Readers may think the question ridiculous, or with an obvious answer.  Personally, I think the answer to both is no (it’s not ridiculous and the answer is not obvious).  But I don’t have the political clout of a United States Senator.  Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma raised the question when he introduced an amendment to the appropriations bill that covers the National Science Foundation (NSF).  His amendment would defund the Political Science research program at the National Science Foundation.  He was rather quickly confronted by others who noted that one of this year’s Nobel laureates in Economics was supported by several NSF grants.  I do not expect his amendment to go anywhere, and it, along with the explanation, is an interesting example of political theater, wrapping a lot of traditional science advocacy arguments for more dollars around the need to divert an average of 0.15 percent of the NSF budget.  In this instance, Coburn resembles the definition of life described in Macbeth.

As part of his explanation, Senator Coburn went so far as to say

“Whatever jobs and products are created as a result of NSF spending would best serve the taxpayer if they were within the field of practical rather than political science, which really is not science at all.”

He goes on to claim that we already get useful conclusions elsewhere:

“Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters”

Theories, sure.  Useful theories?  Only from one of these groups.

With the exception of historians, Senator Coburn is completely off the mark here (though his citation of just one cable news network is interesting).  Each of these entities has their own particular perspective on political behavior, and their own specific interests to serve.  It’s pretty close to saying we get all we need to know about energy production from conservationists, environmentalists, and energy producers.  What ‘information’ they produce has a very short shelf life, and most of it is quite useless, typically offering recitations of opposing viewpoints with little comparison or analysis.

All this sound and fury, signifying nothing more than political grandstanding from Senator Coburn, does prompt a useful question, explored in this New York Times piece.  It’s not whether political science is indeed science (the methods and practices it uses in research demonstrate that it is); but how work in political science translates to application.  The article notes a schism of sorts within the American Political Science Association over the direction of the field.  Coburn’s attack is just one of many criticisms of the field of political science.  Usually they aren’t existential, but concern tradeoffs over research questions, precision, relevance, and influence.  David Ricci’s The Tragedy of Political Science is useful for finding out more about these problems, and he wrote over twenty years before Coburn tried to score a political point.

Political science research runs a greater risk, compared to other sciences, of becoming too specialized and too removed from the field it tries to study (the same can be said for economics, but it has had a much better scientific reputation and greater links to places of power).  Even when research with public impact is done, the translation to the public gets little notice or is done poorly.  Besides a West Wing episode involving Belarus seeking help from a professor in drawing up a new constitution, how many know about similar efforts in the real world?

The challenges political science faces in making its work relevant to the rest of the world are suggestive of the challenges other scientific fields have in communicating the value of their work.  The stakes are different, as other fields are more concerned with finding new researchers and more funding than asserting the relevance of their work.  But effective communication, and from where that communication should come from, are common to both struggles.