Tom Coburn Doesn’t Like Political Science

That’s funny, because Randy Newman’s “Political Science” describes his worldview to a T.

I totally agree with Cockburn.

I totally agree with Coburn and I am a political “scientist”!

I think the basic idea is that if you wire up Berkeley residents to MRI’s and have them listen to Rush Limbaugh, or put an erection-o-meter on homophobic Southern Baptist preachers and have them watch a gay pride parade, then you should be eligible for NSF funding whether or not what you are doing has political consequences. On the other hand just doing surveys or compiling newspaper articles doesn’t fit most people’s idea of science, Coburn is kind of right about that. It is just too hard for political scientists who care about political questions not to let that caring affect their measurements — though personally I would allow NSF funding for you all with the stipulation that researchers only study distant countries, preferably where they don’t speak the language, and try to come up with the kinds of real, unpredictable and un-fudgeable correlations that might be useful to participants in those countries when they hit the news. Stuff like “Henry Farrell discovered that Yuwanmei Party supporters are 30 times more likely to wash their stuffed animal collections than the Standard 5 Party” — and this leads to a brawl in their parliament.

@1: There certainly doesn’t seem to be any disadvantage to pushing ideas that political science has discredited (e.g. “Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 threw the election to Clinton.”). Now, having just finished a B.A. in political science, it occurs to me that this is also the case in a lot of PS classrooms. But I don’t think this makes the case for funding PS research weaker; the field needs to be more research-focused. There’s a continuum between the TV pundit who may do little but TV punditry and talking with other pundits, and the fact-based political scientist who is probably working in an academic setting with little direct publicity. In the middle you have people like Nate Silver, who produces some relatively hard PS work on something like applied roll-call vote models, as well as some basically unsubstantiated punditry, like his argument a few months ago with David Sirota. Silver uses a lot of work done by PS professors who are, like him, doing something approach real science. But he’s also swimming in the big netroots river.

PS and political commentary are sort of a stew of a) charisma-driven punditry, b) work, mostly statistical, that approaches hard science, and c) anthropological/journalistic work. Every individual in the field combines them in different proportions. There was a fascinating study a few years back that tested the abilities of various pundits to predict, in a binary/ternary way, the outcomes of certain future political events. Some of them demonstrated fairly strong predictive ability. Quite a few had little to no ability to make correct predictions. Several even demonstrated strong negative abilities. Sadly, they didn’t name names or ask much about the subjects’ methods.

Sorry, mistyped the link. It is:

who pour over this data

Hm.

s/b

a seemingly endless number of cats who paw over this data

I have to say, as a mathematician, the idea of reducing the number of people fighting over the size of the NSF pie, while reducing the pie by a smaller amount, is music to my ears.

Well, there is that.

First they came for the political scientists, but I did not speak up, for I was not a political scientist… Then they came for the philosophers, but I did not speak up, for I was not a philosopher… Then they came for the ethnic studies professors, but I did not speak up, for I was not an ethnic studies professor… Then they came for cultural studies, because it’s not like they do anything useful… Then, I dunno, maybe they come for the mathematicians because f— it, pi = 3 was good enough for God the Lord, now wasn’t it?

“But I also think that there are measurable Good Things (in terms of understanding how our system of politics works etc) that come from good empirical work in political science.”

Right. We like political SCIENCE but we aren’t thrilled about funding POLITICAL ‘science’. And poli-sci departments are rather noticeably filled with both.

As an Econ BA, and Political Science PhD Candidate, I think the argument can be made about marginal benefits of only 91 million spent over the past 10 years on Political Science versus the projects not funded in other “hard” sciences. I think those choices should be made by NSF, not Politicians in Congress.

One could argue that 91 million dollars is a cheap price to keep your intelligentsia at bay; especially one that explicitly studies how governments and revolutions work.

Frankly, if Tom Coburn thinks social science is such a waste of resources then he should work to ban state universities from teaching those courses.

Although I am an American with a Ph.D. in history from SOAS I teach in a political science department outside the US. I actually work in one of those far away countries mentioned by Timon. While I would like to see more grant money be made available to my department, I can understand the basic idea behind not including politics under the rubric of science. There really is nothing scientific about political science in the sense of the English word.

Indeed I think there might be an argument for breaking up the discipline and having historians cover political history. This is what I essentially do now. Philosophers could have political theory. Economics could have political economy, etc. Unfortunately right now a lot of “political science” seems to be impossible to differentiate from the greater social studies mush that anthropology and sociology too often produce.

Did Jefferson or Plato or Aristotle need government funding for theri political theories

Well, Jefferson was on the government payroll for much of his life. Plato was subsidized by the government of Syracuse, while Aristotle was subsidized by the government of Macendonia.

Sebastian 10.08.09 at 4:54 am

” Right. We like political SCIENCE but we aren’t thrilled about funding POLITICAL ‘science’. And poli-sci departments are rather noticeably filled with both.”

Sounds like Coburn-level empiricism to me.

I think Coburn is a crackpot. But his challenge is important. How would our discipline present an intellectual justification for itself as (1) not just the same thing as (if maybe somewhat more systematic and reliable) journalism and (2) still a scientific discipline, if not one quite like cell biology or astrophysics or plate tectonics whatever. By and large political scientists are wholly unprepared to undertake that task. Indeed, they look down on anyone who might so much as suggest that such basically philosophical questions have any merit. And, their ‘let’s just get on with the research’ attitude generates lots of real crap – and I mean crap in the sense that it does not come close to living up to its own criteria of success.

So, while Dr. Tom is nuts (what are his views on climate change or the theory of evolution?), the discipline has asked for this. On the one hand there are the ‘we are real scientist’ types whose notions of science reflect what in 1940 was clearly crack-pot philosophy of science. These folks tend to have a methods fetish – think Imelda Marcos only formal models and quantitative methods instead of shoes. On the other hand we have various luddites who, accepting the same bad philosophy of science, say ‘see we are not and cannot be a real science.’ These folks want us to draw some sort of inference from case studies but haven’t really a clue about what that would amount to. (And if you think case studies don’t require or sustain such inferences go back and actually read, say, the opening essay to Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures which is largely about the need to generalize.) If it is not general laws, then the luddites have some burden to offer an alternative account – which is notoriously not forthcoming.

By the way, yes I draw a check from a Political Science Department. And, for the lamentable political science majors, the textbook based courses you were spoon fed as sophomores and juniors have nothing to do with political science.

People do realize that NSF has- and rightly so- an entire Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Science? It’s not as though they accidentally funded political science by mistake because they were confused by the word “science”. Sheesh.

As a poli-sci grad student and part of a team that does political psychology work, funded in part by an NSF grant right now, I think this is ludicrous. There are projects in the poli-sci department that don’t fall under the purview of what we traditionally think of as science- political theory comes to mind- but those projects aren’t getting NSF grants. The projects that are going to the NSF for money are data-driven empirical research projects. They have every right to be funded by, as #32 points out, a “Directorate of Social, Behavioural and Economic Science”.

Interestingly enough, Sen. Coburn brings up the point that political behaviourists and political psychologists often pathologise conservatism, which we were discussing in the lab just yesterday. This is a potential problem for researchers, but it’s an issue that ought to be worked out in academia, rather than chopped off by a senator on a political tirade.

And, incidentally, I would really like to study the effect of youtube.com on the 2008 election… where was this conference held and where can I get the proceedings?

To be fair, the NSF website page they’re quoting doesn’t specify what they funded Krugman to do either. However, this grant was $100K in 1991 (or about $150K in 2009 dollars) to “develop and empirically test models of the location of production within countries”.

It’s a government work project. Political scientists have to eat too, y’know. WPA is not dead.

I mean, is cock burn really advocating an end to tax breaks for churches? Goood on him if so, but I suspect not.

Oh, I forgot to post my own amendment:

The U.S. Senate may have some interesting theories about democracy, but Americans who have an interest in democratic politics can turn to the House of Representatives, the White House, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who actually do shit and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.

Oh, I just love the possibilities of that paragraph.

Well if he’s an MD, he has obviously never spent more than five minutes with a biomedical researcher. I know immunologists who get sh!tloads of cash from all sorts of national agencies to work on something they know for certain will never have the smallest clinical application.

This is doubly funny, because not only were Plato and Aristotle funded by their respective governments, their governments were funded in large part by slave labour. So I guess following the cited logic that sort of makes for a good defense of slave-labour as well as government-subsidies for political science.

As a political science major I am somewhat disheartened by the pile-on. Of course, international security doesn’t matter at all, much the same way it won’t matter when the world erupts in nuclear war. Additionally, studies of democratization and social movements don’t matter at all because dissidents in Iran will never move against their theocratic government. I hope my sarcasm brings the point home, but just in case, Coburn doesn’t have a freaking clue!