What do the most senior national security policymakers want from international relations scholars? To answer that question, we administered a unique survey to current and former policymakers to gauge when and how they use academic social science to inform national security decision making. We find that policymakers do regularly follow academic social science research and scholarship on national security affairs, hoping to draw upon its substantive expertise. But our results call into question the direct relevance to policymakers of the most scientific approaches to international relations. And they at best seriously qualify the "trickle down" theory that basic social science research eventually influences policymakers. To be clear, we are not arguing that policymakers never find scholarship based upon the cutting-edge research techniques of social science useful. But policymakers often find contemporary scholarship less-than-helpful when it employs such methods across the board, for their own sake, and without a clear sense of how such scholarship will contribute to policymaking.
Scholars continue to debate the relationship of academic international relations to policy. One of the most straightforward ways to discern whether policymakers find IR scholarship relevant to their work is to ask them. We analyzed an elite survey of US policy practitioners to better understand the conditions under which practitioners use academic knowledge in their work. We surveyed officials across three different policy areas: international development, national security, and trade. We also employed multiple survey experiments in an effort to causally identify the impact of academic consensus on the views of policy officials and to estimate the relative utility of different kinds of research outputs. We found that policymakers frequently engage with academic ideas, find an array of research outputs and approaches useful, and that scholarly findings can shift their views. Key obstacles to using academic knowledge include practitioners' lack of time as well as academic work being too abstract and not timely, but not that it is overly quantitative. Additionally, we documented important differences between national security officials and their counterparts who work in the areas of development and trade. We suggest that this variation is rooted in the nature of the different policy areas.
Los expertos continúan con el debate acerca del vínculo entre los estudios académicos sobre relaciones internacionales y la política. Una de las formas más sencillas de determinar si los responsables de formular políticas consideran que los estudios de RI son relevantes para su trabajo es preguntándoles. Analizamos una encuesta de élite realizada a profesionales de la política en EE. UU. para comprender mejor las condiciones en las que utilizan los conocimientos académicos en su trabajo. Encuestamos a funcionarios de tres áreas políticas diferentes: Desarrollo Internacional, Seguridad Nacional y Comercio. También realizamos varios experimentos de encuestas para identificar la influencia del consenso académico en las opiniones de los funcionarios políticos y estimar la utilidad relativa de los distintos tipos de resultados de investigación. Comprobamos que, con frecuencia, los responsables de formular políticas se comprometen con las ideas académicas, consideran de utilidad toda una serie de resultados y enfoques de investigación, y que los hallazgos académicos pueden cambiar sus puntos de vista. Entre los principales obstáculos a la hora de recurrir a los conocimientos académicos se encuentran la falta de tiempo de los profesionales, así como el hecho de que los trabajos académicos sean demasiado abstractos y poco oportunos, pero no el hecho de que sean excesivamente cuantitativos. Además, documentamos importantes diferencias entre los funcionarios de Seguridad Nacional y sus colegas que trabajan en las áreas de Desarrollo y Comercio. Sugerimos que esta variación tiene su origen en la naturaleza de los diferentes ámbitos políticos.
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