Engaged Political Science
| Author | Matthew Wood |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929919855949 |
| Subject Matter | Special Section: Impact |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919855949
Political Studies Review
2020, Vol. 18(2) 245 –262
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929919855949
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Engaged Political Science
Matthew Wood
Abstract
Political scientists are wary of engaging with ‘the public’ on mainstream and social media because
they fear those mediums fail to get across the deep and nuanced argument they develop in their
own research. This article suggests a way of justifying public engagement that begins not with
debates about the ethical and political concerns of doing this in practice (of which there are
many), but how we as political scientists justify public media engagement to ourselves on the basis
of the ethical and political process of ‘doing’ political science. As such, this article identifies the
disciplinary basis upon which we may justify media-driven public engagement as an integral part of
political science as an academic enterprise. Drawing on current epistemological debates in political
science, the article characterises moments of political research as impressionistic exercises, which
require public engagement. This means making the public aware of the deep and valuable insights
of political science, in a way that sketches out how the discipline can shed light on important
social and political phenomena, thereby informing our own scholarly thinking, and that of those
we engage with.
Keywords
impact, engagement, political science, impressionism
Accepted: 20 May 2019
Introduction
It is a widely ingrained assumption that political scientists should do work that has
relevance to the public. Indeed, classic methodological texts like King et al.’s (1994: 7)
Designing Social Inquiry state that a research project should pose a question that is
‘important’ to the real world. The topic should be consequential for political, social or
economic life, for understanding something that significantly affects many people’s
lives, or for understanding and predicting events that might be harmful or beneficial
(King et al., 1994).
The assumption has always been, as Stoker et al. (2018: 322) state, that ‘political sci-
ence should do good science and if the science is good then it will be relevant’ (see also
Head, 2017; John, 2013). In many respects, the debate over whether political science can
or should be ‘relevant’ has long since been ‘won’ in the discipline’s corridors of power,
Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Corresponding author:
Matthew Wood, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield Building, Northumberland Road,
Sheffield S10 2TB, UK.
Email: m.wood@sheffield.ac.uk
855949PSW0010.1177/1478929919855949Political Studies ReviewWood
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
246 Political Studies Review 18(2)
mainly because its protagonists were pushing at an open door. In response to politicians
and commentators demanding ‘value for money’, particularly since the 2008 global
financial crisis, research councils and funders now regularly integrate ‘impact and
engagement’ criteria into their funding rules, promotion criteria reflect this, and research
excellence assessments require statements of successful impact (Dunlop, 2018).
Nevertheless, there are still lingering doubts within the discipline about the ethical impli-
cations of ‘doing’ impact, which are the subject of this special issue.
Concerns about the ‘impact agenda’ often come from more ‘critical’ voices. These do not
reject ‘impact’, but suggest an institutionalised impact agenda ‘limits opportunities for criti-
cal scholarship to demonstrate impact in the way it is understood by government and research
funders, even if it goes on to have long-term transformative effects on the discipline’ (Hayton,
2017: 364). Even from a ‘mainstream’ perspective, though, ethical worries have emerged. It
has been suggested that too much engagement (or, perhaps more precisely, engagement of the
wrong kind), may in fact be damaging to the discipline (Vincent, 2015). For example, if
political scientists attempt to commentate in the media on subjects they know little about, this
may damage their standing, and by implication the standing of the discipline as a whole, if
they are called out. This is a significant problem because the nature of the contemporary
media cycle; 24-hour attention to day-to-day, often trivial, events, mixed with professional
incentives for visibility, mean that political scientists can end up acting in ‘talking head’ roles
determined by the media, and encouraged to take contentious oppositional positions. At
worst, their role becomes indistinguishable from pseudo-journalistic ‘pundits’ commentating
on the latest political events and ‘gossip’ in a purely descriptive way with little depth or
nuance. This seems heretical for a profession priding itself on detailed and credible scientific
or analytical explanation.
Accusations of punditry are easy to take for some senior (especially white, male) polit-
ical scientists who can rely on their long-established publication record as back-up.1
However, other scholars in the discipline, particularly women, ethnic minority scholars
and scholars from other comparatively disadvantaged backgrounds (early career academ-
ics and those from non-elite institutions, for example), may be especially vulnerable to
criticism of their expertise on these grounds, whether such criticism is legitimately justi-
fied on the basis of their work or not.
A very recent media controversy in the natural sciences illustrates some of the con-
cerns providing the context for this article. In 2019, it was reported that a 29-year-old
Astrophysicist, Dr Katie Bouman, recently led a team of scientists who produced the
first picture of a supermassive black hole, an outstanding and pioneering scientific
achievement (Filipovic, 2019). In the parlance of research funders, Dr Bouman is with-
out doubt a ‘future leader’ of her discipline. Dr Bouman very quickly received wide-
spread media coverage claiming she was ‘responsible’ for the achievement (no doubt
because she is a young woman with a compelling story to tell). At the same time, how-
ever, online ‘trolls’ accused her of taking ‘credit’ for work she never did, alleging that
a male colleague wrote a large chunk of the code that enabled the image to be produced.
They attempted to publicly humiliate Dr Bouman by making her look to her peers like
an illegitimate media-friendly ‘figurehead. Dr Bouman’s colleagues, including the
male colleague in question, disproved these allegations in the media, but the trolls’
posts in online web forums and their dissemination on social media showed the ‘depth
and degree of virulent misogyny’ she, and countless women like her, experience
(Filipovic, 2019). Was Dr Bouman an illegitimate ‘pundit’, or had nefarious internet
‘trolls’ attempted to ferment a public controversy to make this outstanding scientist the
subject of a moral panic, amid the broader moral panic of ‘post-truth’ (Brennen, 2017)?
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