Response to the final report of the APSA Strategic Planning Committee, reprinted for the members of the Public Policy Section

by Lawrence M. Mead

 

I have read “Planning Our Future,” SPC’s appraisal of the problems of the APSA.  I commend the committee on an incisive report.  It is thorough and notably well-written. 

I offer these responses.  Note that I address only certain issues, and I do so based on limited knowledge of the APSA’s affairs.  I have been an APSA member since 1978, but this is the first time I have seriously read any document of the organization or made any reaction to it.  I am a member of the Public Policy Section and, currently, a member of its council.

My main response is that the problems of the APSA run deeper than suggested in the report.  The organization’s priorities are askew.  I infer APSA’s values chiefly from the people it honors and names as officers, the sort of research it publishes in its journals, especially the APSR, and the institutional concerns that emerge from PS. 

On that basis, I would say that the APSA is interested mainly in political science as an institution, not in the bulk of its members or in what they do on a daily basis.  This gives the organization two tendencies:

·        Scientism: The APSA seeks to advance the discipline’s claims to be a rigorous and scientific enterprise on the model of economics or the natural sciences.

·        Populism: The APSA seeks to expand the number of political scientists and the availability of the Ph.D., especially to underrepresented groups such as minorities and women.

By promoting these values, the organization promotes the worldly influence of itself and the discipline.  Both tendencies are deeply imbedded in American culture, perhaps too deeply to challenge.  But, pushed to the current extremes, these values have created serious internal problems.  They’ve seriously damaged political science as an intellectual endeavor and a community of scholars.

The membership problem

The falloff in membership appears due mainly to scientism.  Many members are repelled by the research published in the APSR.  It is no longer accessible or meaningful to them.  More generally, APSA no longer represents them.  It appears that most of the leading figures in the organization and the APSR believe that:

·        Method is more important than substance.  The mark of leading research is that it rests on a methodology that one can specify and defend precisely, and which is more sophisticated than methods of the past.  Most published articles in the APSR are either game theory or pure political theory, because mathematics and the linguistic analysis of texts are the only methodologies of which one can give an exact account.  They can be reduced to rules.  The substantive importance or interest of the findings is secondary.

·        The goal of research is discovery.  Research should aim to uncover facts about politics or government previously unknown, on the model of natural scientists seeking new discoveries.  So the empirical articles in the APSR often address obscure subjects.  That is why the findings are new.  Again, the importance or interest of the results is secondary.

I disagree with these premises, and I suspect that most political scientists do.  I think substance is more important than method.  It is a greater contribution to knowledge to construct a compelling argument about an important question in politics than it is to achieve complete methodological coherence.  Indeed, few questions worth studying can be researched in an entirely coherent way.  Methodologies that are entirely defensible generally lack enough empirical content to be realistic. 

The current orthodoxy suggests that research can be reduced to a system, requiring only technical intelligence.  Actually, creative research hinges mostly on asking a good question at the outset and then coming up with an original hypothesis.  Those are arts that can never be reduced to rules.  It’s the verification of hypotheses that can be systematized to some extent,[1] but the intellectual content must be there in advance.  Thus, the most memorable research has intuitive elements of which one can never give an exact account.

I also think that few political scientists discover things in the manner of the natural sciences.  Because the subject matter of politics is largely open to untutored inquiry, at least outside closed societies, political scientists rarely uncover facts that are truly new.  Our evidence is mostly researchable with only journalistic methods.  We must compete with journalists and the man or woman in the street.  Lay people are always entitled to opinions about politics, as they are not about atomic physics.  We can be more precise than they, we can update old findings, and we can teach enduring realities to students.  But the notion, as recently claimed in PS,[2] that we can teach unknown truths about politics to government professionals is presumptuous.  There is never going to be National Institute of Politics in the way there is a National Institute of Health.

Much of the real work of political science is interpretative.  It is to appraise the implications of facts that anyone can see, or could see if they took the time to gather them.  What do the facts imply for the success of government or policy?  Many of the best-known older works in political science have this interpretive character.[3]  Today, their authors would be much less known.  The presentation and interpretation of well-known facts is also what most of us do in the classroom, even at the best colleges and universities.

PS appears to be popular because it expresses a more catholic view of what the profession does.  Also, the Washington staff operation of the APSA I’ve found to be admirable— always responsive and effective.  I think the APSA’s web page and the materials on it are fine.  I’d say the organization is responding well to the internet, contrary to the report.

But all this is not enough to offset the exclusionary message given by the leadership and honorees of the APSA, and especially by the APSR.  Until these institutions change to give a different message, I doubt the membership problem can be solved.  All the outreach and salesmanship in the world will accomplish little.  Why join an organization that apparently excludes you as unimportant and doesn’t value what you do?

The organization can continue on its present course only if it is prepared to say that the best technical researchers, and the departments they dominate, are political science—and write off the rest of the profession.  I think there are some in the APSA leadership and in the leading departments who would like to do this.  That way, I think, lies scholasticism and irrelevance, not to mention financial disaster for the APSA.

Scientism also drives the over-specialization of the discipline.  If good research is defined in terms of method and discovery, then one must concentrate on smaller and smaller slices of the political world to have any hope of discovering or saying anything “original.”   After a while, all one’s interlocutors are other super-specialists of the same kind, and one has less interest in participating in—perhaps even in joining—the APSA.  By promoting overly-technical research, the organization has helped to destroy its own foundation.  There no longer is a single discipline that one can call political science.

I know from talking to editors—even at academic presses—how distressed they are at the trends.  They foresee little audience for the hyper-technical research that is now in vogue.  They worry not only about the economics of publishing such work but its long-term value.  A gulf now separates “cutting-edge” research and anything that could be understood or valued even by well-educated lay people, let alone undergraduates. 

The APSR

The problems of our main journal also spring from scientism.  The APSR appears to be edited with a view to disciplinary ambition rather than findings of substantive interest or importance.  The contribution of most of the articles is methodological.  Most enhance or discuss the pretensions of the discipline in some way.  Few show any findings that alter one’s view of politics or government.  This is aside from the problems of accessibility posed by mathematical methods.  The political theory articles are the most accessible, but they too seldom relate to the real world.  The book reviews are far and away the most useful part of the journal.  They have more empirical content than most of the articles; they derive it second-hand from the books under review.

The exclusion of policy: The report speaks of “selectivity bias.”  That is, the APSR may publish little in certain areas because it seems to be uninterested in them, so few scholars in these fields submit, in a vicious cycle.  I can vouch for that.  As a public policy specialist, I’ve published four books (three of them prominently reviewed, including in the popular press) and about 25 academic articles, including papers in all the leading public policy journals.  Some of these publications are semi-popular, others aimed at technical and expert audiences.

But I’ve never even submitted a paper to the APSR.  The journal publishes very little touching on public policy, and what it does publish shows little awareness of actual government or public programs.[4]  If I were to submit to the journal I would expect, not only to be rejected, but to be told to go back to graduate school and learn game theory. 

The problem here is broader than the APSR.  I recently wrote quite an ambitious statistical analysis of the determinants of successful welfare reform in Wisconsin.  A leading political science journal declined the paper, saying this subject no longer fell within political science.  An excellent policy journal then accepted it with no changes at all.[5] 

Perhaps my version of public policy is itself a super-specialty that mainstream political science justifiably ignores.  Hardly.  I write about poverty, welfare, and other social policy problems, issues with an outsize influence on politics in America and in other developed countries.  I’ve gone overseas several times to speak at international conferences on these questions.  I have a sizable audience outside academe.  Some other policy specialists can say the same.  But all this counts for little to the APSA or its outlets.

PS recently published a symposium claiming political science should be credited with more influence on policy than members of Congress think.[6]  But the editor included no contributors who actually had had much to do with policy.  A few political scientists actually have influenced policy.[7]  A larger group studies how to improve the operations of government.  Presumably, these researchers have some claim to attention from the scholarly community.[8]  But the contributors to the policy symposium were all behavioral modelers.  After this, you would have to twist my arm to submit to either APSR or PS. 

Among political scientists, I’m probably the best-known expert on poverty and welfare reform.  My work is prominently cited in scholarship on these subjects and on social policy generally.  But I’ve been asked to review for the APSR perhaps twice in twenty years.  What work it prints on welfare is published without me.  I’ve reviewed more books for the journal than I have manuscripts.[9]  Meanwhile, I review copiously for all the policy journals, the National Academy of Sciences, foundations, and publishers.

Rational choice: To restore the popularity of the APSR, the most essential step is to break the grip that rational choice has on the journal.  The editors are overly impressed with the mathematical sophistication of these methods.  This is what suggests that they are interested in disciplinary climbing more than understanding.  I think the point of research is to fathom the real world, not to demonstrate that political scientists are smart.  Rational choice has actually contributed little to our grasp of politics.  The school also displays intellectual arrogance and intolerance for other methods.[10] 

Above all else, that arrogance must be disowned.  The president of the APSA and the editor of the journal should both state in print that rational choice has no lock on the discipline, and mean it.  That method should become one among many in political science, not the only one with pretensions to scientific status.  Concretely, APSR should no longer publish rational choice articles that are purely formal, without empirical verification.  That is mathematics, not science.  Political science is about the real world.

Broadening the APSR: The report suggests that the APSR consider publishing “high-quality peer-reviewed essays” that would “integrate cutting edge research for a broad readership.”  Mark Schneider announced at the Policy Section meeting at this year’s conference that the APSA council had voted either to open the APSR to such work or to establish a second journal that would emphasize such work by 2003.  This second journal might be modeled on the successful Journal of Economic Literature in economics. 

This would be an improvement.  Schneider, the new head of the Public Policy Section, thought that the new outlet offered particular opportunities to policy scholars like me.  I would welcome that.  But this step is insufficient.  Integrative essays are not themselves research.  They would just package the existing overly-technical literature for the uniniti-ated, a condescending enterprise.  The real need is to broaden what counts as research within the APSR itself.  One could also establish a second journal for research using less technical methods.  But it would have to stand on the same level as the existing journal.

I pass over the threat of the internet to the journals, about which the report says much.  This seems to me quite secondary to the problems of breadth and audience.  I see little problem putting the existing journals, or new ones, on line provided they remain well-edited and can be downloaded in the same format as now. 

The annual meeting

The problems with the annual conference stem from the populist animus of the APSA—its urge to generalize graduate political science to many more people than is realistic.  Too many people are trying to be political scientists, with the encouragement of the profession.  They aren’t all up to it, and there can never be enough academic jobs for all of them.

Access: The report mentions complaints that the conference denies sufficient “access” for scholars.  Indeed, I heard that, in the policy section this past year, a mere 19 percent of proposals were accepted.  Personally, I haven’t suffered here.  Since 1982, I’ve given seven papers and organized four panels at APSA conferences, besides other appearances.  I’ve been able to get a proposal of some kind accepted virtually every year I wanted to go.

I have the impression that the conference is unselective.  At least, quality is low.  Judging by what I see in the panel paper room, the vast majority of papers contain little of interest.  Most address very narrow subjects, many contain few findings, and some are quite badly written.  This appears to be partly because most of the authors are inexperienced—graduate students or junior faculty.  The meatiest papers are usually from senior scholars whose names I recognize.  That is not an accident.

Most of the panels on the official program also strike me as narrow and uninteresting.  Other people apparently agree.  The audiences at most panels are remarkably small, often smaller in number than the panelists.  On most panels, too, the participants present badly—in excessive length and detail, and without force.  Discussants dawdle over minutia rather than addressing major issues crisply.  Again, the usual reason is inexperience.  If one is interested in the subject, it’s a far better use of one’s time just to read the papers.

The situation has worsened noticeably since I began going to APSA conferences twenty years ago.  Today, during panel time, it’s the book exhibits and the bars that are crowded, not the meeting rooms.  The only sessions that draw meaningful audiences and generate any serious discussion are roundtables.  That is because their subjects are broader, the participants are usually more senior, and the giving and critiquing of papers is eliminated. 

Careerism: To expand access would only exacerbate these problems.  I think the problem with the conference isn’t low acceptance rates.  It’s careerism.  What drives applications to the conference isn’t the desire to give a paper and engage in serious colloquy with one’s peers.  It’s the drive to get a line on one’s résumé, hence to have a better shot at a job interview or tenure.  Secondarily, both graduate students and faculty often cannot get their schools to pay for their travel to the conference unless they are on the program.

That’s why so many of the papers are low-quality.  The motivation is all to get accepted, not to produce a decent paper afterwards.  For the same reason, some of the panel discussions strike me as semi-serious.  Even as a full professor, I feel some of the same incentives.  I put much more care into a paper I submit for publication than one I write for the APSA. 

The report says that a quarter of the current presenters are graduate students.  I think they cause most of the problem.  They’ve become entangled in an arms race where they have to get a paper accepted to have any chance for a job.  But they usually don’t know enough or have enough experience to write or present well.  What is in their interest individually is not in the collective interest.  After they’ve finished their degrees and led a few classes (or meetings outside academe), they’ll be much better conferencers than they are now.

Shrinking the program: I would recommend, not a larger conference program, but a smaller one.  Have fewer panels on broader, more mainstream subjects, more like the evening plenary sessions than the current daytime panels.  Members would still propose their own papers and panels to the program committee, but each section would have fewer slots than now.  The sections would assemble their own panels as now, but the subjects would be critiqued by the full committee for interest and importance before the acceptances went out.

I’d exclude non-Ph.D.s entirely from panels.[11]  They might co-author papers with more senior people, but they could not present.  Their exclusion would permit shrinking the program and raising quality and audiences without making the competition for the remaining members any worse than it is now.  Restraining the conference might also restrain over-specialization.  Secondarily, the APSA should go on record against the policy of paying travel to the conference only for people on the program.

As evidence that a smaller program can work, I offer the conferences of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.  APPAM is the principal organization of public policy specialists from academia as well as government.  I am a longtime member and, currently, a member of the APPAM council.  I’ve also sat on the conference committee three times.

At APPAM conferences, the program is much smaller than at the APSA.  This is partly because the organization is smaller, but also because there is more insistence on quality and audience.  Presenters tend to be senior people who know how to summarize an argument in less than 50 minutes, in part because many have government experience.  Graduate students typically do not present.  Presenters are also tightly policed by panel chairs, preserving time for discussion.  So the dialogue and interest at these sessions is vastly superior to what typically occurs at the APSA, even though the subject matter is often rather technical (e.g., program evaluations).

A small program works because careerism is restrained.  There isn’t much academic hiring in policy, so APPAM hasn’t been on the job track, and the conference is less affected by credential-hunting.  Junior people accept that they are there mainly to listen and meet people, not to give papers.  Indeed, the program is so selective that many senior people don’t get chosen.  Traditionally, senior people accepted that because they know chance is involved, and they’ll get in next year.  They have other chances to participate because the discussion is so good.  But recently, I admit, pressures have risen to allow more panels.  It’s coming, I am told, less from grad students than frustrated faculty.  That will degrade the conference.  APPAM may go the way of the APSA.  It’s an arms race that should be nipped in the bud.

Working sessions: I don’t think poster sessions are a meaningful substitute for panels.  They produce yet further fragmentation and, if possible, even smaller audiences.  Rather, I’d organize working meetings of paper writers on common subjects.  The members of each pool would send a paper on that subject to all the other members, say by a month before the conference.  Each would read the other papers, on the understanding that his or her paper was also read by the others. 

The groups would meet at the conference and exchange comments.  At these meetings, a senior person recruited by the program committee would preside.  There would be no presentations at all.  It would be assumed that everyone had read the papers.  Rather, the time would be divided among the authors present.  Each would have the floor for that time and receive comments from all the other participants, including the chair.  Ambitious chairs might organize a dinner for their group.

For these sessions, all applicants who were at least in graduate programs would be accepted.  There would be no competition and no academic credit gained.  But one could get serious feedback on one’s work and a chance to meet other people with common interests, including the chair.  I’ve advised a number of graduate students, all from outside NYU, who met me at the APSA or other conferences and expressed interest in my research.  These working sessions would formalize this sort of interchange.  Of course, senior scholars would have to be willing to act as mentors.

The job market

The report makes brief mention of the employment problem in political science.  Tenure-track jobs in academia are falling in number.  The output of new Ph.D.s from the graduate schools continues to outpace openings.  More should be made of this.  Here, too, populist goals have been taken to extremes.  The problem isn’t just that more political scientists have to work outside the university, where they are less likely to join the APSA.  It’s also that intense job competition comes to dominate the association and the profession.

The narrowing of graduate school: The scarcity of academic jobs creates harsh pressure for graduate students to publish very early, if they are to have any hope of making the short list for a junior academic position, let alone getting appointed, let alone getting tenure.  That in turn has made graduate programs narrower.  Students now primarily study econometrics or game theory.  Substantively, they specialize much more than formerly, preparing only one field for comprehensives, versus four when I was in grad school.  All of this is aimed at early publishing.  This weakens people as teachers and as scholars.

Thirty years ago, graduate training was less technical, but broader and deeper.  One studied little methodology but much history and theory.  One specialized in political science, but not much within the discipline.  Because one prepared multiple fields and methods, one learned what it meant to construct an argument in some general sense.  You were expected to put your own methodology together to do your dissertation.  The ability to build an argument up from basic premises and language, after all, was what made you a philosopher.  The need to find your own way meant that you might take awhile finishing your degree and publishing.  But what you did publish was likely to be original.  And you built up a store of knowledge, interests, and questions to form a research agenda for the future.

Today, there is much less intellectual investment like this.  Students seriously learn only one analytic method and, often, one data base.  This allows them to finish their degrees and publish quicker, but they also know much less about their specialty and related subjects.  They have less range and flexibility.  Since they know only one thing, they simply have to keep doing it, and hope it will land them a job and tenure.  Rather than develop their own method, they apply the one they are taught.  Rather than find their own question, they derive one from the work of their advisors.  They don’t know how to form their own questions for research later.  In short, they are technicians, not philosophers.  It makes for very narrow, scholastic research, of little interest outside the sub-specialty involved.  And it contributes to the hyper-fragmentation of the discipline. [12]

Meanwhile, the over-extension of graduate studies had debased the coinage of the Ph.D.  Most of today’s grad students lack the mental range, language abilities, and background knowledge traditionally associated with that degree.  That is one reason why graduate education has had to become narrower and more literal.  Students require the structure; few can build it themselves.  On the other hand, this style of training also produces scholars without knowledge and literacy.  It’s chicken and egg.

Loss of collegiality: The sheer number of political scientists also promotes the scientistic canons of research that now dominate.  For if intellectual standards have declined in a profession, some members will be very much better than others.  The most able strive to distinguish themselves from the rest.  An eclectic approach to methodology makes it too judgmental who is the best.  With quantitative methods, one can at least say more clearly who is the smartest, and the pecking order is clearer.  But our ability to understand and interpret the real world suffers.

Of course, competition within a profession is nothing new.  If the profession were more limited and selective, however, the main point of struggle would be getting into it.  After that, the members would face less struggle to find meaningful employment, and they could adopt a more relaxed, more collegial attitude to each other.  Rather than one-up each other, they could associate more as equals.  They could debate method and meaning, rather than use method to define an inner circle and exclude the bulk of the profession.  The whole atmosphere would be more intellectual, more collegial, and less scholastic.

To moderate these trends, the association should actively promote a better balance between the supply and demand of Ph.D.s.  The number of useful positions might expand if the discipline looked more seriously outside academe. 

Expanding opportunity in government: I think the chances for political scientists in and around government are considerable, and under-exploited.  As one of the few political scientists who went first into government, and then came back to the university, I know this first-hand.  When I went to Washington after graduate school, I had little difficulty in applying my studies to the policy problems I encountered.  I had to learn more quantitative methods, but the analytic and writing skills I had learned in graduate school carried over very directly.

Political scientists are too pessimistic about their ability to make it in government.  The usual view is that lawyers have an inside track for political and staff jobs, while economists dominate research and policy analytic positions.  The truth is that you don’t have to go to law school to learn enough law to function in government; a smart person can pick it up on the job.  You do have to go to school to learn the analytic skills that economists have.  But today, political scientists often learn some of the same skills, and they typically know much more about how government functions.

It isn’t commonly perceived, but lawyers and economists have suffered serious reverses in Washington in the last twenty years.  Attorneys have been eclipsed in many staff jobs by people with academic training.  Washington is becoming more elitist, and the ability to call yourself “Doctor” counts.  More important, economists have proved unable to deal persuasively with many policy problems.  They do well, not surprisingly, with problems where the market can be presumed to operate and behavior is economizing.  Behavior can then be changed by altering payoffs.  This situation prevails in much of economic and regulatory policy.  So in these areas economism reigns, and it should.

But in areas where there is no clear market, or behavior seems irrational, economists function poorly.  That is the case in much of social policy.  Schemes to overcome social problems with incentive schemes have showed slim results in welfare, employment, housing, health care, and so on.  That has driven economists out of leading positions in the poverty debate, to be replaced by sociologists, who have a more complex view of behavior, and political scientists (myself, Charles Murray, Richard Nathan, James Q. Wilson, etc.).

Above all, political scientists are much more comfortable dealing with politics and government.  When issues are strongly politicized, they deal better with the moral and value issues.  Economists once thought budgeting had a rational solution, but recent budget battles in Washington are contests of ideology.  Political scientists also know infinitely more about administration and intergovernmental relations, which are critical factors in implementing programs.  And it’s exactly political forces and administrative reforms that are driving change across much of domestic policy—in welfare, health, education, housing, the “reinvention of government,” and so on.  Political scientists are equipped to understand these changes as no one else can.[13]

In view of these trends, the hubris of the 1960s that economics could comprise a universal policy science has been abandoned.  The policy schools, set up largely by economists with such fanfare in the 1970s, have given up the idea that all students have to learn to solve public problems is some statistics and applied economics.  Policy curricula now include more political analysis and “public management,” which is not far from old-fashioned public administration. 

Today, more than ever, policy is institutions.  Policy must be built by harnessing public passions for change and building and rebuilding government itself.  Those who can say even a little about how to do that will inherit the government policy and analytic jobs of the future.  Policy science could be returning to its original home in political science, which truly is the master science.

Required changes:  Most of the political scientists who have done well in government were atypical of their craft, and most are toward the middle or end of their careers.  To recruit their successors, and increase their numbers, political science will have to change.

First, political scientists must give up their reluctance to make policy arguments about best policy.  Traditionally, they thought that to do this was somehow antidemocratic.  Economists lack the same inhibition, and that partly explains their influence on policy.[14]  Second, departments must recruit more and better students to enter graduate studies in the American field, the natural home of most students seeking policy careers.  American is now a small field in most graduate programs.  That largely means attracting more Americans, as against foreign students, into graduate studies.

Third, and most important, graduate training in political science must include more training in policy analysis and actual government—as against the modeling of government—than it does now.  That is, it must become more like the training that Masters students get in the policy schools.  It should include quantitative methods, but also a lot of more general learning about government, programs, and issues.  Too much focus on the technical should be avoided, because it is really more general reasoning skills and writing ability that allow one to make one’s way in staff jobs in the government.  Many analysts in Washington can run a regression equation; few can write an incisive memo.

Public policy research: At the doctoral level, this focus on policy analysis coupled with institutional knowledge must be raised to a theoretical level and made a basis for research.  This the policy schools typically do not do; their doctoral programs are small and economistic, in part because their faculties are still dominated by economists.  How to do it is one of the frontiers for political science.  Currently, most political scientists who study policy focus on modeling the policy process, on how policy is actually made.[15]  That focus is not really distinct to the policy field.  There is also not enough policy analysis in it to prepare students for governmental careers, where they will have to make arguments about issues.  Research on what policy should be is largely abandoned to the economists.

I think policy research within political science ought to join policy analysis with political analysis.  One first develops a position about how to solve an important public problem on the merits, and then goes on to investigate the actual politics of the issue.  Policy analysis provides a standard against which actual policymaking is judged.  Typically there will be a gap between the norm and the reality.  Government does not actually “do the right thing.”  What are the political or institutional reasons for that?  The final question is how the desired outcome and the policy process might be reconciled, for how that is done is at the heart of statecraft.

This combined approach takes breadth, but it has the virtue that it brings together research on policy itself with research on the politics of policy, which today are virtually separate.  It models policy research on the reasonings that policymakers themselves do as they strive to reconcile their desires with what politics and government can deliver.  Such writing, if one can pull it off, will be visible and influential, and it will yield insights about government distinctive to the policy field.[16]

Debunking the “applied”: A final intellectual change is that political scientists must give up thinking of work in government as “applied,” therefore of less value than the theoretical research that goes on in the academy.  It is true that some political scientists who go into government become so absorbed in administration that they lose all academic perspective on what they are doing.  But it is equally true that hands-on contact with government generates more new ideas for research than reading other people’s research in the academy is ever likely to do. 

Almost all the questions I’ve pursued in my work on welfare reform go back to anomalies I noticed while working for government or while doing fieldwork on welfare employment programs when I was at the Urban Institute.  Research on poverty, chiefly by economics, traced low work levels by the poor to economic forces such as welfare disincentives or the job market.  But in my interviews, staff suggested rather that it was a problem of public authority.  Mainly, welfare recipients would work if they were expected to by welfare itself, and not otherwise.  That located the impediment to work within government rather than the society.  This perception led to the arguments that I and others made for enforcing work, and from this a revolution in social policy eventually followed.

My point is that this was a contribution to knowledge, not only to policy.  We usually think that the way to solve social problems is to expand opportunity.  If, instead, it is to obligate people in new ways, our whole idea of how government relates to society must change.  The implications reach to the meaning of democracy and citizenship and other issues in political theory.  (A colleague and I are currently framing a panel proposal for the next APSA conference on this theme.)

I’m convinced that other findings as important as this remain to be discovered—provided researchers have enough contact with government for serendipity to occur.[17]  I know several former academics now working in government who have comparable things to say based on their experience.  Of course, they must somehow break the time free to carry out a systematic inquiry and write up their results.  That means moving to a think tank, getting a foundation grant, or—as I did—returning to academe.  But in principle, there need be no conflict between government service and continuing to function as a political scientist.

Even at a philosophic level, there can be no clear division between policy and scientific argument.  Today, all the social sciences pretend to scientism or positivism, but in fact all have resources that allow them to address questions of the social good.  Political science, because of political theory, is especially rich.[18]  Even the constructs that social science uses to understand the world tend to embody social ideals, against which reality can be appraised.  That is true of the conception of the free market in economics, the Madisonian political arena in political analysis, and so on.[19]  Thus, political scientists should see either academia or government as arenas in which to practice the master science.

Narrowing the supply: That said, I doubt that expanding job opportunities in government can entirely balance demand for new political science Ph.D.s with the supply.  So the APSA should also seek to downsize graduate programs to something more like the output that the job market can absorb.  I’m not sure how to do this.  A collective action problem is involved.  It’s in the interest of every program to keep churning out degree holders, but not in the interest of the profession as a whole.  Somehow, the available jobs have to be rationed around graduate departments at the point of admission to the Ph.D. and not later.

Conclusion

The APSA has allowed the profession to appear exclusive to its members, while at the same time it has grown too large.  The canons of research are too narrow, while entry into the discipline, including the conference, is too broad.  I think pretty much all the organization’s problems follow from these trends.  We need rather a profession that is more collegial within itself, but also smaller and more exclusive in how it relates to the outside world. 

Perhaps the trends are too deep-seated to contest.  Scientism is such a dominant value in Western culture that, perhaps, it is bound to take over all disciplines that pretend to make statements about reality.  Populism is so canonical that perhaps all intellectual distinctions, including the Ph.D., are bound to be democratized and degraded.  That amounts to saying that a true intellectual life is difficult to defend in American culture.  Other values are always more important.  What America cares about most deeply isn’t the life of the mind.  It’s subjecting the outside world to science and promoting social equality.  So Weber and Tocqueville said.[20]

But the trends must be resisted to preserve any meaningful profession of political science.  Rather than drive the trends onward, the APSA should at least lean against the wind.  We must become less worldly.

Lawrence M. Mead is a Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics, New York University.