Political Science Isn't Civics
It's my job to help students learn to think, not to tell students what to think
One of my goals for this newsletter, albeit sporadically realized, is to provide fast and readable materials that readers who are professors can assign in their courses. Think of this as being The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Political Science compared to The Monkey Cage: less official, spicier, and much more likely to have an entry like “Bolivia: Mostly harmless.”
Today, I want to address a confusion I see just regularly enough that it should be addressed: political science isn’t the college version of civics courses. It might come in handy as my colleagues head back to the classroom.
For readers who might not be American (or who might be somewhat distant from their own secondary education), civics courses—sometimes also known as government classes—in high schools are universally required courses or curricular standards. They usually describe the federal Constitution, state government, and local government. Sometimes they’re taught by social studies teachers, sometimes by teachers hired more as athletic coaches than as teachers. Occasionally they take a critical tone. Mostly, they are designed to make students imbibe the “right” lessons about the United States—and when the courses become too relevant or critical, state governments will step in to bring them back in line, as Texas did when the state legislature radically restricted “woke civics”.
For a lot of students, these courses are the closest analogue to political science that they will encounter at the K-12 level. This is part of a larger pattern in which high school curricula tends to be STEM, vocational, or humanities, with little sustained attention to social sciences. The idea that college political science is just like civics courses only with more remote teachers is reinforced by the fact that many universities accept AP Government and AP Comparative Government courses for credit for introductory political science courses.
Political science and civics, however, are not very close at all. In many ways, political science is the opposite of a civics course.
Defining political science is legendarily difficult. One way to sidestep providing a neat definition is to look at what political scientists do. And what they do is not really close to what civics classes provide.
As an empirical rule, political scientists do not spend their days teaching people how to engage with the political system or describing the institutions of government. Rather, they are much more likely to research how people engage with politics—or why they choose not to. That can mean that political scientists may be interested in topics like how homeownership affects voting turnout or why local governments tend to be skewed toward responding to the interest of homeowners. In that way, empirical political scientists try to move past the ought of governments—what governments should do or, even less reliably, what governments say they should do—and toward the what governments and other political actors actually do and the why behind what they do. In concrete terms, then, whereas a civics class might “cover” Congress by describing the House and the Senate and the mechanics by which people are elected to each chamber, a political science course on Congress might try to explain what political scientists have found about how lobbying influences lawmaking or whether incumbent senators have an advantage over challengers when they seek re-election.
(To complicate things a little bit, there are a lot of political scientists who focus on the “ought” of governments. These political theorists frequently do so by trying to make more precise or challenging arguments about the reasons why governments and political actors should behave in a particular way. These arguments might take the form of asking what “equality before the law” really requires of us, rather than just asserting that institutions provide equal access—or even of just denying that they empirically do provide such equality.)
Nor do political scientists necessarily study government itself. They might study why people choose to run for Congress, how organized interest groups seek to influence government, or why countries resort to war as a means of settling international disputes, but they will frequently approach these questions from a theoretical standpoint that treats the specific actions and constitution of the governments involved as somewhat of a black box. To be sure, even this is a generalization, as there are certainly political scientists who know the extreme details of congressional procedure, treaties between the federal government and Native American tribes, and United Nations agencies, but as a general rule political scientists tend to be interested in the why rather than the what of government action and in seeing governments as embedded in larger economic and social practices.
This might seem unobjectionable, but you might be surprised at how much hostility doing research into political behavior can generate. When a researcher approaches a topic in political science, they are apt to encounter findings that don’t easily sit with the beliefs that people want them to report. Some research in political science, for instance, shows that donors to legislators get much greater access to legislators than do non-donors. If you’re a legislator, this is not the sort of thing you’d like to have advertised! At other times, research into political science might involve trying to understand how nuclear weapons can be used as a threat to produce better outcomes for a particular country. People get very uneasy about the moral implications (and practical implications!) of this sort of research. In both cases, some groups would prefer for these lines of research to be shut down (although note that the legislator has much more direct ways to shut down research into Congress and state houses than activists have to curb research into nuclear strategy).
And at still other times, people will even wonder how politics can be researched at all. This is a reaction that really exists in the world! Mostly, I’ve personally encountered it from STEM scholars (and undergraduates) who don’t understand that the social world can be a subject of research. But the alternative to formal, disciplined research into politics isn’t no research—rather, it’s bad research. The other side of this response comes when one describes their research findings and someone scoffs “that’s obvious”—but everything is obvious once you know the answer. The point of research in political science, like any discipline, is sometimes to see which of several plausible answers is more likely to be right. It really matters, for instance, if we can explain war as a consequence not of personal ambition or stupidity but of institutional failures and inability to reach credible bargains. And it’s probably a good idea to have independent experts and observers to conduct this research.
One underlying source of these objections may be, as the political scientist Arthur Lupia once observed, that “many people believe that politics is something that we can live without or something whose less attractive attributes are easy to eliminate.” As Lupia continues, “when outsiders look into the subject matter of other sciences, their jaws drop in awe of nature’s beauty and power. They are justifiably impressed by those who work hard to uncover nature’s amazing secrets. By contrast, when outsiders look into the subject matter of political science, they see ideological battles, demagoguery, and scandal.” A loose translation of this, then, is that people may object to political science research because they’d prefer to avert their eyes from politics altogether. Toddlers have similar reactions to scary animals at the zoo.
Neatly for our purposes, Lupia’s observation tends to confirm that civics courses and political science are different. Civics courses tend to shy away from anything that makes America or its political system look bad. Some political scientists don’t exactly rush into the breach, but as a group we are a lot more likely to acknowledge systemic variations, dysfunctions, and oppressions.
Yet the real distinction is even deeper. Civics courses tend to think that the list of what you need to know about politics is relatively short and easy to relate. Political scientists tend to take the subject of politics as posing a long, perhaps infinite, list of open questions whose answers are only dimly knowable and which will tend to change over time.
And that’s why I think that my job isn’t to teach people what to think about politics. Rather, it’s my job to teach them how to think about politics by learning and applying the theories and findings of a community of scholars. My goal isn’t, ultimately, to produce good citizens as defined by some state legislature’s committee. Instead, it’s to nurture well-trained students who are curious, thoughtful, and independent adults.