Some in the policy blogosphere believe that the American Political Science Review does little more than publish abstruse, small findings of no consequence to anyone other than fellow political scientists.  And, truth be told, a lot of political scientists think this to be the case as well.  

The APSR has had a pretty decent month contradicting that belief, however.  The February 2010 issue of the journal already touched on issues related to Rusia's counterinsurgency tactics in Chechnya. 

A different article has now cropped up in a front-page story in the New York Times by Julia Preston on immigration.  Preston reports that more immigrants are employed in white collar professions than previously thought.  Why is this politically significant?  Preston goes to the APSR for an answer: 

The data belie a common perception in the nation’s hard-fought debate over immigration — articulated by lawmakers, pundits and advocates on all sides of the issue — that the surge in immigration in the last two decades has overwhelmed the United States with low-wage foreign laborers.

Over all, the analysis showed, the 25 million immigrants who live in the country’s largest metropolitan areas (about two-thirds of all immigrants in the country) are nearly evenly distributed across the job and income spectrum....

The findings are significant because Americans’ views of immigration are based largely on the work immigrants do, new research shows.

“Americans, whether they are rich or poor, are much more in favor of high-skilled immigrants,” said Jens Hainmueller, a political scientist at M.I.T. and co-author of a survey of attitudes toward immigration with Michael J. Hiscox, professor of government at Harvard. The survey of 1,600 adults, which examined the reasons for anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, was published in February in American Political Science Review, a peer-reviewed journal.

Americans are inclined to welcome upper-tier immigrants — like Ms. Kollman-Moore — believing they contribute to economic growth without burdening public services, the study found. More than 60 percent of Americans are opposed to allowing more low-skilled foreign laborers, regarding them as more likely to be a drag on the economy.

You can access the Hainmueller and Hiscox article by clicking here.  Their argument:

Past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti-immigrant sentiment among native citizens: concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services. We provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide U.S. survey. The labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have skill levels similar to their own. We find instead that both low-skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low-skilled immigrants, and this preference is not decreasing in natives' skill levels. The fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low-skilled immigration more than poor natives, and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure (in terms of immigrant access to public services). We find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low-skilled immigration in general. In states with high fiscal exposure, poor (rich) natives are more (less) opposed to low-skilled immigration than they are elsewhere. This indicates that concerns among poor natives about constraints on welfare benefits as a result of immigration are more relevant than concerns among the rich about increased taxes. Overall the results suggest that economic self-interest, at least as currently theorized, does not explain voter attitudes toward immigration. The results are consistent with alternative arguments emphasizing noneconomic concerns associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about how the local economy as a whole may be affected by immigration.

To unpack that abstract a bit:   Hainmueller and Hiscox are arguing that material self-interest does not explain attitudes about immigration.  The findings suggest one of two possibilities:  simple prejudice, or concerns that low-skilled immigration negatively affect overall U.S. welfare. 

I confess I have some skin in the game on this question, as I've argued that American attitudes towards immigration would be affected by implicit realpolitik calculations of national interest. 

Still, this is the second time in less than a month that a quant study in the most recent issue of the APSR has yielded salient findings about a matter directly affecting public policy. 

Steve Walt weighs in with his take on the relative virtues of NSF funding of political science.  I agree with a fair amount of what he wrote (in particular the lNSF's listing of sponsored research outputs), but this part brought me up short: 

I can't say that I think Coburn is right, but I'm finding it hard to get too exercised about it. I say this in part because I think a lot of NSF-funded research has contributed to the "cult of irrelevance" that infects a lot of political science, and because the definition of "science" that has guided the grant-making process is excessively narrow.  But I also worry that trying to use federal dollars to encourage more policy-relevant research would end up politicizing academic life in some unfortunate ways.

Walt is conflating two different things here -- "policy-relevant research" and "publicly beneficial research."  Believe it or not, those two terms are not equivalent. 

The implicit assumption in Walt's post -- and a lot of discussions on this topic -- is that if political science research cannot produce policy-relevant advice, then it's not worthy of public funding.  But this gets the argument exactly backwards.  One would assume that, the greater the demand is for policy-relevant research, the more outsourcing and consultancies that would be pursued.  And, indeed, I think that's what you're seeing with the rise of political risk consultancies and the Defense Department's Minerva project. 

The key question to ask is whether that kind of policy-relevant research can be produced out of whole cloth or whether it rests on more basic research into political science and international relations -- the kind of basic research for which the free market would underprovide.  Much of Walt's own research, for example, rests on Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics.  This is a book that proffers very little in the way of useful policy advice.  It is, nevertheless, a foundational text; an awful lot of realists build their policy prescriptions off of that book (and, if memory serves, Waltz received NSF funding to write that book).  Speaking for myself, a lot of what I wrote in All Politics Is Global is cribbed from rests on Albert Hirschman's more abstract work Exit, Voice and Loyalty. 

There is a continuum of research that exists in the socal sciences.  One could start with basic theoretical work and empirical data collection that seems far removed from policy relevance, and move to finely detailed policy memoranda.  I don't think the latter are terribly useful without resting on the former -- and one could argue that it's the former that would be underprovided without NSF funding. 

But I could very well be wrong -- perhaps policy analysis can be done independently of more abstract theories and models of political science.  That's a discussion worth having.  Requiring NSF-funded projects to have immediate policy relevance, however, cedes way too much terrain to critics of the discipline.  As Nobel-Prize-winning Elinor Ostrom pointed out, sometimes it's worth investigating the seemingly obvious -- because sometimes the obvious is wrong. 

Matt Yglesias linked to this months-old Emily Stokes profile of Rory Stewart in the Financial Times.  Yglesias highlights one of the funnier metaphors I've seen about the trouble with advising policymakers:   

“It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says ...’"

OK, that's really funny, and I think it's true a fair amount of the time. 

On the other hand, I'm not sure that metaphor holds up all of the time.  Consider another possibility.  From the policymaker's perspective, getting outside advice is like trying to figure out which railroad track to take if you're driving a train.  There are three options ahead, and for myriad reasons each of the possibilities carries some risk.  So you go place an emergency phone call to the head of Harvard's Department of Railroad Studies to get a recommendation.  His advice?  "Why don't you go off-track?"  

To revisit a recurring theme on this blog, sometimes the outside advisor is right to make policymakers question core assumptions.  At the same time, however, sometimes a policymaker has neither the time nor the political capital to go back to first principles.  Sometimes they just need to know what is the least bad policy option.  And I guarantee you that having an academic tell them, "they're all bad policy options" is of no use whatsoever in that moment.   

I suspect that knowing which metaphor applies is more art than science, but I'm curious to hear from commenters on both sides of the policymaking divide.