Bridging the Theory-Practice Divide in International Relations

Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, Michael J. Tierney, Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, Michael J. Tierney

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781626167834
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

There is a widening divide between the data, tools, and knowledge that international relations scholars produce and what policy practitioners find relevant for their work. In this first-of-its kind conversation, leading academics and veteran practitioners reflect on the nature and size of the theory-practice divide. They find that the gap varies by issue area and over time.

The essays in this volume use systematic data gathered by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project over a fifteen-year period. As a whole, the volume analyzes the structural factors that affect the academy's ability to influence policy across issue areas and the professional incentives that affect scholars' willingness to attempt to do so. Individual chapters explore these questions in the issue areas of trade, finance, human rights, development, environment, nuclear weapons and strategy, interstate war, and intrastate conflict. Each substantive chapter is followed by a response from a policy practitioner, providing their perspective on the gap and the possibility for academic work to have an impact.

Bridging the Theory-Practice Divide in International Relations provides concrete answers and guidance about how and when scholarship can be policy relevant.

1

EXPLAINING THE THEORY-PRACTICE DIVIDE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Uncertainty and Access

Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney

Is research produced by scholars of international relations (IR) relevant to contemporary policy debates? Do policymakers understand that research? If they do, is it useful to them? In recent years, commentators have bemoaned the uselessness of academic IR research to policymakers and practitioners. In early 2014, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, “My onetime love, political science . . . seems to be trying, in terms of practical impact, to commit suicide.” Around the same time, David Rothkopf, then editor of Foreign Policy, echoed this assessment; “academic contributions,” he argued, are often too “opaque, abstract, incremental, dull” to be relevant to policy practitioners (2014). After perusing an issue of the peer-reviewed journal International Security, influential war correspondent Tom Ricks (2014) similarly lamented the “extraordinary irrelevance of political science.”

These declarations on the irrelevance of IR and political science more broadly came, ironically, at a time when many political scientists sought to move their own discipline in a more policy-relevant direction. Almost a decade earlier, Stephen M. Walt (2005) called on IR scholars to take seriously the substantive needs of policymakers even if it meant abandoning sophisticated methodological tools. Similarly, in 2009 Joseph Nye took to the Washington Post op-ed pages to argue that IR scholars should consider serving in government at some point in their careers. He argued that both public policy and the scholars’ postgovernment scholarship would be improved by the experience. Nye’s sentiments were widely held among the broader community of IR scholars at the time. A 2011 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of IR scholars at US universities (Maliniak et al. 2012) revealed that respondents overwhelmingly share these views; they perceive that there is a large gap between scholars and policymakers and that this gap should be narrowed. In all, 85 percent of IR scholars in the United States think that the academic-policy divide is as large as, or larger than, it was twenty to thirty years ago, and 92 percent believe there should be greater links between policy and academic communities (Maliniak et al. 2012).¹

With this clear demand within the academy for increased links between scholars and policy practitioners as context, it is not surprising that a number of prominent initiatives emerged to facilitate more and deeper interaction between scholars and policymakers. Perhaps most visible has been the growing presence of political scientists and IR scholars in day-to-day policy debates taking place online and in prominent news outlets. The Washington Post, for example, hosts Daniel Drezner’s widely read column, The Monkey Cage, which regularly features research and commentary from IR scholars, was self-consciously founded on the premise that political science research “gets short shrift” in the media and among policymakers (Sides 2007). Similar efforts by scholars to communicate their research, analysis, and commentary are found in other online outlets that are read extensively in policy circles. These include War on the Rocks, Lawfare, The Conversation, and Political Violence at a Glance. Similarly, an increasing number of prominent IR scholars have taken to Twitter to discuss foreign policy issues of the day with reporters and the public. In addition, some academic institutions are seeking to train students to contribute more directly to policy debates. The Bridging the Gap Project, for example, hosts well-attended workshops designed to help PhD students and faculty make their research more policy relevant and accessible to nonacademic audiences. As part of this initiative, Bridging the Gap partnered with Oxford University Press to create a new series featuring scholarly books that explore important international policy problems.

There is, in short, a vibrant and growing community of institutions and scholars making significant investments—in both time and money—to narrow the gap between scholars and policymakers. Despite these investments, as a discipline we lack systematic answers to some of the most basic questions about the nature of the theory-practice divide. How big is it? Why does it exist? Is the gap the result of incentives and constraints imposed on scholars by the academy? Or are policymakers and/or the structure of the policy problems they confront to blame? How does the nature and size of the gap vary by substantive issue area? Are some policy problems more amenable to input from scholarly experts than others? Is input from scholars only useful or possible at certain points in time?

We asked leading scholars in eight different issue areas (trade, finance and money, human rights, foreign aid and development, environment, nuclear weapons and strategy, interstate war, and intrastate conflict) to address these and similar questions in a series of research essays. We paired these scholars with veteran policy practitioners who comment on these essays and offer their own reflections on the nature of the theory-practice divide in their area of expertise. This book’s chapter on the theory-practice divide in trade policy research exemplifies these contributions. Two of the discipline’s most prominent scholars of trade politics, Edward D. Mansfield and Jon C. W. Pevehouse, provide a chapter on the history of the theory-practice divide in trade policy research. Ambassador Robert Zoellick, who served as US trade representative under President George W. Bush and undersecretary of state for economic and agricultural affairs for President George H. W. Bush, offers a response.² The resulting discussion reveals areas in which IR research on trade both affects and is affected by the policy community, but it also reminds us of areas in which scholars and policy officials remain ships passing in the night, constrained from deeper and more frequent engagement by circumstances beyond their immediate control.

To facilitate these scholar-practitioner exchanges, we asked our academic contributors to focus their efforts on producing descriptions of how research in their substantive issue area has influenced (or been influenced by) international policy. We asked practitioners from each issue area, who all had significant experience crafting, implementing, and/or advocating for specific policies, to provide commentary on where scholarly ideas, data, theories, and methods have been useful and where academics might focus their efforts to more effectively speak to the policy community. To ground the discussions empirically, we provided both the scholars and policy practitioners with access to a number of TRIP datasets and an annotated bibliography on the theory-practice divide, but we also invited them to gather their own original data, use other existing datasets, and draw on their professional experiences and those of their colleagues trying to navigate the theory-practice divide. The result of these efforts is a first-of-its kind conversation between leading IR scholars and veteran practitioners across eight substantive issue areas. We believe this book provides important new insights into the nature and size of the theory-practice divide in IR and, as important, sets the stage for future efforts to measure, understand, and, where possible, narrow the gap between theory and practice in IR.

This comparative study of the theory-practice divide highlights two features of policy problems that shape the ability and/or willingness of scholars with expertise in different substantive issue areas to influence policy and policymakers: 1) the level of uncertainty surrounding a policy problem and its proposed solutions, and 2) the level of access that scholars have to policymakers. In addition, we also highlight two sets of professional incentives that may affect IR scholars’ research choices regardless of substantive issue area: 1) pressures to employ sophisticated research methods, and 2) lack of rewards for communicating research findings to the public or to practitioners outside of academia.

In this chapter, we highlight the book’s novel contributions to the literature on the theory-practice divide. We then define key concepts and explain the vocabulary we use to describe various ways that scholars might be involved in the policymaking or implementation process. Next, we introduce our theory of the theory-practice divide, which is grounded in work on the role of epistemic communities and policy change. We then describe the mechanisms through which scholars and scholarship might engage, influence, and/or simply be relevant to policy debates and outcomes. Next, we reverse the causal arrow and ask how real-world events and policies might influence scholarly research. We conclude with a brief outline of the book.

BRINGING SCHOLARS AND PRACTITIONERS FACE TO FACE OVER THE THEORY-PRACTICE DIVIDE

Until recently, most students of the relationship between the academic and policy communities of international relations argued that there is a sizable and growing gap between the two groups and that this gap was a problem.³ Observers of the gap often blame academic norms and incentive structures for its existence and persistence (e.g., Kruzel 1994; Walt 2005, 2009; Nau 2008; Jones 2009; Nye 2009; Jentlesen and Ratner 2011). Robert Gallucci (2012), former president of the MacArthur Foundation, denounces “the incentive structure in universities and in disciplines [that] has endorsed [an] emphasis on theory and methodology.” Hiring, tenure, and promotion standards earn particular scorn among critics for failing to give policy experiences sufficient weight, actively discouraging junior faculty from taking time off to gain policy experience, neglecting policy-relevant research and publications, and not hiring sufficient policy practitioners within the academy (e.g., Diamond 2002; Jentlesen 2002; Nye 2009; Walt 2009; Mahnken 2010). Scholarship is criticized for being too abstract, arcane, and theoretical (e.g., George 1997; Haass 2002; Jentlesen 2002, Mahnken 2010). Many of these arguments about the negative effects of academic culture also claim that it has created a discipline characterized by increasingly specialized and esoteric methodological approaches. John Mearsheimer calls this the “mathematization” of the discipline (Miller 2001). More recently, Michael C. Desch has argued in a number of outlets, including his chapter with Paul Avey in this volume, that the IR discipline’s increasing reliance on quantitative and formal methods has contributed significantly to its declining relevance (see Avey and Desch 2014; Desch 2015, 2019a; also see Oren 2015; Walt 1999; Martin 1999).

Some works that assign responsibility to the academy for the existence and persistence of the theory-practice divide argue that the problem is less about the content of scholarly work and more about the format and/or effective communication of that research to policy officials. Much of what comes out of the academy, critics lament, simply is not readable and/or doesn’t address issues of interest to practitioners (e.g., Kurth 1998; Putnam 2003; Hurrell 2011). Observers likewise bemoan the time it takes to bring peer-reviewed publications to print (Bennett and Ikenberry 2006) and argue that scholars do a poor job packaging and marketing their work for the policy community (Lepgold 1998; Eriksson and Norman 2011). Michael Barnett (2006) claims that policymakers miss the nuance in academic research for this reason; scholars need to present their findings in short, easily digestible “talking points” in outlets such as Foreign Policy magazine. Joseph Kruzel (1994) made a similar point decades ago, when he wrote that scholars could bridge the gap by translating their knowledge into the accessible language of op-eds, briefings, and faxes. Recently, the Bridging the Gap Project housed at American University has responded to this perceived need by teaching academics to produce and effectively communicate policy-relevant research to practitioners.

Other observers of the academic-policy divide blame policy officials and staffers for neglecting IR scholars’ advice. A common refrain is that practitioners do not have the time (Lieberthal 2006; Goldman 2006; Avey and Desch 2014) and/or interest (Siverson 2000; Jentlesen and Ratner 2011) to read academic journals and books. This view is echoed by several of the practitioners who contributed to this volume. As former chief economist for the US Agency for International Development Steven Radelet notes in chapter 7, “Neither policymakers nor their staff have time to wade through 40-page papers that cover literature reviews, methodological approaches, data issues, and results. They just aren’t going to do it.”

This literature on the theory-practice divide is extensive, but it suffers from several limitations. First, there is a decided security bias in both the discussion of and efforts to address the gap between policymakers and scholars. Less ink has been spilled on gaps between policymakers and scholars in the trade or human rights areas. A recent review of the literature on the theory-practice divide shows that 49 percent of all articles and book chapters on the subject of the academic-policy gap have been written by experts from the security subfield (Campbell et al. 2015), even though the 2014 TRIP faculty survey showed that only about 21 percent of all IR scholars in the United States claim that international security is their primary area of research. The commentaries that we highlighted at the outset of this chapter illustrate this point; they focus almost exclusively on how scholars of international security might better serve policymakers and implementers in the security policy arena in the United States. Second, and perhaps as a consequence of the first issue, there is both a paucity of systematic data and a lack of theorizing about the nature and evolution of the theory-practice divide in IR over time or across different issue areas. Nearly all the work on the gap is based on firsthand experience in the academy, policy circles, or both (Lowenthal and Bertucci 2014). And, because the dominant explanations for the gap focus on professional incentives within the academy or the limited time that policymakers have to engage with traditional scholarly outputs, they are unable to explain variation in the gap across IR subfields. This is the case because academic incentives and policymakers’ time and interests do not vary systematically, for the most part, across those subfields. These weaknesses in existing work combine to provide scholars and policymakers alike with a view of the theory-practice divide that is most relevant to scholars of US national security at particular moments. Previous work on the gap provides only partial insight into why particular scholars in particular issue areas at particular moments in time are effective in influencing policy debates, whereas others, presumably working in the shadow of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Explaining the Theory-Practice Divide in International Relations: Uncertainty and Access
• 2 Rights and Wrongs: Human Rights at the Intersection of the International Relations Academy and Practice
• 3 Closing the Influence Gap: How to Get Better Alignment of Scholars and Practitioners on Human Rights
• 4 The Study and Practice of Global Environmental Politics: Policy Influence through Participation
• 5 The Limits of Scholarly Influence on Global Environmental Policy
• 6 Mind the Gap? Links between Policy and Academic Research of Foreign Aid
• 7 Making Academic Research on Foreign Aid More Policy Relevant
• 8 Trade Policy and Trade Policy Research
• 9 Making International Relations Research on Trade More Relevant to Policy Officials
• 10 Is International Relations Relevant for International Money and Finance?
• 11 Is International Relations Relevant for International Monetary and Financial Policy? Reflections of an Economist
• 12 Lost in Translation: Academics, Policymakers, and Research about Interstate Conflict
• 13 Reflections from an Erstwhile Policymaker
• 14 The Weakest Link? Scholarship and Policy on Intrastate Conflict
• 15 On the Challenge of Assessing Scholarly Influence on Intrastate Conflict Policy
• 16 The Bumpy Road to a “Science” of Nuclear Strategy
• 17 Academia’s Influence on National Security Policy: What Works and What Doesn’t?
• 18 Supply- and Demand-Side Explanations for the Theory-Practice Divide
• References
• Contributors
• Index