Fascinating chart below. Interesting what policy makes assess as most useful: policy analysis, area studies, historical case studies, contemporary case studies.
V/R
Dave
What do policymakers want from academics?
By Erik Voeten
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September 25 at 9:00 am
We are delighted to welcome the following guest post by Paul Avey (MIT) and Michael Desch (Notre Dame).
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We are grateful to Henry Farrell and his colleagues at the Monkey Cage for their interest in, and thoughtful comments on, our forthcoming International Studies Quarterly piece. We would also like to congratulate them on their move to The Washington Post. Indeed, we are thrilled to be hopping on the MC bandwagon to engage in a longer discussion of our article.
It is not only the MC’s recent success, but also its original mission of connecting work within our discipline with broader audiences, that makes us so excited to have our piece the subject of discussion here. Indeed, of all of presentations at this year’s APSA panel on the National Science Foundation decision to restrict funding for political science, it was the presentation of MC member John Sides that we found to be the most constructive in responding to that challenge. It is our hope that our own work will help advance this cause as well.
In our piece, we try to ascertain what the most senior national security policymakers want from international relations scholars. An answer to this question matters because there has been recurrent interest among policymakers in drawing upon academic social science expertise in support of more effective national security policymaking. Despite this high-level interest, there has also been enduring frustration on both sides of the “theory-policy gap” with our inability to bridge it. One of the primary obstacles to building this bridge is the lack of systemic data about when and how academic social science is useful to policymakers.
As early as 1971, a National Academy of Science study concluded that “what are required are assessments of the research needs and resources from the point of view of policymakers.” (Advisory Committee on the Management of Behavioral Science Research in the Department of Defense, 1971:28)
Working with the Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) project at the College of William and Mary, we have taken a first step to get a better sense of when and under what conditions policymakers pay attention to the work of academic social scientists. Our unique survey of nearly 1,000 current and former national security decision-makers (of whom 25 percent responded) provides the most systematic evidence to date of what the highest-level national security decision-makers want from academic international relations scholars.
(Continued at the link below)
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