Image from a quicklink (Image by Unknown Owner) Details DMCA | One of the more remarkable phenomena of U.S. politics is the relatively low utilization rate of the findings of political scientists by practitioners and journalists in the field. Until fairly recently, as a matter of fact, there was astonishingly little interaction between the two worlds of the academic study of politics and its day-to-day analysis and operations. One reason for the rise of the ubiquitous think tank industry was this gap between the thinkers and doers, which extended to a host of public policy areas.
That's changed a fair amount in the very recent past, and today political scientists are a robust minority in the chattering classes, some via conventional news outlets and some in blogs (prototypically The Monkey Cage, which we regularly cross-post from here). But the gap remains pretty large. Today Nate Silver fired a shot across the gap... |