Political Science Funding Black Out in North America? Trends in Funding Should not be Ignored

Abstract

Recent actions in Congress that threaten political science funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have caught the attention of political scientists, but this was not the first attack and not likely to be the last. Less than one year ago, the Harper government ended the Understanding Canada program, an important source of funding for academics in the United States and abroad. This article stresses the value of the program and the importance of this funding steam by demonstrating what the grants have done both more generally as well as for the authors individually. In addition, by looking at the political process that led to the end of the Understanding Canada program and the similarities in the attacks on NSF political science funding, this article identifies potential reasons why these funds were and are at risk. We conclude by arguing that normative action in support of political science is a necessity for all political scientists. Hain, 2006(Bright 2006

Collaborating with the Machines: A Hybrid Method for Classifying Policy Documents

“…The costly and time‐consuming process of collecting and content coding policy agendas data presents a major barrier to initiate new country data collection projects, and the scale of the data, already vast, grows more quickly over time as governments make more and more information available online. At the same time, social science research funding is tightening around the world (Plazek & Steinberg, ), making it increasingly difficult to mobilize the funding needed to engage expert human coders to prepare large data sets. Currently, 15 CAP country projects exist, relatively few in comparison to other cross‐national research programs .…”

Political Science at the NSF: The Politics of Knowledge Production

“… 1. For more details on the amendment’s passage and unsuccessful attempts that preceded it, see Plazek and Steinberg (2013). …”