At the Midwest Political Science Association meeting over the weekend in Chicago, the distinguished political scientists Arthur Lupia, Jeffrey Isaac, Marc Lynch, Rogers M. Smith, and Lynn Vavreck discussed “Political Science and The Public: It’s Time for More Effective Engagement.” As the program promised, the panel was “about what we are, and can be, doing right now to increase the public relevance of political science.”

Lupia began the panel with a forceful argument that the problem is not with the public. People are overwhelmed with data and opinion; the competition for their attention is fierce. The problem is with us if we fail to communicate effectively. Several panelists noted that we now have many venues for doing so, and political scientists are using them. Lynch, for example, is one of the leaders of The Monkey Cage, the Washington Post’s blog for political scientists; Vavreck is often on TV.

Everyone acknowledged pitfalls and challenges. Writing for the public may not help get tenure; it takes time; and it can seduce you into trading scholarly rigor for public attention. I think the general view was that scientific expertise adds value to public debates. As Vavreck said, there is a difference between data and anecdotes. Political scientists should contribute reliable data (as well as sensitive readings of texts) and not abuse their professional standing by merely opining or making empirical claims outside their expertise. “Stay in your lane” and “Don’t write about the Red Sox” were suggestions made from the podium.

I see important truth in all of this and tried to address similar issues in my Knight Foundation/Aspen Institute White Paper on Civic Engagement and Community Information. But I think Isaac hinted at difficult issues regarding expertise. A simplistic fact/value distinction would encourage political scientists to write about facts for public audiences and leave the public to draw their own value distinctions. That would be a neat division of labor. Unfortunately …

Research programs are always deeply imbued with values. That’s easiest to see when one objects to the values. Plenty of critics have complained that neoclassical economics makes assumptions about social welfare, choice, individualism, etc. that should be controversial. But to say that a research program makes normative assumptions is not to undermine it. Good research programs have good values. For instance, I know and admire the work of Smith and Vavreck, each of whom (in different ways) helps to expand the exercise of political power in the US. That is a good thing to do. But political science, as a science, cannot tell us whether or why it is good.

Further, research is always aimed at some kind of audience and has effects on that audience, whether anticipated or not. Neoclassical economics gives corporate lobbyists arguments to use when they influence voters and policymakers. Sociological research on community organizing should assist community organizers. Choosing an audience is a political act. Expertise cannot distinguish whether that act is good or bad.

One way in which experts affect audiences is by influencing their sense of what is known, what is knowable, and who can know what. For instance, the Monkey Cage announces, “H.L. Mencken said ‘Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.’ Here at The Monkey Cage, we talk about political science research and use it to make some sense of the circus that is politics.” That implies that a person who knows political science can make more sense of the democratic system than someone who doesn’t. I don’t disagree, but the implications are complex. Should people who don’t know political science not participate in politics? In 1914, the APSA’s Committee of Seven argued that citizens “should learn humility in the face of expertise.” Nobody would say that now, but why not? If there is expertise, and some lack it, shouldn’t they be humble in its face?

In short, as Isaac said, there is not one political science and one American public. Fairly diverse political scientists hold a range of normative positions and use a range of tools to various ends; and Americans belong to whole set of competing publics. Asserting that political scientists should communicate facts to the public overlooks complex political and normative issues: Which political scientists? (And who gets to be one in the first place?) Which publics? What kinds of facts? To what end?

Political science, as an empirical research program, can contribute to addressing these meta-questions. For example, it can help us to know which forms of communication are likely to affect which audiences by changing their minds on the issue or by raising or lowering their estimation of their own capacity. But it cannot tell us whether these results are good or bad.

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Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, has written a manifesto entitled Restructuring the Social Sciences. I have mixed feelings about it, but it’s a useful statement of influential trends in academia. King begins:

The social sciences are in the midst of an historic change, with large parts moving from the humanities to the sciences in terms of research style, infrastructural needs, data availability, empirical methods, substantive understanding, and the ability to make swift and dramatic progress.

King is highly enthusiastic about these trends, asserting that “the social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them.” Solving problems certainly sounds like a good thing. One important reason is that social scientists are moving from statistical models based on samples (for instance, surveys) to the analysis of comprehensive datasets, such as all the job announcements posted in a set of newspapers over many years, or all the votes cast in the 2012 election. Social science thus merges with the kind of research conducted by firms like Google and Facebook, government agencies like the NSA, and political campaigns. Disciplinary boundaries are blurred, as some of the most interesting basic research on society now comes from computer science and business rather than the liberal arts.

In practical terms, King advocates the creation of centers like his own that can provide a shared infrastructure and a meeting place for diverse social scientists who use the new techniques. He claims that qualitative methods will retain an important role, because the masses of data that ethnographers and interviewers collect can also be mined by data analysts.

He suggests that centers for social science can become dramatically more efficient and effective if they apply their findings about organizational psychology to their own operations. For instance, they need lots of IT support, and they can provide that in ways that mimic the best-practices of IT firms. Finally, King would make a place for theorists, arguing that their insights can be helpful. “Moreover, theorists don’t cost anything! They require some seminars, maybe a pencil and pad, and some computer assistance.”

I am left with several questions:

1. What does King mean by the humanities? He repeatedly describes the social sciences as moving away from the humanities, but what does he think they are leaving behind? Solo research? Unsystematic research? Unproductive research that doesn’t solve problems? (See my post on “What are the humanities? Basic points for non humanists” and also “Stop problematizing–say something“)
2. How successful are these new techniques, really? In particular, are they generating new general knowledge and frameworks, or simply ad hoc answers to very particular problems? King cites a study that used massive data to demonstrate discrimination against people with stereotypically African American first names. I think that is an important finding. But does it tell us anything about the underlying reasons for racial prejudice or general strategies that we might use to defeat it? (Cf. “Bent Flyvbjerg’s radical alternative to applied social science” and my “critique of expertise, part 1″)
3. What are the ethical pitfalls of increasing our power to track, predict, and influence human behavior? To put it another way, if the social sciences move from studying problems to solving them, are the “solutions” ethically acceptable in terms of their means, their ends, and the ways that they engage the affected populations? (See my “qualms about Behavioral Economics” and “the new manipulative politics: behavioral economics, microtargeting, and the choice confronting Organizing for Action.”) This, of course, is why the humanities remain so important in an era of big data.

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I’ve written a chapter for a forthcoming book edited by Harry Boyte (Democracy’s Education: A Symposium on Power, Public Work, and the Meaning of Citizenship, Vanderbilt University Press) in which I summarize evidence that colleges and universities can improve the economy by teaching their students civic skills and by being good institutional citizens, participating in local networks for community development.

I think the evidence is reasonably strong. But, like all empirical claims, it has exceptions and caveats. And even if civic education and engagement really do pay economic dividends, something else could work even better: for example, distance-learning, educational video games, or installing surveillance cameras in schools.

Thus we must be careful about how we generate, interpret and use empirical findings. This is where the emerging idea of Civic Studies provides guidance.

Often, social scientists presume that their job is to study a real-world practice that is already fully developed to learn whether—and why—it “works.” Usually they define success in terms of the objectives of the practitioners or their funders. In this case, we would ask whether college-level civic education and engagement generate what politicians demand: jobs.

But nothing simply “works.” Success always requires experimentation, assessment, adjustment, reflection, and new experimentation, in an iterative cycle. By the same token, many things can work if they are developed properly. One could start with civic engagement or with surveillance cameras in schools and improve either one until it enhanced students’ employment prospects.

In the best cases, the researchers who study a given practice are part of the reason that it works. They contribute to its development by offering their data and insights. They choose to work on this practice rather than something else because of a more fundamental commitment. I, for example, have studied deliberation. I want deliberation to work and I hope that the research that I produce will contribute to its success. I have no such commitment to surveillance cameras. I would not study them or strive to improve their impact.

The reason for my hope in deliberation is fundamentally moral. I think a world in which people reason and work together is better than one in which they achieve the same levels of security, income, or welfare without freely collaborating. Deeper down, I believe in a theory that the good life is a life of freedom, reflection, and mutual commitment.

Thus I hope that civic education and civic engagement boost employment because I am fundamentally committed to civic values. My colleagues and I seek evidence of economic benefit to persuade policymakers to support what they should support anyway. If the economic evidence is favorable, we will use it strategically to expand support. If not, our values and commitments should encourage us to improve civic education until it enhances democracy and also produces jobs. Regardless of the empirical results we find, we owe a public explanation of our core values.

A public defense of our values also yields criteria by which to assess the practices that we have been studying empirically. For instance, my chapter for Harry Boyte’s book is about college-level civic engagement (an input) and jobs (an output). I discuss the empirical link between the input and the output, as they exist today. But both are subject to criticism and change.

Today, many civic programs basically take the form of volunteering. But civic education can be reconceived so that it is less about volunteer service than about working on public concerns, where “working” implies serious commitment and accountability for results. “Public work,” in the phrase championed by Boyte and colleagues, means work that is done in public, by diverse citizens, on common issues. Reconfiguring civic education at the college level to look more like public work would satisfy core values that Boyte and colleagues have defended well. It might also strengthen the impact of civic education on jobs and careers. Students would be more likely to learn skills useful for employment if their civic experiences in college were more like paid work.

Meanwhile, jobs could become more public. A given job might serve only the interests of the employer and deny the worker any scope to address community problems in public with diverse other citizens. But even if the employer is a for-profit firm, the job can promote and encourage public work. For example, I presume that the corporate executives, government officials, and labor leaders who attended meetings of the Lehigh University board contributed insights from their daily work to the conversations about Lehigh and Allentown. They then brought ideas from those discussions back to their jobs. If that is true, they were doing “public work” in the Lehigh boardroom and in their own offices. Public work is obviously harder for low-paid service workers and low-ranking bureaucrats, but within many industries and professions, a struggle is underway to recover their public and democratic traditions.

If we made civic education into public work and also created jobs of greater public value, then the alignment between civic education and employment would be stronger and we would find more impressive evidence of economic impact. The data would then satisfy governors and presidents who want to see colleges produce jobs. More importantly, we would be building a better society and the educational system to support it.

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