Research for Whom? Social Science and Public Policy

Abstract

Whenever someone dares to suggest that social scientists should participate in shaping public policy, their argument is usually either completely ignored or met with the counterargument that such activities would threaten the intellectual integrity of scholars. What counts in the academic careers of social scientists is peer reviewed theoretical and methodological development. For anyone seeking tenure at a university, anything you have done that smacks of ‘‘policy relevance’’ is not considered a merit; sometimes it is even treated as a liability (Lepgold 2000:75). Social scientists, therefore, tend to shy away from the question of what is, or what should be, the relationship between social science and public policy. A noteworthy exception to this generalization is Lisa Anderson, Dean of Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Her intriguing new book, Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the 21 st Century, provides a welcome critique and historical narrative of how the relationship between social science and public policy has developed in the United States. In particular, she unveils how US social science and a distinctively liberal public policy have gone hand in hand. She also shows how unaware social scientists have been of the ideological and material structures that have shaped both social science and public policy. These structures include the liberal ideals of individualism, the freedom of belief, and the right to question authority, as well as the material conditions that have waxed and waned between governmentally and privately funded research. In particular, Anderson is very critical of the ostensibly apolitical, technocratic perspectives that still dominate the curricula of most schools of public policy in the United States. This critical view does not, however, prevent her from seeing an important role for university-based social science. Anderson thinks social science can and should combine both peer reviewed methodological development and an openly political engagement in public policy issuesFwhether these are about health policy, immigration policy, ethnic conflict resolution, the war on terrorism, or any other political matter. Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power is grounded in a wide-ranging, multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between social science and public policy. Partly because of this, it is difficult to place the book within a specific genre, unless studies of the relationship between science and public policy can themselves be considered a literature (see, for example, Wildavsky 1987; Fischer 1990; Wagner, Wittrock and Weiss 1991; Weiss 1992). But Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power is also hard to place within a literature because of its form and presentation. Anderson is aware of this conundrum, acknowledging that ‘‘[s]trictly speaking, this is not a work of social science research, nor is it really policy analysis, although it draws on social science and advocates public policies’’ (p. x). The book looks more like the work of an historian or anthropologist than a social scientist, something that probably pleases