A short op-ed called “Scholars on the sideline” by Joseph Nye in the Washington Post kicked off an interesting (online) debate (read a reaction by Daniel Drezner here) on the relevance of political science/international relations for actual policy making.
Nye writes in his article that “not too many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory. (…) The fault for this growing gap lies not with the government but with the academics.”
If you are interested in that topic, here is a nice video featuring Daniel Drezner in a online debate with Joseph Nye on Blogginheads.tv. The debate and the issue are rather typical for the US and its academic tradition in political science- so it would be intersting to see whether this debate has any significance for European political scientists…
Boring. This discussion is so basic, that you could have it in a second semester course. Had to stop after 12 minutes; such kind of discussions are a waste of scientific time – because they advance neither science nor policy practice.
Of course it is boring: two academics discuss academic traditions…hardly an exciting thing to watch but being in politics department every day seems to have an effect on me…
As I said, this is a very typical US debate and two things I found interesting:
(1) Obviously the debate about ideological theory and how scholars, for the sake of the ‘scientific’ argument, work in academia and engage in public debates. The neo-cons are probably the case in point. In a way this is a very typical US phenomena which stems from several tendencies: generally there is a positivist dogma in US political science which affects IR as well, area studies have a different standing, think tanks play a bigger role in policy development, academic debate and career paths – and the US have a tradition of academics (in general) to change between jobs in academia and public/private sectors.
It seems to me that both, ideological theory and quantitative dogmas are increasingly seen as problems for political scientists to have alternative career options.
(2) A couple of things stroke me because we discussed that in our institute in recent weeks – Is it possible to have an academic career (in IR or political science that is) but at the same time be involved in other jobs (journalism, think tanks, maybe even government or administration)? And how does that affect career paths of younger scholars. Another thing is the theoretical position of a researcher and whether it is necessary to have one in the first place…
And I actually quite like the fact that 2 well known academics do a feature for a page called “bloggingheads” – don’t think academics in Europe would do that…