Joseph Nye recently published an op-ed pointing out, once again, the irrelevance of mainstream political science to public policy in this country. This sparked an uptick in posts to the Perestroika listserv, which was created some years back to challenge the imperialism of formal theory, econometrics, and theory-driven research in political science. I posted as follows:
I'm all for policy-relevance, but I should think a good start would be to produce material that is relevant and accessible to our students (undergrad, especially non-majors) who need to understand how politics does and could work.
I just despair at the waste of time, energy and paper that is delivered through my door quarterly from the APSA. What the hell do these folks think they're doing? Who do they think they're serving? It's especially offensive for publicly academic institutions to produce work that obscures and mystifies what is , after all, a constitutive human activity.
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