Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • On Academic Writing

    Lots of academic writing is bad—such is the conclusion of Stephen Walt, Dan Drezner, Jay Ulfelder, Steve Saideman, Greg Weeks, and probably 10 other poli sci bloggers whom I follow. The diagnoses are many (the logic of discovery versus the logic of presentation, the useful shortcuts of professional language, the lack of incentives), but the solutions aren’t particularly sophisticated, as far as I can tell. They boil down to “don’t write poorly.”

    EDIT: Writers credited above do not say all writing is bad, but some of it is. Important distinction.

    My perspective is going to be a little different. I think that the problem facing academic writing in the social sciences is that most social scientists don’t consider themselves writers. They consider themselves social scientists first and foremost, and writing is just one part of what they do. Prose is a rather inefficient and cumbersome technology that serves the purpose of transmitting their thoughts to other people.

    It’s no surprise, then, that social science writing isn’t very good. It’s not considered a craft worth perfecting.

    For all of the value of Strunk and White and Politics and the English Language and other style guides, I see getting the mechanics right as secondary. The primary task is to decide that writing matters, and to think consciously of oneself as a writer.

    One piece of advice—one that I haven’t seen mentioned—immediately follows from this: The way to improve your writing is to practice writing. Serious prose writers write every day. Academic social scientists who want to write well should do the same, and this especially holds when carrying heavy teaching, administering, and research loads. Because no one generates enough primary research to fill a solid hour of writing every day, it means writing for other audiences. Book reviews, referee reports, recommendation letters, blog posts, it probably doesn’t really matter, so long as the focus is on the act of writing.

    I can’t much tell if I myself am a good writer. But I do know that today is my “non-writing day,” and I just wrote a 300 word blog post anyway.

  • Political Science and the Critique of Policy Relevance

    The disconnect between academic political science and real-world policy is a topic of some concern in current discussions of the purpose and future of political science. Dan Drezner has insisted that even the most technical political science (or narrowly for him, IR) research has pretty clear implications for policy if you take the time to read it. Political scientists could probably do better to reach out—for this purpose, blogs are a tremendous resource—but the point is that there is plenty of policy relevant research out there already.

    There is, of course, another view. That is the perspective that political scientists should not reach out to policymakers, because they won’t listen. Or, they will mess it up. Or, they actually just select the research that comports with their views, sometimes even creating intellectual homes to produce the research that contains the ideas that will justify their actions (this is the critique of the Chicago school of economics and the Mercatus Center). In the extreme, it takes the form of beliefs like the RAND Corporation invented game theory as a tool of domination; or less audaciously, that the beliefs nurtured by RAND enabled domination. It’s ultimately a lazy critique, often made from the sidelines, and it contains within it the Simpsonesque implication that the lesson is, never try to engage with the policy community. Because you should never try, you can both be a strong critic of whatever odious thing you think is being done, but you are happily excused from offering any sort of solution.

    That critical view is a real barrier to policy engagement among academic political scientists. That said, the idea that policymakers are either ideological, or essentially career-minded, or flitting from one hot academic trend to another, is easy to understand. It is especially clear in the field of development (microfinance experiments for the QJE!). For someone with an academic background, especially a critical one (my college buddy loved to say that he wanted to “subvert the dominant paradigm”), the development industry can be depressing place. But my sense is that the general critique of the development industry greatly underestimates the self-awareness and self-criticism of many who work on the ground. There are plenty of “helicopter consultants,” but there are also of people who are deeply invested in local knowledge and understanding as well. Not just as naive do-gooders (although these exist too), but as real critical thinkers.

    Because I don’t see the development industry as simply an instrument of domination, I conclude for those of us who work on basic problems of governance and accountability, thinking in terms of policy relevance is profitable. I have no illusions that our research will shape the policy agenda, but it can be targeted in a way that finds common cause with the sorts of careful and critical thinking that, to me, should help to produce good policy.

    That is why I was particularly excited to receive an email from a colleague at AusAID in Jakarta, who reported that he had shared some thoughts with his colleagues about my recent paper on migration and the origins of governance in Java. I quote from his memo:

    Pepinsky’s paper is a novel new contribution to the growing literature on the political origins
    of comparative economic development – this time at a sub-national level. But is it of any
    relevance to us [the aid community]? The answer is in the last paragraph of the paper:

    “Understanding local political economies in the post-colonial states that have inherited extractive institutions requires attention to the informal institutions, norms, and practices that supported exchange when modern market relations were first established. Effective strategies to reform local economies, in turn, will depend on the informal institutions that they have inherited from the colonial
    era.”

    In other words – when working at the local level – it’s good to know a little history!

    Know history. Take local context seriously. Think about the political contexts in which market relations were formed, and why that matters. Exactly!