I’m in waste management
“When you fly, never tell your seatmates you are a political scientist,” my graduate school professor once told me. “Say that you are in waste management.” I didn’t understand his advice at that time, but I soon got the point after several miserable cross-country flights.
Don’t get me wrong, I like talking to others about politics. My academic specialty is American public opinion, a field entirely devoted to what other people think. What I find odd is that most people are eager to talk politics, yet few care to hear what I have to say in return. Several years back, an acquaintance vented to me about how President Obama issued more executive orders than any other president in history. When I told him that this was not the case—Obama is near the middle of the pack when it comes to executive orders—the guy became incensed and showed me the tweet that proved his point. It wasn’t the first or last time my Ph.D. lost out to some random Twitter user.
It’s not just me. Political scientists generally don’t have much of a public voice, and when we speak out, people dismiss us as partisan hacks or Ivory Tower eggheads. I used to think that this dismissal of expertise was only reserved for political scientists and football coaches. I now see it as one of the defining trends of American politics (I’ll unpack this point in subsequent posts).
So, why don’t people listen to political scientists? I can think of several reasons:
1. Our work is inaccessible to the outside world. We use complicated statistical models that only a handful of people can understand, our prose is jargon-laden, and we focus on the minutia of politics. Simply put, our irrelevance is of our own doing.
2. There are partisan reasons to doubt what political scientists say. Democrats in the social sciences outnumber Republicans nearly 12 to one. As a result, Republicans contend you can’t trust our work.
3. Politics is accessible to people in a way that many other endeavors are not. Democracies expect their citizens to be knowledgeable about politics. By contrast, we don’t expect the average citizen to perform open-heart surgery or fix the fuel exchanger of a Boeing 777 engine.
4. There is also a danger in deferring to expertise because the experts can get things wrong. Political scientists are good at predicting a lot of stuff. However, we’re not especially good at telling you when ethnic conflicts will turn violent, when groups will resort to terrorism, when revolutions occur, or when wars start. It seems like we should get these things right, and when we get them wrong, it is only natural to wonder if academics know anything at all.
5. The general public and political scientists also view politics very differently. The average American typically sees politics through the normative lens of “what ought to be” (e.g., “we ought to cut taxes;” “we ought to do something about climate change;” “we ought to elect Donald Trump”). Political scientists, by contrast, are more interested in questions of “what is?” and “why is it so?” This non-normative focus puts the science in political science. So, we probably won’t tell you who you should vote for in 2024, but we can say, with pretty good accuracy, who will win.
These are all valid concerns that political scientists need to take seriously. Still, I think you should at least hear us (and other experts) out. After all, we do this for a living.
I realize that this might sound like a sob story about how no one listens to me. Maybe it is, but I think that political scientists have some important things to share, including:
Elections are not what you think they are.
Political campaigns rarely matter.
Money doesn’t buy a politician’s vote.
Negative media coverage rarely hurts candidates.
Direct democracy (e.g., initiatives, referendums, and recalls) and term limits are bad ideas.
This column will explore these and other things that many political scientists believe but you likely do not. Although I probably can’t convince you of the validity of these claims, I do hope to provide food for thought. And if you happen to see me on your next flight, I’m in waste management.
