Record Details

What Do Policymakers Want From Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision Makers

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title What Do Policymakers Want From Us? Results of a Survey of Current and Former Senior National Security Decision Makers
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/1P0IL3
 
Creator Avey, Paul C.
Desch, Michael C.
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description 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.
 
Subject Social Sciences