Over at the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward has a new piece arguing that political science is on its last legs. His main evidence is that Stanford University’s political science department has seen a big decline in undergraduate enrollment. This leads him to argue that students are fleeing political science because it is too concerned with arid mathematical exercises, and doesn’t concern itself nearly enough with questions of justice.
There are indeed grounds for criticizing political science’s weaknesses at public engagement. Unfortunately, Hayward’s inept article ends up illustrating exactly why good social science methodology is necessary for evidence-based-argument.
If you want to make even semi-convincing claims about what is causing what — for instance, to show that there’s a good case that boring technical work is driving undergraduate students away from political scienceen masse — you need to test them using boring, technical-seeming social science methodology.
An intuitive argument isn’t enough
Hayward has a PhD and an appointment at Pepperdine University, but would appear to be more interested in engaging in spirited debate about contentious partisan issues than in the formulation of hypotheses and careful testing characteristic of the traditional social sciences. That’s perfectly fine; I’ve argued with Cosma Shalizi that vigorous partisan dispute has much greater value than most people believe.
But ideological back-and-forth tends to socialize people into looking for arguments that are intuitively plausible given their political preferences. That’s not the same as claims that are right. Hayward’s claim — that students are fleeing political science because it’s boring and apolitical — fits all too neatly with his personal beliefs. There may be other possible explanations.
For example, it could be that students don’t care very much about whether political science is interesting or boring. Instead they care about getting well-paying jobs, and have seen political science as a good undergraduate major for people who want to go to law school. Under this theory, undergraduate enrollment would be declining because going to law school doesn’t look as financially attractive as it used to.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:12/18/2015