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CHAPTER 1
The Relevance Question
PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE FATE OF SECURITY STUDIES
In his April 14, 2008, speech to the Association of American Universities, former Texas A&M University president and then secretary of defense Robert M. Gates declared that "we must again embrace eggheads and ideas." What he meant was that "throughout the Cold War, universities were vital centers of new research" and that at one time U.S. national security policymakers successfully tapped intellectual "resources outside of government" to help them formulate policy. One of the most influential civilian academic strategic theorists, the late Harvard Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, confirmed that there once was "a wholly unprecedented 'demand' for the results of theoretical work: scholars had an audience and scholars had access to classified information. Unlike any other country … the United States had a government permeable not only by academic ideas but by academic people."
While not all scholars and policymakers agree that the two sides of what many now see as a yawning chasm have had, or could have, much useful to say to each other in the realm of national security affairs, the vast majority do. Former ambassador David Newsom, for example, thought that of all the various groups in American society that could shape U.S. foreign policy, "the free realm of academia — the 3,638 institutions of higher education and the persons associated with them — should have the most knowledge and insight to offer to policymakers." MIT professor and long-term U.S. government consultant Ithiel de Sola Pool agreed that training in the social sciences constituted a useful tool for policymakers.
Despite this general optimism and the best of intentions among both scholars and policymakers "the relationship between the federal government and the social sciences generally and historically, while substantial in scope, has not been altogether harmonious," to put it mildly. According to a Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) survey, a regular poll of international relations scholars, very few believe they should not contribute to policy making in some way. Yet the majority also recognize that the state-of-the-art approaches of academic social science constitute precisely those approaches that policymakers find least helpful. A related poll of senior national security decision makers confirmed that for the most part academic social science is not giving them what they want. The problem, in a nutshell, is that scholars increasingly equate rigor with the use of particular techniques (mathematics and universal models) and ignore broader criteria of relevance.
Gates's efforts to bridge the Beltway and Ivory Tower gap thus came at a time when it seemed to be growing wider. In April 2009, Harvard professor (and former high-level State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence community official) Joseph Nye opined in a widely discussed article in the Washington Post that "the walls surrounding the ivory tower never have seemed so high." The gap between scholars and policymakers has widened in recent years, particularly in the realm of national security affairs, once a model of collaboration. And there is hard data undergirding this concern. As figure 1.1 shows, the willingness of leading international relations scholars to offer such policy recommendations has declined in absolute terms, at least since 1980 (and I will show well before then). In the view of many on either side of the chasm, the bridge between the Ivory Tower and the Beltway has become an increasingly rickety one, particularly as the discipline of political science has striven to become more scientific.
This development is puzzling: it flies in the face of a widespread and long-standing optimism about the compatibility of rigorous social science and policy relevance that goes back to the Progressive Era and the very dawn of modern American social science. As historian Barry Karl remarked apropos Charles Merriam, one of the founders of the modern discipline of political science, he "was an American activist of his generation before he was a political scientist; it was his reason for becoming a political scientist. He saw no conflict between activism and science. Indeed, he saw science as the essential precondition of a useful activism." And early in the Cold War at the height of the Behavioral Revolution in the social sciences, his student Harold Lasswell sought to craft a "policy science" that would apply cutting edge social science to the pressing policy problems of the day. Indeed, there is confidence that the effort to make the social sciences more "scientific" is not incompatible with relevance. Some scholars go so far as to argue that it is the sine qua non of real relevance. This confidence persists today.
I suggest that this growing scholarly/policy gap is the result of the professionalization of the discipline of political science. While the professionalization of a discipline and its increasing irrelevance to concrete policy issues is not inevitable, there nonetheless seems to be an elective affinity between these two trends. Rigor and relevance are not necessarily incompatible but they are often in tension, which is why social science's relevance question endures. Figure 1.1 demonstrates this point clearly: as the number of scholarly articles using sophisticated quantitative or formal methods increased since 1980, the percentage of them offering concrete policy recommendations — the core of policy relevance — has declined.
Second, many proponents of the scientific study of politics now eschew advocacy of particular policies on the grounds that doing so is incompatible with scientific objectivity. This is the widely embraced, but frequently mischaracterized, value-neutrality concern that the early twentieth-century German social scientist Max Weber first raised. Third, many pressing policy questions are not readily amenable to the preferred methodological tools of social scientists. Fourth, even when the results of these approaches are relevant to policy questions, they are often not accessible to policymakers or the broader public.
Finally, many scholars are overly optimistic that despite these other problems the pursuit of basic research will nevertheless produce applied knowledge via a "trickle-down" (or bubble-up) process. Adherents of this view believe that normal progress of science naturally confers policy benefits in much the same way that some economists are sanguine that economic growth will increase the wealth of the poorest, even if wealth is quite unevenly distributed. As F. A. Lindemann, Winston Churchill's wartime science adviser put it, "Every addition to our knowledge re-acts upon industrial problems and either suggests improvements in technical processes or at any rate prevents the waste of time entailed in attempting impossibilities." This reinforces the inclination of social scientists not to worry about whether their own work is directly relevant.
These factors explain why the more "scientific" approaches to international relations scholarship seem to be the least relevant, at least as measured by their practitioner's willingness to offer policy recommendations. The problem, in my view, is not so much that "scientific" approaches to national security policy are irrelevant by definition; rather, their current dominance is a symptom of a larger trend among the social sciences to privilege sophisticated method and universal models over substance with a resulting decline in policy relevance. As Kenneth Waltz warned, methods-driven work is likely to be at best only "accidently relevant." Method-driven and model-driven research do not cause identical pathologies but both can inhibit "problem-driven" research, the sine qua non of policy relevance.
This is by no means an argument against the importance of theory in security studies. Social science theories matter because they can serve as analytical models, rhetorical instruments, and cognitive frameworks for policymakers as they make and implement policy. The key is that scholars try to address problems of concern to the policy community and in a way that informs action. Rather, it echoes the caution expressed by participants in the Rockefeller Foundation Conference on International Politics, held on May 7–8, 1954, such as Reinhold Niebuhr who maintained that "the theorist's contribution would be very irrelevant if he thought that the only rational theory was one based on constants and general laws. Theory must be built into the knowledge of what the statesman faces."
This book seeks to answer social science's larger relevance question: How can it be both a rigorous scholarly enterprise while also engaging with society's practical problems? To do so, it engages four specific questions: First, what do I mean by policy relevance? Second, what has been the influence of academic social science on policy historically? Third, what explains variation in its influence over time? Finally, what, if anything, should be done to close any gaps between scholars and policymakers?
In general, policy-relevant scholarship limns the range of possibilities open to policymakers and assesses the consequences of the particular policy choices they make. While such work does not have to be produced directly for policymakers, it should offer concrete policy recommendations derived from systematic investigation aimed at shaping government action, directly or indirectly. The best metaphor for describing policy-relevant scholarship is that it provides policymakers (or journalists or citizens) with a mental map to help them navigate the real world.
Expectations for what sort of influence scholars can have need to be reasonable. The notion that to matter academic social science must regularly shape high-level national security decisions on a consistent basis is too demanding a standard. As RAND Corporation historian Bruce Smith noted, "The end product of most planning and research activities is not an agenda of mechanical policy moves for every contingency — plainly an impossible task — but rather a more sophisticated map of reality carried in the minds of the policy makers." Relevance, of course, is not identical with influence. A scholar can offer concrete policy recommendations but policymakers may not adopt them. Moreover, even if policymakers adopt these recommendations, that is no guarantee that good or effective policy will result. So relevance, in my view, is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for influence. And I will offer logical arguments and historical evidence to suggest that scholarly input into policy is more often than not beneficial and its absence detrimental to good policy.
Ascertaining the extent to which academic social scientists had influence on policymakers is challenging: As political scientist John Kingdon warned, the influence of academics on policy debates is often "hidden," and the secrecy surrounding national security decision making makes their role in national security strategy even more opaque. An internal State Department report highlighted the problem of measuring the impact of external research: "Actual utilization of this information is difficult to measure. Reports and written memoranda are distributed to approximately 500 officers in the Department and other agencies concerned with foreign policy and national security matters. The external research division answers some 35 telephonic queries per day. The continuing demand for this kind of information indicates a felt need on the part of policy and intelligence officers, but it is not known exactly how or to what extent this information is put to use in the actual formulation of policy or analysis of issues." Indeed, such an exercise shares the more general challenge of tracing the influence of ideas — the currency of academics — on policy outcomes.
To answer this second question about the influence of social science on policy, I explore the changing relationship between the discipline of political science and its subfield of international security from the early years of the twentieth century through the post–Cold War era. Most security scholars share Columbia political scientist Robert Jervis's view that there was a "golden age," during which "there were significant links between theory and U.S. policy." International security has long been among the most policy relevant of subfields within the discipline of political science. This is still the case today, at least as measured by the willingness of authors in top international relations journals to offer explicit policy recommendations. There is a significant difference in this regard, as figure 1.2 shows, between articles since 1980 dealing with security issues (i.e., weapons of mass destruction, weapons acquisition, terrorism, and military intervention) and other issue areas in the field of international relations.
Admittedly, this view of an academic-policy golden age is not universally shared. After serving in the Second World War, U.S. Navy anthropologist Alexander Leighton reported that the conventional wisdom among social scientists in government during the war was that "the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." More recently, highlighting the difference between U.S. nuclear declaratory policy (in which civilian defense intellectuals apparently had influence) and actual operational doctrine and war plans (where they did not), historian Bruce Kuklick presented the most sustained critique of the Golden Age nostalgia. One basis for pessimism that policymakers and scholars could have much to say to each other is that the former operate in a very different environment from the latter. Policymakers need good enough answers in a short period of time while scholars are hesitant to say anything about an issue until they are highly certain of their answer. Former director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff during the George W. Bush administration and Stanford professor Steve Krasner also blamed the "complexity" of the policymaking process for the inability of scholars to intervene effectively in it. Given this, so the pessimists maintain, it is futile to think that it can mesh with the academic enterprise.
Another objective of this book, therefore, is to look at a broader swath of history and a wider array of national security issues. Doing so reveals that, despite waxing and waning, there were periods in which social scientists had significant policy influence. Indeed, few people outside the subfield of international security are aware of the extent to which the U.S. government routinely reached out to academic social scientists to meet these challenges in the past. The history of the last hundred years shows that the scholarship of some social scientists did have real impact on presidential and senior policymakers' decision making at certain junctures, particularly during wartime and periods of crisis. Table 1.1 highlights some of these particular national security issues.
This book seeks to trace and explain this influence in national security policymaking, much as political scientist Robert Gilpin did for the role of natural scientists in U.S. nuclear weapons policy. The late Stanford political scientist Gabriel Almond pointed out that many of his colleagues ignored the history of the discipline, save for occasionally dismissing it as a prescientific dark age. In his view, this was part of an intentional strategy to shape the future of the discipline by ignoring its past. If the policy-relevant past was a period of methodological and intellectual stagnation, then moving forward, political science ought to eschew policy relevance in the interest of scientific progress. I want to reintroduce this history to challenge the facile view that policy-relevant security studies is an artifact of the discipline's prescientific era and also highlight the downsides for relevance of previous efforts to modernize and professionalize the discipline.
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Excerpted from "Cult of the Irrelevant"
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