Public scholarship in a degraded public sphere

An important new study shows that political scientists want to be relevant. But is there still a public sphere to sustain it?

Way back in 2016, I published an article in the American Political Science Association journal Perspectives on Politics entitled “Political Science in Real Time,” celebrating what I called a “golden age” of political science public scholarship and policy relevance. I had grown baffled by the perennial self-flagellation by political scientists about our irrelevance to policy debates and the broader public sphere, at a time when I lived in a world surrounded by so many of my colleagues doing just that. At the time, I had recently moved from editing Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel to the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage political science blog. In both venues, what I saw firsthand was hundreds and hundreds of my peers eagerly writing for the public, volunteering their time and energy to translate their expertise and publications into informing a broader public. As I put it then,

Today, there is a dense and eclectic ecosystem of political science and international relations-focused blogs and online publications, where good work can easily find an audience through social media. There are multiple initiatives dedicated to supporting academic interventions in the public sphere, and virtually every political or cultural magazine of note now offers a robust online section featuring commentary and analysis in which political scientists are well represented. This has transformed publication for a broader public from something exotic to something utterly routine.

This week, a team of scholars including Cullen Hendrix, Julia McDonald, Ryan Powers, Susan Petersen and Michael Tierney published a fascinating new paper in Perspectives on Politics entitled “The Cult of the Relevant: International Relations Scholars and Policy Engagement Beyond the Ivory Tower” evaluating the extent to which International Relations (IR) scholars actually attempted to engage in policy relevant public scholarship and what they thought about such efforts. And, surprise! It turns out that contrary to the perennial lamentations about our irrelevance, strong majorities of IR scholars do in fact attempt to engage in public scholarship — and nearly 70% of their sample of nearly 1000 scholars believe that it’s worth doing.

That roughly matches up with the findings of our Middle East Scholars Barometer survey last fall:

43% [of respondents] hoped to reach the policy community, broadly defined, with a huge disciplinary divide: 64% of political scientists and 28% of non-political scientists. But the disciplinary divide went the other way when it came to the broader public: 60% of non-political scientists sought to speak to the broader public against only 48% of political scientists. Huh. But then when you look at how they have actually disseminated their research, things look a bit different: 50% of political scientists, compared to 35% of the other scholars, have published an online post about their research in the last three years. Maybe that’s the Monkey Cage effect?

The Hendrix et al study is based on the TRIP Survey which the William and Mary team have been running for years, with 971 respondents to the battery of questions about public scholarship. They make an important conceptual move, shifting away from trying to prove policy impact — which is too high a bar, given the density and complexity of what goes in to the formation of policy — towards instead measuring the efforts at policy engagement and public scholarship. Given the realities of academic careers, they suggest quite reasonably that scholars will prefer to engage in public scholarship for which they can claim credit on their annual reports - with high visibility but low time investment activities such as Monkey Cage pieces being the modal preferred output. They also hypothesize that junior scholars, under greater pressure to produce peer-reviewed publications and rightly cautious of antagonizing senior scholars who might decide their tenure, will produce less public scholarship than senior scholars. And they expected a gender gap, given the disproportionate abuse women tend to face online.

What they found is very robust public and policy engagement by IR scholars across the board. 68.7% of their respondents engaged in media appearances and 63% wrote op-eds or contributed blog posts, while sizable numbers reported engaging in other forms of policy work such as consulting. Senior faculty were slightly more likely to engage in public scholarship than untenured faculty, but more than 50% of the latter reported doing so at least a few times a year. They found virtually no gender gap, contrary to their initial hypothesis. And they don’t do this primarily for career reasons, at least narrowly defined: only 31% said that “their university currently values policy engagement in the tenure and promotion process” even though 63% said that it should. In short, the conclude, “the evidence indicates that some form of relatively frequent policy engagement is the norm, rather than the exception, among IR scholars.”

So is it time to declare victory and move on? Afraid not. Because over the last few years, I feel like political science public scholarship has taken a step back, largely due to developments in the broader public sphere. The golden age of public scholarship has sort of been buried in an avalanche of [censored], and while there’s still a lot of admirable efforts — like, say, the return of old school blogging here on Substack — things don’t look nearly as bright for scholarly engagement as they did a few years ago.

The platforms that enabled scholarly publicly engagement have taken severe hits. The Monkey Cage, which Hendrix et al literally use as their proxy for interest in public scholarship, has gone on indefinite sabbatical after the Washington Post stopped hosting it and other independent blog-type sites. Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a shambling, rotting zombie, its animated corpse still shambling around searching for brains to eat but rapidly shedding body parts through the ending the verification of accounts and most content moderation while promoting right wing content; most of its longtime users are actively seeking a replacement, with little success. Social media platforms popular with younger audiences, like TikTok, are manifestly unsuitable for public scholarship (at least for people who can’t dance as well as me or have my encyclopedic knowledge of Taylor Swift lyrics). Substack-style newsletters can only go so far as a stand-in for a functional public sphere. There’s still plenty of great stuff out there, but there’s been pretty severe degradation of the new media ecosystem which sustained it and brought it to broader publics.

The degradation of the platforms is matched by the calculated assault on expertise and the rise of attention-seeking “influencers” (academic or otherwise) rewarded for having controversial “takes” on everything, everywhere regardless of whether it lay in their area of expertise. That’s always been a feature of the public sphere, of course, and it isn’t always a bad thing — much of the appeal of the old-school blogosphere, after all, was its inverting of hiearchies and shattering the power of the gatekeepers. But it’s not the same as public scholarship in the sense of bringing deep scholarly expertise to broader publics, enriching and informing debate when those issues find themselves on the public agenda or bringing marginalized but important issues onto that agenda.

Our public sphere never lived up idealized Habermasian ideals, obviously. The online Syria narrative wars of a decade ago would have fit in quite well today. But things do feel very different now compared with a decade ago, especially since COVID. It’s hard to locate authentic debate or norms of reasoned discourse in the massively scaled campaigns against vaccinations or the horrific, ghoulish targeted harrassment against transgendered individuals and LGBTQ communities more broadly. In the Middle East space, government-led disinformation campaigns and bot swarms rendered social media virtually unusable — and, with the growth of surveillance tech and transnational repression, at times actively dangers (RIP Jamal Khashoggi). Academics and other analysts have taken real abuse and paid real costs for online engagement during, say, the absurdities of the long years of the anti-Qatar campaign, the systematic harrassment of Iranians deemed insufficiently hawkish, or pretty much anything related to Israel and Palestine.

This isn’t a public sphere into which as many academics would enjoy intervening, or finding much success attempting to do so. Don’t get me wrong - some, even many, individual academics have thrived in that space. But it’s not necessarily someplace that an untenured junior scholar would want to venture — or where even those of us who have pushed the political science profession to valorize and value public scholarship would be willing to push them (hence my discomfort with formally including public engagement in tenure, promotion, or merit expectations).

It’s frankly impressive that so many academics still want to try to engage in public scholarship despite all of these disincentives. That shows how deeply an ethos of public scholarship has taken root, after so many decades of complaints about our disciplinary irrelevance. I certainly haven’t given up, and won’t give up, on the mission of promoting public scholarship. At this point, the Hendrix et al findings reinforce my sense that the issue is no longer convincing political scientists of the value of public scholarship, or even training them in how to do it well. It’s trying to find some way to recover a genuine public sphere open to meaningful public scholarship, whether through the launching of new platforms or through new forms of engagement. If there’s any original thoughts out there, we could use them right now.