The absent professor: why politicians don't listen to political scientists.

• Author: Balz, John
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

Several years before his death in 2003, Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt offered an accurate, if understated, assessment of how his discipline was regarded in Washington. "The standing of our profession," he told a group of fellow political scientists, "is not high." Indeed not. For decades now, political scientists have bemoaned how little use those who practice politics have for those who study it. Among political professionals--politicians, Capitol Hill staffers, journalists, pollsters, and campaign consultants--economists are prized, but political scientists are spurned. "When you go to talk to policy makers," says Jacob Hacker of Yale University, one of the few political scientists who can start a sentence in that way, "if there is someone else in the room who is a social scientist, 90 percent of the time she is an economist."

The last two political books to generate serious Beltway buzz came from nonpolitical fields. First, there was George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, whose book Moral Politics gave Democrats an F and Republicans an A for their storytelling abilities. Then this past summer, there was Emory University's Drew Westen, a psychologist, touting the importance of emotion over reason in The Political Brain. But what about the release of that three-years-in-the-making report called Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn, authored by fifteen of political science's finest thinkers? Remember how it warned that America's "ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat"? Well, perhaps you missed it. So did Washington. As Hacker puts it, the report "fell into the water with a ripple, but not much else."

How did the hapless political scientist fall so low? As a political science graduate student at the University of Chicago, I would certainly like to know myself. Things started off so well in my field. No less an eminence than Woodrow Wilson himself laid out a vision for a discipline in which the study of politics would support and guide government. For many years, that's just what political science did. During the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt made extensive use of political scientists in his administration. Later, giants of the field such as Harold Lasswell, David Truman, and Gabriel Almond consulted with policy makers about World War II and the cold war. In subsequent decades, the field continued to produce stars...