With the exception of hand-wringing about intellectual diversity on campuses, the contemporary S&T policy community spends precious little time on “social sciences policy” – that is, (a) policies for the social science and (b) how the social sciences contribute to decision making. Frances Fukuyama thinks that this is a mistake. He writes in a recent essay,

“The scandal that the media has thus far failed to cover is the utter failure of the American academy to train adequate numbers of people with deep knowledge about the world outside the United States. This failure is linked to the decline of regional studies in American universities over the past generation and the misguided directions being taken by the social sciences in recent years, particularly political science and economics.

The story here is one of colonization of the study of politics by economics. Known as the “queen of the social sciences,” economics is the only discipline that looks like a natural science. Economists are carefully trained to gather data and build causal models that can be rigorously tested empirically. The data that economists work from are quantitative from the start and can be analyzed with a powerful battery of statistical tools.

Economists’ powerful methodology has been a source of envy and emulation on the part of other social scientists. The past two decades have seen the growth of what is known as “rational choice” political science, in which political scientists seek to model political behavior using the same mathematical tools (game theory, for the most part) used by economists. Economists tend to believe that regularities in human behavior are universal and invariant across different cultures and societies (for example, the law of supply and demand is the same in Japan and Botswana). Similarly, rational choice political science seeks to create broad, universally applicable laws of political behavior by generalizing across large numbers of countries rather than focusing intensively on the history and context of individual countries or regions…

It is certainly desirable for a social science to be rigorous, empirical and seek general rules of human behavior. But as Aristotle explained, it should not try to achieve a rigor that goes beyond what is possible given the limitations inherent in the subject matter. In fact, most of what is truly useful for policy is context-specific, culture-bound and non-generalizable. The typical article appearing today in a leading journal like the American Political Science Review contains a lot of complex-looking math, whose sole function is often to formalize a behavioral rule that everyone with common sense understands must be true. What is missing is any deep knowledge about the subtleties and nuances of how foreign societies work, knowledge that would help us better predict the behavior of political actors, friendly and hostile, in the broader world.”

If important problems cannot be addressed with only knowledge from the natural sciences and engineering (and I don’t think they can), then it is necessary that we take on the challenge of social sciences policy. (And this is in addition to more conventional understandings of S&T policy, and also what Bob Frodeman has called humanities policy.) For the S&T community this means clearly distinguishing interdisciplinary policy research from the natural and social sciences, and the humanities, or perhaps as a true integration of these areas. Ideally, the S&T policy community should focus comprehensively on the systematic production of knowledge and its two-way connections to decision making.

End Note: In the 1970s the subject of social sciences “research utilization” occupied the time of a number of policy scholars, and there is some very valuable literature from that era. But as Fukuyama observes, interest in the usefulness of social sciences waned in the 1980s and 1990s. But there are some signs that interest in this topic is picking up again. Here is a recent literature review (Chapter 2) on this subject:

C. Donovan, 2001. Government Policy and the Direction of Social Science Research. PhD Thesis, University of Sussex.