The Boredomization of Politics

You’re dozing in a Government class when the professor calls on you. “How were the readings?” he asks, and you scramble for an answer. The course packet lies unopened on your shelf, so you recite CliffsNotes of previous lectures to fill time. Miffed, the professor scorns your apathy, but he should expect a lack of interest: Much of political science today is dull.

Many students concentrate in Government hoping to tackle questions like “What is justice?” or “Who should rule?” Unfortunately, their courses more often dissect queries like “Does Representative X follow the constituency’s preferences on policies A, B, and C?” That’s because many political scientists consider themselves solely scientists: They describe what is, not what should be.

These professors ditched The Federalist Papers for Excel spreadsheets years ago. Initially, political scientists studied how institutions shaped human behavior. American scholars, in particular, examined the Constitution’s influence on legislators. In the 1950s, however, “behavioralists,” led by Robert Dahl, revolted. Human behavior shaped institutions, they argued, so political science could predict future events by analyzing motivations, which seemed more useful than quaint debates over checks and balances.

Today, behavioralists are less dominant, but their impact is still palpable: Political science savors a more scientific flavor. Its stockroom boasts mathematical methodology and theoretical terminology, borrowed mostly from economics and statistics. While this renovation attracts attention from other scholars, it also mars political science’s relevance outside the academy, making it uninteresting, uninspiring, and unrealistic.

First, the biggest obstacle to a broader audience is political scientists’ use of jargon. Mangled terms like “import-substituting industrialization” and “competitive authoritarianism” litter the typical textbook. In theory, these labels should make the discipline more precise, but in practice, they make it inaccessible. Not only are they hard for casual readers to understand, they also are difficult for students to remember. What is “amoral familism” again?

Second, mathematical explanations of politics conceal its larger significance. For example, take Charles Cameron’s piece on veto bargaining. You could learn about the give-and-take between the president and Congress by scrutinizing Bill Clinton’s schemes against Newt Gingrich. But Cameron reduces these highly personal exchanges to utility maximization problems. “The utility of any point in the policy space to either the president or Congress can be read from their utility functions,” he drones. His observations are nearly impossible to use: How do you find Barack Obama’s utility function?

Third, an overly scientific approach to politics makes even the most colorful characters appear gray. Former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills was an alcoholic who cavorted with an Argentinean stripper—you couldn’t make him boring. Yet, John Manley comes close in his research, outlining the theory behind “Congressional influence” instead of letting Mills illustrate it: “When one thinks about power between A and B there is a tendency to view the relationship as unidirectional,” Manley intones. “With influence, the relationship is more apt to be seen as a mutual process of stimulation.” For pages, the protagonist and his antics are never in sight. Where’s Wilbur?

In their defense, these academics are trying to cull universal lessons from particular cases, and a common vocabulary eases this task. The predictive ability that scientific methodology affords is also an asset. But some political scientists want to quantify the unquantifiable. No equation can capture the emotion essential to politics, and getting a feel for human nature from the study of history is more beneficial than tinkering with inherently flawed models.

A less scientific approach to politics is necessary because it is more practical. Indeed, Jimmy Carter once signed an executive order that federal regulations be written “simply and clearly.” When presented with a memo directing staffers to “obscure all Federal buildings…from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination,” Franklin Roosevelt told his assistants that if a blackout occurred, “to put something across the windows.” Real leaders—and real people—do not speak in jargon.

Most importantly, when political science is more scientific, it is less political. The charts and graphs describe the status quo; they don’t define our ideals. If we focus too much on what the people want from their government, we may forget to wonder what they should want. For centuries, people have debated the proper role of government, and the significance of these questions attracts students to the field. Only humans can provide answers to these problems; science just measures the results.

Most academics are guilty of wordiness, but political scientists study one of the most important aspects of our lives: They, more than others, need to be relevant. The impulse to measure phenomena as closely as possible is respectable, but students of government should remember Harry Truman’s quip: “Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.”


Brian J. Bolduc ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is an economics concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.