The Senate voted Wednesday to bar the National Science Foundation (NSF) from approving political-science grants. The sole exceptions are research projects the foundation’s director can certify as “promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”
The measure was an amendment to a budget bill, which the House will likely approve, to finance the federal government until the fiscal year ends Sept. 30. After repeated budget stalemates that led to across-the-board spending cuts, any sign of fiscal compromise — the bill passed 73 to 26 — is refreshing. But the amendment attacking political science research, sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), does little in the way of tightening the federal budget. His amendment strips about $10 million from political science research: a trivial amount by the standards of the federal government, which spent a total of $3.796 trillion in fiscal year 2012, but an enormous sum in the world of social sciences, where research grants are scarcer than in medical and engineering disciplines.
Why single out political science? Coburn’s amendment left funding for other social sciences, such as sociology or anthropology, untouched. The tremendous irony of the matter is that Coburn tacked his measure on a bill that attempted to mitigate the damage of sequestration cuts, which resulted from egregious political deadlock and negligence of the public good. Considering the Capitol’s recent dysfunction, maybe we should be studying political science more, not less.
Also relevant is the awkwardness of the government shutting down research on the behavior of the government. Today’s heated partisan climate offers many fruitful potential areas of study. Not all these areas are flattering to those now in power. By defunding political science research, the government avoids systematic scrutiny, at least from one avenue.
The intrusive measure appears to be a less extreme version of an earlier proposal by Coburn that would have eliminated the NSF’s political-science funding altogether. But the amendment in its present form nonetheless damages the research capabilities of political scientists at universities across the country.
One project likely to be affected is the American National Election Studies initiative, a compilation of studies and polls assessing voting behavior and public opinion on various topics. Such projects are valuable because they consolidate otherwise-fragmented studies into a single bank of data, which any scholar or journalist can use. Federal research funding in cases like these provides for a level of efficiency and synthesis that smaller-scale grant programs do not achieve.
The unnecessary restriction on political-science funding the Senate approved Wednesday will likely have a chilling effect on the discipline because it removes a key revenue source. The NSF estimates that its grants fund 61 percent of basic research in the social sciences.
Defunding also creates a vicious cycle. With fewer resources, political scientists have fewer opportunities to perform valuable work. Opponents of the discipline can then point to these reduced outputs to suggest that studying politics isn’t valuable. Such arguments — such as Coburn’s assertion, in a March 12 letter to NSF Director Subra Suresh, that “studies of presidential executive power…hold little promise to save an American’s life from a threatening condition or to advance America’s competitiveness in the world,” or his conclusion, in the same letter, that “[d]iscontinuing funding for these types of studies will increase our ability to fund research into basic fields of mathematics and science” — set up a false and misleading dichotomy between different fields of research and ignore the important role academic study of politics plays in guiding informed policy decisions. But then again, if Congress had paid more attention to what academics said, we probably wouldn’t be confronting the sequester’s aftermath in the first place.
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