The Other Side of Academic Politics

To the editors:

Brian Bolduc’s opinion essay, “The Boredomization of Politics,” paints an all-too-simple picture of an academic discipline that is much more complicated. On the credit side of the ledger, Bolduc is right that some of the more technical developments in political science have come at the expense of accessibility and even insight. What is not true is that we have to choose between quantitative and non-quantitative approaches to politics. Bolduc’s essay establishes a false binary—“These professors ditched The Federalist Papers for Excel spreadsheets years ago.” In this crude thinking, no course could (or should) have both.

Yet politics is full of things countable and not. We can indeed learn about some of the most interesting things in politics —votes, campaign contributions, election returns, government spending—by quantifying them. If, like tens of thousands of other readers, you followed Nate Silver’s electoral projections at www.538.com this past fall, you were reading the fruits of modern political science, which has made important contributions to survey research and applied statistics.

And, of course, many critical features of politics are distorted when they are quantified. Albert Einstein was apparently fond of a remark that “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” (There is a deeper mathematical insight here that underlies much of modern statistics and decision theory; for an introduction, see Patrick Billingsley, Convergence of Probability Measures.) And so hundreds of political science courses at Harvard and elsewhere continue to offer readings in political philosophy, American political development and political history, and legal and administrative decisions.

The real failure of Bolduc’s essay is its intellectual laziness. Had he consulted a wide range of courses at Harvard alone, he would have found the intellectual content he was looking for. To take one among many of the possibilities, he might have considered my course, “The Theory and Practice of Republican Government,” where dozens of the Federalist Papers are read and studied intensively. In “Bureaucratic Politics: Military, Government, Economic and Social Organizations,” a sampling of decision theory, non-parametric statistics and stochastic modeling is combined with a healthy reading of Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand, the history of the U.S. Army, and Mary Douglas’s How Institutions Think. There are many other courses at Harvard that combine narrative, philosophical, and quantitative methods, and this combination represents one of the real strengths of modern political science education.


DANIEL CARPENTER
Cambridge, Mass.
April 8, 2009
Daniel Carpenter is the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard.