PROSPECT THEORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE Jonathan Mercer

THEORY AND POLICY IN IR 41
staff members had prominent careers in academe as well. Today, by contrast, a
RAND analyst would be unlikely to be a viable candidate for an IR position at a
major university, and RAND’s research products do not exert much influence on
the scholarly world. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Foreign Policy Studies
group at the Brookings Institution was not very different from an academic
IR faculty, and publications by its staff were similar to works produced within
prestigious departments. 14 Moreover, the director of the group, John Steinbruner,
held a Ph.D. from MIT, had previously taught at Harvard, and was the author of
several important theoretical works (Steinbruner 1974, 1976). Today, by contrast,
the Foreign Policy Studies staff a Brookings writes relatively few refereed journal
articles or scholarly books and concentrates primarily on producing op-eds and
contemporary policy analyses (e.g., Daalder & Lindsay 2003, Gordon & Shapiro
2004). Consistent with this focus, the current director of Foreign Policy Studies
is a lawyer and former government official with little or no scholarly training. My
point is not to disparage the work done at Brookings (or at similar institutions); it is
simply to note that the gulf between academic scholars and policy-oriented analysts
is widening. One suspects that scholars in think tanks pay less attention to their
academic counterparts than they did previously, and vice versa. This tendency is
exacerbated by the emergence of “advocacy think tanks” (e.g., the Heritage Foundation,
the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute) in which analysis is
driven by explicit ideological preferences (Wallace 1994, Weaver & Stares 2001,
Abelson 2002). As connections between the ivory tower and more policy-oriented
scholars become tenuous, the trickle-down model of scholarly influence seems
increasingly questionable.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
The literature on the gap between theory and practice addresses most of its recommendations
toward reforming the academic world, for two obvious reasons. First,
scholars are more likely to read these works. Second, policy makers are unlikely
to be swayed by advice to pay greater attention to academic theory. If scholars
produce useful knowledge, policy makers will want to know about it. If academic
writings are not useful, however, no amount of exhortation will persuade policy
makers to read them.
What is needed, therefore, is a conscious effort to alter the prevailing norms of
the academic IR discipline. Today’s professional incentive structure discourages
many scholars—especially younger scholars—from striving for policy relevance,
but the norms that establish that structure are not divinely ordained; they are collectively
determined by the members of the discipline itself. The scholarly community
gets to decide what it values, and there is no reason why policy relevance cannot be
14 I am thinking of the work of Richard Betts, John Steinbruner, Joshua Epstein, Bruce Blair,
Paul B. Stares, Raymond Garthoff, Yahya Sadowski, William Quandt, and others.