Public Inquiry and Democracy: Should the National Science Foundation Fund Political Science Research

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from Dissent magazine:



Public Inquiry and Democracy: Should the National Science Foundation Fund Political Science Research?


[font size="1"]National Science Foundation building in Arlington, Virginia[/font]

By Jeffrey C. Isaac - March 28, 2013

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to carry out the functions of the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation, except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.

With these words, furnished courtesy of U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), the U.S. Senate acted by voice vote this week to politically circumscribe and de-authorize the funding of almost all NSF-support political science research in the United States. The rationale presented by Coburn for this move was simple: the federal budget contains lots of waste, and NSF funding of political science is a waste of money. Coburn has been crusading against the NSF Political Science Program for years, and with a zeal that seems wildly out of proportion to the amount of money in question—approximately $11 million out of an annual NSF budget of $7.8 billion, or less than 0.2 percent. His opposition is no doubt ideological, in the sense that he is an avid proponent of fiscal austerity when it comes to U.S. government support for social, cultural, and educational programs, and in the sense that he clearly has a particular animus toward political science.

But beneath these ideological dispositions is a particular understanding of political science—that it is not, in his words, “a real science,” and that it produces nothing of value to society sufficient to warrant government support. It is for this reason that Coburn continually cites the technological advances that have been generated by NSF-funded research in the natural sciences and contrasts these palpable advances with the scholastic sounding titles of NSF-funded political science research. And it is clearly for this reason that the Coburn amendment contains a caveat: NSF funding of political science research is acceptable whenever this research can be certified “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”

It seems very clear that the move to defund political science is linked to a broader conservative political agenda targeting many aspects of science and the humanities, and rooted in a hostility toward intellectuals; that it hypocritically singles out the relatively small amounts of the NSF budget spent on political science; and that it rests on a range of specious assumptions and claims. One is the notion that most important NSF-funded natural science is technologically driven applied science. This is obviously false, and the distinction between theoretical and applied science is well established within the natural sciences—and scientists well understand that the practical advances that science makes possible are only enabled by theoretical advances. Another is the notion that the only way to be a “real” science is to be a science like physics or chemistry. And the third, and most serious, specious assumption is that the principal scientific and social value of American political science is its ability to promote the “national security” and “economic interests” of the United States. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/public-inquiry-and-democracy-should-the-national-science-foundation-fund-political-science-research