Dan Drezner over at ForeignPolicy.com has a good and sharp response to my post yesterday about how the events in Egypt and the West’s reaction to it are another sign of the continued irrelevance of modern political science. I asked readers to correct me if they thought I was wrong, and this is what Drezner says:
OK… you’re wrong. Let me correct you.
First of all, let’s clarify the division of labor in political science a bit. Crudely put, international relations focuses on the interactions between governments and other transnational and subnational actors. Comparative politics focuses on the domestic politics within countries.
To put this in the context of Egypt, it’s the job of comparative politics scholars to explain/predict when we should see mass protests and when those protests might cause authoritarian regimes to buckle. It’s the job of international relations scholars to predict what effects the regime change/authoritarian crackdown would have on both Egypt’s foreign policy and the situation in the Middle East.
Calling out IR scholars for not predicting the uprising in Egypt is like calling out a cardiologist for not detecting a cancerous growth.
All fair points. But I think Drezner misses my point. First of all, I’m not blaming what happened in Egypt on political scientists, as the title of his blog post implies. Rather, I’m saying that the methods with which the political scientists in our academy study the world are so rigid that policy makers imbued in such scholasticism did not appropriately react and make immediate policy decisions when our foreign policy was on the line. Simply put, our administration equivocated. I think they were too confused by all the “variables” involved in Egypt: the protesters themselves, Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hosni Mubarak, etc. In other words, their mental multiple variable regressions failed to produce statistical significance, so they sent mixed messages instead.
Second, yes, there are divisions of labor within political science; I should have been clearer in my original post. We should expect comparative politics to elucidate the domestic factors of unrest in Egypt and IR theory to put it in the Middle Eastern context. But therein lies the problem: a policy maker in our administration can’t craft the right policy when everything he is supposed to think about Egypt is compartmentalized into such rigid sub-fields. Okay, so we shouldn’t expect a cardiologist to detect a tumor, but I do think we need more general practitioners calling the shots rather than “specialists.”
Drezner goes on to show how some political science-trained experts like Robert Kagan and Michele Dunne had already predicted the unrest in Egypt. Again, he proves my point. Kagan and Dunne are think tankers more than they are political scientists. Go to their respective websites and read their latest work: you will not find a single regression output or mathematical model.
The good thing about think tanks in our country is that they, for the most part, do a great job helping political scientists “unlearn” everything they were taught in the academy. And we’re better off for that.
None of this is to say that we should shut ourselves off from structured thinking about politics and international affairs. In fact, it should be quite the opposite. Our political scientists shouldn’t be hiding themselves behind theoretical models. They should be studying more history, getting on the ground, doing qualitative research. But look at the syllabus of any graduate level “qualitative methods” class, and I guarantee you it will be just as mind-numbing as their quantitative methods courses.
Perhaps a few months or years from now political science will help us clarify what happened in Egypt over this past week, and it may even look back and dictate what should have been the correct U.S. response. But none of the academic work to date helped policy makers make the right decision when it mattered this week. And that’s the crux of this story. In crunch time, the political scientists failed to get the policy right. But that’s what we should expect: political scientists avoid the word “policy” like lab scientists avoid daylight.
