Should Political Science Be Relevant?

It's a question as old as the discipline, discussed at Inside Higher Ed. And it won't go away anytime soon. Political science for the most part is about theory-building and knife-sharpening. Even international relations can be an irrelevant pain sometimes, although I think my subfield has a better edge than American politics, surprisingly. (IR sees lots of cross-pollination from the super-scholarly literature to the popular magazines like Foreign Policy.)

In any case, the American Political Science Association held its annunal meeting over the Labor Day weekend, so there's some follow-up buzz going around. At the image below is Ezra Klein, and also Matthew Yglesias, c/o The Monkey Cage. And my sense is that's another reason for the dismal prospects for political science, the discipline's disastrous left-wing bias. Sure, there are lots of professors who are rigorous and avoid hack partisanship, but as a whole I'm underwhelmed by the attempts. (Henry Farrell was at APSA as well, and earlier this year, after repeated comments at Crooked Timber, he never did respond to my queries on the lies of the WikiLeaks Apache video — such otherwise smart people, so bogged down with deathly ideology.)

Anyway, an interesting passage from Inside Higher Ed.

One of the most biting critiques came from Bo Rothstein, the August Röhss Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. Rothstein, who noted that this was his 20th APSA meeting and who has held visiting professorships at several leading universities in the United States, said that maybe the problem to discuss isn't whether political science is relevant, but whether American political science is relevant.

"If you want to be relevant as a discipline," he said, "you have to recruit people who want to be relevant." And in this respect, he said, American political science departments are not doing well. He described his experiences teaching at Harvard University, where he was tremendously impressed with the 20 seniors in his seminar on comparative politics. One day he asked how many were planning to go to graduate school in political science and was "stunned" to find out that the students -- many of them idealistic about changing the world -- had to a person ruled that out in favor of law school. Their view was that "to be relevant, you have to have a law degree."

In Sweden, Rothstein said, this would be viewed as a terrible thing. "No such persons" like those Harvard seniors he taught "would dream of going to law school," which they would see as "boring and technical." But while American universities tell those who want to change the world to go to law school, they attract other kinds of students to grad school. "I was not at all impressed by the graduate students" at Harvard, he said. "They wanted to stay away from anything relevant."