theorists provide valuable contributions to the development of politics and public policy – is not lost on many policy-makers. Indeed, it may be surprising how frequently political theorists are called upon for their insights and advice. This is not to say political theorists have all the answers – they don’t – but rather they provide a useful perspective that can capture what might otherwise go unnoticed because of the distinctive skill set of conceptual tools and analysis that political theorists can offer.

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I warmly welcome the impact agenda as an opportunity to be embraced that may help improve the public standing of political theory and draw greater attention to the many contributions we offer.

Acknowledgements This chapter is an expanded and reworked version of Brooks (2013c). My sincere thanks to two anonymous referees and Gerry Stoker for their outstanding advice that much improved this essay.

Chapter 9

Constructivism and interpretive approaches: especially relevant or especially not? CRAIG PARSONS

The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the global financial crisis after 2008, the sudden fall of authoritarian governments in the Arab Spring: these may be the biggest political developments of the past few decades. Each also constitutes a significant failure for the long-dominant approaches in political science and international relations (IR) that analyse politics in terms of rational individuals pursuing known interests. Of course we might not begrudge rationalist approaches for failing to predict these events, even if they typically endorse a philosophy of science in which their research should generate useful predictions. No social science approach has ever been very good at forecasting, and we might class major political events in a category with complex phenomena like the weather that we can understand fairly well but not predict very far out. Their failure is clearer, though, in the difficulty that such approaches meet with in accounting for these developments with hindsight. Without claiming that rationalists have nothing at all to say about the evolving material or organizational constraints to which individuals responded in these contexts, it seems fair to say that models of people rationally pursuing clear interests in wellstructured interaction look only marginally relevant in these stories. All seem to involve massive uncertainty, considerable contingency and what looks like rather rapid change in how many people understood their interests. 148

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The assumptions of formally rationalist approaches also make them seem weakly relevant when we move from historic change to a more quotidian level of politics. Both from modern psychology and our personal experiences as human beings, we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that people are never close to being perfectly rational. Some may challenge that claim (Tsebelis 1990: 31–9) but many other rationalists justify their conscious use of unrealistic models with a philosophy of science in which parsimonious assumptions deliver useful predictions (Friedman 1953c). When such models predict successfully, their authors conclude not that they have perfectly represented the mechanisms of action, but that they have roughly captured the stripped-down core of a political story. The problem, however, is that such successful predictions or ‘retrodictions’ seem few and far between – not just in giant historical developments, but also in simple contexts like voting behaviour – and, oddly, this gives pause to few rationalist scholars (Green and Shapiro 1994). At points, to put it bluntly, they seem frankly uninterested in why real people actually do anything. Extremely clear, moreover, is that many care little that anyone outside of restricted academic circles reads their work. In the name of parsimony and logical rigour they often translate accounts of political action into equations. Subjects that might, in principle, interest politicians or citizens become literally illegible to those without doctorates. But we need not despair. Constructivists, together with diverse fellow-travellers whom we can broadly call interpretivists, have risen to save political science from self-marginalization. These scholars criticize ‘outsider’ social science that assumes monolithically rational action and naturalizes apparent constraints in favour of more grounded ‘insider’ research that captures how actors perceive and interpret their context. The message of a socially constructed ‘world of our making’, they often add, has an important normative value. It encourages people to ask questions and empowers a voluntarist, humanist vision of political possibility (Onuf 1989). The currents in this movement fly the flag of relevance in several different ways. For the most ‘modern’ constructivists, increased relevance will come mainly from better science. We can show that our political world is largely socially constructed, and a political science that does so will better grapple with everything from quotidian political participation to IR.

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For the most ‘postmodern’ constructivists or interpretivists, increased relevance will come mainly from rejecting science in favour of critical engagement with real politics. They see academic writing as just another form of political action, and call for us to recognize and embrace this condition. A Derridean break with any claim about reality is the prerequisite to more honest and open political debate, and scholars who refuse this step will remain ‘marginal to international relations’ (and politics more generally) (Zehfuss 2002: 37, 263). In-between these poles stands perhaps the most interesting group: interpretivists, some of whom identify as IR constructivists, who call for increased relevance through a more engaged and practical science. They want to ‘make political science matter’ by making it more attuned to meaning, more pragmatic, and more normative (Schram and Caterino 2006). Though they agree on these goals, they are a diverse group, ranging from fairly mainstream leaders of the ‘Perestroika Movement’ within the American Political Science Association (Shapiro 2007; Smith 2002; 2011), to champions of Bourdieusian approaches (Adler and Pouliot 2011; Guzzini 2000), to post-positivist methodologists who seek a rigorous but practical basis for interpretive social science (Flyvbjerg 2001; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). Or perhaps we should despair after all. The most aggressive position in this movement, on the postmodern side, posits a stark choice between doing political science and being relevant. Though it ostensibly opts for the latter, it also argues strongly that academics have no special claim to knowledge – begging the question of why any audience would turn to its dense, heavily theoretical, introspective scholarship rather than to more accessible sources of wisdom. Advocates of perestroikan-interpretivist positions hold out greater hope in principle, clearly seeing themselves as able to generate useful knowledge. Yet we will see that their recipe for relevance melts the category of academic knowledge into something more like investigative journalism – similarly begging the question of why any audience would turn to the turgid writings of PhDs when they can get the same kind of knowledge from good newspapers, magazines and other social commentators. Even modern constructivists, who surely believe that they focus more on big questions and relevant meanings in politics than their rationalist colleagues, tend to write in ways that are so wrapped up in meta-theory and methodology (not to say jargon) that they are just as illegible to laymen as is

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formal modelling. It is not obvious, then, that constructivists and interpretivists are actually better suited to crafting and communicating broadly relevant messages than any other denizens of the Ivory Tower. Yet all is not lost. Constructivism and interpretivist approaches do, in my view, have some modest potential for directly relevant policy work and a larger potential for indirect relevance to nonacademics. Constructivists can write things for policy-makers’ consumption, and there is one reason to think that policy-focused versions of their work may be especially helpful to policy-makers: of the various conditions that affect policy domains, historically and culturally situated contexts of norms and identities may be the hardest for policy-makers to perceive and digest themselves. A version of the same logic underlies constructivists’ larger potential for indirect relevance, which operates through teaching rather than research. Since social construction tends to be naturalized into the background of political life, it is especially important to help students perceive it alongside the material or institutional conditions in politics that are often harder to miss. In teaching students to ask of any political situation ‘What seem to be the underlying ideas, norms, identities, practices and discourses at work here?’, academic constructivists fulfil a valuable function for their societies that cannot be performed by other academics, journalists or some other group. To be clear-eyed about constructivists’ potential for relevance, however, we must recognize that there are logical and practical limits to that potential. I will now consider how strong postmodern and perestroikan-interpretivist visions of direct relevance ultimately undercut themselves by blurring constructivists’ claims to distinct expertise. I will then stress that, even if modern constructivists make a more coherent case that their academic work tells extra-academic people something they need to know, there is tension between their academic credentials and policy relevance. The very theoretical and methodological practices that uphold their claims to distinctive expertise make their research fairly impenetrable to others; seeking relevance means somehow finding the time and motivation to translate their work into non-academic presentations. This can be done, and we should celebrate those who do it, but we cannot expect it on any large scale. Indirect relevance through teaching will remain the main way in which constructivists impact on society.

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Of gadflies and journalists: problems with postmodern and interpretivist claims to specific and direct relevance I take it for granted that readers know what constructivism is, but in order to discuss the possible relevance of constructivist social science we must also define ‘relevance’ and ‘social science’. When academics question their ‘relevance’ they mean something like ‘perceived by a non-academic as usefully worth reading or listening to’. Relevance is determined by the audience, of course – I cannot simply declare myself relevant – and so a call for academic relevance must logically take the form of arguments about why nonacademics would listen to academics. Thus we can rephrase the question for this chapter as: for what insights would academic constructivists claim that non-academics must come to them rather than to other kinds of people? Equally important is our definition of ‘academic social science’, since we are asking about how constructivist academics can be relevant as constructivist academics – not by leaving their university jobs and joining a political campaign. Defining ‘social science’ is a rather large challenge, but at a minimum it seems to involve the notions of distinctive methods and explicit competition between points of view. Unlike anyone else in society, social scientists (constructivist or otherwise) aspire to arrive at conclusions by highly explicit methods – often, we must recognize, in meticulous and quite tedious forms – that involve a relatively open clash between opposing perspectives. Any claim that people should look to academics for knowledge they cannot find elsewhere depends on their commitment to some version of these processes. The problem with both postmodern and interpretivist calls for relevance, at least in their strong versions, is that their views of relevance and scholarship provide no case for why non-academic audiences should listen specifically to people like them.

Postmodern constructivism and relevance as gadfly – or crank? Postmodern constructivism, including approaches from poststructuralism or critical theory, is largely based around a rejection of social science in the name of being relevant. Scholars like Richard Ashley (1984), R. B. J. Walker (1993), Robert Cox (1987), James

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Der Derian (1987), Roxanne Doty (1996), David Campbell (1992), Ann Tickner (1992), Stephen Gill (1990) or Maja Zehfuss (2002) seek to deconstruct the political world to reveal and criticize the role of power and particular political values therein. This includes deconstructing and criticizing academic writing about politics, which postmodernists see as just another arena of politics itself. The payoff, as Ashley and Walker stressed in an influential early statement of such approaches in IR, is to open ‘a space in which it is once more possible to think’ (Foucault 1973: 386, cited in Ashley and Walker 1990a: 263). Clearly they intend this space to include people beyond their colleagues, since they situate critical theory (in IR) ‘at the uncertain interstices of international theory and practice’ (Ashley and Walker 1990a: 263). Some such scholars make their call to relevance very explicit. For example, Maja Zehfuss announces that she aspires to empower ‘a more responsible politics’ (Zehfuss 2002: 37). Her book on constructivism ends with a section titled ‘Responsibility in International Relations’ (ibid.: 254), where she argues that without fully accepting that all of reality is profoundly political – a space of clashing normative agendas, not a reality amenable even to the most caveated truth statements – scholars will shirk their responsibility to engage in important political debates. Jim George suggests that critical work offers ‘more sophisticated, inclusive, and adequate reference points for understanding a complex world’, and opens up the opportunity for ‘a more comprehensive and insightful agenda by which questions might be answered and problems might be “solved”’ (George 1994: 23). As an abstract logical position and as an empirical claim about how academia works in practice, the postmodern stance must be taken seriously. Even most rationalist political scientists today accept a Lakatosian philosophy of science that identifies theoretical contributions and ‘progress’ only according to academic conventions, not through proven concordance with reality (Lakatos 1970). In some hard sciences concrete results in launching rockets or fighting cancer support the notion that such conventions give some purchase on reality, but theoretical contributions in political science have no such foundations. As concrete as some of our outcomes may seem – war, economic growth, electoral victories – both these outcomes and the causes and conditions by which we explain them are deeply embedded in social meanings that greatly complicate broad acceptance of specific claims about definition, measurement and what causes what. Our human subjects also do not react to

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these conditions as apples do to gravity, instead seeming to display non-automatic mechanisms of contingent choice that many see as frustrating the very notion of causality. These complications mean that even contributions that attract wide admiration from some parts of the discipline may be enduringly rejected as flawed or wrongheaded by other schools. In practice, the resultant theoretical and methodological contestation plays out in hugely divergent reviews of submitted manuscripts, hiring battles and other patterns that often look more like political jockeying for advantage than any sort of rational engagement within shared conventions. Thus no sophisticated political scientist – and especially no political scientist who has lived through a few experiences of peer review and hiring decisions – can blithely rule out that the postmodern view of political science might be right. It may be more politics than science. To the extent that this vision of academia as politics is right, the relevance of constructivist academics is best described as a role of gadflies. They pose uncomfortable questions, shine light in dark corners, challenge assumptions and generally shake up the complacent citizenry of twenty-first-century democracies. They may go no further than offering a destabilizing discourse, since both the logistics and norms of academic employment limit most professors’ ability to become actual activists in politics, but they nonetheless may fulfil an important social role in the grand tradition of the original gadfly, Socrates. Yet if the postmodern analysis of academic life is difficult to dismiss, this logic for its relevance has a flaw. The more they are right about political science as politics, not science, the less of a foundation they have for claims to relevance. Even the role of gadfly presumes that the audience lends the speaker some credence: a self-described gadfly with no particular claim to credibility is just a crank to ignore. If long years in PhD programmes, mind-numbingly minute attention to methods and debate with our peers, and all the other trappings of academia do not convey some sort of special claim to less politicized knowledge, why should nonacademics value them as gadflies rather than dismissing them as cranks? Why listen to them any more than to people on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll? Postmodern constructivists are clearly aware of this issue, but seem oddly untroubled by it. Zehfuss does not shy away from declaring her own lack of foundations with admirable pithiness, dismissing the ‘rhetoric of reality’ upon which any claims to special

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knowledge are built: ‘the rhetoric of reality gives a special status to what is being claimed, a status which is unfounded’ (Zehfuss 2002: 258). Ashley and Walker give extended attention to the risk that academic work unmoored from truth claims will hold no particular interest for any audience: Surely, then, there is cause for pessimism. The scholars of a discipline governed by iterations of this strategy might claim to be seriously engaged in the great social and political struggles bearing on questions of freedom, dignity, justice, welfare, ecology, and peace. But in fact they would be obsessed with the performance of an art of scholarly self-making that is conducted in a register of desire that is radically detached from the material reality of a far-reaching crisis of representation, and that neither listens nor speaks to the real problems of people who must labor with scant resources to question limitations and generate possibilities in the paradoxical localities of life. (1990b: 407) They offer no retort to this observation, and even go further in a wonderfully crafted series of imagined responses to their work. If postmodern constructivists are just another kind of provider of political debate, argues one of their imaginary interlocutors, their writing style might well lead most non-academics to prefer consuming political ideas from journalists, pundits and baby-kissing politicians: If this be theory, it is theory of, by, and for a jet-set elite. Its language – so sophisticated, so ‘lit crit’, so French – has the ring of so much alien and impenetrable jargon. I wait to hear it clarify our political situations; it confuses. I anticipate its precise answers to our problems; it celebrates ambiguity. I await its respectful treatment of our place in life; it seeks to displace. Who could relate to such theory, save those who can afford selfconsciously to embrace a ‘postmodern style’ and leap off in pursuit of the so-called ‘free-play of self-referential signifiers’ in nonstop flight. (Ibid.: 370) Yet as lucidly as Ashley and Walker perceive this risk, they make no effort to dispel it. Apparently they are comfortable recognizing that there is ultimately no reason why others should read their work, resting the justification for their labours on a modest hope that their

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thoughts just might resonate with someone. I suspect that, at some semi-conscious level, this cannot be the real view held by most selfdescribed postmodernists – especially the large number of such scholars who undertake elaborate and often very insightful empirical work (such as Epstein 2008; Campbell 1992; Weldes 1999; and many others). It seems to me that they must at least believe for themselves that they are coming to a better understanding of the issue or context they study, and that they publish their studies due to some sense that others will profit from that understanding as well. They can see themselves as gadflies, not cranks, because in some sense they actually think that their knowledge is not totally without foundation. Still, if we simply accept their explicitly announced views, we must see their aspirations to relevance as incoherent. They insist that there is no particular reason why nonacademics should listen to them rather than to Rush Limbaugh (a conservative American radio talk show host widely listened to across the USA) .

Perestroikan interpretivism and relevance as investigative journalist Louder, more explicit, and more optimistic calls for greater relevance from constructivists have come recently from a large, diverse group for which ‘perestroikan interpretivists’ is a reasonable label. The best-known focal point of their appeals for relevance is the movement that emerged in the United States after an anonymous email in October 2000 by ‘Mr Perestroika’, who denounced the American Political Science Association (APSA) and its flagship journal, the American Political Science Review (APSR), as a ‘coterie’ of quantitative, rationalist, formal-modelling white males who were disconnected from the real world (Anonymous 2000). The subject line of the Perestroika email was ‘On the irrelevance of APSA and APSR!’; and relevance was a central emphasis of the discussion that followed. As Rogers Smith rephrased Perestroika’s vitriolic questions in a following letter that attracted wide support, ‘Why do the APSR and other professional fora seem so intensively focused on technical methods, at the expense of the great, substantive political questions that actually intrigue many APSA members, as well as broader intellectual audiences?’ (cited in Rudolph 2006). Though not all participants in the Perestroika Movement identified as constructivists, most of their diagnosis of the irrelevance of

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rationalist quantoids (with their commitment to quantitative methods) implied that ‘relevance’ meant being more constructivist. Suzanne Hoeber Rudolph (APSA President at the height of the debate) characterized the Perestroikan episode overall as pitting a ‘scientific’ mode of inquiry against an ‘interpretive’ one that emphasized meaning, contingency, thick description, multiplicity of truth, context and subjective knowledge (Rudolph 2006). In other words, the core claim of Perestroikans was that, in order to address ‘great, substantive political questions’ and speak to ‘broader intellectual audiences’, political scientists must give more attention to constructivism and related variants of interpretive institutionalism. And though the Perestroika Movement was an American phenomenon, it dovetailed with similar and contemporary calls for relevance-through-constructivism in Europe. In the early 2000s a variety of European interpretivists called for a practical, relevant version of constructivism rooted in Bourdieusian sociology, stressing that attention to meaning was both necessary to capture how politics works and to render explicit academics’ broader social embeddedness and relevance (Guzzini 2000; Kauppi 2003). This same emphasis on constructivism with a practical, relevant focus has since blossomed into a larger Bourdieusian literature (see Adler and Pouliot 2011; 2012; Hopf 2010; Kauppi 2003; Mérand 2010a; 2010b; Pouliot 2008; 2010). In a tone much like that of many Perestroikan writings, Stefano Guzzini ended his Bourdieusian ‘reconstruction of constructivism’ article with an anecdote (Guzzini 2000: 175): In a keynote speech to an Association of Economists, the chairman criticized the discipline for the little impact it had on actual politics. His speech was met with outrage. The audience recalled numerous examples of policies influenced by the discipline’s thoughts or main protagonists. After listening to these examples, the chairman addressed the floor by asking how it could be, then, that so little research has been done on this link, why the discipline was not reflecting on its eminently social role. Constructivism would have helped to avoid the embarrassed silence which followed. The highest-profile version of this theme from Europe came with Bent Flyvbjerg’s (2001) epistemological treatise, Making Social

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Science Matter. Flyvbjerg proposed what he called ‘phronetic social science’ as ‘an antidote to the “so what” problem’, resolving: to conduct my research in ways that make it relevant to practical politics, administration, and planning … to work with problems that are considered problems, not only in the academy, but also in the rest of society … to actively feed the results of my research back into the political, administrative, and social processes that I studied. (Ibid: 156) Flyvbjerg’s phronetic social science is constructivist by definition, as well as synthetic and holist. His key reason to re-centre social science around what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical wisdom that displays how best to realize certain social values, is that the contextual variation introduced into human action by socially constructed meaning renders it too contingent and particularistic to allow for the universalistic if–then relationships sought by natural science (ibid.: chs 3–4). He takes his most direct inspiration from Foucault, Hubert Dreyfus and above all Bourdieu, for whom the importance of social construction in all human action is a basic ontological assumption (Foucault 1973; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Bourdieu 1977; 1990; 1992). Yet also like Bourdieu, Flyvbjerg sees social construction just as one piece of a synthetic understanding of human action: any worthwhile analysis combines attention to material conditions as well as cultural meanings. And since the real world is a synthesis of material and ideational processes, Bourdieu argued, we should adopt a synthetic approach that emphasizes the interdependence of many conditions rather than setting misleadingly separate accounts of action in competition. Flyvbjerg even goes beyond Bourdieu to see these elements as so entangled that the linear connotation of ‘analysis’ exaggerates our ability to separate them out. As Sanford Schram summarizes Flyvbjerg in Making Political Science Matter, ‘understanding can never be grasped analytically; it has a holistic character, given that the social world is both historical and connected by narrative structures’ (Schram 2006: 9). Good phronetic work, then, seeks out the blend of material and cultural conditions that allow us to understand a given arena or issue while avoiding any imposition of false dichotomies and cartoonish theories on a complex reality. Rather than parsing out elements of action in pursuit of a scientistic fantasy of specified causes, we should try to convey a multifaceted sense of

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action in ways that can be concretely related to extra-academic values and problems. What answer, then, do perestroikan interpretivists give to the question of why non-academics should listen to academic constructivists? First we must recognize the diversity of scholars that might accept this label, some of whom do not argue for radical departures from prevailing social-science practices. The most prominent American Perestroikans, like Rogers Smith or Ian Shapiro, call for pluralistic methods and approaches, defining research projects around real-world problems, and including serious attention to meaning and social construction in the standard research toolkit (Smith 2002; Shapiro 2002; 2007). If Flyvbjerg cites them approvingly, though, he and other proponents of phronetic social science argue that the pursuit of relevance requires a much sharper break with mainstream social-science practices. At points Flyvbjerg seems to recognize some non-constructivist work as valuable, citing Putnam’s Making Democracy Work as a phronetic model and applauding the scholarship of James C. Scott (who is often mistaken as an ideational thinker, but in whose work culture, norms and identity derive mainly from material conditions). Since neither Putnam nor a clear version of Scott would accept Flyvbjerg’s core argument that all human action is contingent and socially constructed at a deep level, this praise seems incoherent. Together with his citing of even some non-academic work as phronetic models if they simply speak to important issues in interesting ways, like Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities (1997), this seems to suggest that he values any work that addresses large social issues, irrespective of other criteria. Yet his longer abstract definition of ‘phronetic work’ suggests otherwise. Flyvbjerg and Schram leave little doubt that they see work that is not constructivist, synthetic, holist and explicitly normatively engaged with real-world debates as frankly inappropriate to human disciplines. And therein lies the rub. Flyvbjerg’s formula for ‘making social science matter’ unravels around this insistence on a single formula for good scholarship. It might well deliver work that is relevant, but it is hard to see how the results retain a distinctive claim to being social science. Without maintaining distinctively academic methods that aspire to competition, even with approaches that we think are woefully misguided, academics (constructivist and otherwise) ultimately class themselves as a group of investigative journalists: wellinformed, engaged thinkers who may offer useful, interesting and

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perhaps even well-founded arguments, but who do not display exaggeratedly explicit methods and compete with a wide range of alternatives to arrive at the most robust conclusions possible. Moreover, people who arrive in university positions through PhD programmes probably do not write as well as real investigative journalists. If social scientists simply become turgid investigative journalists, I, for one, would prefer to read the New Yorker. Let me elaborate on how these interpretivists neglect a methodology of competing alternatives, and why this amounts to erasing a distinctive claim to academic knowledge rather than making it relevant. Flyvbjerg’s writings leave little doubt that it would be pointless to set up a phronetic interpretive narrative against one of the scientistic, non-interpretive arguments that are ontologically and epistemologically wrong. Bourdieusian constructivists, too, stand out for their explicit refusal to engage direct debate with non-constructivist alternatives. Bourdieu himself was strictly opposed to any attempt to parse out what he saw as false dichotomies; one of his students even summarized his scholarship under the heading ‘The Refusal of Theoretical Alternatives’ (Pinto 1999). Today’s Bourdieusian constructivists in political science and IR follow this advice. Much as Flyvbjerg advises, they set out a Bourdieusian ontology and epistemology, and use those tools to guide their research and tell a synthetic (or holist) story about the world. Other approaches are set aside for having the wrong theoretical commitments, not for evidentiary reasons. Like most constructivists I am sympathetic to the synthetic ontology that Flyvbjerg and Bourdieusians share, but their neglect of explicitly competing alternatives represents a profound and ironic error of epistemology. As Imre Lakatos argued (Lakatos 1970), and as more post-positivist epistemologists like Flyvbjerg would argue more strongly, we are in debates between scholars, not with Truth itself. This implies that alternatives are not just obstacles to our claims; they are parts of our own contributions that give our claims meaning. When phronetic or Bourdieusian constructivists take a certain theoretical toolkit into the field without a competition with decidedly different alternatives, they thus make the same error as rationalist game theorists who claim to have understood something once they construct a model for it: both imply that, since they have obtained correctly the key theoretical assumptions, their approach alone now offers direct illumination of the world. This position is considerably more ironic for constructivists than for game theorists, though, since the core point of the formers’ stance is that knowledge is contextual.

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The upshot is that, unless interpretivist constructivists show concretely how their interpretations differ from non-interpretivist alternatives – engaging sustained empirical debate with at least some of the scientistic approaches they abhor – they lose the most important methodological basis for making social-science claims. This is why the more aggressive perestroikan-interpretivists’ calls for a sharp break with scientistic, non-Perestroikan approaches end up leaving social science rather than making it relevant. If social science means anything, it means an attempt to understand social phenomena in an open-ended way – allowing a priori that a variety of things might be going on, and then attempting carefully to arrive at our best understanding of what mix of things actually is going on. Competition between alternatives is the core of science. A corollary of that principle is that complex arguments need foils to make any sense. In committing to strong theoretical views and eschewing competition and foils, Flyvbjerg and most Bourdieusians adopt a model much more like investigative journalism. They set aside competition over some very deep issues that non-academic audiences are ready to take for granted and focus on telling a good, plausible story about something that people care about. They may make recommendations as well, as Flyvbjerg did in his work on planning processes in Aalborg, Denmark (Flyvbjerg 1998). These are worthy goals, and investigative journalists often produce important work that is accessible partly because it is liberated from the tiresome methodological competition that defines social science. Once we depart from this competition, however, our PhDs and university positions no longer provide arguments for why non-academics should pay any special attention to us. We pursue relevance right out of the door. (Note that by this argument rationalist game theorists who do not seriously consider constructivist or other alternatives also effectively left social science long ago – and, unlike Flyvbjerg, they do so without any hope of realworld relevance. This is basically a rephrased version of the argument of Green and Shapiro 1994.)

Constructivism as eye-opener for policy-makers and especially students In my view, then, the potential for making constructivist social science relevant lies mainly with modern constructivists like Mark Blyth (2002), Jeffrey Chwieroth (2007), Martha Finnemore (1996;

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2003), Peter Katzenstein (1996) or Alexander Wendt (1999). Even for them, I see rather limited potential for direct relevance in generating research that will be seen as concretely useful by non-academics. The commitment that modern constructivists make to some sort of truth claims – asserting, with many caveats, that they are right when they argue that social construction operates in certain ways with certain consequences – at least allows for a coherent role as credible gadflies. Yet the academic processes that undergird those truth claims require so much attention that few academic constructivists have the time to translate their arguments for other audiences. The less tension-ridden route to constructivist relevance takes the more indirect route of teaching. By opening their students’ eyes to the possibilities of social construction, constructivists offer our citizens and future leaders useful lessons that no one else can provide as credibly and clearly. In terms of the content of political action outside of academia, a modern constructivist’s perspective is basically the same as that of a postmodernist or Flyvbjergian interpretivist: action always operates within an ideational context, and in elucidating the socially constructed interpretations that constitute and regulate certain actors and actions we reveal fundamental aspects of action that are often difficult to see at first glance. All these strands of constructivists could agree that people who fail to perceive the operative norms, identities, cultural practices and other social constructs within an arena are likely to misunderstand it and fail to achieve their goals, whatever they may be. History both recent and distant is replete with examples of how analytic failures to perceive the interpretive context led to concrete failures to make money in financial markets, win elections, deter security threats or accomplish other tangible goals. Only modern constructivists present an argument, however, that they hold special, credible knowledge of these dynamics. Postmodernists reject the notion of especially credible knowledge; Flyvbjergian interpretivists seem to assume that credible knowledge flows from correct theory. Modern constructivists hold that, through explicit methods and debates with contrasting theoretical perspectives – not just despite the fact that they see nonconstructivist perspectives as wrongheaded, but precisely because their wrongheadedness makes them powerful foils – they arrive at demonstrations of social construction that are as robust as possible. Such demonstrations are still not terribly robust, requiring many caveats about the subjectivity and fallibility of academic debate, but

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they claim to enjoy at least some margin of credibility by passing through explicit methods and competition. This margin of credibility makes them plausible gadflies, at least. As tentative and potentially wrong as they still may be, modern constructivists can point to reasons why others should see their claims as insightful and possibly relevant to broader political action. Thus they can coherently do what postmodernists seek incoherently: speaking (caveated) truth to power; destabilizing complacent, ideologically blinkered politics; and pushing people to problematize their political views and strategies more profoundly. To take an example from my own work, it could matter in real life whether we see the construction of the European Union as reflecting a rather straightforward aggregation of material ‘national interests’ (as in the rationalist account of Moravcsik 1998) or, as I tell it, as the partial victory of a certain ideological interpretation of national interests that was never widely shared across European elites (Parsons 2003). Had European elites in the early 2000s been more aware of my version of their history, they might not have so hastily assumed that European citizens (and many politicians themselves) would rally around a ‘Convention on the Future of Europe’ and a European ‘constitution’ – which instead stirred up the scepticism and opposition that had been barely suppressed in earlier decades. The euro’s travails in recent years also make more sense if we understand the single currency as a deeply political step toward a contested ideological vision than as a technical and rational response to underlying economic trends. There are general reasons, too, to think that the messages constructivists might translate into policy circles or that public debates could tend to play an especially relevant gadfly role. Constructivist arguments are unusually likely to underscore aspects of political action that escape the notice of actors themselves. Material conditions and institutions – the two biggest alternatives to constructivists’ emphasis on interpretive social constructs – are, in principle, hard for actors to miss. Indeed, though materialist or institutionalist scholars might claim to uncover counterintuitive or complex patterns that flow from these sorts of conditions, they would never claim that real actors do not realize that their action is significantly influenced by those conditions. Yet that is very often the key point of constructivist work: highlighting the taken-forgranted interpretive context for political action; and suggesting that once we perceive this interpretive context we gain a different sense

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of actors’ motivations and possibilities. This was not actually the point of my own work on the EU, admittedly. To the contrary, political actors were often aware of ideological battles in EU history – denouncing each other openly as nationalist sovereignty hoarders or starry-eyed Euro-federalists – and it was largely academics who had constructed a discourse of technical economic interests around the EU project. Still, most constructivist research draws our attention to ideas, norms or identities that political actors naturalize in some way. Accessible translations of such research should play a more useful gadfly role than those anchored in any other theoretical tradition. On the other hand, there are built-in limits to how much modern constructivists can translate their research into a directly relevant gadfly role for society at large. They confront any academic that aspires to relevance, not just constructivists. European elites were not likely to become conscious of my version of their history, even had my first book been published earlier than 2003, because of how it was written. Since I attempted to support my version of EU history in highly explicit methods and against a tough competition with contrasting approaches, its distinct story is buried in academic procedures and discourse that make it slow going for the uninitiated. My father-in-law, an engineer, politely bought the book and tried to read it, but pronounced it too full of ‘jargon’ for him to understand. I tried to explain to him the difference between method and jargon – and pointed out that he would never accuse a hard-sciences publication of ‘jargon’ just because it used big, uncommon words – but either way he saw it as inaccessible. Of course I could have written an entirely different version of my argument, stripping out the methods and competition to make it more accessible, but the individual incentives of a university career steered me away from spending too much time on such popularizations. In order to generate the kind of person who can even claim to follow a special methodological process to a special kind of knowledge, universities incentivize professors to publish for research audiences first and foremost. They also fill up their time by asking them to teach high theory and methods to the next generation of scholars. Thus the research practices and organizational context that uphold claims to special knowledge from social science create obstacles – above all in the allocation of our finite time – to translating that special knowledge into widely accessible venues.

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Some of us still manage to do so, and should indeed be celebrated for our energy and multiple contributions. Just to cite one example, Mark Blyth draws very directly on his constructivist work in political economy in regular media commentary, and his book on the ‘dangerous idea’ of austerity has attracted a huge policy audience (Blyth 2013). Still, the methods that validate special academic knowledge are exactly what non-academics do not want to hear about, and there are rather severe trade-offs between the time academics spend doing their research and making it directly relevant and available. The most that can be asked of most academic constructivists in the face of this trade-off is probably the kind of stance advocated by moderate Perestroikans like Smith and Shapiro. Constructivists should define their projects around issues or debates that are widely important to non-academics, in some variant of what Shapiro calls ‘problem-driven research’ (Shapiro 2002). Their research efforts will then at least lend themselves to translation into relevant conclusions, even if it remains to be seen who has the time and inclination to do the translation. Constructivists should thus rest their main claim to relevance on the indirect and diffuse condition they can realize as part of their jobs and incentives as academics, not as an additional effort. Academic constructivists are relevant because they are the bestplaced actors in society to teach others about the possibility of social construction, which is simultaneously one of the least obvious and most fundamental eye-opening possibilities that anyone can learn about politics. To a certain degree, my version of this point parallels Smith’s bottom line on the relevance of political science in general, which he too locates in teaching. He wants political scientists to aspire to a gadfly role that ‘speaks truth to power’, but sees tension in this role as a basis for relevance. Gadflies are inherently annoying to many non-academics and especially to the ‘power’ they seek to unveil, making such a role a risky basis on which to rest one’s worth in society. Powerful players may seek to characterize gadflies as cranks and take away their public funding, as did Nebraska Senator Tom Coburn in a recent assault on political science grants through the US National Science Foundation. Thus Smith sees basic ‘tension between doing good political science research and sustaining broad public support for such research’, and calls for basing a defence of the extra-academic relevance of political science above all on teaching (Smith 2011). Senator Coburn may react against the specific

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and direct ‘truths’ that political scientists advance, but he and other critics are less likely to dispute the general and indirect value of teaching students to ask tough questions and think critically. I have emphasized a different tension surrounding directly relevant political science, but end up in a similar place. The only coherent bases for proclaiming that one does ‘good political science’ require commitments to elaborate debates and methods that obstruct accessibility to non-academics, so generating ‘good political science’, and generating directly relevant work means having two jobs. But academic political science can teach students new questions to ask about their political environment that will help them to think more critically and carefully about political and social problems. And of all the questions that political scientists could teach students to pose, the kind advanced by constructivists surely delivers the most added value for would-be political actors. Why? As a card-carrying constructivist, I am tempted to say that students must be taught to pose questions about social construction because these are obviously the most fundamental kind of questions to ask about any sort of social action. As much as I believe that claim, the problem with resting my case there is that only other committed constructivists are likely to agree – and constructivists do not need to be persuaded of the relevance of constructivism. (To the contrary, I have suggested in this chapter that they need to be pushed in the other direction, recognizing that the relevance of constructivism is not obvious to many people and needs to be thought through carefully.) Another reason, though, may make sense to a broader audience. It was foreshadowed by my point vis-à-vis policy-makers above. Of all the questions that political scientists can teach students to pose, questions about social construction are the least obvious and the most challenging to the ways of thinking students more commonly absorb. It is difficult to become a somewhat-educated person in a Western country without getting a grip on the gist of materialist rationalism: that there are always clear and conscious ‘interests’ behind everything. Almost as difficult, probably, is to miss the basic insights of institutionalism. In the United States and the European Union, the powerfully dominant historical myths are that overarching federal institutions have organized these continents in ways that brought stability and prosperity. Citizens of the West today also most commonly diagnose other countries’ problems as a

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consequence of less well-designed institutions. Political beliefs and ideology may admittedly be just as hard to overlook, since they shape and animate the everyday language of politics everywhere, but this is not true for a sense of the possibility that our world is deeply socially constructed. Students may easily see that advocates of the free market can be animated by certain ideological views, but not many will spontaneously grasp that the very notion of a ‘market’ may be a social construct. They may perceive a role for ideology in conflicts with communists or Islamists, but will many recognize the possibility that ‘anarchy is what states make of it’? They may see that Naomi Wolf and Phyllis Schlafly hold contrasting ideological views of feminism, but without an instructor pushing them deeper, are they likely to even consider that gender and sexuality are more socially constructed than biological? Even non-constructivist academics are likely to allow that posing these kinds of questions about social constructs opens students’ eyes to the possibilities of politics in an especially profound way. Since constructivism problematizes the given, taken-for-granted quality of contexts of action more deeply than any other school of thought, students who learn to ask constructivist questions will gain the most far-reaching ability to consider why the world is as it is (and how it could be otherwise). Such questions will not necessarily make them into card-carrying constructivists; asking why we take certain things for granted may just lead students to accept materialist arguments that some of these things could not be otherwise and should indeed be taken for granted. Learning to ask constructivist questions thus pushes students to think about the make-up of their political context in the deepest and widest sense, whatever credence they ultimately lend to constructivism itself. They encourage non-academics to consider alternatives in their lives and in the world – and the ability to imagine alternatives is the root of all critical thinking. It is above all for this valuable lesson that non-academics should keep modern constructivist academics around: they can provide coherent, confident reasons why such questions are important to ask. Non-academics will likely continue to find most constructivist writing as too scholarly to be accessible, since such writing is what gives constructivists the coherence and confidence to motivate the lesson. With good teaching, though, they will perceive the relevance of constructivism.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have made four points about the potential relevance of constructivist theorizing. First, it makes little sense to suggest pathways to relevance for constructivist academics in which they cease to be constructivist academics. Our subject is not whether or not constructivists can leave their desks and become policy advisers or political activists – they can – but whether or not the distinctive work they do as academic constructivists can be relevant. Second, relevance is defined by the audience; to argue that academic constructivists are relevant to a broad audience means providing arguments that they provide non-academics with a distinctive and valuable kind of knowledge. Third, the claim of any academic to offer special knowledge that is not available elsewhere rests on methods and an explicit clash of alternatives that lend a tentative but quite distinctive credibility (if not, of course, any sort of unquestionable Truth) to their conclusions. Since postmodern and most interpretivist constructivists disavow such bases for their work, only the modern strand of constructivists retain a distinctive claim to such special knowledge. Fourth, these foundations in explicit method and competitive arguments push constructivists, like all academics, away from directly relevant dissemination of concrete arguments and toward indirect relevance through teaching. Since explicit methodology simultaneously justify academics’ special claim to knowledge and typically render their work inaccessible to a broad audience, it is rare that constructivists can make directly relevant contributions without effectively taking on a second job as popularizers. Teaching students to pose questions about social construction, though, is an especially powerful way to help them become critical thinkers. Let me end on a more ecumenical note that reopens the door to relevance for all strands of constructivism. In the classroom, students may not perceive much difference between modern, interpretivist and postmodern constructivists. Whether or not constructivists hold to a philosophy of science that gives them a claim to special knowledge, they can all teach the broad lesson of posing constructivist questions. Smart students who push their instructors may pose a deeper level of questions about these questions – and at this level only modern constructivists have answers. For most of the students whom constructivists of all sorts can help to become critical thinkers, though, most of what I have written here is academic and irrelevant.

Chapter 10

Is comparative politics useful? If so, for what? B. GUY PETERS

One of my favourite findings in comparative politics was published several decades ago. A distinguished student of comparative public policy determined that the best predictor of per pupil educational expenditures among Swiss cantons was the altitude of the canton. The causal logic behind this finding is apparent, with lower population densities and higher general cost levels at high altitudes producing higher expenditures in the schools relative to the number of students. But is that finding really relevant, as there is nothing any political leader or institutional designer can do about altitude? Political science is becoming a more experimental social science, but for most research the real world of numerous countries and even more numerous different sub-national governments is the laboratory from which we can learn most readily. At times those governments perform natural experiments that enable political scientists to confirm our assumptions about the behaviour of individuals or political systems (Dunning 2008). More commonly, however, we must depend upon identifying significant differences among existing cases and using those to understand the factors that produce different outcomes. Why, for example, have several Asian countries been economically successful and capable of making the movement toward political democracy, while most countries in Africa have not been able to make these transitions, at least not on a sustained basis (see Acemoglu and Robinson 2012)? This natural laboratory existing among the numerous governments of the world, each one of which may be considered a quasiexperiment of a sort, provides an immense dataset for political scientists to explore what works and what does not in governing. 169

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These governing arrangements are quasi-experiments because researchers have little or no control over the choices being made about institutions and processes, so that we have to discover cases that match our research questions. The most important issue in comparative research design is the selection of cases, and this is perhaps even truer for developing a body of findings that has relevance for the ‘real world’ of governing (Geddes 1990; Peters 2013). Comparative politics therefore should be the most relevant subdiscipline within political science. The basic logic of comparative politics is to examine cases (ranging from 1 to very large Ns) to be able to make generalizations about politics and governing. While the comparative method per se (Collier 1993; Lijphart 1971) utilizes a limited number of carefully selected cases to tease out differences and similarities, contemporary comparative politics employs the full range of social science methodologies to ask the same sorts of questions. Most comparative politics focuses on the level of the state, but comparative sub-national politics (Snyder 2001) also has a lively research tradition, especially in federal states and for cities. Like most other components of political science comparative politics now avoids most prescriptive statements in favour of theory development and extensive statistical analyses. That said, if those empirical findings are indeed valid they should have substantial capacity to inform decision-making in the real world. In principle those empirical findings could be applied to the real world, but we must question the extent to which those findings are indeed being utilized. More fundamentally, we must question the capacity of most of the findings in contemporary comparative politics to make any substantive contribution to the performance of political systems. In this chapter I will first discuss several different interpretations of relevance, and argue that comparative politics is more capable of providing enlightenment than it is of more exact statements about what courses of action to follow. I will then proceed to examine the contributions that comparative politics has made to making political science more relevant – and they are important. At the same time, there are also substantial challenges and limits to the relevance of this sub-field, and these will be discussed. The chapter will end with some modest ideas about how to enhance relevance in this component of the discipline.

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Varieties of relevance For comparative politics, perhaps more than for other components of the discipline, relevance and utility may be present at two levels. The first and more basic is whether comparative research can identify relationships among characteristics of political systems that can inform decision-makers about what they should expect from their own governments, or from other governments with which they interact. A demonstrated relationship among variables may help us understand what is occurring in one case, and therefore lead us to expect, or to understand better, the occurrence of a similar phenomenon in another case. This ‘enlightenment function’ (Weiss 1977b) may not solve problems but it does assist in making more informed choices. This enlightenment function of comparative analysis is also apparent in more ideographic studies of individual countries or even sub-national political units, perhaps now especially evident in area studies (Avery and Desch forthcoming). It could also be argued that V. O. Key’s (1956) Southern Politics, as a study of politics and the roots of politics at the state level in the American South, remains one of the most interesting and perceptive comparative analyses ever published. While this type of scholarship has largely been evicted from the major journals and the major presses in the discipline, and is scorned as ‘stamps, flags and coins’, area studies and individual country studies remain the type of research that is most sought after by decision-makers in the public sector. The second and more difficult criterion for relevance would be whether those findings from the comparative research can be translated directly into suggestions for reform or for the adoption of particular structural or policy innovations. Do we understand enough about the internal dynamics of political structures and processes, and about the social and cultural foundations of those entities, to be able to transplant them into other settings? The answer, regrettably, in general has to be no. Even if we can observe a strong statistical relationship that may not be sufficient to say that we can transfer the findings into another setting and expect the same result. These two versions of relevance to some extent correspond to the familiar dichotomy of internal and external validity. The majority of the focus for contemporary political science has been on internal validity, attempting to assure that observed relationships between

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independent and dependent variables are indeed valid. The internal validity may have been purchased at the price of external validity, or the ability to extrapolate from the findings to the ‘real world’. Some degree of internal validity is necessary if the findings from which the lessons are drawn are indeed to be useful, but an apparent lack of concern for relevance – and therefore external validity – cannot help but be noticed in a good deal of contemporary political science research. Both of these versions of relevance and utility can make contributions to the real world of governing. If we can understand how individual political systems function and what their behaviours are likely to be in different circumstances then this is indeed relevant and useful. Likewise, it is also useful to understand how various institutions or processes function, and therefore what the likely consequences of any changes within a political system are. The latter version of ‘relevance’ is generally what is meant by the term, but for foreign policy decision-makers the former may be equally if not more useful.

The contributions of comparative politics The comparative politics literature contains some examples of highly relevant research, as well as some that, while interesting and intellectually sound, does not appear to be particularly relevant for improving the quality of governance, nor the quality of life for citizens. The glass of relevance is therefore half-full and half-empty. In this section I want to discuss some of the clear successes of comparative politics, demonstrating how the empirical and theoretical content of the research has been able to contribute to solving realworld problems in governing.

Institutions The most obvious contribution that comparative politics can make is through the analysis of political institutions. The development of the ‘new institutionalism’ returned the study of institutions to the centre of the discipline, though institutions were really the foundation for political science. The historical foundation of comparative politics was in the study of institutions, beginning with Aristotle’s discussion of the institutions of tyranny and good government. For

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much of the history of comparative politics the emphasis within the sub-discipline was on formal-legal differences among systems, with the assumption that the formal structures indeed operated as they were designed (Eckstein 1967). Although the assumptions behind formalism in comparative politics, and the formal study of institutions, now appears somewhat naive, that approach to institutional analysis was indeed relevant for would-be designers of institutional structures (see Peters and Wright, 1996). For, example, even if subsequent studies have elaborated the dynamics more fully (see Gerring and Thacker 2004; Tsebelis and Money 1997), the selection of a bicameral legislature could be argued to produce certain costs and benefits for a political system based only on an understanding of the formal structures and processes within the legislature. The period during which many counties in Africa and Asia gained their independence, and a second period during which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe also gained their independence, were the proving grounds for much of this presumed knowledge about institutions and their presumed effects. While American presidentialism, in various formats, was exported to the countries of Latin America a century earlier, the end of communism led to the adoption of some European innovations such as semipresidentialism to newly independent regimes (Elgie 2011). The constitutional engineering that was tried then and in subsequent reforms (see Sartori 1997) demonstrated the utility of understanding political institutions, as well as providing a number of tests of the assumptions of the institutional designers. The various strands of contemporary institutional theory have elaborated on the understandings of formal structure, while at the same time accepting the premise that indeed structure is important and can to some extent shape outcomes of the political process. Weaver and Rockman (1983; see also Hammond and Butler 2003), for example, sought to understand the impact of presidential versus parliamentary governments, and more particularly whether parliamentary government would change policy outcomes in the United States. Although the approaches within contemporary institutional theory to some extent all ask rather different questions, they are bound together by the basic premise that organizations and institutions do matter and that these structures constitute at least as valid a beginning point for analysis as does the study of individual behaviour.

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As well as the macro-level analysis of the principal institutions of government, there is the micro-level analysis of the interactions of institutions in the public and private sectors, as they are involved in making and implementing policy. For example, Culpepper (2003) sought to explain the success or failure of labour-market training through rather conventional institutional mechanisms but found instead that public sector action was essential for creating cooperation between labour-market actors and businesses on the one hand and labour unions on the other. The public sector organizations involved were most important in creating the conditions under which potentially antagonistic economic actors could cooperate. Kathleen Thelen’s work on labour-market policy has many of the same micro-institutional characteristics (2004), demonstrating factors that can make these markets more or less effective. At an even more micro-level, social institutions can provide the mechanism for instigating public policies (Tsai 2007). This example from comparative political economy also demonstrates the relevance of thinking about politics in organizational terms. The original version of the new institutionalism (March and Olsen 1983) attempted to move contemporary political science away from its dependence upon the individual level of analysis (see below). The central argument of this approach is that individuals receive many or most of their political preferences from membership in, or identification with, organizations, and therefore beginning an analysis with the organizations in the public sector (including perhaps political parties and interest groups) is more efficient than beginning with the individuals who comprise the organizations. Other versions of institutional theory, such as the late Elinor Ostrom’s ‘institutional analysis and development’ (see Polski and Ostrom 1999) and Fritz Scharpf’s (1997) ‘actor-centered institutionalism’, have a more individualist set of assumptions. Despite the emphasis on agency, they consider the design of institutions as the means of overcoming the collective action problems created by individual utility maximization, notably the ‘tragedy of the commons’. In this perspective the creation of rules, as the foundation of an institution, are the mechanisms for solving policy problems. Further, the example of solving certain cases of collective action problems has been extended so that this general model has demonstrated its utility in a variety of settings.

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Historical institutionalism basically warns decision-makers that they should be very careful when they make decisions because the institutions and policies created are likely to endure. This is a useful warning, but gives little real guidance. So although some versions of institutionalism appear less useful to decision-makers, the study of institutions does provide political decision-makers with some substantial level of useful guidance about governing and the design of institutions. Beginning the analysis of politics and policy with organizations and institutions provides those decision-makers with more guidance than does an individualistic perspective. Further, we tend to have greater confidence in the information available concerning the effects of institutional choices than we do about the more variable aspects of individual behaviour. Thus, as well as the general level of utility of institutional analysis, the experience of institutional change does appear portable.

Electoral systems Perhaps the clearest case of our comparative understanding of politics influencing the design of political systems has been in the selection of electoral systems, especially within emerging democracies. Going back at least to ‘Duverger’s law’ there has been an understanding that the outcomes of elections can be shaped effectively by shaping electoral laws (Taagapera and Shugart 1989). The academic understanding of electoral laws has been verified any number of times in practice, and several international advisory services are available for advising on, and monitoring, electoral systems. The choice of electoral systems can be seen as a simple mechanical, or political, exercise, but it also has significant normative implications. The choice between single-member districts and proportional representation is not, however, just a choice of the number of parties likely to gain seats in the legislature. It is also a choice about representation, and the possible trade-offs between representativeness and the capacity to form easily a majority government. This is a choice that cannot be made without some understanding of the nature of the political systems in question. Westminster systems, everything else being equal, tend to favour single-party majority governments, or at least limited coalitions, while most others tend to prefer closer relationships between the proportion of votes cast and the proportion of seats won. Thus,

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although we may know perfectly well how to engineer the outcomes from electoral systems, designers must still consider the context into which the electoral laws are being introduced.

Democratization One of the most important areas in which comparative politics has demonstrated its relevance is in the study of democratization. While democracy has long been a focus for political theory (Dahl 1989) and for empirical analysis (Cnudde and Neubauer 1968), the increasing number of successful democracies formed in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia has produced a spate of important work on the characteristics of successful democratic transitions (Linz and Stepan 1996; Sørensen 2010) and on the consolidation of those transitional systems into (more or less) stable democratic systems. The findings of studies of democratization have been sufficiently robust to be capable of predicting the likelihood of successful changes, and also to be able to provide some advice to would-be democratizers. As with almost any area of political science research, the findings are sufficiently probabilistic that no guarantees can be offered to regimes attempting to create and consolidate democratic government, though there are some prescriptions that can be extracted from the experience of democratizing regimes. One of the more important pieces of advice emerging from the research about democratization is that would-be democratizers should not be seduced by their apparent capacity to produce changes in structures and some aspects of behaviour. It may be relatively easy to create ‘shallow democracy’, but creating ‘deep democracy’ that is embedded into the social and political lives of the population is much more difficult (Haerpfer et al. 2009). This understanding of context is crucial for those attempting to produce change, and should lead to substantial caution when observing events such as the ‘Arab Spring’. Another of the instructive findings from the literature has been the importance of elites in democratization. There is a major role for leadership in producing transformation and ensuring a peaceful acquiescence from traditional elites. As noted below concerning conflict management, that leadership may involve the capacity to make agreements with historical opponents in order to assure the

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transition to democracy and the maintenance of some stability after the transition.

Conflict prevention and conflict resolution In addition to the general discussions of institutionalizing democratic governance, there has been an increasing understanding of the manner in which governments, including democratic governments, can manage potential social conflict. These conflicts can arise from two types of divisions within society and economy. One source of potential conflicts are social cleavages based on race, religion, language or simply region. The other source is economic, and especially the differences between management and labour. Both of these types of difference have been the source of major social conflicts, though comparative politics has learned a great deal about how to manage both. And in both cases there have been developments in the manner in which the institutions for managing conflict have been conceptualized. There has been a long tradition in comparative politics of studying the political relevance of social cleavages and the mechanisms for managing potential social conflict. Arend Lijphart’s seminal study (1975) of consociational politics in the Netherlands, and the numerous other studies that investigated the possibilities for consociational solutions in other settings (for a review see Lijphart 1991), sought to understand the influence of social divisions and ways of mitigating potential conflict. Lijphart’s basic puzzle was: how could a country deeply divided along religious lines find ways to manage successfully in a democratic manner? Politics is driven by difference, and social differences have been a continuing source of conflict; and so to govern effectively and democratically some means must be found to cope with these differences. Consociationalism represents one clear instance of political systems attempting to learn from the successes of other systems. The example of the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Belgium demonstrated that deeply divided political systems could indeed manage those differences successfully; those findings were used to attempt to address other difficult political situations. These attempts at transplanting the consociational solution have met with varying levels of success, with some seeming positive results (Malaysia) and others that were total failures (Northern Ireland, see Rose 1971).

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The consociational solution represented one era of conflict resolution utilizing bargaining among the possibly conflicting groups. In the era of democratization, and post-conflict societies, there has been a growth of ‘elite pacts’ as the means for managing the potential for conflicts (Higley and Gunther 1991). These pacts have many of the features of consociationalism, e.g. the agreements among elites in the face of possible serious consequences and the relatively small numbers of actors involved. They differ in that, instead of being organized on the basis of political parties, they generally have been the contending factions in civil wars. The logic, however, is similar to that in consociationalism in that elites agree to cooperate in order to govern in situations that might otherwise produce conflict or ungovernability, and that cooperation may be conducted with relatively little involvement of the mass population. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, the transition to democracy may involve some arrangements that appear, at least at first glance, undemocratic. The diffusion of the idea of elite pacts has been an important case of the apparent relevance of comparative politics for the performance of political systems. For example, various forms of elite pacts and governments of national unity have been implemented in Africa, often after serious internal strife. While these arrangements have been far from universally successful, they have in many cases produced a means of restraining inter-ethnic conflict and producing some movement toward effective governance (LeVan 2011). Pacts of this sort have also been important for countries in Latin America (Higley and Gunther 1991). The economic foundations of conflicts have been the principal driver of politics for more than a century. The Industrial Revolution produced the class conflict between industrial labour and the owners and managers of enterprises. While the violent revolution at the centre of Marxist theory only rarely materialized, there has been the continuing political struggle between the Left and Right. This struggle over political and economic power was at times more than a little disruptive to governance, mainly in the alternation of political parties and their associated economic policies. The question then became one of how to manage these conflicts that are inherent in contemporary economic systems. One of the effective responses to these economic conflicts has been corporatism. Although in use as a remedy for potential economic conflict since the late nineteenth century, this mechanism became a major focus for political theory during the 1970s (Berger

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1981; Schmitter 1974). The corporatist literature, and the variations such as corporate pluralism (Rokkan 1966), were central in the study of comparative politics and helped to shape a broader debate on the relationships between state and society (see Migdal 2001). This thinking therefore helped to elaborate some of the gross generalizations about linkages between social actors and the ‘black box’ of government inherent in political systems analysis (Easton 1971). While corporatism was a dominant strand of theorizing during one era of comparative politics, its analogue – social pacts – is present, albeit playing a smaller role, in contemporary comparative analysis. The basic logic of social pacts – agreements between labour and management mediated by government, or with government as a participant – is the same as for corporatism, although the range of public policy affected is generally smaller. And given the prevailing neo-liberalism in most industrial democracies, these pacts tend to be more constraining on labour than they are on business or government, unlike traditional corporatism (Rhodes 2001). Still, these arrangements constitute a means of preventing overt economic conflict and disruptions.

Quantitative comparative analysis Much of the linear statistical methodology that dominates contemporary political analysis tends to lessen the relevance of comparative politics for the real world of governing. Without going into a detailed discussion of the quantitative–qualitative divide within the discipline (Brady and Collier 2010), the fundamental point is that the disaggregation of governing systems into collections of variables has tended to mask the complex interactions among variables that define national governments. In their seminal work on comparative social science, Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune (1970) argued that the goal for comparative analysis should be to replace proper names of countries with the names of variables. For most comparativists, however, context and place still matters, and we assume that there are country effects on individual level behaviour that remain significant (intellectually if not statistically). The development of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has provided a means of identifying the way in which multiple variables that shape political outcomes combine to explain the occurrence or non-occurrence of those phenomena (Marx and Rihoux 2013).

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Rather than identifying the proportional contribution of variables to outcomes, QCA identifies whether the presence or absence of those variables (at least within crisp-set versions of QCA) is related to the outcome. Thus, the underlying logic is more deterministic than probabilistic, and therefore tends to be more suited to the more holistic basis of comparative politics. However, the fuzzy-set version of QCA approaches the proportional contribution form of analysis by measuring the variables involved with at least an ordinal level of measurement (rather than dichotomies) and then assessing their contributions to the presence or absence of a dependent condition (see Ragin 2009). The other virtue of QCA for comparative research is that this method is able to introduce context perhaps somewhat easier than do the usual quantitative methods. Given that many of the comparative contextual variables tend to be dichotomous – Asian versus non-Asian for example – they can be included readily in qualitative analyses. In terms of relevance, however, the contextual variables may be of relatively little use, given that there is little that can be done to transfer those effects. The ‘Little Tigers’ may all have been small and Asian, but there may be little that can be done to translate those conditions elsewhere.

Challenges to the relevance of comparative politics Despite the positive statements concerning the relevance of comparative politics, there are some significant challenges to that relevance. Further, these challenges may be increasing as political science, and comparative politics, become more quantitative and more concerned with theoretical development as the primary goal for research. Again, the emphasis on quantitative research and some aspects of theory may not necessarily undermine the relevance of the research, though some aspects of that research agenda may pose significant challenges to that relevance.

Methodological individualism and rational choice theory As is true for all corners of the discipline, comparative politics is being influenced heavily by both behavioural approaches and rational choice theory. These approaches to social and political life assume that the best, or perhaps only, means of understanding politics is

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through the behaviour of individuals. The behavioural strand of methodological individualism focuses on social, and later more on psychological, factors that shape individual behaviour. The rational choice approach adopts a more economic and calculating perspective and assumes that all political actors are utility maximizers that use the political arena as a locus through which they can enhance their own utility. The question about the domination of individual explanations is another statement of the familiar structure–agency problem in the social sciences. It is easy to argue that comparative politics traditionally had relied on holistic explanations, drawing on concepts such as the state, class and institutions to explain political phenomena. This holism often turned into formalism, with unexamined hypotheses that formal rules and structures could indeed shape behaviours. The fundamental question is therefore whether these collectivities that are so familiar in comparative politics can only be understood as compilations of individual choices, or whether indeed they have some explanatory powers of their own. The basic assumptions about the common motivations of actors tend to devalue much of comparative politics, given that much of the logic of comparison is to identify differences. For example, much of the study of issues such as political culture and identity, that have been significant components of comparative analysis, depends upon differences in these more social and psychological variables that produce differences in political behaviour and ultimately perhaps performance (see Eriksson 2011). The above having been said, however, there are some utilizations of rational choice approaches and their relationship with comparative politics that can enhance the relevance of this sub-discipline. In particular, if we assume that individuals do have relatively homogeneous preferences then understanding the manner in which these preferences interact with institutions and other structures can assist in the design of structures. Given that governments have experimented, wittingly or unwittingly, with a range of institutional structures, then having a clear assumption about the role of individual preferences helps to predict how those institutional choices might produce different outcomes. From the perspective of the relevance of comparative politics, the capacity to explain outcomes of political processes through individual actions and characteristics, even if it were indeed the only way ultimately to understand the choices being made, may be

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an inefficient means of providing that explanation. This is true for both rational choice and behavioural approaches. More holistic variables such as class, political parties or institutions may be more proximate causes for outcomes than are the behaviours of individuals, even if we could identify those behaviours one by one and find effective ways of aggregating them. Even areas of the discipline that have long been able to identify individual behaviours effectively and make predictions based on those behaviours may find it useful to utilize more collective properties. For example, students of judicial behaviour have begun to consider courts as entities and examine their strategic behaviour (see Besabe-Serrano 2008; Hammond et al. 2005). This concern with the role of individuals in explaining political phenomena is analogous to the more familiar structure and agency debate (Sibeon 2002) in the social sciences. The fundamental question is: can we better understand social life by beginning with individual action or by beginning with collectivities, including organization and institutions? Comparative politics has always had a strong institutional component and we must question whether those institutions are a more efficient explanation than are the actions of the individuals within them (see above). And additionally we need to understand how institutions aggregate individual action as they make and implement public policies. Therefore, for comparative politics, the methodological individualism that constitutes the fundamental approach of contemporary politics provides both opportunities for, and significant challenges to, the utility of the sub-discipline. On the one hand, if we assume that motivations are indeed rather homogeneous then we have a better chance of understanding the consequences of altering particular structural features of the public sector. On the other hand, the emphasis on individual level behaviour tends to emphasize factors that may have little to do with cross-national differences.

Non-manipulable variables The example presented at the beginning of this chapter points to one of the major factors affecting the relevance of contemporary comparative politics. A large number of the variables that are used in comparative analysis are not readily manipulable, and therefore any findings about their capacity to predict certain desirable or undesirable outcomes may not be relevant for political leaders or

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institutional designers. It may interesting to know that some variable is indeed correlated with those outcomes, but if there is nothing that can be done to manipulate those variables then those findings will not be really relevant. Several sets of findings within comparative politics help to illustrate those points. The comparative political economy literature has helped to emphasize the importance of the linkage of politics and economics (see Hall and Soskice 2001). It has, for example, been analysing the effects of trade openness of countries on aspects of their policy and political choices for some decades (Cameron 1978; Rogowski 1990). This literature has demonstrated a number of interesting relationships between patterns of trade and the actions of governments, and the strength of various political actors such as trade unions, but there is relatively little that governments can do to alter the factors involved in these relationships. Further, there is little sense of endogeneity in the relationships, so that altering the dependent variables in those relationships, e.g. the nature of the welfare state, does not appear to feedback into the trade relationships. Also, although I was singing hymns of praise to studies of democratization above, one of the common explanatory variables for successful democratic transitions has been the level of economic development. This argument goes back at least to the work of Seymour Martin Lipset (1959), though it has been a continuing finding since that time (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). From an analytic perspective it is important to understand that we should not expect to encounter effective democracies in extremely poor countries. But if indeed we wish to be able to provide useful advice to governments or NGOs about promoting democracy, saying simply ‘get rich’ is not very useful, as surely they would if they knew how. That said, however, the demonstrated relationship between capitalism and democracy may be more manipulable, although that economic system may in turn generate inequality that may undermine democracy. The concept of political culture also illustrates the importance of non-manipulable variables in comparative politics. Although political culture has been utilized less commonly as comparative politics has become more quantitative and more focused on rational choice theory, it remains an important concept for understanding the environment within which politics functions. Political culture does change in response to external events and the replacement of political cohorts, but it is difficult to change through overt manipulation.

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Even when autocratic regimes attempt to alter the underlying values of their countries, those values may be suppressed for some time, though they often reassert themselves. Although not frequently discussed in these terms, social capital is one important dimension of political culture (Putnam 2002). Trust is an important dimension of political culture, and it has been emphasized by the trust required in the creation of social capital and the relationship of social capital to democracy, as well as to successful governance more generally. This dimension of culture is perhaps especially important in understanding the differences between developed and less developed political systems. The absence of social trust in many less developed political systems removes opportunities for governance through social actors (see Jamal 2007) while at the same time converting most political issues into zero-sum games that engender the possibilities for conflict. Trust does appear to be an important resource in governing, but can it be manipulated? Some authors have argued that it can, largely through the development of effective political systems. In contrast to most approaches that assume citizens themselves create trust, Rothstein and Stolle (2003; 2008) have argued that institutions and institutional performance are significant influences in building trust. Their arguments are based largely on the historical evidence from Scandinavia, and it is far from clear if the lessons from that long period of relatively autonomous development are relevant for Suriname or Swaziland. While it may be difficult or impossible to manipulate, understanding political culture is far from irrelevant for understanding the outcomes of political processes. Indeed, as political psychology becomes more important within the discipline, understanding political culture becomes more relevant for understanding political outcomes (Sheafer and Shenhav 2012). In particular, a higher level of congruence between political values and the institutions that are created to provide governance may contribute to the stability of governments. At a lower level of generality, congruence between the design of bureaucracies and the general conceptions of management within the society may contribute to the effectiveness of those institutions (see Hofstede et al. 2010; Painter and Peters 2010). Further, although political cultures and levels of social capital may not be manipulable in the short term, they are capable of significant change in the longer term. The transformation has been far from complete, but political cultures in the countries of Central

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and Eastern Europe have become more democratized (Klingemann et al. 2006) in what in historical terms is a short time. These changes are to some extent a function of conscious attempts at change, but they also represent natural evolutions through the replacement of cohorts and the influence of continual interactions with other members of the European Union. Similarly, there is evidence that social capital can be created, albeit with some difficulty, in order to enhance the possibilities for democratic stability (Kumlin and Rothstein 2005).

Comparative policy and administration At one point in the development of comparative politics there was a significant concern with comparative public policy and the role of ’political’ and ’institutional’ in shaping policy choices (Heidenheimer et al. 1983). There was at the same time also a significant comparative literature that focused on public administration and the place of the public bureaucracy in the processes of governing (Peters 2010; Riggs 1964). Both of these aspects of political action have very strong applied elements and demonstrate the consequences of actions within the public sector and changes in the surrounding society and economy. Unfortunately for the relevance of comparative politics, most public administration and even most public policy studies have been written out of contemporary political science. As the discipline became more concerned with individual behaviour, whether understood from a sociological or economic perspective (see above), there was declining interest in organizations. Even institutional theory appears to have had relatively little interest in public administration, despite the clear institutional and organizational elements of this component of the public sector (but see Frumkin and Galaskiewicz 2004). This diminished concern with public administration and public policy is perhaps particularly unfortunate because these areas of the discipline tended to contain more manipulable variables than did most of the other areas. A good deal of the research in public administration had been about how to organize the public sector in ways that will produce better policy outcomes. This focus has been particularly true for public administration and its continuing fascination with administrative reorganization as a means of enhancing government efficiency. Lester Salamon (1981) argued

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that the search for efficiency through reorganization was pursuing a ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, but did recognize that reorganization could have significant effects on policy choices. Processes and general managerial perspectives can also be, and have been, manipulated. This has been demonstrated throughout the history of public administration and particularly in the emphasis on adopting the new public management (Christensen and Laegreid 2001). It appears extremely unfortunate, if relevance is one of the goals of political science, that public policy and administration have been removed from the mainstream of comparative analysis. While these areas of study persist, and even flourish, they tend to do so outside of political science, which should be their natural home. Certainly some research on bureaucratic behaviour remains within political science, but it is generally not work that is informative for, nor informed by, the work of real world administrators. Finally, having said rather rude things about rational choice theories above, in fairness it should be noted that comparative policy may be one area in which this approach becomes more relevant. Many public policies are designed based on assumptions of individual rationality and utility maximization, especially in areas such as tax policy. Likewise, much of the instruments literature in policy studies tends to have underlying it assumptions about human behaviour that are largely rational (see Howlett et al. 2009: ch. 5). Even if not always sustainable empirically, these assumptions do provide useful beginning points for an analysis.

The limits of relevance in comparative politics The above discussion about the potential relevance of studies of public administration and policy points to the capacity for learning from other political systems and their experiences. The growth of ‘evidence based policy-making’ as a paradigm for many governments has meant that not only do they attempt to learn from their own experiences but they also attempt to learn from the experiences of other countries (Bogenschneider and Corbett 2010). Many contemporary governments are using the rest of the world as their laboratory for policy-making, just the type of opportunity we argued above should be possible with comparative politics.

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Evidence based policy-making also illustrates one of the major limitations of attempting to learn from comparative examples. Any policy, administrative structure or other aspect of political life is embedded in the social and political environment from which it emerged and must be understood within that context. Thus, policy learning, and learning from comparative examples more broadly, is more difficult than it might appear and runs the risk of making many false equivalences and false analogies in attempting to transplant programmes and structures (Marston and Watts 2003). Comparative public administration provides perhaps a clearer example of the difficulties in transplanting institutions and procedures that have been successful in one setting into others. The success of the new public management in many industrialized democracies, and its failure in most other settings, demonstrates the importance of understanding how structures and processes function within particular settings. Allen Schick (1998) for example, made a very strong argument concerning the inappropriateness of these reforms for less-developed political systems which lacked an institutionalized bureaucracy as a starting point for the changes. The failure to think comparatively and to understand the nature of the system into which an innovation is being introduced severely limits the capacity for effective policy and institutional diffusion. That said, there has been significant attention in the academic community, as well as in the world of government, to ‘evidence based policy-making’ and policy learning (Bogenschneider and Corbett 2010; Stone 2012). To some extent the experiences of other systems in making and implementing policies have become a form of policy analysis on the cheap for governments, and academics have also returned to thinking about the means through which effective transfers of policy may occur. While recognizing the importance of comparative analysis, this research has yet to develop effective methodologies for facilitating the identification of the relevant cases and for preventing learning the wrong lessons from cases that appear analogous. The above challenges to relevance arising in comparative politics demonstrate to some extent the absence of one of the most important aspects of comparative politics – the role of context – and has been tending to diminish the utility of this sub-discipline (see Pollitt forthcoming). The logic of context is that variables affecting political life do not act independently but instead often interact in complex packages, so that their effects cannot be readily

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disaggregated. As noted above, the development of QCA in the social sciences has been an important methodological tool for coping with that complexity, but theoretical development does not appear to have moved as far. Robert Jervis’s interesting discussion (1997) of international relations theory, and to some extent comparative politics, in terms of complexity and the interaction among variables, demonstrates the need to think about comparative politics in other than linear terms. It also demonstrates that, like QCA, conjunctures of factors may be essential for understanding outcomes of the political process. Therefore, to be increasingly relevant, comparative politics must become more concerned with ‘deutero learning’, or learning about learning (Visser 2007; see also Cortazar 2006). For purposes of relevance, comparative politics needs to understand better how to extract lessons from evidence from the available cases in order to generate usable prescriptions. Prescription has not been a primary, or even significant, focus for political science for the past several decades, so the absence of thinking about how to learn to make those prescriptions is not surprising. There have been some noticeable exceptions to that generalization. The literature on policy diffusion (Shipan and Volden 2008) and the literature on evidencebased policy both have attempted to understand better how to transfer programmes and therefore how to make better prescriptive statements. But in general if the sub-discipline is indeed to be useful then some capacity for prescription may be desirable, and this will in turn require thinking about how to utilize the available evidence for making those prescriptions.

Conclusion The verdict on the relevance of comparative politics must be mixed. There have been some notable successes, including the study of democratization and the very important literature on managing social and economic cleavages. Other factors that may be very successful in explaining differences among political systems may be counted as failures in relevance terms, given that there is little that can be done to produce the desired outcomes. Further, the sub-discipline appears to be moving away from relevance, increasingly focusing more on individual sources of behaviour rather than the more manipulable aspects of political structure.

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In addition, the above discussion of the relevance of comparative politics appears to contain some inherent paradoxes. One of the more important of these paradoxes is that some of the variables that provide an understanding of the context of political action, and therefore to some extent make comparative politics comparative, are among the least manipulable. If we want a rich understanding of the differences among political systems we need to understand political culture and similar factors that function as context in political life; but there is nothing that the would-be manipulator of politics can do in the short run about those factors in order to generate systemic change. The need to consider culture and other collective factors raises some other points about the relevance of comparative politics. First, the emphasis on individual sources of causation in contemporary political science theories tends to be contradicted by the dominance of statistical and aggregating forms of empirical analysis. Second, methodologies such as process-tracing (Bennett and George 2005) that are better suited to identifying the immediate influence of individual actors have generally been associated with less individualistic theoretical approaches. For comparative politics the employment of these case-oriented methodologies requires careful selection of countries, and the cases within those countries, so that this limited number of observations could have a limited range of generalizability. These contradictions, or paradoxes, and others, affect the capacity of comparative politics to be relevant, especially in terms of the capacity to link theoretical explanations for phenomena with the methodologies appropriate to the level of explanation being pursued. Much of our empirical work deals with aggregates while most of our theorizing is about individual motivations and behaviours. What may be needed more than anything in this field is the capacity to link those two levels more directly, for example through social mechanisms (Hedström and Swedborg 1998), rather than depending so heavily on assumptions.

Chapter 11

Can political science address the puzzles of global governance? JON PIERRE

The idea of global governance continues to be little more than an idea. The failure of the Copenhagen meeting in December 2009 to produce a global agreement on carbon dioxide emission was yet another illustration of the tremendous difficulties in getting states to commit themselves to collective solutions. While transnational regions like South East Asia (Katzenstein 2005; Pempel 2005), Mercosur, the EU and the NAFTA area continue to develop concerted governance, the prospects of global governance continue to be bleak. At the same time, however, many of the top issues on the agenda of most nation states – environmental protection, national security, financial instabilities and pandemics – are inherently transnational or global issues requiring some degree of collective, concerted action to be resolved or at least addressed. Thus, it is fair to say that there is a global governance deficit. Despite the increasingly global nature of the most salient issues on the agenda, and the common view on the contemporary era as that of globalization, creating global governance remains extremely difficult. At the same time, there is now a growing debate on the relevance of political science to policy-makers and public bureaucracies (Flyvbjerg 2001; Peters et al. 2010; Schram and Caterino 2006; see also Williams 2009). Political science, the argument goes, is preoccupied with its internal debates and theory building, is detached from social practice, and has failed to produce solutions to contemporary problems or even to provide politicians and the public with useful analyses of past reform or future reform options. 190

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In the context of global governance these issues have had a somewhat different spin compared with most other policy fields. It would be misleading to argue that global governance has failed, since it never really existed in any deeper meaning. The United Nations, which is the institutional structure that would come closest to a framework for global governance, lacks both the authority to impose policies on individual member states and the authority to make binding decisions. This helps to explain why the most ambitious attempts to create globally coordinated programmes of actions like the Rio Summit and the Kyoto Protocol have evolved within rather loose institutional frameworks, and with the UN as a supporting partner, at best. Some believe that global governance on specific issues such as pandemic control, climate change or financial stability is attainable. Very few, if any, seem to believe that global governance covering several policy sectors is possible. Thus, the key obstacles to global governance are not so much related to a lack of knowledge about how best to organize it but should instead be attributed to the pursuit of national self-interest. The task facing the global community of leaders, then, is to devise frameworks and procedures of governance to which nation states will be willing to commit themselves in order to produce binding, collective courses of action, instead of going it alone. In this chapter I discuss the extent to which political science research on governance and collective action has anything to offer to facilitate such concerted international action. How relevant is political science in the search for sustainable global governance mechanisms and frameworks? The basic argument I present is that Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) common pool resources framework in many ways offers the most relevant theory in terms of showing how submitting to a regime, while suboptimal to the individual actor, helps facilitate a Pareto-optimal equilibrium governing collective action and the consumption of common resources. However, successfully implementing the model in real-world contexts hinges to a large extent on exogenous factors like the quality of political leadership and deliberation procedures. Global governance is probably an extraordinarily challenging task for political science to prove its relevance. For almost all countries vast interests are at stake, either in the prospect of global governance to address some salient problem or in avoiding globally binding agreements which are believed to be detrimental to the interests of the country. Given those strong interests, political

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science models of global governance will be reviewed first and foremost with regard to the extent to which they promote or obstruct the interests of individual countries rather than global governance as such. Second, global governance remains to a large extent a theory or something desirable which has not yet existed. Many observers would look at the Kyoto Protocol as the closest we have come to global governance so far, but several key international players such as China, Australia and the US were not part of that governance arrangement. That means that there is no real-world model of global governance to change, develop or depart from if the political science community is to prove its usefulness to solving political problems. The risk of being considered academic, in the most pejorative meaning of the word, is imminent. A third problem regarding political science making a contribution towards global governance is related to time. Creating and reproducing global governance is an extremely long-term and highly complicated project, covering several election terms. If we are to take the rational choice model of political behaviour seriously, where only those projects that will produce a visible return during the election period will be considered by politicians, we soon understand that short-term considerations are likely to prevent any more long-term measures towards global governance (Downs 1957). Even if we were to dismiss the short-term view of political leadership and electoral strategy, there is much to suggest that politicians will be cautious about devoting massive energy and time to long-term projects with uncertain yields. Honourable as such a cause might be, there are only so many hours in a day, and voters will also want their political leaders to focus on more immediate and concrete issues. Fourth and related to the previous point, the yields of investing political leadership in the pursuit of global governance are not only uncertain – the risk of failure being significant – but also diffuse. Even if the effort were to be successful in so far as there would be emergent global concerted action to address specific policy problems, the very nature of global governance as a problem-solving strategy involving nation states, global and national corporations and NGOs makes it difficult for a single politician to persuade the electorate that he or she should have all the credit. Fifth and finally, creating global governance is one thing, and for that governance to actually address and solve salient global problems

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is another. Even if global governance on some specific issue such as global warming were to evolve, the effects of that governance would be uncertain and long term. No single actor would be able to claim credit with any creditability. Each of these issues poses formidable challenges for global governance and also for political science to be of relevance to politicians or society. In the remainder of the chapter I will first discuss global governance in some detail and then the potential for political science to make a contribution towards that end.

Towards global governance? The challenge of creating some form of global governance is not new. Following the peace treaty of almost every major international conflict there have been conferences aimed at creating a new model of world order, as happened after the two world wars. Notions of ‘the war to end all wars’ have been easy to sell to political leaders and peoples that have suffered the consequences of military conflict which, as the historical record shows, has destroyed civilians’ lives and the economic infrastructure of countries much more than military personnel andequipment . That said, the political agenda during the 1990s and 2000s has seen a set of arguably new issues rapidly becoming more salient. Environmental protection has been on the agenda since the 1970s but had its definitive political breakthrough with the alarming news about global warming. This was a truly global issue – no national measure, however far-reaching and effectively implemented, would significantly address the problem – and since previous international agreements like the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro or the Kyoto Protocol conference in 1997 had shown that widespread global agreements could indeed be reached, the global warming issue intensified the political work to develop a global regime that could enforce and implement policies which would reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. The political attention given to international terrorism followed a similar path. The 1970s witnessed the initial wave of terrorist actions: Munich 1972, the Brigate Rossi in Italy, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader–Meinhof Group) in Germany, and the IRA in Northern Ireland. Terrorist attacks triggered a governmental response, security worldwide was stepped up and the issue seemingly

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lost some of its former salience until September 11, 2001. Thus, for both the environmental protection issues and international terrorism the turn of the millennium saw a rapid leap in salience and the subsequent call for global strategies and institutions to respond to the new challenge. The search for global governance has also been driven by increasing inequalities in wealth and life chances between the North and the South. Despite massive international aid these inequalities keep growing. There is today widespread belief that unless some global order is set in place to address this issue with some institutional force this pattern will persist. Needless to say, concrete proposals to this effect like the Tobin tax on global financial transactions have been met with fierce opposition from a variety of actors and interests. Global governance will display a complex mixture of nation states, transnational institutions, NGOs and private capital (Jönsson and Tallberg 2010). It is also fair to assume that such governance arrangements will be issue-specific rather than seeking to provide governance across a large number of issues. The stakes and willingness of different (types of) actors to commit themselves to such governance processes will vary considerably. All these factors suggest that there is no standard model for global governance but that such governance, to the extent that it is attainable at all, must factor in a large number of contextual factors. How does political science prove relevance to such challenges?

Enter the scholar: the political science contribution Political science research and theory building on global governance would, prima facie, have plenty to offer towards designing regimes and institutions for global governance. On closer inspection, however, there are several aspects of the issues now most frequently identified as suitable for global governance that question the relevance of political science theory. One such problem is the multitude of agencies. The liberal and (neo)realist theories of international relations defined nation states as the key players, simply because the international scene was for long dominated by states along with corporate actors. Today, agencies can be defined in almost any number of ways, ranging from transnational organizations such as the EU, the WTO or the UN, to ad hoc treaties like the Kyoto

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Protocol and regional instruments of economic governance (like NAFTA and Mercosur), to terrorist cells. It is intriguing to note that as the world system of nations was able to enjoy a rapidly decreasing level of armed conflict, domestic conflict in fact began to increase. Today, most armed conflict is domestic, not international. Certainly, this pattern could be taken as proof that peace-keeping efforts now are more efficient than previously. Another interpretation would be that the ethnic and economic cleavages that were concealed during the process of building nations – such as in the former Yugoslavia, several African states and most recently Georgia and the Ukraine – have resurfaced. Thus, agency in the field of military conflict and international terrorism has seemingly become too diverse for any theory to accommodate. Or, as is the case in the global warming issue, agency is nowhere – or everywhere, depending on how you define the problem. Thus, the contemporary heterogeneity of agency in global governance poses a very real and significant problem which political scientists have difficulties addressing. With these difficulties in defining agency comes the problem of analysing power in global governance. Barnett and Duvall (2005a: 6) argue that ‘prevailing definitions of global governance … have liberal undertones and mask the presence of power’. The problem is that, in the absence of formal authority which is the conventional locus of political power, there is a need to rethink the sources of power and the ways in which it is exercised. Here, global governance scholars face the same problem as their colleagues in most governance research fields: how to conceptualize power in a context where it derives less from formal institutions and offices and more from a capacity to harness resources from a variety of different actors and interests towards collective goals. Jacob Torfing and his associates (Torfing et al. 2012: ch. 3) approach this issue by distinguishing between ‘power in governance’, ‘power of governance’ and ‘power over governance’ as three different aspects of power in the context of governance. More specifically applied to global governance, Barnett and Duvall (2005a: 3) bemoan the scant attention that the global governance community pays to the power dimension of global governance. They outline a typology of power comprising ‘compulsory power’ (based in threats of coercive measures), ‘institutional power’ (the submission to an international regime promoting the interests of a group of countries in juxtaposition to other countries), ‘structural

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power’ (derived from ‘the constitution of social capabilities and interests of actors in direct relationship to each other’) and ‘productive power’ (‘the socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification’). The realist school of thought in international relations perceives power as primarily compulsory, whereas critical theory emphasizes the structural and productive types of power (ibid.: 4). If the power dimension of governance in a general sense is a challenging issue, this is particularly the case in global governance where national interests are at stake, military capabilities are present and there is no recognized authority to make collective decisions. The common distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power is useful in describing the different strategies available to nation states and other actors in global governance (Nye 2004). ‘Hard power’ is closely related to compulsory or institutional power, whereas ‘soft power’ is akin to structural and productive power in Barnett and Duvall’s typology. Again, the absence of formal authority and a commonly recognized process of making and enforcing decisions have driven the search for alternative conceptions of power and its sources. In addition to these problems in defining or contextualizing agency and power, current political science also has problems with defining institutional arrangements for collective problem solving in the absence of formal authority. Where such authority exists, the obvious collective problem-solving institution is government. How do we, as Rhodes (1997) would say, design governance without government? In part this problem is related to the complexity that surrounds agency, but there are other issues as well: the absence of legal authority and subsequently the complexity of imposing sanctions on defecting behaviour. The defining problem in global governance is the absence of formal authority and, therefore, there is a search for a regime which can impose order on sovereign actors. Models derived from rational choice theory would define this as either a collective action problem or a common pool resource problem. The collective action problem suggests that free riding is rational behaviour since it allows the actor to collect the benefits without carrying the costs of the collective action (Olson 1965). For instance, the perverse logic of public goods is that it would be considered ‘rational’ for governments not to be a forerunner in carbon dioxide emission reduction policy but rather to let other countries take the

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lead. In order to prevent such ‘rational’ behaviour and instead promote collective goals in carbon dioxide emissions, global governance must be facilitated and imposed by a regime that has some formal leverage on individual countries. Thus, the solution to the problems of shirking and free riding, in theory as in real life, is imposing a sanction on free riding. In global governance, such sanctions are extremely difficult to design and even more difficult to impose. If there is no authority controlling global governance, how is a sanction imposed? Exclusion, which might be an effective sanction in some forms of governance, is not an efficient instrument in global governance because the basic idea of such governance is that it is global. By conveying the idea that all actors swim or sink together, actors are more likely to commit themselves to the global governance regime. If sanctions, then, are problematic in global governance, can incentives achieve the same commitment to the regime? Participating in, and contributing to, global governance might offer incentives which may or may not be sufficient to commit an actor. Again, however, the free riding strategy poses a problem. A country can choose not to sign the Kyoto Protocol and to refrain from domestic regulation to reduce carbon dioxide emission. At the same time it will benefit from the restrictions imposed in other countries. How does a global governance arrangement prevent that strategy, which incidentally is the choice of (in)action that the United States has pursued in the global warming issue so far? To Elinor Ostrom (1990), the solution to this dilemma is reciprocity. A regime among sovereign, rational actors can be formed and sustained if they represent equilibriums among rational actors, i.e. if the regime is Pareto-optimal and no actor can be better off without at least one being worse off. A Pareto-optimal regime is a situation in which actors find it more rational and goal-fulfilling to submit to the regime than to remain outside the collective arrangement because it allows for a sustained consumption of the collective resource. Thus, actors submit to the regime because it is in their interest to do so. The alternative strategy, going it alone and maximizing consumption, is not an option because the resource is common. For the same reason, the only sanction which is available to the regime, reciprocity, becomes effective because the actor is committed to the locality; in Ostrom’s model the fishermen do not have much choice but to fish in that particular lake, and in global governance exiting the system is not an option.

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So is common pool resource theory an appropriate and effective political science model for guiding the design of global governance? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it tells us something about how to devise regimes for regulating the consumption of common resources without relying on formal, legal authority. No, because there is essentially very little to suggest that the equilibrium that would sustain such a regime would be effective or sufficient in resolving the collective problem. Indeed, the Kyoto Protocol has been criticized for not setting reduction targets that will significantly slow global warming. The price for getting all major (or the vast majority of) players on board might well be a diluted and substantively speaking insufficient policy. Another aspect of the global governance problem which contemporary theory has problems addressing stems from within the political science community itself. Going through the first volumes of the journal Global Governance, one cannot escape the impression that this is a scholarly field which is probably just as much concerned with devising theories and models as it is with studying real cases of global governance. The constructivist ‘turn’ in International Relations has made a distinct imprint on global governance, something which raises questions about the extent to which this is a research field which is likely to be able to make a contribution to the real-world struggle to create global governance. The problem is not so much the basic ontological argument that different actors perceive governance issues differently but rather the tendency among scholars in the global governance genre to be more inclined to debate the virtues of that ontological preference at the expense of debating global governance proper. Furthermore, the increasing interest among political scientists to position themselves on normative issues complicates the prospects of proving political science to be relevant to solving societal problems. While normative theory could make a useful contribution to solving policy problems, ‘the ongoing divorce of normative theory and empirical analysis leaves a good deal of work in the Theory camp isolated from things that matter, here and now’ (Gerring and Yesnowitz 2006: 105). All of this means that while the potential relevance for political science remains high, developments, trends and fads among the political science community effectively prevents that relevance from being a factor in the real world. I have previously mentioned time and political leadership as indigenous problems in solving long-term problems such as global

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governance. That would suggest that Ostrom’s model of regime building in and of itself is not sufficient to provide advice in the pursuit of such governance. For all its brilliance, common-pool resource management theory is almost devoid of an analysis of political power (Galaz 2005). It also has problems taking into account time and change. Mainstream political science would probably suggest that some form of deliberation among the key players would be an efficient strategy towards accommodation and commitment to collective objectives. Ostrom’s interest-based model argues that actors will submit to a Pareto-optimal regime as long as there is stability and reciprocity. In the real world, the amount of common resources – real or perceived – varies, as does the number of players. A deliberative model of governance would probably be more apt at accommodating those types of changes than would an Ostromian model be.

Discussion The brief discussion earlier in this chapter on the prospects of global governance and the role of political science towards that end suggests a couple of important differences between politics and the academic, theoretical models of collective problem solving. One such distinction is that between substantive and instrumental goals. In the political sphere, substantive problems are to be resolved by politicians which are frequently assumed to be all about instrumentality. The dichotomy to some extent exaggerates the difference between substantive and instrumental goals since there is political currency in solving societal problems. That said, however, politicians sometimes give a clear priority to substantive considerations over strategic objectives and pursue politics that, at least in the short term, are not vote-maximizing. Another distinction, again, is related to time. Creating global governance is a long-term challenge which is not easily collapsed into election terms and ‘deliverables’. Without going too far down the rational choice avenue of thought it can be assumed that elected officials have an interest in acquiring substantive results to present to the electorate in the election campaign. Yet, such short-term objectives may be counter-productive to the more long-term process of developing governance structures, and political science is far more likely to be able to offer advice on the latter problem than

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the former. Political science, particularly the formal modelling versions of political analysis, does consider time in terms of sequencing and the coupling of policy to the electoral cycle. Institutionalists have a somewhat more awkward relationship with time and change (see Pierson 2004) and tend to see change as discontinuous, abrupt processes followed by extended periods of institutionalized choice. A third distinction relates to the previous discussion concerning responsiveness and leadership. This is obviously a perennial discussion in democratic theory: should political leaders first and foremost be responsive to the demos, or should they impose unpopular decisions and programmes if they are believed to be in the longterm interest of the demos? Again, institutionalists appear somewhat oblivious to time while rational choice theory would link such choices to the electoral cycle. At the end of the day, both institutional theory and rational choice theory – which together dominate much of contemporary political analysis – have indigenous flaws in the perspective of their utility. Institutional theory still grapples with conceptualizing agency. Informing a political decision-maker that there are important sources of inertia and fixity in both political structure and process will not raise any eyebrows. Rational choice theory is of little help, too, since it assumes complete instrumentality on the part of the politicians and, perhaps more challenging, complete knowledge of preferences and options. The main contribution of political science in the context of global governance has been to diagnose the problem and to uncover the huge complexities in creating global governance. It has been far less successful in providing any answers to the issue of how these problems are to be resolved. In fairness, it should be noted that research on global governance thus far has only been marginally concerned with designing models that would work on the ground. The utility dimension of political science research is a yardstick which is not self-evident and has not been systematically applied hitherto. Global governance research faces a particularly difficult challenge in this respect: history is replete with examples of failures to create international or global governance and it is not easy to see any prospect as to where political science can move the idea, let alone the practice, of global governance forward. Since global governance is still evolving the potential relevance of global governance should be significant – this

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would be the time when practitioners turn to academia for advice. It is now up to the scholarly community to rise to that challenge, perhaps spending less time scrutinizing theories and approaches and more on focussing on making a concrete contribution.

Conclusions It is not difficult to dismiss political science as a source of ideas and prescriptions for global governance. Several circumstances contribute to the problems facing the discipline in trying to perform such a role. The global governance community is still devising theories and models while being internally divided over issues related to ontology and epistemology. Secondly, relevance or utility have not been intra-academic criteria (Peters et al. 2010): when allocating research grants or making tenure decisions relevance is rarely a salient factor except perhaps in professional schools. Since such decisions are essential to academic life, scholars will conform to institutional rules of publication and teaching. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the problems facing the development of global governance are not organizational or technical or derived from insufficient knowledge. They are first and foremost real-world problems of making states and other global actors comply with collective rules in a world where no authority exists. Elinor Ostrom (1990) shows how such compliance can be attained among rational actors; but then rationality itself becomes an empirical question rather than a postulate. Again, theory and real-world political behaviour seem to have very little to do with each other. Political science is not alone in this situation. In sociology, globalization has triggered extensive research on the impact of global political and economic forces on society. The ‘world polity theory’ has emerged as an attempt to reconceptualize the state and the demos in the globalized world (Boli and Thomas 1999; Lechner and Boli 2005; Meyer et al. 1997), but on closer inspection it is highly uncertain as to whether this offers a promising path towards new theory. Economic theory, too, struggles with similar problems. Although institutional economic theory has brought parts of the discipline somewhat closer to real-world problems, mainstream economics still appears to follow Milton Friedman’s argument that ‘theory is to be tested by the accuracy of its “assumptions” as

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photographic descriptions of reality, not by the correctness of the predictions that can be derived from it’ (Friedman 1953c: 91), a motto which does not speak to utility. In all three disciplines the tension between theory building and the development of academic discourse seems to stand in the way of relevance and utility. It is indicative that in areas such as public administration and policy analysis, where the utility dimension is much more present, there is a perennial criticism of eclecticism and atheoretical analyses. Global governance is in many ways the ultimate test of the relevance of political science: if the discipline can provide robust theory which could make a contribution, however small, to promote global governance, then it could probably perform even better in most other areas of governance and public policy, too. The key reasons why that has not happened so far is in part the scope and complexity of the challenge and in part because the discipline as of yet does not have a theory to offer. Here, global governance presents an interesting point of comparison with the relevance of policy research. As argued in Chapter 7 in this volume, public policy as a research field has been able to prove its relevance by embracing inter-disciplinary approaches and to engage intermediary institutions like think tanks, professional organizations and transnational organizations devoted to the diffusion of policy concepts and models. The global governance community of scholars, so far, appears more preoccupied with internal debate than to engaging the world of practitioners.

Chapter 12

Maximizing the relevance of political science for public policy in the era of big data HELEN MARGETTS

The environment in which public policy is made has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the internet and social media means most of the activities of citizens and governments leave a digital imprint which can be harvested to generate so-called ‘big data’. So policy-making takes place in an increasingly rich data environment, which offers both promises and threats to policy-makers. The worlds of science and business have been quick to recognize and exploit the research and financial values of big data. For example, in physics, systems biology, neuroscience and climate change there have been enormous advances based on big data analysis of particles, cells, brain activity and weather. Corporations routinely exploit big data relating to customer behaviour. But in terms of establishing the public value of big data, and its potential for better governance and more efficient provision of public goods, the policy-making community has lagged behind. Policy-makers face cultural, organizational and technological barriers to generating and using big data, lack the expertise and analytic skills to maximize its potential for public sector innovation, and are deterred by unresolved ethical challenges. Although there is some exciting social science research that has applied a multi-disciplinary perspective to large-scale data and virtual environments to understand the changing political world, in the UK mainstream political science has been slow to capitalize upon the potential of big data, and is therefore not yet equipped to assist policy-makers in this endeavour. 203

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As forms of data previously used only by the physical and life sciences become available to social science research, there is great potential to apply natural science models and concepts to enhance our understanding of politics. In this chapter I argue that this changed environment and the reluctance of political scientists to embrace it could threaten the relevance that political science can have for practical policy-making. I will lay out the shifts taking place in political life and the policy-making environment from the perspective of both citizens and governments, outline the potential for big data to feed into policy-making, detail the challenges facing policy-makers in the big data era, and make some recommendations for how political science as a discipline might use big data to maintain and even increase its relevance for policy-makers struggling to cope with a deluge of data.

Citizens, social media and big data The context in which people decide whether to participate politically has undergone a period of radical change. People in both democracies and authoritarian regimes spend growing proportions of their lives on the internet and social media. At the time of writing, YouTube receives four billion views a day; Twitter has 140 million users, while its Chinese equivalent, Sina Weibo, has 368 million users; and Facebook has 600 million users. Half of US and UK adults use a social networking service. Even in countries with lower levels of internet penetration, social networking sites are popular, with Facebook the third most popular news source across Arab nations with 12 million users in Egypt alone (Dennis et al. 2013). Social media were mostly developed for social use, but they all have the potential to host a wide range of political activities and civic engagement, such as: receiving and sharing news, information and views; expressing opinions; discussing issues; coordinating activities; and matching individuals across political, geographical and economic boundaries. And there is every sign that the swelling ranks of social media users are employing these sites for political activities. In the US, nearly half of younger users of social networking sites have used them to share political views (Pew 2012), while in Arab countries more than 60 per cent of users (around one third of citizens in Lebanon, Tunisia and Egypt) report using the sites to share views about politics (rising to 70 per cent for community

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issues). In addition to general social media sites, there are also a huge range of internet-based platforms dedicated to political activity (such as Avaaz, Kiva, MoveOn, 38 Degrees, change.org, JustGiving, government petition sites and the MySociety suite of sites) where users can participate quickly and easily, such as joining an email campaign or online protest, signing a petition, writing to a representative, complaining or commenting on a public service or contributing money. It is via these social media and campaigning platforms that most contemporary political participation takes place. They make possible new ‘micro-acts’ of political participation and civic engagement, such as a status update on Facebook, a tweet or re-tweet, signing an electronic petition, sharing a political news item, posting a comment on a blog or discussion thread, making a micro-donation of funds to a political cause or campaign, uploading or sharing a political video on YouTube, ‘rating’, ‘ranking’, complaining about or giving feedback on a public service and so on. All these are very small acts of participation that for most people were not available until the advent of social media, adding rungs to the ‘ladder’ of participation (Verba et al. 1995) at the bottom end. The mechanism is the lowering of transaction costs in relation to participation costs, meaning that it becomes possible to donate smaller and smaller amounts as potential participants receive requests for micro-donations of political resources in the course of their normal lives both online and offline. Taken individually they may seem insignificant, but these tiny acts of participation scale up to major mobilizations, from mass demonstrations during the Arab Spring to the petitions that have brought about policy change in liberal democracies, which are qualitatively different from traditional, offline mobilizations as discussed in Margetts et al. (2013; 2015). Early work on understanding how these mobilizations start up and gain momentum shows that a (very) few of them succeed dramatically, while the vast majority fail absolutely, making them unstable and unpredictable. Political mobilization of this kind forms part of the new ‘democratic weather’, a challenging environment for policymakers. My colleagues (Peter John, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri) and I have developed a model to encapsulate these changes. ‘Chaotic pluralism’ (Margetts et al. 2015) is a political pluralism that is characterized by non-linearity and interconnectivity and is far more disorganized and individualized than the original architects of pluralist political theories ever envisaged.

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So widespread use of social media can create new uncertainty in political life. But it can also provide new means of understanding it. Every participatory act, however small, carried out on social media leaves a digital imprint. So political mobilizations or fluctuations in political opinion produce digital trails that can be harvested by researchers to generate large-scale datasets, so-called ‘big data’. Big data emerged as a key trend in the corporate world (Gartner 2012; IBM 2012; Manyika et al. 2011) from around 2010 and has engendered great interest from journalists, academic commentators and entrepreneurs (see Mayer-Schoenberger and Cukier 2013). There is much debate over what exactly the term means, but typically it refers to data too large to be manipulated in a desktop computing environment and that is produced in real time, representing actual transactions or interactions. Real-time transactional data have the potential to tell us what people are really doing or have done, as opposed to survey data that tells us what people think they did or might do in the future. They can be retrieved and analysed with software, text and data-mining tools, and sophisticated network analysis (as in Aral and Walker 2011; Goel et al. 2012; González-Bailón et al. 2011; González-Bailón and Barbera 2013; Hindman 2008). So as well as being a major sphere of political participation and civic engagement, social media and other web-based platforms can provide a new way to research and understand it. However, the UK social science community in general, and political science in particular, has not yet fully appreciated and capitalized on the potential of big data for understanding the social and political world. As forms of data previously used only by the physical and life sciences become available to social science research, there is potential to apply natural science models and concepts to social behaviour. According to the growing field of ‘social physics’ big data could revolutionize the social sciences in the same way as the telescope did for physics and the microscope for biology (Pentland 2014). Yet UK social science departments remain mono-disciplinary, while the burgeoning fields of computational social science and data science, which incorporate mathematics, physics and engineering expertise into social science enquiry, are still largely US-based. The data science programmes within the UK are so far dominated by computer science, engineering and business, and remain critically uninformed by social science theories, models or questions. As a consequence, many technological and methodological barriers to

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generating and analysing big data to understand the social world are yet to be tackled. So in the seven years since Savage and Burrows’s (2007) article predicting the ‘Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ and the replacement of surveys with large scale datasets of real-time transactional data, little progress has been made in terms of developing big data capacity and tools for understanding the social world, especially in the UK. In political science, this state of affairs is particularly pronounced. Most of the work quoted above based on big datasets of political data is carried out by large multi-disciplinary research teams, incorporating computer scientists, mathematicians and physicists, and it is in the US research environment that such teams thrive. In 2009 David Lazer and 14 colleagues from across the social sciences, physics and computer science published an article entitled ‘Computational Social Science’ in the journal Science (Lazer et al. 2009), as the first step in developing the nascent field of ‘data-driven computational social science’, involving the collection and analysis of data on social and political behaviour at an unprecedented breadth, depth and scale. They cite as a forerunner cognitive science, which has involved fields ranging from neurobiology to philosophy to computer science, and which has attracted the investment of substantial resources to form a common field and ‘created enormous progress for public good in the last generation’. They urged social scientists to start paying attention to big data developments, warning that computational social science was occurring principally in internet companies such as Google and government agencies such as the US National Security Agency (NSA), out of which there might emerge a privileged set of academic researchers ‘residing over private data from which they produce papers that cannot be critiqued or replicated’. Yet although three of the co-authors came from political science, this work has been little referenced by political scientists operating in the mainstream (indeed of the authors listed, only a handful come from the social sciences, suggesting that concern over the lack of social science input comes from the other side of the social science/natural science boundary). Likewise the entire literature on government information technology has long been ‘ghettoized’ in political science in general and public administration in particular (see Dunleavy et al. 2006; Hood and Margetts 2010; Margetts 1999).

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Governments, digital technologies and the promise of big data for policy-making Just as citizens spend increasing proportions of their political life in online settings, leaving digital traces, so do governments and political institutions of all kinds. From the 1950s onwards, large governments have progressively moved their administrative operations onto large scale information systems, and smaller states have followed suit to the extent that in the twenty-first century very few governmental processes in developed countries take place without the use of digital technologies (Dunleavy et al. 2006; Margetts 1999). So do most government–citizen interactions leave a digital trail of some kind within government, as well as on internet-based platforms outside government? Most governments have a poor record on using this kind of internal administrative data to feed into policy-making (Margetts 1999), but with the wave of e-government initiatives that spread across the world in the early 2000s, the modernization of legacy computer systems, and the slow but now substantive move towards digital transactions, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis when governments like the UK turned to ‘Digital by Default’ initiatives as a way of doing more for less, there are more and more opportunities to use the data generated by internal administrative operations and government–citizen interactions to shape policy-making processes and improve service delivery. Likewise, in an age where government agencies ‘are’ their website or digital presence on social media (Dunleavy et al. 2006; Steinberg 2012), clearly there is much understanding of their structure and operations to be gained from analysis of their digital interactions. This kind of big data can provide real insight into institutional change over long time periods. So for example Bright (2012) has used the digital parliamentary record to investigate the hypothesis that politics is becoming more contentious over time, analysing 75 years of parliamentary debates in Hansard (12 gigabytes, 740 million words) to show that the rate that speakers are interrupted by other MPs has risen dramatically during the period from 1980 to the present time. Similarly, Hale et al. (2014) have used the entire .uk domain dataset of the British Library to analyse changes in the UK university network over 15 years. For newer organizations which exist partially or entirely in digital settings, big data of this kind is the only way to understand institutional change.

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So the first ever complete transaction history of an organization, Wikipedia, is provided by the complete download of the entire edit history of that website (Loubser 2010), given that the production of Wikipedia takes place entirely online. Likewise the analysis of the Twitter network of the Indignados (González-Bailón et al. 2011), showing how information spread across this movement’s prime method of communication, provides a comprehensive picture of a protest movement. So what opportunities do this ‘data deluge’ (Margetts 2013), including big data generated by governments and other political institutions and the digital trails left by citizens on social media, offer to policy-makers? First of all, ‘big data’ provides a real chance for policy-making to be more citizen-focused, taking account of citizens’ needs and preferences (as expressed on social media) and actual behaviour (as recorded digitally whenever citizens interact with government). Policy-makers can mine data from social media, generating a picture of how a very large proportion of the population view policies and services, and what their concerns and experiences in dealing with government are. For example, data from Google Search API and Google Trends can provide useful indicators of where citizens get information from about government, policy change or service delivery, and what issues they are thinking about, which could allow departments to adjust their communication strategies. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook present an understanding of how many people are discussing policy or services and can provide information about the experiences of services that people have publicly shared, or their opinions about specific policies. Twitter in particular is used by some corporations as a way of gathering and responding to complaints, although this is not as yet done by governmental organizations. Comparing comments on social media, ratings and ranking sites, or discussion threads on sites like Mumsnet can highlight differences in performance across local offices (like job centres, hospitals or schools) or different contract providers. Together with a multi-disciplinary research team from the Oxford Internet Institute, the author of this chapter has carried out a feasibility study for the UK Department of Work and Pensions, investigating the use of all these data sources in relation to that department (Bright et al. 2014). The insight provided by such data can give policy-makers a much clearer picture of their own activities, for example through log usage data of their own electronic presence or transactions

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recorded on internal information systems, which are increasingly interlinked with web-based platforms. In this way, policy-makers can use data from social media for self-improvement, by understanding what people are saying about government, and which policies, services or providers are attracting negative opinions and complaints, enabling identification of a failing school, hospital or contractor, for example. So, social media data can act as a barometer of public services, showing where things are going wrong. If usage of such data really becomes sophisticated, then it might become possible to predict from underlying patterns in such data when a hospital or school is going to fail, rather than waiting until some public scandal of complete service breakdown (such as the case of the Mid Staffordshire Hospital Trust) bursts into the public and media eye. It also becomes possible to model and even predict both collective and individual behaviour such as riots and healthcare crises caused by high demand, with obvious policy-making benefits (Moat et al. 2014), just as the use of large volumes of search data to detect epidemics can allow the planning of interventions (Ginsberg et al. 2009). Likewise Wikipedia data may be used to predict electoral behaviour in countries where opinion polling is problematic, such as Iran (Yasseri and Bright 2013).

Big data challenges Capitalizing on the potential of big data for public policy is not a simple matter, however. First, big data is technically and technologically challenging for government, particularly those governments (like the UK) which have always struggled with large-scale information systems and technology projects (Dunleavy et al. 2006; Margetts 1999) and, as noted above, in extracting data from its own systems to inform policy-making and service delivery. There are cultural barriers to government using social media on account of the informal style and blurring of organizational and public–private boundaries which they engender (Clarke 2012; Margetts and Dunleavy 2002). Gathering data from social media platforms, with technical barriers distinct to each platform, requires coding skills which will be difficult for policy-makers to acquire. Indeed, in the UK civil services the majority of civil servants outside communications departments do not have access to social media while at work, presenting an obvious challenge to

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using social media data for innovation in service delivery or for developing the technical skills required. The technical challenges of manipulating and analysing big data require quantitative skills far out of reach of most civil servants and unlikely to be offered in the training and educational environments they typically use. Second, big data presents new moral and ethical dilemmas to policy-makers. In part these are reputational: there is an image problem for government in the use of big data – this chapter contains a few sentences like this which include both the word ‘big’ and the word ‘government’ and that is an unpopular combination. Policy-makers’ responses to Edward Snowden’s revelations of the US Tempora and UK Prism programmes have done nothing to improve this image, with their focus on the use of big data to track down individuals and groups involved in acts of terrorism and criminality – rather than on anything to make policy-making better, or to use the wealth of information that these programmes provide to improve public services. Such challenges can be far greater for governments than corporations. Citizens (reasonably) happily allow Tesco and Facebook to use their data on the basis it will improve their products and minimize costs for the consumer, but if government tries to use social media to understand citizens and improve its own performance, there is the danger that it will be accused of spying on its citizenry in order to quash potential resistance. The ethical challenges of using big data go beyond the presentational, however. Most obviously, privacy is a serious issue: just because many of the data generated online are available ‘does not mean that their analysis is legitimate’ (boyd and Crawford 2012). And there is the question of those who are under-represented or misrepresented in the data; or those who are non-users or only partial users of the internet, for example. There are also groups that are systematically excluded or under-represented in the production of the world’s digital knowledge and information (Graham et al. 2012; 2014), and they will be under-represented in many big data sets. The strong focus of the computational science research on those data sources that are easiest to collect (such as Twitter) exacerbates this problem. There are even more complex moral issues further down the line. For example, big data increasingly facilitates probabilistic policymaking, where policy is made on the basis of what segments of individuals will probably do, rather than what they have done.

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Predictive policing for example has had some success, particularly in California, where robberies declined by a quarter after the use of the ‘PredPol’ policing software, but it can lead to a ‘feedback loop of injustice’, as one privacy advocacy group put it, as policing resources are targeted at increasingly small socio-economic groups. Big data provides unprecedented levels of knowledge about people’s life expectancy or likely educational attainment. What responsibility does the state have for the education of those school pupils who are, probabilistically, almost certain to drop out? The more that these kinds of data and methods become mainstream with policy-makers, the more that policy-makers will have to tackle this kind of moral dilemma.

Maintaining relevance So how can political scientists help policy-makers in this changed environment, ensuring that political science research can maintain its relevance? As for public policy-making, I have argued above that big data holds major promise for political science, which should enable us to further extend our record in policy research. We now have access to a cornucopia of data of a kind more traditionally associated with the natural sciences. Rather than being dependent on surveys, the traditional staple of social science empirical data, general social media platforms – such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Google Search and platforms dedicated to political activism or civic engagement (such as change.org, MoveOn.org and Avaaz.org) – present us with the opportunity over time to scrape, generate, analyse and archive huge quantities of comparative data about political activity. Some such data is of a comprehensiveness and quality (in terms of representing real transactions) that political science has never had before. Take for example the entire dataset of all petitions to the UK government created over the last four years – scraped every hour to provide an hourly signature count – and the time stamps and geocodes of every signature, collected and analysed by the author’s own research team at the Oxford Internet Institute (see Hale et al. 2013; Lowther 2013; Yasseri et al. 2013), which will allow for the first time a complete geographical ecology of petition signing, one of the most popular participatory acts outside voting. Following these petitions through social media gives

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a further picture of the process of dissemination of these thousands of mobilizations around individual petitions throughout a population; similar activities in the US and Germany provide a comparative picture. This data has attracted attention from policy-makers in the UK, the US and Canada and is currently being used by the UK House of Commons in the redesign of the petitions platform, including the selection of thresholds and deadlines for petitions. One reason for the lack of development in ‘computational political science’ discussed above is that just as big data presents challenges to policy-makers, it also presents new challenges to political scientists in terms of the technical skills, multi-disciplinary expertise, ethical procedures and computing resources required to harvest, store and analyse it. First, the technological challenge is ever present. To generate their own big data, researchers and students must learn to code – and for some that is an alien skill. At the Oxford Internet Institute, a multi-disciplinary department of the University of Oxford, we run a course on Digital Social Research that all our postgraduate students can take. But not all social science departments could either provide such a course or persuade their postgraduate students that they need it. Ours, who all study the social science of the internet, are obviously predisposed to do so. Furthermore, big data analysis requires multi-disciplinary expertise. Of the immediate research team working on our petitions data, there is a computer scientist (Scott Hale), a physicist (Taha Yasseri) and a political scientist (myself). It would be virtually impossible to carry out this sort of research without such expertise, and as a multi-disciplinary department the Oxford Internet Institute is (reasonably) free to recruit these types of research faculty. But few social science departments outside the US can promise a research career for computer scientists, physicists or any of the other disciplinary specialists that might be needed to generate and manipulate big data. There is a strong rationale, however, for political science as a discipline to overcome these challenges. The need for normative and theoretical development to accompany the use of big data for both research and public policy interventions is high. The more that engineers, computer scientists and physicists take the lead in developing the computational social science agenda in general and ‘computational political science’ in particular, the more unlikely it is that theoretical development and interesting research questions will keep pace with the generation of data, and meaningless analyses of

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those data which may well find their way into public policy processes, if political scientists are not in a position to aid policymakers in extracting sense out of the data deluge. So, how can political scientists overcome these challenges, and thereby be in a good position to aid policy-makers to tackle their own barriers to making the most of the possibilities afforded by big data? First, political scientists may have to accept that multi-disciplinary research teams are going to become the norm for social science research, extending beyond social science disciplines into the life sciences, mathematics, physics and engineering. At the ‘IPP2012: Big Data: Big Challenges’ conference, the keynote speaker, Duncan Watts (himself a physicist turned sociologist), called for a ‘dating agency’ for engineers and social scientists – with the former providing the technological expertise and the latter the interesting research questions. We need to make sure that forums exist where social scientists and technologists meet and discuss big data research at the earliest stages, so that research projects and programmes incorporate the core competencies of both. Political science departments will need to reach out to other departments across their universities, and those in universities which lack the natural sciences (such as the London School of Economics) will need to build collaborations with researchers in other universities. As Lazer et al. (2009) pointed out, tenure committees and editorial boards need to understand and reward the effort to publish across disciplines, as do research funding councils. Second, political scientists need to provide the normative and ethical basis for policy decisions in the big data era. Again as Lazer et al. (2009) pointed out, ‘quarks and cells neither mind when we discover their secrets nor protest if we alter their environments during the discovery process’, but if we apply the methods of physics or computational biology to social settings, we face very different ethical barriers. That means bringing in normative political theorists and philosophers of information into our research teams, again crossing disciplinary boundaries, this time into the humanities where the nascent field of the ethics of information can start to provide a normative basis (Floridi 2013). It also means university social science ethics committees tooling up to understand the risks to privacy and data protection that big data generation and analysis can hold, developing expertise in what is legal or ethically permissible. This may involve developing the same kind of rigour and expertise as ethics committees in the medical sciences,

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but with a far steeper learning curve. Ethical issues are crucially important and must be taken into account at all stages of research using big data, but the political science research community should not let the dangers obscure the potential benefits. Perhaps there are lessons from health research, for example where researchers using animals for experimentation have overcome huge ethical (and sometimes life-threatening) resistance to develop viable ethical frameworks for such research. Often, big data itself may be used to highlight issues such as under-representation in information geography (Graham et al. 2012; 2014). And some of the reputational problems for governments using big data for policy-making are minimized where research designs are developed in an academic setting. In any case, as González-Bailón (2013: 157) points out, ‘since large data sets that track our behaviour are here to stay, it is probably best to start demanding responsible use of that information than to prevent its use’. Third, there is going to be a need for training in data science, to be available to both political science postgraduates and policymakers. Harvard admitted 300 students to the first year of its new data science course in 2013, but the course was born out of the computer science department with little social science input. Of the 20 US masters courses in big data analytics compiled in 2013 by Information Week (Henschen 2013), nearly all came from computer science or informatics departments, with no evidence of political science involvement. Political science research training needs to incorporate coding and analysis skills of the kind these courses provide, but with a social science focus. If we as political scientists leave the training to computer scientists, we will find that the new cadre of data scientists will tend to leave out political science concerns or questions. Fourth, we need to bring policy-makers and academic researchers together to tackle the challenges that big data present. At Harvard in September, 2013 the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the journal Policy and Internet convened a workshop on ‘Responsible Research Agendas for Public Policy in the Big Data Era’, which included various leading academic researchers in the government and big data field, and government officials from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Board, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Office of Management and Budget. Senior officials in all these departments face fundamental questions in the light of the big data era. What is the role of the Federal Reserve, for

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example? Is it still necessary to run a census when so much data is freely available and could be gathered non-obtrusively? Which labour statistics do governments need to produce, when so many can be derived from corporate data? The discussions revealed that there is a continual procession of major events on big data in Washington DC (usually with a corporate or scientific research focus) to which US federal officials are invited, but of whom very few are really dedicated to tackling the distinctive issues that face government agencies such as those represented around the table. Finally, political scientists have a responsibility to take forward theoretical development in the age of big data. Big data offers the beguiling possibility of hypothesis generation, working against the social science tradition of establishing a theoretical research question to test, and designing the data collection (such as a survey) accordingly. But as González-Bailón (2013) argues, theory is still of vital importance in building credible stories of what the data reveal. Indeed, big data can allow social scientists to revisit old theoretical questions, testing some of them for the first time as data becomes available. And the very fact that so much of political life does take place in online settings may challenge some of those theories and concepts, particularly those concerning participation of young people or minorities. If political scientists don’t take on this role, then researchers from other disciplines will do it for us, in ways that ignore decades of political science research and theoretical development. An example of this is provided by the sub-field of sociophysics, where physicists (largely unbeknownst to political scientists) have developed a ‘statistical physics approach to social behaviour’ (Castellano et al. 2009), developing models to understand at large scale the collective effects of the interaction among single individuals, considered as relatively simple entities. Sociophysics is attracting a great deal of interest in the age of big data mined from the social web (see Mestyán et al. 2013, for example, who predict box office sales of movies from Wikipedia data), but the seminal review article on the topic (Castellano et al. 2009) shows clearly that this field is proceeding without input from recent social science research at all, with topics like ‘social influence’ introduced with reference to works published in 1950. There could be exciting possibilities here for theoretical and conceptual development at the boundaries of political science and physics, now that big data on political systems could take a form akin to the kind of data used by physicists; but this will not take place in ghettoized sub-fields.

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Public policy pay-offs So what might be the pay-offs of the development of capacity within political science to maximize the potential of big data, offer policy-makers access to new computational skills and expertise, and tackle the ethical and theoretical challenges that big data throws up? First, as outlined above, insight derived from such research could enable policy-makers to improve services and make policy-making more citizen-focused, by mining data from social media to understand preferences and issue salience, to identify problems, and to work out where citizens are willing to be engaged and to participate in policy-making. Crowdsourcing initiatives of the kind suggested by Noveck (2009) have already illustrated the potential of marshalling willingness to participate in collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia (which as famously observed ‘works in practice but not in theory’) for a policy context. Some of the biggest pay-offs from this type of initiative have come from crisis, disaster or post-conflict situations, where necessity has forced innovation in unlikely contexts (such as in Japan, in the wake of the 2011 tsunami; Hale 2012). A promising example of this is the UN global pulse initiative (www.unglobalpulse.org), developed by the United Nations in response to the need for information to track and monitor the impacts of crises, which has done much to mainstream the use of data mining and analytics in development organizations. But even here, the importance of theoretical insight to keep pace with methodological development has been well illustrated (Welch et al. forthcoming). Such data can also be used to design interventions. In the 2012 US election for example, James Fowler and his research team collaborated with Facebook to undertake a massive field experiment in voter turnout (with 61 million subjects), in which individuals were shown pictures of their Facebook friends who had voted and were able to record whether they themselves had voted via a ‘Voted Today’ button. The experiment showed that people were more likely to vote if their friends had voted, suggesting that Facebook might be used in this way to increase voter turnout (Bond et al. 2012). Although the experiment was criticized for its low effect size and various methodological issues, there is little doubt that it was computational political science in action and that it did cause more people to vote than would otherwise have done so. ‘Nudge’ interventions have become popular in the UK government,

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with the experimental work of the Behavioural Insights Team generating efficiencies, for example by ‘nudging’ citizens to pay taxes, fines and penalties on time. But most interventions are largely paper or mobile-based, rather than based on a huge digital field experiment of this kind. Virtual worlds that capture a complete record of individual behaviour offer incredible potential for experimentation of this kind, once the challenge of trawling data from social networks is overcome (Bainbridge 2007), in this case by collaborating with the internet company that runs it. Another possible pay-off in terms of relevance could be the ability to detect underlying patterns of political activity, which could provide important indicators of future events. Other chapters in this volume have pointed to political scientists’ failure to predict the Arab Spring of 2011. Even in the years that followed this event, each new wave of mobilization, from the ‘Occupy Movements’ to the protests from Brazil to Turkey, from the Ukraine to Thailand, has seemed to take political commentators by surprise. The internet and social media are fingered in all of these events, but far more attention is paid to (sometimes heated and often pointless) debate as to whether these new media provide a greater boost to democratic participation or to authoritarian regimes (see Gladwell 2010; Morozov 2011). Meanwhile, across liberal democracies political science continues to bemoan the decline of politics and falling levels of civic and political engagement, particularly among the young (precisely the demographic who have taken to using social media to make the kind of ‘micro-donations’ of political time and effort discussed in the first section), rendering political scientists ever more surprised by each new mobilization. Thus as well as contributing to the unpredictability of political participation, social media can provide a solution to understanding it and, perhaps, even to prediction. The new ‘political superstar’ of big data, Nate Silver, shot to fame when his use of big data enabled him to predict the election results in all 51 states in the 2012 US presidential election. His otherwise excellent new book, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction, discusses how various phenomena such as the financial crash of 2008, or the 2001 terrorist attacks, were not but might have been predicted. It does not discuss social media and political mobilization, or the Arab Spring, or any of the above. It is time, perhaps, to start applying the same methods to the even more messy and uncertain activity of political participation. As noted above, social media and digital

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systems are providing political scientists with the kind of data that natural scientists have. So just as social media inject instability, unpredictability and even chaos into contemporary political life, in a model of ‘chaotic pluralism’, it may be that they enable the employment of scientific models of chaos theory in natural systems (characterized by non-linearity and a high degree of interconnectivity) to understand a changed world and even to predict it, or at least identify underlying patterns. As political scientists, we enjoyed some jokes at economists’ expense over their inability to predict the financial crash of 2008. But post-2011, the joke has been on us. So perhaps we have some responsibility to make use of the massive potential that big data generated from social media provides to understand the changing face of contemporary political participation, to detect underlying patterns of political behaviour, and to aid policy-makers in using such data to provide a more ‘citizen-focused’ form of policymaking and service delivery.

Conclusion GERRY STOKER, B. GUY PETERS AND JON PIERRE

In this conclusion we explore three issues. First, are there any ‘in principle’ objections to relevance that stand up? Our answer is a clear no. Second, what is stopping political science being relevant and how could the chances of relevance be increased? Here our answer is more nuanced and reflects several of the issues raised throughout the book. Third, we conclude the book with a new manifesto for relevance. Here we echo some of the arguments made by David Easton in 1969 in his call for a credo of relevance but argue that rather than an implied trade-off between methodological rigour and relevance the two need to go hand in hand alongside a broad commitment to methodological pluralism.

The case for relevance There are some that hold the view that the job of political scientists begins and ends with their description and analysis of politics. Many political scientists view the connection between the discipline and the world of politics as appropriately detached: they are neutral observers of the political world. None of the authors in this book would question the idea that there should be some distance between political science and everyday politics since relevance is premised on the idea of a distinctive contribution stemming from political science. Yet the position of the authors and the editors of this book is that a discipline that studied politics but had nothing to say to those involved in politics or who might be involved would be failing. Political science is engaged with the wider world whether it wants to be or not, a point made more generally by John Gerring about social science in his contribution to this volume. Relevance is an already present issue as there is no such thing as a neutral or value-free political science. What is chosen to be studied or not 220

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studied is itself likely to involve some, at least implicit, value judgements. Beyond that there are always issues about the appropriate connection between empirical and normative theorizing that need to be considered. Political science in its everyday practice therefore has to be sensitive to the implications of its findings and arguments and the intersection of empirical analysis and normative judgement. By its very presence in a world of social choice, political science needs to be sensitive to the challenges of relevance. Not one of the authors in this book is suggesting that political scientists become moralists or constantly engage in normative arguments about the good polity. Nor do we think that political scientists do or should be expected to share a normative framing of political issues. In practice, rather like the rest of the population, political scientists have different views of political issues and values. That is as it should be, as individuals the political position of political scientists is a matter for them. But equally we do not think that the discipline should restrict itself to studying simply what is, rather than examining what should be. Some engagement with normative issues is inevitable. A number of the concepts used by empirically oriented political scientists, such as democracy or justice, are contested or disputed. You simply cannot avoid the challenge of relevance if you are studying an aspect of human society, as political scientists do. Moreover it would be odd indeed if there was no connection between the agenda of political science and the concerns raised in ‘real’ world politics. Political science should as part of its vocation seek not to pursue an agenda driven by its own theories or methods as if it were in a separate world, sealed off from the concern of its fellow citizens. Rather the problems of the political world as perceived, or at least as can be understood, by our fellow citizens should set the bulk of our agenda. We should be asking questions to which others outside the profession want to know the answer; and as, in different ways, Hay and Flinders conclude that political science should be better at promoting and communicating the relevance of its findings. None of the arguments presented for relevance in this book argue against rigour in the methods of study and analysis. On the contrary if political science is going to have any relevance it has to deliver more than good quality journalism and certainly something different to the vote-seeking speeches delivered by politicians. Parsons makes this point powerfully but is joined by many others in the book. Above all both the editors and contributors agree that it

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is the pluralism of approach embedded within political science that offers the best chance of achieving relevance in a variety of ways. Political science has to offer ‘science’ in the sense of an ordered, reflective and meticulous analytical practice, a point established by Hay and Parsons among other contributors to this volume, though it has to do so in a way that makes a virtue out of the variety of ways of knowing the political world. Following the shifting patterns of the daily news is not appropriate, but that does not deny the case for political science to pick away continually at issues of concern in modern societies. A focus of relevance does not demand a downplaying of developing the best means of investigating politics. Indeed methodological innovation is, if anything, likely to be simulated rather than hindered by such dealing with the intractable and complex challenges thrown up by ‘real world’ politics. There is nothing as practical as good theory, and theory can find no tougher test than achieving effectiveness in the world of practice. Moreover, as both Rothstein and Wilson point out, there are big issues about human welfare and the working of economies that affect all citizens and to which political science could and should devote more of its attention. Nor do we naively wish to deny, just as in other areas of expert knowledge, that the evidence may not be good enough to allow for clear findings to be identified. Causality in particular is indeed difficult to establish, and events in human society are always influenced by elements of contingency. But that should not stop political scientists making probabilistic statements that such and such an intervention is likely to achieve some outcome or other. This does not stop us developing accounts that allow scope for, and an understanding of, the role of contingency. Solutions do not need to be cast in the nature of ‘iron laws’. ‘Do this and all your problems will be solved’ is not a message we should offer our fellow citizens; and nor is it likely to be believed by them. But it should be possible for us to intervene in public debates, to offer tentative solutions to problems and at the very least to help to frame public debate.

Why is relevance difficult to deliver? Much of the advice about getting relevance right is couched in terms of improving the communications skills of political science. In this book, for example, Matt Flinders offers up in his chapter the

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idea of ‘triple-writing’ as part of a smarter approach to political science. The art of triple-writing sees research results presented, first, in traditional academic outputs like books and articles, and then, second, the research is captured in shorter note form that is written in a jargon-free way and made both accessible and of value to a range of user groups. The third stage involves making research available through short, sharp and even controversial articles for newspapers, magazines or popular websites. We would certainly endorse this advice from Matt Flinders, though many colleagues are already delivering on that agenda. This observation begs the question whether there are other blocks on relevance other than communication, and the answer from various authors in this book is a clear ‘yes’ – and they are moved to do so on the back of decades of analysis of politics. The judgement about whether to undertake a policy or political action revolves around not only evidence about whether it will work but also on its political acceptability, administrative achievability and its resource consequences. To demonstrate that ‘the science is right’ is really only the start of a policy decision, and even that process can, of course, be fraught with difficulty; but, beyond that, other decisions need to be made. There are always value choices in politics (what does society prize?) and above that there are the issue of realpolitik (are the votes there to support this measure?). If something is politically doable then the next issue is whether effective governmental or administrative action processes can be designed to achieve the political goal. Designing effective implementation strategies is by no means easy and can provide a major stumbling block to giving a policy idea the go-ahead. Finally spending resources on one thing means foregoing spending on another, and the opportunity cost of undertaking an intervention is always a feature of the choices involved in policy-making. Moreover the agenda of the policy process can be fast moving and difficult to predict, and unless a policy idea hits the right ‘window of opportunity’ – so that evidence meets policy interest meets political capacity to take action – then, no matter how good the science, it will not have an influence. If relevance is to be determined by whether a contribution is made to the making of public policy then political scientists are subject, as are all participants, to the play of power in that exercise. There may also be some internal blockages to relevance as identified by Gerry Stoker in his chapter with a lack of incentives for

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demonstrating the relevance of political science among political scientists. In addition, as Graham Wilson and Bo Rothstein argue, there may be times when political science has not offered enough in terms of grappling with pressing issues, such as the financial crisis of the post-2007/08 era or even more directly the determining qualities of good governance. Of course it would be difficult for any discipline to offer clear cut responses to such complex yet highly salient issues, but it is probably fair to say that political science has not always set for itself the agenda that our fellow citizens might have thought or imagined we would automatically address because of their pertinence to certain issues. Insularity is the enemy of relevance and the editors and authors here join the legion of other political scientists in arguing that it is vital to guard against it. In the roll-call of different sub-disciplines within the profession that occupies the second part of the book we are offered a complex set of mixed reviews. Brooks, Peters and Pierre, for example, in covering the diverse fields of political theory, comparative politics and global politics, show that there is plenty of work that does pass a threshold of relevance, even if there is plenty of work that fails to meet the challenge. It is difficult to say how much work should be expected to be at the highly relevant end of the spectrum, and it is fair to argue that work that gets the acclaim of being directly relevant often builds on the shoulders of work that might be less immediately engaging. The issue from the point of view of political science is whether the balance should be tilted more in favour of work with a stronger relevance focus; and the overall judgement of the editors and most of the authors in this volume is that most parts of the discipline could and should do more. One theme that comes through is that relevance is most likely to be achieved in partnership with others. The study of public policy as Howlett and colleagues argue has a lot going for it in terms of relevance, but the key to sustaining its impact is most likely to work through think tanks and various other intermediaries. The theme of working at one remove is also captured in the case made – by Craig Parsons for example – for achieving relevance through teaching and creating critically aware political actors. Finally Helen Margetts argues that if the advantages of big data analysis are going to be used to enhance the relevance of political science then it will require partnerships with other disciplines to reap the full rewards.

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A manifesto for relevance In the Introduction we quoted extensively from Easton’s Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association in which he set out a seven-point credo for relevance, a plea that, as we note since its delivery in 1969, has fallen on largely deaf ears. So, approaching half a century later, let us have another go. Of course our new manifesto for relevance may meet the same fate, but we hope it will not for two reasons. First, unlike Easton, our manifesto does not assume a tradeoff between relevance and social science rigour. On the contrary we agree with the explicit and implicit argument of several chapters in this book that in order to be relevant political science has to be rigorous. There is no point in political science offering second-rate scholarship, non-expert investigative journalism or political rhetoric, no matter how flowing and compelling. Its job is to offer science: organized, evidenced and methodical knowledge. Second, we do not want political scientists to sign up to any particular principles or ethics such as those embodied in Easton’s call to promote ‘humane values of civilization’. We editors have no problem with the substance of that particular call – it is just that its vagueness and cosy blandness does little to make the case for relevance. Rather, for us, the case for relevance is made by the embedded nature of political science, given its subject matter is such that you cannot avoid the challenge of relevance if you are studying an aspect of human society, as political scientists do. Our manifesto is not a call for a different political science that is engaged in a moral crusade. Instead we want a political science that produces high quality research tested through systematic and challenging peer review, yet one that is less insular and more willing to devote a greater share of its effort and commitment to the tasks of achieving relevance for its work. Too often over the past three or four decades political science has constructed for itself a way of working that appears to give little or no credence to the demands of relevance. If political science is therefore judged irrelevant by others, most of the blame, though not all, rests with the profession. It is in the hands of the profession to react; and we hope that this book shows how thoughtful and reflective that reaction can be. But ultimately political science will need to act differently, and so we offer our guide below. Our seven-point manifesto for relevance ends the book, and hopefully it will encourage greater relevance for political science in the future.

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1. Have confidence in the value of rigorous scientific analysis and so do not let relevance compromise high quality investigation but embrace it as a critical friend, providing tough and different challenges for your evidence and argument. 2. Develop relevance not as an afterthought in the construction of your research but put it at the heart of what you select to investigate and how you present and share the outputs of your research. Set your agenda in dialogue with others outside the profession and improve your communication skills using traditional and new media. 3. Offer solutions as well as analysis of problems and take on board some of the arguments for a design orientation in your analysis so that evidence and argument can be applied as thoroughly to the construction of potential answers as well as spelling out the challenges facing desired change. 4. Support methodological pluralism in the discipline as that variety of approaches most likely to deliver a rich array of relevant work that can reach out to a diverse group of potential users. 5. Be committed to work in partnership with other disciplines to improve the relevance of your work. Good and innovative work often is cross-disciplinary. Many issues have a ‘wicked’ or multidimensional quality, so again working across disciplinary boundaries enhances the chances of relevance. 6. Actively cultivate links with intermediaries as appropriate – think tanks, journalists, special advisers, political parties, citizens’ organizations and social media networks – in order to boost the relevance of your work. 7. Celebrate the role of teaching as a means of delivering relevance by encouraging a cadre of critically aware citizens and policymakers.

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Index Notes: bold = extended discussion or word highlighted in text; f = figure; n = endnote or footnote; t = table.

Aalborg (Denmark) 161 Aberbach, J. 110, 227 ‘abstracted empiricism’ (Mills) 67 academics: varieties of policy input 23t accessibility (Flinders) 65, 71, 74–7, 79–80 Acemoglu, D. 169, 183, 227 activist scholarship (Flinders) 66 Adler, E. 147, 227 administrative reorganization 185–6, 253 advisory boards 131–2 Afghanistan 32, 89–90f Africa 89–90f, 169, 173, 176, 178, 195 agencies 194–5 agency [empowerment] 174, 196 agenda-setting 22t, 123 AIG 108 Alexander the Great 137, 138 algebra 53, 57, 59 Almond, G. 78–9, 227 America’s Hidden Success (Schwartz, 1983) 107, 254 American Political Science Association (APSA) 1, 3, 9–10, 27, 82–3, 150, 156, 225, 227, 251 American Political Science Review (APSR) 6, 10, 97, 156, 234, 246, 255 American Science of Politics (Crick, 1959) 56, 67–8, 232 anthropology 62 anti-governmentalism 113 anti-politics 68, 69

anti-scientism 68 apartheid 87 Arab Spring 148, 176, 205, 218 Aral, S. 206, 227, 244 Aristotle 85, 137–8, 158, 172, 227 Arneson, R.J. 94–5, 96, 227 ‘art of translation’ 66 Ashley, R. 152–3, 155–6, 227–8 Asia 89–90f, 169, 173, 176, 180, 242 Augustine of Hippo, St 138 Austerity 165, 229 Australia xii, 90f, 131, 192 authoritarianism 218 auto-critique 51, 54 autocracy 184 Bair, S. 113 Banco Santander 114 Bank of England 109 banks 110 see also central banks Barbera, P. 206, 238 Barnett, M. 195–6, 228 Bauer, R.A. 96, 228 Bauer, Y. 96, 228 Bauman, C. 72, 228 Baumgartner, F.R. 112–13, 228 BBC 72, 245 Beard, C. 68 behaviour/behaviouralism ii, 69, 78, 105, 124, 182, 188–9 Behavioural Insights Team 218 Belgium 90f, 177 Berman, S. 103n Besabe-Serrano, S. 182, 228

263

264

Index

bicameralism 173, 257 big data viii, 15, 84, 203–19, 224 challenges 210–12 description 206 literature 229, 236, 240–1, 246–7, 254 promise for policy-making 208–10 public policy pay-offs 217–19 theory 216 big government 108 big ideas (trickle-down) 25 Billig, M. 69, 229 biology 46, 214 Bjørnskov, C. 101, 229 blue skies research 21, 145 Blyth, M. 106, 161, 165, 229 Boston 114 Boswell, S. 22t, 229 Bourdieu, P. 150, 157–8, 160–1, 229, 242, 247 box office sales 216, 247 Brazil 218 ‘bridge’ analogy 133 bridging (Flinders) 65, 71–4, 79–80 Brigate Rossi 193 Bright, J. 208–10, 229, 260 British Academy 116, 236 Brooks, T. x, 13–14, 136–47, 224, 230 Brown, J.G. 114 ‘Brunei’ [Negara Brunei Darussalam] 89f Brzezinski, Z. 24 Buhlmann, M. 101, 236 Burawoy, M. 66, 250 bureaucracy see civil service Burma/Myanmar 32, 90f Burrows, R. 207, 253 businesses 31, 174 Butler, C.K. 173, 239 Café Philosophique 143 California 212 Cambridge University 41

Campbell, D. 153, 156, 230 Campbell, R. 6, 230 Canada 131, 213 capitalism 105, 183, 236, 239 Caplan, N. 121, 125–6, 128–9, 230 Carr, E.H. 43–4, 231 Carrigan, C. 108, 231 Castellano, C. 216, 231 Castles, F.G. 92, 231 causality 28–9, 37–8, 48, 85, 154, 189, 222 definition debate 37 censuses 215–16 central banks 57, 108 ‘chaotic pluralism’ (Margetts et al.) xi, 205, 219, 246 child deprivation 87, 91, 239 Childs, S. 6, 230 China 87, 89f, 105, 192, 204, 254 Chwieroth, J. 161, 231 citations 144 cities 170 citizen participation 33, 245 citizens 1, 10, 34, 47, 62, 64, 100, 105, 116, 149, 204–7, 209, 211, 217, 219, 221–2, 224, 226, 246 citizenship 28, 141–2, 230 City of London 113–14 city-states 85 civic behaviour 32, 242 civil service and bureaucrats 25, 69, 92–3, 107, 131, 184–5, 187, 210–11, 237, 241 see also public administration civil war 46, 87, 91, 98, 178, 195, 244, 248 see also just war class 178, 181, 182 classic tradition 68 classical Bildung 41 clientelism 99 climate change 34, 140, 145–6, 190–1, 193, 195–8, 203, 230, 237

Index 265 Clinton Administration 113 coalition governments 175 Coburn, Senator T. 165–6 Coglianesi, G. 108, 231 cognitive science 207 Cohen, G.A. 95, 96, 231 Cohen, P. 70, 232 Cold War 148 collective action xi, 32, 34, 68, 174, 191, 196, 246, 249 Collins, R. 48, 232 colonialism 38 ‘Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ (Savage and Burrows, 2007) 207, 253 command and control regulation 107–8, 115 commissions 131–2 Commodity Futures Trading Commission (USA) 108 common-pool resources 32, 191, 196, 199, 249 communication 11, 25, 35, 52, 54–5, 63–4, 122–3, 127, 129–31, 221, 222–3, 22 see also accessibility communism 87, 167, 173 comparative advantage 5, 239 comparative government 75 comparative politics viii, 14, 169–89, 224 case selection 170, 189 contributions 172–80 limits of relevance 186–8 paradoxes 189 comparative politics: challenges to relevance 180–6 methodological individualism and RCT 180–2 non-manipulable variables 182–5 policy and administration 185–6 comparative research ii, 13 ‘computational social science’ 207, 211, 213, 244

computer science 213, 215 conceptual clarification 22t consensus 132, 252 consociational politics 177–8, 244 constitutional issues 8 constructivism vii, 14, 148–68, 198, 261 ‘eye-opener’ 161–7 context 31, 34, 160, 162–3, 167, 179, 187–8, 189, 191, 196, 204, 217 conventional wisdom 145, 146 Cook, T. 68, 232 Copenhagen meeting (2009) 190 Coppedge, M. 42, 232 corporate social responsibility (CSR) 107, 144–5 corporation tax 114 corporations 108, 111, 192, 203, 209 corporatism 178–9 corruption 68, 85–6, 88, 91, 237, 241–2 cosmopolitanism 137 counterfactuals 48 courts [of law] 182 Cowley, P. 22t, 232 Cox, R. 152, 232 Crick, Sir Bernard x, 4, 33–4, 56, 67–8, 75, 77–8, 79–83, 232 criminal justice 131, 140–1 crisis 61 ‘crisis of relevance/irrelevance’ 50, 53, 57, 61 see also relevance crisis critical theory 196 same as ‘post-modern constructivism’ 152 crowdsourcing 217 Cukier, K. 206, 246 Culpepper, P.D. 174, 232 culture 47, 142, 144, 239 curiosity 12 current events 105, 116, 117 Dahlberg, S.

93, 232

266

Index

‘daring to be Daniel’ 82 data collection 22t data deficiencies 133 ‘data deluge’ (Margetts) 209, 246 data-mining 206, 209, 217 deceit 74 decision-makers 175 decision-making 19, 122–3, 140, 170–1, 257 rational model 20 structuring 22t Delhey, J. 101, 233 democracy 34, 42, 138, 218, 245 ‘deep’ versus ‘shallow’ 176 generation of political legitimacy 92–3, 103 literature 227, 230, 232–3, 237, 240, 242, 248–9, 254 production of well-being 86–8 democratic deficit 22t, 235 democratic designers 6 Democratic Innovations (Smith, 2009) 33, 255 Democratic Party (USA) 109, 113 democratic politics 78, 80 democratization 14, 42, 86–7, 88, 93, 169, 178, 183, 185, 188, 232 comparative politics 176–7 Denver, D. 22t, 232 Der Derian, J. 152, 233 derivatives 105, 106, 113 Derrida, D. 40, 150 design 30–5 three moments 31 Designing Democracy in Dangerous World (Reynolds, 2011) 31–2, 251 deutero-learning 188, 258 Deutsche Bank 108 developing countries 100, 187, 254 development 116, 183, 245, 248, 252, 254 Dewey, J. 36, 48–9, 233 Diamond, L. 88, 233

‘Digital by Default’ 208 Digital Social Research course 213 digital technologies xi, 208–10 ‘dignity’ (Lasswell) 28 Dionysius II (Syracuse) 85, 138 Donovan, T. 22t, 229 Doty, R. 153, 233 Dreyfus, H. 158, 233 Dreyfus, S. 158, 233 Dryzek, J.S. 28, 233 Dunleavy, P. xi, 207, 233–4, 246 Dunn, W.N. 127, 234 Duvall, R. 195–6, 228 Duverger’s law 175 ‘earthquakes of change’ (Mills) 72 Easton, D. 9–10, 220, 225, 234 Eckstein, H. 42, 234 economic factors 37 economic growth 153, 233 see also development economics 13, 36, 42, 84, 86, 94, 97, 104, 115–16, 121–2, 157, 236, 241 modelling 58–9 ‘private language’ 59 see also neo-classical economics economists 98, 106, 219, 231, 243 education 48, 87, 100, 125, 131, 169, 212 Eek, D. 101, 253 Egypt 89f, 204 Einstein, A. 74 elections 84, 92–3, 153, 162, 192, 210 electoral cycle 199–200 electoral laws/rules 7, 175 electoral reform 22t, 229 electoral systems 15 comparative politics 175–6 electronic mail 205 Eleventh of September attacks (2001) 194, 218, 219 elite pacts 178 elites 6, 52, 59, 84–5, 88, 102, 155, 163–4, 176

Index 267 elitism 28, 56 Elliott, M. xiv emotion 67 empiricism i, 9, 23, 27, 29–30, 33–4, 60, 71, 92, 94, 96–101, 102–3, 107, 112, 121–2, 125, 129, 133, 153, 156, 161, 176, 186, 189, 198, 207, 221, 253 ‘endism’ (Gamble) 82 engaged scholarship 54, 67 engineering/engineers 31, 213 ‘enlightenment function’ (Weiss) 171, 259 entheos (inspiration) 71, 77 ‘entrance into fruitlessness’ (Mills) 70 environment xi, 9, 34, 114, 144–5, 190, 194, 258 epidemics/pandemics 190, 191, 210 epistemology 59, 78, 160, 201 see also knowledge Epstein, C. 156, 234 equality of opportunity 144, 252 Eriksson, L. ii, 181, 234 Estlund, D. 95, 234 ethics 139, 140, 143, 214–15, 225, 230, 260 Eulau, E. 28 Europe i, 89–90f, 92, 100, 101–2, 176, 249 Europe: Central and Eastern 173, 184–5 European Union 89–90f, 114, 163–4, 166, 185, 190, 194 democratic deficit 22t, 235 evaluation 26, 259 evidence 7, 11–12, 19, 20–3, 26–30 experience 22t, 27, 102 expertise 27, 42, 115–17, 127, 135, 140, 151, 203, 213, 229 experts 69, 222, 245 moderation of inter-party discussion 22t explanation 38

Facebook 204–5, 209, 211–12, 217 facts versus values 27–8, 67, 77–8 fairness 92, 101, 145, 227, 231, 241, 252 Fama, P. 106 Farr, J. 27–8 fate 82, 236 Fay, B. 39, 41, 235 Fearon, J. 2, 235 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 108–9, 113 Federal Election Commission 112 Federal Reserve Bank 108 Federal Reserve Bank of New York 110 Federal Reserve Board 215–16 federalism 170 ‘feedback loop of injustice’ 212 feminism 6, 30, 167, 257 financial markets 105–6, 162 Financial Services Agency (FSA, UK) 109 financial stability 13, 190, 191 Finnemore, M. 161–2, 235 Fischer, D.H. 43, 235 Flinders, M. x, 11, 12, 51–2, 54, 56, 57–8, 65–83, 221, 222–3, 235 ’flying’ metaphor (Shapiro) 70–1, 73 Flyvbjerg, B. 14, 157–60, 162, 235 Follesdal, A. 22t, 235 foreign policy 41 see also international relations formal authority 196 formalism 173, 181 Foucault, M. 40, 153, 158, 236 Fowler, J.H. 217, 229 Frankfurt 114 free market 167 free riding 197 Freeden, M. 80, 236 Freedom House 89n

268

Index

Freitag, M. 101, 236 Friedman, M. 59, 201–2, 236 Frumkin, P. 185, 236 Fukuyama, F. 93–4, 236 Fung, A. 144, 236 Future of Political Science (King, Schlozman, Nie, 2009) 3, 248, 251 Gadflies 152–6, 161–7 Galaskiewicz, J. 185, 236 Gamble, A. 82, 106, 116, 236 game theory 10, 160, 161 Gardiner, P. 37, 236 GDP 91, 100, 113 Geitner, T. 110 gender ii, 22t, 66, 85, 256, 257 general public 84, 85, 102 genocide 38, 43, 96, 228 genius 44, 74 George, A.L. 3, 237 Germany 193, 213, 257 Gerring, J. v, x, 11–12, 36–49, 173, 198, 220, 237 Giddens, A. 72, 237 Giest, S. vii, x, 13, 121–35 Gill, J. 81, 237 Gill, S. 153, 237 Gilley, B. 93, 237 Gladwell, M. 218, 237 Glasnost thesis 56–8, 59, 60 global financial crisis (2007–8) vii, 12–13, 58, 104–17, 208, 224 causes 105–6 ideas 106–8 interests 106, 110–14 institutions 106, 108–10 literature 231, 236, 246, 258 prediction failure 218, 219 what political science got right 115 global governance 190–202, 228 attempted 192–4 political science contribution 194–9

Global Governance (journal) 198 global governance deficit 190 global politics 14, 224 globalization ii, xii, 34, 114 Goel, S. 206, 238 Goldman Sachs 110, 112 González-Bailón, S. 206, 209, 215–16, 238 Goodnow, F. 68 Google 207, 209, 212 governance ii, xii, 6, 13–14, 22t, 32, 88, 140, 178, 184, 190–202 bad 91, 97, 103 deliberative model 199 good 91, 97, 115, 224, 249 literature 233–4, 236, 239, 248–9, 251, 257 see also quality of government ‘governance without government’ (Rhoses) 196 Governing Commons (Ostrom, 1990) 99, 249 government 116, 124, 135, 172, 241 government effectiveness 93 government service 24 government size 100 governments 20, 39, 107, 121, 134, 169, 171, 175, 177–9, 181, 183–4, 186–7, 196, 208–10, 215 ‘grand theory’ (Mills) 67 Great Depression (1930s) 104 ‘great divide’ (Weiss) 128 Greece 90f, 100 Greeks (ancient) 39 Green, D. 22t, 161, 238 Guzzini, S. 157, 238 Haas, E. 132, 238 Hale, S.A. xi, 205, 208, 212–13, 229, 239, 246, 260 Hall, P.A. 86, 183, 229 Halleröd, B. 87, 91, 239 Hammond, T.H. 173, 182, 239 handbooks 97–9

Index 269 Hansard 142, 208 ‘happiness’ 85, 86, 249, 257 ‘life satisfaction’ 91, 97 Hart, A.B. 68 Harvard University 215 Hay, C. ii, vi, xi, 12, 50–64, 68, 221–2, 240 health 85, 87, 92, 95–6, 100, 131, 239, 257 versus control of corruption 90f, 91 versus level of democracy 89f, 91 see also public health health care 201 health research 214 Heclo, H. 110, 240 Hegel, G.W.F. x, 128, 230 Henschen, D. 215, 240 Herod 79 higher education 66, 145 Higher Education Funding Council for England 52 Hindman, M. 206, 240 Hirschman, A. 8, 240 historical institutionalism 175 history 31, 39, 43, 142, 145–6, 162–4, 184–5, 200, 232, 235, 248, 250, 261 Hix, S. 22t, 235 Hobbes, T. 138 Hofstede, G. 184, 240 holism 181, 182 Holmberg, S. 86–7, 91, 93, 103n, 232, 240–1, 253, 257 Holocaust 38, 43, 96, 228 Hood, C. xi, 207, 241 Hopf, T. 157, 241 House of Commons 213 Howlett, M. vii, xi, 13, 121–35, 186, 224 publications 228, 231, 233, 241 human action: unintended consequences (Hirschman) 8 human nature 68 human rights 85

‘humane values of civilization’ (Easton) 9, 225 humanism 4, 34, 69, 149 Hutton, W. 144–5, 241 Iceland 110, 114 identity 4, 181 ideology 7, 42, 92–3, 103–4, 129, 163–4, 167 imagination of alternatives 167 immigration 7, 141, 145, 229 impact 6, 52, 74, 136–7 see also political theory ‘impact imperative’ 6, 66, 230 In Defence of Politicians (Riddell, 2011) 80, 252 In Defence of Politics (Crick, 1964/2000) 33–4, 75, 79, 80, 232 India 87, 244, 254 Indignados 209 individuals 174, 182, 185, 186, 189 inequalities/cleavages 87–8, 91–2, 114, 177, 183, 188, 195 infant mortality 85–6, 97 information 87, 91 Information Week 215, 240 Informed consent 140, 245 Institute for Government 70 ‘institutional analysis and development’ (Ostrom) 174, 250 institutionalism 166 ‘actor-centred’ (Scharpf) 174, 253 see also new institutionalism institutionalists 200 institutions 31, 86, 99–100, 101, 106–7, 108–10, 122, 124, 127, 134, 139, 141, 163, 181, 182, 184 comparative politics 172–5, 258 literature 228–9, 236–7, 239, 248, 250, 252–3, 257–8 output side 102 transnational 194

270

Index

intellectual history 145, 146 ‘intelligence of government’ 124 international development 41 international relations (IR) 6, 148–50, 153, 160 constructivist ‘turn’ 198 liberal theories 194 literature 234, 237–8, 241, 257–8 practice 3, 237 realist and neo-realist theories 194, 196 theory 3, 23–4, 237, 258 Internet 34, 203–5, 211, 213, 218 literature 238–9, 246, 248, 260 see also digital technologies interpretivism 40, 148–68 claims to relevance 152–61 interviews 72 Iran 89f, 210 Iraq 32, 89–90f Ireland 110, 114 Isaac, J. 3, 5, 242 Islamism 167 Italy 90f, 98, 100, 193, 251 J.P. Morgan 108 Jamal, A.A. 184, 242 Japan 89–90f, 257 tsunami (2001) 217 jargon 25, 57, 70, 74–5, 81, 150, 155, 164, 223 Jaschik, S. 1, 70, 242 Jefferson, T. 138 Jencks, C. 42 John, P. xi, 5–6, 32, 58, 205, 242 Johnston, M. 98, 242 journalism and journalists 8, 11, 14, 75–6, 150–1, 155, 156–61, 206, 221, 225–6 journals 4, 10, 23, 70–2, 96–7, 105, 144, 171, 198, 215 judges 42–3, 69 just war 139, 146 see also peace

Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (Sandel, 2010) 143, 144, 253 Kaiser, R.G. 109, 242 Kammen, J. 130, 242 Kant, I. 138, 242 Katzenstein, P.J. 162, 242 Kauppi, N. 157, 242 Kellstedt, P. 4, 242 Key, V.O. 171, 243 King, D. 103n Kingdon, J. 124, 133, 243 Kissinger, H. 24 knowledge 121, 122–4, 130, 134, 150, 201, 230, 245 causal versus descriptive 37–8 relevance 5 see also epistemology knowledge brokerage 128–33, 242, 247, 258 ‘mediation’ 129–30, 131, 133 see also policy knowledge utilization Kristof, N. 2, 243 Krugman, P. 84, 243 Kyoto Protocol (1997) 191–5, 197–8 labour 179 labour markets 174 labour statistics 215–16 Lakatos, I. 46, 153, 160, 243 Lamont, M. 86, 239 Landry, R. 126, 243, 249 language 74–5, 77, 177 see also private language Lapuente, V. 91, 244 Lasch, C. 41 Lasswell, H.D. 3, 27–8, 121, 122, 123–5, 235, 244 Latin America 89–90f, 173, 176, 178, 228 law 145 Lazer, D. 207, 214, 244

Index 271 leadership 191–3, 198–200 Learn to Write Badly (Billig, 2013) 69, 229 Lebanon 89f, 204 legitimacy 92–3, 94, 103, 237, 245 Lerner, D. 3, 225 liberal democracies 34, 179, 205, 218 liberalism 194, 227, 255 life expectancy 86, 87, 212 life sciences 214 ‘Life in United Kingdom’ Citizenship Test (Brooks, 2013) 141–2, 230 Lijphart, A. 177, 244 Lilla, M. 85, 244 Limbaugh, R. 156 Lindvall, J. 133, 245 Lipset, S.M. 183, 245 liquidity (Bauman) 72, 228 literacy 85–6, 97 local government 130–1 Locke, J. 138, 245 lobbying 128, 228 ‘logic of discipline’ 69, 252 London School of Economics and Political Science 104, 214, 235, 242 ‘London Whale’ 108 low-income countries 87 Lowell, A.L. 68 Lowther, E. 212, 245 ‘luck egalitarianism’ 95–6 Lupia, A. 5, 245 Lynd, R.S. 47, 245 Macedo, S. 27, 245 Machiavelli, N. 75, 139, 245, 251 Making Democracy Work (Putnam, 1993) 98, 159, 251 Making Social Science Matter (Flyvbjerg, 2001) 157–8, 235 Malaysia 89f, 177 Mandela, N. 87, 245

March, J.G. 174, 246 Margetts, H. xi, 15, 203–19, 224 publications 229, 233–4, 239, 241, 246, 260 markets 106 Marsh, D. ii, 61–2, 246 Marx, K.H. 48, 138 Marxism 178 maternal mortality 86, 87 mathematical formalism 53–4 mathematics 70, 214 Mayer-Schoenberger, V. 206, 246 McCarty, N. 106, 246 McCloskey, D.N. 36, 246 media 2, 11, 20, 24, 40, 116, 124, 131–2, 142, 146, 165, 223, 226, 238 medical sciences 31, 214 Meier, K. 81, 237 Melander, E. 91, 248 Mérand, F. 157, 247 Mercosur 190, 195 Mestyan, M. 216, 217 ‘methodological manifesto’ (Gill and Meier) 81 methodological pluralism 220, 226 methodology I, x, 2, 4, 23–4, 37, 48, 69, 74, 104, 126, 150–1, 154, 160–1, 164, 168, 170, 179, 187–9, 206–7, 217, 221–2 literature 232, 236, 243, 251 Meyer, M. 129, 247 Mid-Staffordshire Hospital Trust 210 middle-income countries 87 Migdal, J.S. 179, 247 Miller, J.D.B. 30, 247 Mills, C.W. 51, 65, 67. 68, 70–83, 247 modern constructivists 149, 161–3, 167–9 Money, J. 173, 257 Moneypenny, P. 68, 247 Moore, B. Jr 39, 41, 247

272

Index

morality 34, 65, 67, 71, 77–9, 80, 86, 221, 225, 240 Moravcsik, A. 163, 248 Morozov, W. 218, 248 ‘Mr Perestroika’ 156 Mukherjee, I. vii, xi–xii, 13, 121–35 multi-disciplinary approach 121, 122, 124, 213–14, 224, 226 multiculturalism 140, 249 Mumsnet 209 Munich (1972) 193 Murdoch, R. 154 NAFTA 190, 195 nation-state 85, 190, 194 National Endowment for Democracy (USA) 88 national interest 163, 191, 196, 259 natural sciences 46, 206, 214, 219 see also philosophy of science naturalist vision 48 Nebraska, 165 neo-classical economics 53, 58, 59, 94, 99 neo-liberalism 179, 231 neo-Marxism 70 neo-realism 194 Netherlands 177, 244 network analysis 135, 206 networks 6, 116, 208, 239, 251 new institutionalism 172, 174, 246, 250 New Labour 113 new public management 186, 187, 233 New York 108, 114 New York Times 70, 232, 235, 243 New Yorker 160, 237 Newcastle: Festival of Philosophy 143 Newton, K. 101, 233 Nietzsche, F.W. 138

non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 1, 24, 108, 131, 183, 192, 194 non-scientific approach 40–1, 41–2 normative approach 4, 27, 29–30, 33–4, 43–5, 55, 60, 92, 103, 122, 140, 149–50, 153, 175, 198, 213–14, 221, 237 Norris, P. 88, 91, 248 North, D.C. 59, 99–100, 248 North America i, 137 North–South (global divide) 194 Northern Ireland 177, 193, 252 Noveck, B. 217, 248 Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009) 143, 257 ‘nudge’ interventions 32, 217–18, 242 Nussbaum, M.C. 140, 144, 230, 248 Nye, J.S. 3, 24, 34, 70, 248 Oakeshott, M. 43 Obama, B.H. Jr 112 Öberg, M. 91, 248 objectivity 3, 43–5, 68, 77–8, 122 obscurantism 54, 56–8 ‘Occupy’ Movements 218 Olsen, J.P. 174, 246 O’Neill, O. 140, 245 ontology 53, 55, 59, 78, 160, 198, 201 optimism 77–82 Orwell, G. 77, 80 Ostrom, E. 6, 33, 99, 174, 191, 197, 199, 201, 249, 250 design principles 32 interest-based model 199 model of regime-building 199 Ott, J.C. 91, 249 ‘outside the whale’ (Mills) 81 Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics 97–8 Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics 99

Index 273 Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior 98 Oxford Handbook of Political Economy 98 Oxford Handbook of Political Science 98 Oxford Handbook of Welfare State (Castles, 2010) 92, 98, 231 Oxford Internet Institute xi, 209, 212–13, 215 Oxford University 41 Painter, M. 18, 249 paradigm shifts 50 Parekh, B. 140, 249 Pareto-optimal equilibrium 191, 197, 199 Paris xi, 114 parliamentary systems 173, 175, 239 Parsons, C. xii, 14, 148–68, 221–2, 224, 249 Parsons, T. 74–5, 249 participation 33, 98, 149, 245 peace 138, 193, 195, 242 see also war peer review 57, 58, 60, 154 perception 102 Perestroika 10, 14, 28, 52–3, 55–6, 59–60, 150–1, 165, 227, 247, 253–4 Perestroikan interpretivism 156–61 Perpetual Peace (Kant) 138, 242 Peters, B.G. viii, xii, 1–15, 61–4, 94, 103n, 169–89, 220–6, 249–50, 257 petitions 212–13, 245 philosopher-kings 138 philosophy of science 45, 148, 149, 261 see also science phronesis (Aristotle) 158 phronetic social science (Flyvbjerg) 158–9, 160 physics/physicists 213, 214, 235

Pierre, J. xii, 1–15, 61–4, 94, 103n, 190–202, 220–6, 250, 257 Pierson, P. 200, 250 Pinto, L. 160, 250 Piven, F.F. 27, 29, 250 Plant, R. 140, 250 Plato 85, 138, 230, 250 pluralism 111, 112, 179, 219, 220 policing 33, 212 policy analysis 134, 202, 258, 260 ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (Kingdon) 133 policy input: varieties provided by academics 22t Policy and Internet (journal) 215 policy knowledge utilization 124–7, 128–9, 134, 230, 243, 255, 258–9 ‘policy learning’ 123 policy research 13, 125, 259 linked to policy practice 121–2 ‘policy science of democracy’ (Lasswell) 3, 27–8, 235 ‘policy science of participatory democracy’ (Dryzek) 28, 233 policy sciences 13, 28, 122, 124, 244, 250–1 policy studies 121, 135 research relevance 134–5 policy-makers 1, 2, 5, 10, 12–13, 42, 47, 54, 57, 59, 64, 116–17, 125–6, 132 constructivism as ‘eye-opener’ 161–7 ‘false accusations against political science’ 6–7 policy-making 122–4, 230 evidence-based 186–8, 253 gap between theory and practice 134 partisan 27 power rather than evidence ‘determining factor’ 11, 19, 20–3 promise of big data 208–10

274

Index

policy-making environment 203–4, 212 political action committees (PACs) 111–12 political analysis ii, 179 Political Bubbles (McCarty et al., 2013) 106, 246 political culture 181, 183–5, 189 political debates 145 political disengagement 3, 71 political economy xi, 13, 92, 115, 165, 174, 257 political engagement (partisan) 78 political imagination vi, 12, 65–83 political outcomes 184 political parties 42, 92–3, 98, 112–13, 133, 143, 178, 182, 226 political science 14, 42, 50, 78, 80 agenda (versus citizen concerns) 8–10 American 2–3, 4, 232 bad versus good 55–6 big data era vii, 15, 203–19 blockages to relevance (challenged) 19–35 capacity for engagement and impact 6 contribution 122–4 ‘credo of relevance’ (Easton) 9–10, 220 differentiation from ‘common sense’ 8 embedded nature 225 empirical measures of relevance 96–9 ‘falsely accused by policy-makers’ 6–7 global financial crisis 104–17 global governance (puzzles) viii, 14, 190–202 ‘guilty as charged’ 84–103 heterogeneity 104, 107, 115 histories of discipline 15 level of analysis 174 literature 232, 235, 240, 242–4, 247, 250–2, 254, 256

methods 10–11 ‘myopia’ 8–9 ‘neutrality lacking’ (Easton) 9 ‘not a response-mode discipline’ (Hay) 64 ‘not value-free’ 220–1 versus ‘political studies’ 67 practice 12 problem-oriented 62–4 ‘produces knowledge, therefore relevant’ 5–6 ‘promise’ (Mills) 65 public interest defence 51 public role 3, 251; see also political scientists reconciling knowledge and power in public policy-making 122–4 research agenda 134–5 research rationale (explanation to wider community) 64 schools and sects (Almond) 227 scientific behavioural revolution 9 ‘seven sins’ (Rothstein 102–3 sub-disciplines 13 subject matter 93–4 theory and applied theory 63 ‘unsung relevance’ (human wellbeing) 84–103 validity (‘external’ versus ‘internal’) 171–2 vulnerability 7–11 ‘wobbly’ (Mills) 80, 81 political science: needs (Flinders) to become more amateur 80–1 daring 80, 82–3 optimistic 80, 81–2 Political Science and Politics 36 political science profession 2, 4, 78 histories 15 political science research 4, 242, 245 case-selection 170, 189, 220–1, 226

Index 275 communication of findings 11 evidence-based 7, 11, 19, 20–3, 41 methods 12 specialized topics ‘meet only indifference’ 8 political scientists comparative advantage 5 contribution to global governance 194–9 detachment 220 lack of incentives to make research relevant 11, 19, 23–6 ‘lateral form of influence’ (John) 6 ‘obligation to act’ (Easton) 9 prediction failure 218 role and public responsibility 12, 50–64 political silence (Zinn) 40 political system 179 core outputs 13 significance 13–14 political theory 94–6, 224 ‘bright future’ (Brooks) 146–7 ‘chequered past’ 137–9 impact (creation) 139–43 impact (demonstration) 143–6 impact (‘fact’ versus ‘value’) 138 importance 13–14, 136–47, 230 politicians 14, 54, 69–70, 72, 78, 84, 149, 192 biases 7 role 79 politics 30, 62, 79, 116, 122, 139–40, 141, 143, 146, 154, 222 administrative and institutional sides 95 ‘bad faith model’ (Flinders) 68, 69 and evidence 20–3 literature 232, 235–6, 240–1, 247, 259

as practised 136 public understanding 80 quotidian 220 sub-national 170 as understood 136 ‘politics of crisis’ 72–3 ‘Politics and English Language’ (Orwell, 1946) 77 politics of impact 66 Polity 89n Pollitt, C. 21, 23, 187, 250 ‘polluter pays’ principle 145 Polski, M.M. 174, 250 Porter, T.M. 48, 251 ‘post-autistic economics movement’ 58, 65 post-conflict situations 178, 217, 259 post-modern constructivism: relevance as gadfly/crank 152–6 post-modern constructivists 150, 154, 155, 168 post-modernism and postmodernists 14, 40, 150, 162, 168 claims to relevance 152–61 post-positivists 150, 160 post-structuralism: same as ‘postmodern constructivism’ 152 Pouliot, V. 157, 227, 251 poverty 44, 85–6, 88, 91–2, 97–8, 111, 227 Powell, J. 139, 251 power 11, 19, 20–3, 27, 88, 93, 101–13 passim, 121, 122–4, 153 ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ 196 literature 227–8, 230, 247, 251 typology (Barnett and Duvall) 195–6 practice 3, 12, 121–2, 134, 229, 235, 237 prediction/forecasting 26, 148–9, 218–19, 255

276

Index

PredPol software 212 prescription 26, 38, 188 presidentialism 173, 239 Prewitt, K. 3, 30, 251 Prince (Machiavelli) 75, 139, 245 principal–agent model 109, 259 privacy 211–12, 214–15 private language (of political science) 53–5. 56 private sector 174 ‘problem-driven research’ (Shapiro) 165 problem-solving 10, 21, 22t, 122–3, 174, 192–3, 196, 198 evidence-based solutions 11–12, 26–30 instrumental versus substantive goals 199 process-tracing 189 professional associations 24 professionalism 69 professionalization 56–7, 58, 74, 81 professors of politics 67, 71, 73, 78, 79–83 Promiscuities (Wolf) 159 property rights 100 proportional representation 175 Protecting Mothers and Soldiers (Skocpol, 1992) 98, 255 prototyping 31 Przeworski, A. 179, 251 psychology 37–8, 149, 181, 184 public administration 75, 81, 92, 94, 96, 102–3, 121, 185–6, 187, 202, 207 literature 232, 241, 249–50 see also civil service public choice theory see rational choice theory public debate 63 public engagement 139, 142–3 public goods 63, 99–100, 102, 196 public health 140, 255 quasi-market mechanisms 57 see also health

public interest 107 public intellectuals 24, 40, 66, 85, 86 public opinion 105, 124, 210 public policy xi, 13, 43, 57–8, 63, 95–6, 107, 112, 115, 117, 121–35, 139, 140–2, 143–6, 179, 182, 185–6, 202–3, 224 literature 228, 241, 243, 250, 259–60 pay-offs from big data 217–19 public sector 174, 185, 236 public services 31, 145 improvement 203, 209–12, 217, 219, 248 public spending 100, 240 punishment 140–1, 230 ‘punk politics’ 82 Putnam, R. 3, 98, 159, 251 qualitative approach 110 quality of government (QoG) xii, 88–92, 94–6, 97, 99–102, 231, 244, 257 see also governance quality of life 87, 254 quantitative comparative analysis (QCA) 179–80, 188 quantitative studies 10, 110, 156, 157, 179–80, 211 questioning false assumptions 22t race 177 radio 75, 146 Ragin, C.C. 180, 251 ‘Rallying Cry to University Professors of Politics’ (Crick, 1964) 80 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) 22t, 32 rational choice theory (RCT) 10, 57–8, 60, 68, 99, 180–2, 186, 192, 196, 199, 200, 201, 234, 240 rationalism 148–9, 166 Rawls, J. 140, 145, 230, 251

Index 277 reciprocity (Ostrom) 197, 199 Reagan, R.W. 42 real world 10, 21, 54–5, 62, 122, 129, 136, 138, 156, 158, 161, 169–70, 172, 179, 186, 198–9, 201, 221–2, 236 realism (IR) 194, 196 Realpolitik 223 redistribution 7 region 130–1, 177 regulation 107, 113, 114, 115 regulatory agencies 105–6 regulatory capture 107 rejection 55–6 relevance ‘attained’ versus ‘deserved’ 58–60 attribute to be bestowed by others 60 case for 220–2 communication (better) of case 64 contribution of sub-disciplines 119–219 defence (standard lines) 5–7 difficulty of delivery 220, 222–4 ‘divided by common language’ 51–3 manifesto 220, 225–6 maximization in era of big data 203–19 public policy (academic study) 13, 121–35, 202 and rationality 55–8 variability 5 varieties 171–2 relevance: blockages 11–12, 19–35 designing solution 30–4, 256 the avoidable (lack of incentives to make research relevant) 11–12, 19, 23–6 the obvious (power rather than evidence ‘determining factor’) 11–12, 19, 20–3

the thorny (‘doubts about intellectual case for relevance undermine its practice’) 12, 19, 26–30 relevance crisis diagnosis and resolution 61–4 semantics 61 see also crisis of relevance relevance debate 52 relevance of relevance v, 12, 36–49 religion 140, 177 Republican Party (USA) 109, 113 reputation 23, 211, 215 Rescher, N. 48, 251 research (specialized) 24 Research Excellence Framework 2014 143–4 REF 2013 (2011) 144, 251 REF 2013 (2012) 144, 145, 251 research funding 2–3, 4, 52, 58, 76, 136, 165, 201, 214 research institutes 127, 131, 132–3 ‘Responsible Research Agendas for Public Policy in Big Data Era’ (workshop, 2013) 215 Revolution 178 Reynolds, A. 22t, 31–2, 251 ‘rhetoric of reality’ (Zehfuss) 154–5 Rhodes, R.A.W. 22t, 196, 251 Ricci, D. 69–71, 73, 252 Riddell, P. 54, 56, 57, 70, 80, 252 Rio Summit (1992) 191, 193 ‘road to relevance’ (Flinders) 65 roads to irrelevance 66–71, 72, 77, 79 Roberts, A. 69, 252 Robinson, J.A. 169, 183, 227 Rockman, B.A. 110, 173, 227, 258 Rodrik, D. 84, 100, 252 Roemer, J.E. 95–6, 252 Rogowski, R. 7, 252 Romania 101

278

Index

Rome (ancient) 137–8 Rorty, A. 49, 252 Rose, R. 177, 252 Rote Armee Fraktion 193 Rothstein, B. xii, 12–13, 84–103, 184, 222, 224 publications 231, 239, 241, 244, 253, 257 Rubin, R. 113 Rudolph, S.H. 156, 157, 253 Rule, J.B. 48, 253 rule of law 93, 100 rules 32, 174 ‘runaway world’ (Giddens) 72, 237 Rwanda 38, 89f Sabatier, P. 21, 253 Salamon, L.M. 185–6 sanctions 197 Sandel, M. 142–3, 144, 253 Sanderson, I. 134, 253 Sartori, G. 173, 253 Sceptics Club 143 Scharpf, F.W. 174, 253 Schattschneider, E.E. 115 Schick, A. 187, 254 Scholars Strategy Network (USA) 116 scholarship/academic rigour 73, 80, 105, 107, 116, 221, 225, 226 Schlafly, P. 167 Schlozman, K.L. 112, 113, 115, 254, 258 Schram, S.F. 158, 254 Schumer, Senator C. 113 science 150, 153, 222, 243 definition problem 45 see also natural sciences science of social science 39–43 scientific perspective 4 Scott, J.C. 159 Sebba, J. 126, 130–2, 254 Second Treatise of Government (Locke) 138, 245

selection panels/tenure committees 20, 71, 214 self and other 50 self-knowledge 38 seismologists 116 Sen, A. 87, 145, 254 Seneca 137–8 sexual orientation 144, 248 Shapiro, I. 30, 62, 70, 73, 77–8, 159, 161, 165, 238, 250, 254 short-termism 105, 199 Shulock, N. 126, 255 Sigelman, L. 24, 255 Signal and Noise (Silver, 2012) 218, 255 Silver, N. 218, 255 Simon, H.: ‘science of artificial’ versus ‘science of nature’ 30–1, 255 Singapore xi, 89f single-member districts 175 single-writing 76 Skinner, Q. 145, 255 Skocpol, T. 69–70, 98, 116, 255 slavery 43 Smith, G. 22t, 33, 255 Smith, K.E. 132, 255 Smith, R.M. 159, 165, 250, 255 Snow, C.P. 126–7, 129, 255 Snowden, E. 211 social capital 3, 101, 184–5, 229, 242, 253 social care 131 social conflict: comparative politics 177–9 social construction 166–8 ‘social influence’ 216 social insurance 92, 100 social justice/injustice 9, 95, 103 social media xi, 6, 7, 203, 204–12, 217, 218–19, 226, 229, 246 social pacts 179 social policy 42, 44, 255 social science 8, 14, 21 academic curiosity ‘not sufficient justification’ 12

Index 279 contribution to society 46–7 definition problem 45 engagement and objectivity 43–5 foundations (possible) 45–6 ‘insider’ versus ‘outsider’ 149 institutional turn 99 literature 230, 235–6, 240, 245, 247, 251, 253–4, 259 naturalist or positivist model 37, 39–43 pragmatic inquiry 46–9, 251, 252 ‘promise’ (Mills) 65 purpose 49 relevance 12, 36–49 versus ‘social studies’ 67 Social System (Parsons, 1951) 74–5, 249 social transformation 42 social trust see trust social welfare 44 societies (successful) 86, 91, 239 society 46–7, 144, 240 socio-physics 206, 216, 231 Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959) 67, 71, 72, 79, 247 sociology 42, 45, 51, 65, 86, 121–2, 125, 157, 185, 207 literature 229–30, 232, 242, 247, 253 Socrates 154 ‘socspeak’ (Mills) 74 software 206, 212 solutions 30–4, 35 Soskice, D. 183, 239 South Africa 87, 89–90f South East Asia xii, 89–90f, 190 Southern Politics (Key, 1956) 171, 243 Spain 90f, 110, 114, 244 speaking truth to power 7, 21, 84, 163, 165–6, 260 specialization i, 8, 24–5, 53, 81 specialized advisors 131–2 Squires, J. 22t, 256

stakeholders, 32, 131, 145, 241 ‘stamps, flags, coins’ 171 Standard & Poor’s 91 state ii, 93–4, 102, 110, 115, 170, 181, 202, 232, 237, 253, 259 input–output perspective 93 state capacity 88–92, 94–6, 98, 99–100, 103 ‘statistical physics approach to social behaviour’ 206, 216, 231 Statistical Society of London 48 statistics and statistical methods 36, 42, 101, 127, 170–1, 179, 189, 251 Steinmo, S. 103n stock market 47 Stoker, G. ii, xii–xiii, 1–15, 61–4, 103n, 147n, 220–6 challenging blockages to relevance 11–12, 19–35 publications 242, 246, 250, 256 Stolle, D. 184, 253 structural transformations 83 structure–agency problem 181, 182 students i, 161–8 Sudan 32 Sunstein, C.R. 143, 257 Suriname 184 Sustainable Forestry Initiative 107 Svallfors, S. 92, 257 Svensson, R. 89n, 90n Swaziland 89–90f, 184 Sweden xii, 89–90f, 101, 244 Switzerland 90f, 169 Syracuse 85 Systems Analysis of Political Life (Easton 1971/1979) 10, 234 ‘talking human’ 74 Tawney, R.H. 68 taxation 87, 92, 10–0, 113–14, 186, 218

280

Index

teaching 151, 161–7, 168, 201, 226 technical tips 22t television 75, 113, 144 telos 48 Teorell, J. 87, 257 terrorism 193–4, 211 Tesco 211 Teune, H. 179, 251 Thacker, S.C. 173, 237 Thailand 218 Thaler, R.H. 143, 257 Thelen, K.A. 174, 257 theory i, 33–4, 42, 222, 234, 248 ‘applied’ versus ‘general’ 23 empirical–normative divide 29–30, 33–4 Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971) 145, 251 Theory and Methods in Political Science (Marsh and Stoker, 2010) 61–2, 246 think tanks 1, 24, 127, 131, 132–3, 143, 202, 224, 226, 238, 255 definition 132 serve as ‘mediators’ 133 third community (of policy system) 13, 127 Thomson’s Web of Science 96–7 Tickner, J.A. 153, 257 time 21, 144, 145–6, 164–5, 192, 198–9, 199–200, 201, 208, 250 Times (London) 70 Tobin tax 194 Tocqueville, A. de 100–1 Torfing, J. 195, 257 totalitarianism 138 trade 105, 116, 183 trade unions 174, 183 ‘tragedy of commons’ 174 ‘tragedy of political science’ (Ricci) 69–71, 73, 252 transition countries 100 transparency 144, 236

triple-writing (Flinders) 11, 76–7, 213 trust 68–9, 85–6, 131, 184, 233, 236, 253 truth 3, 44, 153, 155, 160, 162, 168 see also speaking truth to power Tsebelis, G. 173, 257 Tunisia 204 Turkey 218 Turner, S.P. 48, 258 Twitter 204–5, 209, 211–12, 237 two-communities metaphor 124–7, 128–9, 134, 230, 234, 259 ‘two cultures’ (Snow) 126–7, 255 Ukraine 195, 218 Ulubasoglu, M.A. 88, 233 uncertainty 148 understanding 38 unemployment 88, 96 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 148 United Kingdom x–xiii, 52, 54–5, 60, 68, 104, 107, 109, 116, 131, 137, 193, 203–4, 206–13, 217–18 citizenship test 141–2 literature 230, 239, 241–2, 246, 257 research impact 143–6 university network 208, 239 United Kingdom: Department of Work and Pensions 209 United Kingdom: Prism programme 211 United Kingdom: Treasury 110, 113–14 United Nations 144, 191, 194 global pulse initiative 219 UNESCO 144 see also WHO; World Bank; WTO United States x–xiii, 24, 27, 52–6, 59, 60, 68, 88, 89–90f, 94,

Index 281 103, 106, 116, 125–6, 131, 138, 156, 171, 192, 197, 204, 206, 213, 216 federal executive 110, 227 literature 227, 229, 231–2, 237, 242–3, 245–6, 254–5, 257–60 money and politics 110–13 presidential election (2008) 112; (2012) 217, 218, 229 public policy (hidden success) 107, 254 regulatory system 108–9, 231 universities 3, 9, 24–6, 126–7, 133, 208, 214–15, 239, 243–4, 259 University of Southampton xiv, 1 US Cabinet 110 US Civil War 98 US Congress 3, 105, 109, 111–12, 117, 242 US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (2011) 105, 258 US House Finance Committee 109 US National Science Foundation 165 US National Security Agency (NSA) 207 US Office of Controller of Currency 108 US Presidency 110 US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 108–9, 259 US Tempora programme 211 US Treasury Department 109 utility 37, 181, 186, 202 value added 41, 44, 47, 166 values i, 3–4, 19, 69, 79–80, 122, 129, 153, 184, 220–1 pro-market and anti-political 77–8 see also ‘facts versus values’

variables 172, 179, 189 non-manipulable 182–5 Verba, S. 115, 254, 258 vested interests 39, 110–14, 133, 166, 191–2, 194, 260 ‘virtue’ (Aristotle) 85 Vogel, D. 114, 115, 258 voters and voting 10, 30, 43, 99, 149, 217 voting age 22t, 232 Walker, D. 206, 227 Walker, R.B.J. 152–3, 155–6, 227–8, 258 Walt, S. 21, 23–5, 28–9, 258 war 37, 84, 153 see also civil war Ward, V. 130, 258 Washington 111, 117, 216 water 32, 87, 91 Weaver, R.K. 173, 258 Webb, B. 68 Webb, S. 68 Webber, D.J. 123–4, 128, 258–9 Weber, M. 42 websites 208, 223 Weingast, B.R. 109, 259 Weiss, C.H. 20, 21, 121, 123, 125, 171, 230, 259 Weiss, L. 114, 259 Welch, J. 217, 259 Weldes, J. 156, 259 welfare distribution 94–5, 227 welfare state 92, 98, 115, 183, 257 well-being 12–13, 222 dependent variable 93 quality of government and social trust 100–2 quality of government and state capacity 88–91, 99–100 relevance of political science vi, 12–13, 84–103 Wendt, A. 162, 259 Whitten, G. 4, 242

282 WHO

Index

(World Health Organization) 89n, 90n ‘Why I Write’ (Orwell, 1946) 77 wider world 83 Wikipedia 209–10, 212, 216–17, 247–8 Wildavsky, A.B. 7, 21, 84, 110, 121, 240, 260 Wilson, E. 41 Wilson, G.K. xii, 12–13, 104–17, 222, 224, 260 Wilson, T.W. 68 window of opportunity 20–1, 23, 34, 133, 223 Wolf, N. 159, 167 Wolff, J. 95, 260 women 86, 87, 230, 248 World Bank xii, 90n, 116

World Values Study surveys 101 Wright, V. 173, 250 WTO (World Trade Organization) 194 Yasseri, T. xi, 205, 212–13, 229, 239, 246–7, 260 Yesnowitz, J. 198, 237 YouTube 204, 205 Yugoslavia 195 Zehfuss, M. 153, 154–5, 261 zero-sum game 184 Zilak, S.T. 36, 246 Ziman, J. 45, 261 Zinn, H. 40, 41, 261 Ziˇzek, S. 40