Journalism and political science

Just adding a couple of thoughts to Rob and Scott’s comments on the Yglesias post on the absurd anti-incentives for political scientists to engage in public intellectual work.

First of all, it’s my impression that the professional incentive to avoid any sort of public intellectual work or engagement with the broader public in the discipline is not universal. I expect it’s common (although not hegemonic) in PhD granting departments, but in other types of departments, the value of such work would vary considerably. I’m still feeling out the situation at my new job, but I’m reasonably confident public engagement would certainly not be treated as a negative, and I imagine that while it couldn’t substitute for peer-reviewed traditional academic work, it would probably be viewed as a net-positive. I expect this is closer to the norm in most non-research university departments.

More substantively, I suspect a good amount of the distance between political scientists and political science scholarship and political journalism has little to do with a lack of communication or professional incentives for political scientists. As we’ve discussed on this blog numerous times, one major finding is the field of American politics is that elections are mostly a product of what are sometimes referred to ‘the fundamentals’–the state of the economy and the popularity of the incumbent. Evidence suggests that the quality of a campaign matters primarily at the margins. This is hardly cutting edge stuff, nor it is particularly difficult to understand. Indeed, I recall seeing this expressed in the works of at least two of the journalists on that panel.

This particular bit of knowledge about American elections is unlikely to penetrate political journalism in any significant way because taking it seriously would necessitate a significant shift in how political campaigns are covered. Indeed, it would render a good deal of the content of election coverage largely pointless–or at a minimum, less important than it is often claimed to be. Thus, it will continue to be ignored, even if political scientists talk about these findings in public forums and accessible ways. In making this observation, my intention is not to highlight the unseriousness or frivolity of political journalists. I would fully just about any professional group (including political scientists) to respond similarly to information that threatened the value of their long-establisnd practices of political journalism quite this directly, but the possibility remains, and I expect it will limit the extent to which political science findings to penetrate the world of political journalism substantially. Obviously, this doesn’t apply universally, and some wonkish blogger-journalist types, like Drum, Yglesias, and Schmitt, already can and do take political science research seriously, at least occasionally. But I would expect this trend to remain serious outside of the journalistic mainstream.