Policy Relevance versus Engagement

Concerns about a growing policy–academic divide have tended to focus on the issue of declining policy relevance, although the concept itself is rarely defined. For Kristof (Reference Kristof2014) relevance is about “matter[ing] in today’s great debates.” For Van Evera (Reference Van Evera2015), it means “addressing the problems of the real world” and answering problem-driven, important questions. For Nye (Reference Nye2009), similarly, the key to policy relevance is the relationship to the real world, but this relationship presumably can take a number of different forms and would not require that scholarship make explicit policy recommendations (Desch Reference Desch2019). Avey and Desch (Reference Avey, Desch, Maliniak, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2020; also Desch Reference Desch2015) employ this definition to argue that the declining frequency of policy prescriptions within top IR journals demonstrates the increasing irrelevance of IR, and security studies in particular, to policy makers.

But explicit policy recommendations are neither necessary nor sufficient for academic work to inform policy debates. The CIA funds the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), and its analyses are used by the agency in their stability assessments and planning. These modeling exercises do not make policy recommendations, yet result from specific requests by the intelligence community (e.g., Goldstone et al. Reference Goldstone, Bates, Epstein, Gurr, Lustik, Marshall, Ulfelder and Woodward2010; Ward and Beger Reference Ward and Beger2017), even if the PITF’s forecasting efforts are not universally viewed as helpful within that community (Desch Reference Desch2019). As Maliniak et al. (Reference Maliniak, Peterson, Powers, Tierney, Maliniak, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2020) put it, a definition of policy relevance revolving around specific policy prescriptions in published articles “narrows the conceptual aperture too much.”

We assess policy engagement on the basis of engagement-related activities rather than making policy prescriptions per se. As Horowitz (Reference Horowitz2015) and Maliniak et al. (Reference Maliniak, Peterson, Powers, Tierney, Maliniak, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2020) argue, policy relevance can take many forms and flow from many different types of scholar–policy engagements; some scholarship may be “policy actionable,” but much will not. Scholarship without actionable recommendations can offer insights, reframe problems for policy makers, spark public debate, guide policy implementation, and set long-term agendas.

Policy relevance and “impact”—whether academic work or outreach shaped a policy decision or outcome—also are difficult to observe and quantify. Policy-making processes are often opaque, and scholars may never know whether or how their work or engagement shaped outcomes (Devermont and Erdberg Steadman Reference Devermont and Steadman2021). Avey and Desch (Reference Avey and Desch2014) and Avey et al. (Reference Avey, Desch, Parajon, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2022) offer a partial solution to the problem of assessing impact by surveying policy makers—specifically US policy makers in the executive branch—directly about their use of and engagement with academic arguments and evidence in their roles.

This approach has significant merits. It narrows the range of actors considered policy-consequential, however, excluding not just the legislative and judicial branches of the US federal government but also US state governments, other national governments, NGOs, firms, and civil society organizations. Moreover, it focuses on specific scholarly outputs: blog posts, books, social media commentary, op-ed or news articles, policy briefs, think tank reports, etc. (Avey et al. Reference Avey, Desch, Parajon, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2022, 9). This categorization would not include scholars’ direct roles in policy organizations, communication, briefings, inputs for reports not resulting in attribution, and other means by which their expertise might be brought to bear without being tied to specific outputs.

For these reasons, we focus on policy engagement. Engagement is necessary (but not sufficient) for most of the types of policy relevance outlined here. Some types of engagement will generate policy-relevant knowledge in different ways for different policy audiences, and some types of engagement may have more direct impact than others. Yet, understanding the range of different types of engagement, the frequency with which these activities are undertaken, and the barriers or incentives to undertaking them is a key step toward building a comprehensive understanding of the academic–policy relationship. It is key also to establishing the extent of academic engagement and outreach in ways funding organizations and the academy increasingly and explicitly encourage scholars to do. This focus on engagement also broadens the aperture to encompass scholars’ involvement with other organizations that play roles in governance, like think tanks, civil society organizations, interest groups, and the private sector (Avant, Finnemore, and Sell Reference Avant, Martha Finnemore, Sell, Avant, Finnemore and Sell2010).

Policy Engagement: What Would We Expect?

How might we expect IR scholars to engage with the policy community based on our understanding of disciplinary incentives? Below, we outline several hypotheses that we evaluate using data from an original survey of IR scholars.

First, given the range of different policy activities available to scholars, how might we expect them to engage? Will they choose to publish op-eds or blog posts? Will they seek out highly visible policy jobs? Or, will they prefer lower-profile routes like informal not-for-attribution consultations? In answering this question, we assume most scholars are “success-seeking” in the academy. We can think of success narrowly in terms of promotion and tenure, or more broadly in terms of the scholar’s standing within the profession (Goldman Reference Goldman2006). Regardless, we anticipate scholars will choose activities that improve their chances of achieving such success. This assumption is identical to that made by those who herald the declining relevance of IR research. We differ, however, in that we relax two other implicit assumptions present in past work on these questions. First, we allow that scholars can gain standing through outputs and service outside the academy and traditional academic publishing, though the degree to which this is true depends on the form of engagement. Second, we allow that pressure to produce scholarship to improve one’s disciplinary standing will vary over one’s career with, on average, early career scholars feeling greater pressure than later career scholars. This assumption generates different expectations, which are largely confirmed, about scholars’ behavior.

As Hendrix (Reference Hendrix2016) notes, standing within the academic profession is a key metric of success for most academics. To gain standing, scholars generally produce research and seek to publish it in highly regarded journals or university book presses, teach and mentor PhD students (as applicable), and engage in service, with these activities in descending order of their importance. If all goes well, research will generate citations from other, preferably highly-regarded, scholars. Scholars also may seek outside funding or teaching and research awards, or they may provide service to their universities, disciplinary journals, and associations. Excellence in teaching and service are harder for other members of the discipline to observe, however, so success-seeking scholars will try to amass a public record of their impact, and their peers will have shared beliefs about the profile a scholar of a given standing ought to have. There is, thus, a premium on the ability to claim credit for one’s activities and have engagement be visible to other academics and the university administrators who make decisions about tenure and promotion. As the aphorism holds, “deans can’t read but they can count.” Policy engagement that produces lines on the CV will be preferable to that which does not.

All scholars may be motivated to gain standing, but they also face significant time constraints in the form of tenure and/or promotion clocks. The tenure and promotion guidelines prevailing at major research universities inform the research elements of similar requirements at more teaching-oriented institutions. These policies revolve around scholarly output in the form of peer-reviewed books and articles with a premium placed on publications in high-visibility, high-impact outlets. Scholars face opportunity costs for policy engagement that takes valuable time away from producing more traditional scholarly outputs or marketing one’s activities within the academy through conference presentations, service to professional associations, invited talks, and participation in workshops.

Combining these two concepts, credit-claiming opportunities and time commitment, leads to a 2 × 2 typology of types of policy engagement (see table 1).

Table 1 A Typology of Policy Engagement Activities

We expect policy engagement that increases opportunities for credit-claiming while limiting time expenditure will be the most popular activity among those who engage. This engagement will take the form of op-eds in newspapers and outlets like Lawfare, The Monkey Cage, and War on the Rocks, as well as media interviews. This conjecture is consistent with Stephen Walt’s (Reference Walt2016) recommendations regarding policy engagement for early career scholars:

Moreover, as academics themselves are among the readership of these outlets, exposure in them has the added benefit of increasing awareness of the scholar’s work within the very academic community in which they seek to establish standing. In contrast, taking formal policy positions in government or civil society or performing consulting activities requiring large time commitments and/or the inability to claim credit, such as providing uncredited inputs to policy documents, should be the least popular forms of policy engagement. These activities take time away from scholarly endeavors and do not provide obvious opportunities to claim credit. Universities may not grant leaves to facilitate this type of engagement, and the increasing prevalence of dual-career (both academic and nonacademic) households places additional constraints on the ability of academics to take policy positions that require extended relocations (Wilson Reference Wilson1999).

This logic generates the following hypothesis:

Second, who is engaging? A central claim of the “cult of the irrelevant” school is that the quantification and the formalization of IR has resulted in a decline in policy relevance, especially in security studies (Avey and Desch Reference Avey and Desch2014; Desch Reference Desch2015). This supposed decline is due to both supply-side and demand-side dynamics. On the supply side, formal and quantitative researchers, it is argued, are more interested in narrow disciplinary questions that are amenable to “simplistic hypothesis testing” but make “scholarship less useful to policymakers and concerned citizens” (Mearsheimer and Walt Reference Mearsheimer and Walt2013). Desch (Reference Desch2015) argues similarly that professional incentives within the academy have led to “technique trump[ing] relevance,” though more recent work by Desch and coauthors finds policy makers do not regard quantitative methodologies as an impediment to scholarship informing their practice (Avey et al. Reference Avey, Desch, Parajon, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2022). If quantification and formalization of IR scholarship is as antithetical to policy engagement as these arguments contend, we should expect the following:

Following this logic, quantitative/formal IR scholars should be less likely to perceive policy engagement as a standard part of academic employment to be considered in tenure and promotion reviews. Given Avey and Desch’s (Reference Avey and Desch2014) findings, these tendencies should be particularly pronounced among security scholars, who are skeptical about the quantification and formalization of IR scholarship irrespective of its interest or utility to policy audiences (Desch Reference Desch2019).

How might the university system, particularly research expectations associated with tenure and promotion processes, impact policy engagement? Maliniak, Peterson, and Tierney (Reference Maliniak, Peterson and Tierney2019) find that publications generally considered to be policy-relevant, like policy briefs and reports or op-eds and blogs, are assigned less weight in academic tenure decisions than peer-reviewed publications. This finding resonates with calls from many senior scholars (e.g., Walt Reference Walt2016) for junior academics to delay engagement, focus on peer-reviewed publications, and wait until tenure to engage in policy work. Given these professional incentives, we expect untenured scholars to focus more on traditional research publications over policy engagement. This should be particularly pronounced at research universities, where higher numbers of peer-reviewed publications are expected:

Maliniak, Powers, and Walter (Reference Maliniak, Powers and Walter2013) show that IR articles authored by women are less frequently cited and less central in the literature than similarly situated works authored by men or teams of men and women. Additionally, Hancock, Baum, and Breuning (Reference Hancock, Baum and Breuning2013) show that female academics are underrepresented in peer-reviewed publications and are failing to earn tenure in proportion to the number of political science PhDs earned per year. Other work shows that the burdens of departmental and disciplinary service fall more heavily on women than men, and that women face higher demands on their time from students but are penalized in teaching evaluations (Butcher and Kersey Reference Butcher and Kersey2015; Martin Reference Martin2016). Parental leave, often taken early in women’s careers, also increases pressure on tenure clocks (Maliniak, Powers, and Walter Reference Maliniak, Powers and Walter2013). These results suggest that women face higher opportunity costs than men when it comes to policy engagement.

When it comes to policy engagement, furthermore, disparities in recognition for scholarly outputs may be replicated. Women may be in a double recognition bind: they must work harder than their male colleagues to secure recognition for more traditional academic outputs but are likely to be rewarded relatively less for the fruits of policy engagement work. Taken together, gender disparities in the opportunity costs of engagement and the ability to claim credit lead us to anticipate that:

The previous conjectures relate to how scholars may engage. Now, we turn to the question of how IR scholars view the ethics of policy engagement. Do scholars believe that engagement entails some responsibility for the policy outcomes that may arise from their suggestions, proposals, or recommendations? Now more than ever, government funding agencies—including the state legislatures that control public universities’ finances—call for academics in both the social and natural sciences to demonstrate the real-world relevance of their research. Examples include the National Science Foundation’s increasing emphasis on broader impacts and the Impact Agenda of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. Early career academics increasingly are told to produce high-quality scholarship and scholarship that is useful to society in practical terms.

But this engagement is not without jeopardy. Even seemingly benevolent policy engagement can entail ethical dilemmas and yield unintended consequences. Research findings may simply be wrong, charting an incorrect course for policy makers; conflicts of interest may arise; both academics and policy makers bring known and unknown biases to the enterprise; and research findings may encourage some policy actors (such as activists) to put themselves at risk (Hendrix Reference Hendrix2019). Policy engagement also can erode academics’ intellectual property rights, lead to exploitation or harm by powerful institutions, and/or undermine scholarly integrity and independence (Blagden Reference Blagden2019).

Perhaps the most potentially corrosive outcome regards the effects of engagement on academic integrity. Adam Elkus (Reference Elkus2015) worries that preoccupation with policy relevance leads scholars to shape their beliefs and cater to the “whims of elite governmental policymakers.” We have focused on the costs of policy engagement for scholars, but there is little doubt it can confer benefits. In addition to intrinsic benefits, engagement may generate greater media coverage and visibility, access to amorphous “insider” status in powerful organizations, and pecuniary incentives related to consulting activities. To the extent these benefits are desirable, scholars may face pressure to shape their analysis and conclusions to conform to policy makers’ stated or unstated desires.

For this reason, some scholars may find policy engagement ethically dubious. They may heed Weber’s admonition that the proper role of scientists is to seek knowledge and understand causal relations but not to use said knowledge to claim political or ethical authority as a basis for intervening in policy formation, especially as doing so can compromise their commitments to science as a vocation (Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946).Footnote ³ The roles of scientist and policy maker are both to be valued but to be kept largely separate (Tholen Reference Tholen2021).

Given the role Weber’s thoughts have played in the development of the social sciences, IR scholars may believe that those who engage with policy makers are sacrificing academic integrity by distorting their views to appeal to policy audiences. This leads to our final hypothesis:

Methodology

To investigate our conjectures, we surveyed IR scholars about their policy engagement activities. In fielding the survey, we attempted to contact all IR scholars in the United States via email (Hendrix et al. Reference Hendrix, Macdonald, Powers, Peterson and Tierney2023). We define IR scholars as individuals who are employed at a college or university in a political science department or professional school and who teach or conduct research on issues that cross international borders. The survey was open from October to December 2019. Of the 5,251 scholars across the United States contacted, 971 responded to at least one question, for a response rate of approximately 18%.Footnote ⁴ In addition to gathering contact information for these individuals, we also code their apparent gender, their rank, and the type of university at which they are employed (we use the US News and World Report categories: National Research University, Regional Research University, National Liberal Arts College, and Regional Liberal Arts College). Our respondents are roughly similar to the broader IR scholar population in academic rank and the type of academic institution at which respondents work, although it includes a higher percentage of men and a higher percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty than the overall scholar population (see the full details in the appendix).

Despite these similarities, one might still be concerned about self-selection effects: individuals interested in policy engagement may be more likely to respond to our survey than those less interested, which would bias our estimates of engagement upward. To assess this possibility, we need some measure of the latent trait of “taste for policy engagement” that can be obtained for both respondents and nonrespondents to our survey. As a proxy we code all individuals in our population for whether they have published blog posts on The Monkey Cage since it moved to the Washington Post in 2013.Footnote ⁵ This allows us to generate a measure of the incidence rate of one form of policy engagement in both the population of all IR scholars in the United States and the subset of those scholars who responded to our survey. We rely on The Monkey Cage because it is a publicly observable and costly—but not too costly, according to our argument—signal of one’s interest in or taste for policy engagement and because it has a record of publishing work from scholars across a diverse set of institutions.

We find that 12% of US scholars have published in The Monkey Cage since 2013, 9 percentage points lower than among our respondents (about 21%), suggesting that those with a taste for engagement were more likely to respond to our survey. To account for this, we generate poststratification weights (DeBell and Krosnick [Reference DeBell and Krosnick2009], implemented for R by Pasek et al. [Reference Pasek, Tahk, Culter and Schwemmle2018]). These weights correct for differences in the distribution of gender, rank, and Monkey Cage activity between our respondents and the broader population of IR scholars. In addition, we subsample by whether respondents have published in The Monkey Cage. In the first set of analyses below, we report both weighted and unweighted estimates. As will be seen, our conclusions are similar whether or not we apply weights to the data. As such, we report results from our unweighted analyses for the remainder of the paper. Weighted versions of all analyses appear in the appendix.

Findings

Do Scholars Engage?

We find evidence of pervasive policy engagement by IR scholars. A sizable majority—about 70% in both the weighted and unweighted data—of respondents worked either for or with policy-consequential organizations at some point in their careers. We break these results out by organization type in table 2 where we present the raw data, the weighted data, and results based on the subsample of those who have published in The Monkey Cage. In each of these, we find that the most common type of engagement was with the US government followed by engagement with nongovernmental organizations and think tanks (though the order varies somewhat between The Monkey Cage authors and the broader sample). Still our unweighted results do not differ appreciably from the weighted sample or the subsample of The Monkey Cage respondents.

Table 2 Which of the Following Types of Policy Organizations Have You Worked with/for?

Note: percentages do not sum to 100%, because engagement with multiple types of organizations is possible.

Smaller shares worked for or with international organizations and the private sector, foreign governments, and interest groups. For many academics, their engagement spanned organizational types: roughly a third (32.2%) reported engaging with multiple organizational types, and about 14% worked for or with three or more different organizational types.

Nearly half (47.7%) of survey respondents worked in the policy world before entering academia. And these positions were not just short-term summer internships: 37.7% of this group held positions for six months or more. Indeed, for most respondents, some type of engagement during their scholarly career is a relatively frequent activity. When asked how frequently they engaged in these activities over the past five years, a majority (58.3%) said at least several times a year; 15.7% said they engaged monthly.

When IR scholars engage, what types of activities do they engage in? As expected (H1), the most frequent modalities were those that provide opportunities for credit-claiming while requiring smaller investments of time: media appearances or interviews (68.7%) and op-ed/blog-writing (63.0%). Whether blog-writing in general constitutes engagement, however, is questioned by Avey et al. (Reference Avey, Desch, Petrova and Wilson2021), who find that while Foreign Policy-affiliated blogs, War on the Rocks, and The Monkey Cage are consulted by policy makers at reasonably high rates, other blogs like Duck of Minerva and Political Violence at a Glance are not. There may still be professional reasons for scholars to write for these outlets, but policy engagement—at least as recognized by policy makers themselves—does not appear to be foremost among them.

“Deeper” engagement modalities, such as holding a full-time position in a government agency, multilateral organization, advocacy organization, think tank, or interning for some, were much less frequent (19.0% and 11.6%, respectively). This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that IR scholars favor those types of activities that require smaller time commitments and can amplify or enhance their scholarly work, rather than force tradeoffs by occupying more of scholars’ time and energy but resulting in fewer observable outputs (Hendrix Reference Hendrix2016).

Nevertheless, sizable minorities (48.8% and 40.5% respectively) reported that they engage in consulting activities not for attribution/publication and writing policy briefs for government agencies, advocacy organizations, or think tanks. In terms of time commitments, consulting activities are hard to parse, as they might range from commitments of a couple of hours (focus-group participation, Chatham House rules-based discussions) to significant time investments (commissioned reports or studies for private audiences). There are at least two possible explanations for this relatively high rate of engagement in consulting. First, compared to other forms of engagement, the financial benefits of consulting jobs can be enticing. Financial compensation therefore may be an important variable in explaining policy engagement rates when public credit-claiming is not possible. Second, many IR scholars view policy engagement as valuable—both for society and their own professional benefit. In total, 70% of respondents believe that policy engagement enhances the quality of their teaching and research.

Our third hypothesis asks, do junior scholars engage less? Seniority appears to result in more frequent engagement in a roughly linear fashion. Of chaired professors, 74% reported engaging either monthly or several times a year over the previous five years, with full professors (59%), associate professors (57%), and assistant professors (52%) engaging less frequently. Assistant professors engage the least frequently of those on the tenure track, but the majority still choose to do so at least several times a year. These aggregate findings are driven by differential rates of junior engagement between those working at research-oriented R1 institutions and those at other types of institutions. As table 3 demonstrates, junior scholars at R1s engage less frequently than their senior colleagues, while junior scholars at other types of institutions engage at similar rates to their tenured colleagues.

Table 3 Frequency of Engagement by Junior Scholars, R1 vs. Other Institutional Types

Note: percentage of respondents who engage monthly or several times a year.

We find little evidence for a substantial gender gap in scholarly engagement. Higher rates of female IR scholars (63.4%) report engaging at least several times a year than their male counterparts (56.5%), although men engage monthly at slightly higher rates (16.4% vs. 13.8%).Footnote ⁶ The gap in monthly engagement may be partially attributable to the gender gap among chaired professors, who account for 12.6% of male respondents but only 8.9% of female respondents; indeed, the gender gap in chaired professorships (79.6% male vs. 20.4% female) is larger than for any other academic rank. The difference between male and female rates of engagement was not statistically significant, however, either across ranks (Pearson chi²(3)=2.51, Pr = 0.455) or at the junior/untenured level (Pearson chi²(1)=.354, Pr = 0.552). The data are thus inconsistent with our expectations regarding H4.

Is there a quantitative–qualitative divide in engagement practice and perception? The evidence is mixed. Regarding frequency of engagement, we do not see a large gap between qualitative and quantitative IR scholars overall (table 4). There is a more pronounced gap across methodological lines, however, both among frequent engagers (those engaging monthly) and those who self-identify as international/global security experts. Qualitative security scholars engage monthly at over twice the rate of quantitative security scholars. Still, over half (54.7%) of quantitative security scholars engage in policy-related activities at least several times a year, a share similar that of qualitative scholars (57.2%; the difference between the two is not statistically significant).

Table 4 In the Past Five Years, How Frequently Have You Engaged in the Policy-Related Activities that You Identified Above?

There is some difference of opinion across the qualitative–quantitative divide about whether policy engagement is a standard part of academic employment and whether it should be valued in tenure and promotion decisions. Qualitative scholars agree somewhat more with both propositions (tables 5 and 6), though the margins are not large and not wider among the subset of scholars who identify primarily as international/global security scholars. A majority of both qualitative and quantitative researchers (66.1% and 55%) agreed that their universities should value policy engagement in tenure and promotion decisions. Among security scholars, the gap across the methodological divide was even smaller (63.8% and 57.1%).

Table 5 Policy Engagement Should Be a Standard Part of Academic Employment, Like Research, Teaching, and Service

Table 6 My University Should Value Policy Engagement in the Tenure and Promotion Process

What emerges is not a large quantitative–qualitative divide among security scholars, but a more bimodal distribution of preferences among quantitative security scholars. In both tables 5 and 6, quantitative security scholars were less likely to sit on the fence; whereas roughly a quarter of qualitative security scholars neither agreed nor disagreed that their university should value policy engagement in tenure and promotion decisions, only one in nine quantitative scholars neither agreed nor disagreed.

The evidence indicates that some form of relatively frequent policy engagement is the norm, rather than the exception, among IR scholars. A puzzle emerges from the fact that, by and large, IR scholars do not believe that these activities are recognized by universities, their primary employers. Yet, they still engage in such activities relatively frequently. Only 31% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed their university currently values policy engagement in the tenure and promotion process, with 44% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing. This stands in stark contrast to beliefs about whether these activities should count in promotion decisions: 63% agreed or strongly agreed their university should value policy engagement in the tenure and promotion process, with only 16% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing. IR scholars are clearly engaging frequently, but they do not believe that there are direct professional rewards for doing so. In some instances, such as private consulting, the tangible benefits may come in the form of additional income, but many of the engagement modalities involve no direct monetary compensation.

There are several possible interpretations of this apparent paradox. First, many forms of scholarly engagement affect evaluations of scholars by their respective academic communities: a Foreign Affairs article may be intended for a primarily nonacademic audience, but it may have cachet among academic audiences as well. Second, monetary and nonmonetary benefits compensate for the lost time that otherwise could have been dedicated to research and writing for the academic audience. And third, many academics may engage simply because they value it eo ipso.

Does Engagement Entail Responsibility?

Do IR scholars bear partial responsibility for the outcomes associated with their engagement, and does this engagement encourage scholars to distort their opinions to cater to policy audiences?

IR scholars believe policy engagement comes with some responsibility for real-world outcomes. An overwhelming majority (87.1%) of respondents agreed with the statement, “In the event that their policy recommendations come to be adopted by policy makers, scholars bear at least partial responsibility for the impact of those policies in the real world.” At least among IR scholars, the idea that their responsibility ends with communication of their perspective is widely rejected. Given the emphasis on creating opportunities to engage and coaching on the mechanics of engagement, the fact that ethical considerations have not been centered historically in graduate/early career scholar training is striking.

IR scholars disagree on the question of whether policy engagement might lead scholars to distort their own views and opinions to appeal to policy audiences. Policy engagement—especially high-profile, public-facing engagement like media appearances, delivering Congressional testimony, or writing for popular media—can give scholars attention and a platform that their academic work would never provide. Even behind-the-scenes engagement, like consulting and not-for-attribution briefings, can provide academics with access to high-level officials, to say nothing of direct financial compensation. Given these potential benefits, might IR scholars bend their analysis to conform with the perceived expectations of these audiences?

We asked IR scholars how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “I worry that policy-engaged scholars distort their true beliefs or opinions to appeal to policy audiences.” More than a third (36.4%) agreed, while 29.4% disagreed, and 34.3% neither agreed nor disagreed (figure 1). Interestingly, very few IR scholars (4.7%) self-identified as having tempered or withheld their true beliefs or opinions in anticipation that the sponsor of those activities might disapprove. IR scholars report that they have not been tempted to tell funders or organizations they consult with what they want to hear, but a plurality worry that their colleagues have. This creates a potential dynamic in which scholars, even policy-engaged ones, are suspicious of the ways others’ policy engagement shapes their incentives and whether they communicate their views honestly, raising issues of academic integrity.

Figure 1 Respondents’ Concerns about Engagement Distorting Scholarly Perspective

We also asked whether IR scholars tended to express their own views or give deference to scholarly consensus when engaging in policy discussions. This is important, since Pielke (Reference Pielke2007) notes that one of the more common roles that experts play for policy makers is as “science arbiter,” with the expert (or group of experts) supporting decision makers by providing answers to questions that can be addressed empirically: Are foreign-imposed regimes likely to endure? Will climate change increase armed conflict? Under what conditions does foreign aid reduce poverty? At what level is government debt fundamentally unsustainable? The presumption is that scientific experts can provide objective answers to these questions. The answers to these questions are often complex and contextual, however, and the evidence is often ambiguous and subject to ongoing debate (Jassanoff Reference Jassanoff1998). And, of course, scholars typically have their own views on these questions, and their views may or may not represent consensus positions.

Do IR scholars privilege their own views in their interactions with policy audiences, or do they seek to convey expert consensus positions? IR scholars were again divided, with 36% agreeing that they valued their own conclusions over scholarly consensus, 29.4% disagreeing, and 34.5% neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Seniority clearly mattered, with each rung up the academic ladder conferring greater confidence in one’s own findings. Nearly half of chaired professors agreed that they valued their own findings over scholarly consensus, while only 28.6% of assistant professors did (table 7). Given that policy makers tend to value scholarly consensus as a basis for informing policy decisionsFootnote ⁷ (Avey et al. Reference Avey, Desch, Parajon, Peterson, Powers and Tierney2022), this finding is troubling: the most senior (and thus academically qualified, as signaled by rank) voices in the room may be the least likely to use their expertise to advocate for consensus positions on subjects.

Table 7 Academic Rank and Valuing One’s Own Conclusions over Scholarly Consensus