U.S. Political Science in the Crosshairs

Conservatives have a lot of levers yet to pull

Yeah, it’s AI, but so what

Think tanks are petri dishes for policy proposals. Policy entrepreneurs use these institutes and centers as places for rapid prototyping of ideas—and attracting patrons with the resources to turn slide decks into policy. Some proposals catch fire, others wither, some evolve resistance to criticisms, some become used to shift the terms of the broader debate, and still more combine with other proposals.

Although I personally can’t bear the roundtables, panel discussions and issue briefs that this ecosystem thrives on, I recognize that these are not (always) wasted efforts but one stage in the lifecycle of policy proposals. View these debates and discussions like Shark Tank for policies and activism—early proposals seeking backing from a group of wealthy backers who can bring them to market.

The upshot is that if you want to know what is coming down the pike, you should at least intermittently pay attention to the discussions in this universe. And if you’re a U.S. political scientist, you should be aware of conservative movements’ criticisms of political science journals. You should, further, understand that these arguments are laying the groundwork for a serious challenge to academic self-governance.

My goal here is not to rebut these claims but to bring them to greater attention. (I actually do take seriously my intellectual responsibility to understand and analyze!) Even if you dismiss those arguments on intellectual grounds, you must take them seriously politically. You may not take an interest in conservative think tanks, but they will take an interest in you.

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The Goldwater Institute recently launched a broadside against the previous editors of the American Political Science Review, the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association. (Many non-political scientists read this newsletter, so I’ll note that APSA is the leading political science association in the English-speaking world and APSR is among the leading journals in the discipline globally.)

The report takes aim at the “Feminist Collective”, the group of editors who operated the journal from 2020-2024. Like many journals, APSR is operated by editors commissioned by a parent association to manage the review process and decision-making that leads to publication. (And also like many journals, it is increasingly hard to get anyone to bid for the management of journals—this is a lot of work and the upside is not great in immediate terms.)

As you might guess, the Feminist Collective sought to pursue “pursue substantive, representational, and methodological diversity”. (These descriptions are based on the Feminist Collective’s 2024 editorial report to avoid relying on the Goldwater Institute’s representations.) Some of these represent intra-discipline concerns, like increasing the variety of methodological approaches represented in the journal (which is notoriously hostile to qualitative work) as well as substantive topics (the journal is also not particularly welcoming to work in international relations, for instance). These goals represent the sorts of interests that members of a scholarly discipline have in ensuring that their community has a shot in being included in the leading journal—standard academic politics, in other words. A previous generation of scholars, upset that non-statistical work was being largely excluded from APSR, launched a rebellion against the journal’s management that was known as the Perestroika movement.

The representational aspect, however, was more than boilerplate. It represented a consistent effort of outreach to underrepresented communities and an editorial policy to promote topics and issues that—well, look, the team called themselves the Feminist Collective, and they were not shy about what they were going to promote. It was early 2020s DEI logic; we were all there; everyone knows what it means.

The 2024 editorial report shows that there was a shift in the demographics of who made it into APSR. The visualization is a little clunky (the y-axis is percent of approved submission, the labels are the total numbers) but you can pretty clearly tell that male-only (solo and team) submissions went from about 55% under the previous team to about 41% under the Collective and female-only (solo and team) submissions went from about 13% (kinda low, tbh!) to about 20% under the Collective.

Figure from the Feminist Collective editorial report.

And racial composition changed as well, from about 65% all-White authorship (kinda high, tbh!) to somewhat under 60% under the Collective.

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About now you’re thinking that this is the setup for a “Lost Generation”-style complaint in which a middle-aged White dude laments these changes. Nope! Sure, I might look at the two APSR desk rejects I received from this team differently—how could I not? An APSR publication can make a career! It sucks when you get a desk rejection—a submission might represent a year to multiple years of work—and it’s natural to wonder if checking the “Male” box on my author ID made it more likely that my effort would be dismissed. But the odds of publication are so long that I’m not really able to say that any editorial policy actually influenced these outcomes at all.

So, now, this isn’t a lament. I wanted to present this background to the Goldwater Institute report. I want you to remember that everything above comes from the Feminist Collective themselves and so we can take these observations not as a hit job — this was what they wanted to celebrate about their leadership. But you can imagine, pretty easily, that these changes caused consternation within the discipline.

And they made a plum target for outsiders motivated to take on anti-DEI targets—and that the goal of these criticisms is to build a coalition for what they would describe as a radical overhaul of how academia functions.

The Goldwater report—calmly titled “Peer Review Gone Wild”—is written by a historian who goes long on the DEI angle. “Thanks to the APSR’s editorial manipulation, from 2020-25, only three APSR articles…specifically focused on the U.S. Constitution or the 50 state constitutions. The number of articles focusing on race, gender, and/or social justice was more than 40 times greater than the number focused on American constitutions,” one bullet point reads. The next bullet point continues the theme: “The APSR’s obsession with race- and gender-based political advocacy has led to a flurry of other ‘scholarship’ indistinguishable from left-wing activism, including published ‘research’ articles like ‘Violence in the American Imaginary: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Superheroes’”.

These are lemon-picked examples. First, as a political scientist, I’ve never seen “scholarship on constitutions” as constitutive (so to speak) of research standards—this is a meaningless ratio that plays on lazy stereotypes about what political scientists are supposed to research (laws n’ stuff) rather than what they research (political behavior, institutions, and so on). Any article on Congress, the presidency, voting outcomes, and so forth already involves the Constitution; if you want scholarship on the Constitution, well, you can go to other political science journals or ask the law professoriate. Similarly, the superheroes article is a tempting target but it’s telling that the Goldwater report mischaracterizes the article. The Goldwater report says “the author finds that the Marvel character ‘Punisher’s unrestricted violence valorizes white male grievance’”, but the article actually argues that the Punisher icon—the skull logo—symbolizes white male grievance for law enforcement officers. It is kind of puzzling to see Punisher skulls on LEO vehicles and elsewhere! Maybe you think this shouldn’t have been published in APSR, but it’s not obviously a trivial topic or wrong argument if you think that symbols communicate identity.

In the same way, the authors criticize an article about how Donald Trump’s career on The Apprentice helped him come to power. “Any minimally informed observer of American politics would likely not have needed a postdoctoral academic to explain that President Trump’s celebrity sped his political rise,” the report sneers. Yeah, but that’s not the point. First, there’s a difference between a guess and a test, and this is a test. Second, it’s not just about knowing whether but how much. Using an instrumental variables approach employing the fact that people rarely changed the channel in the live-TV era, the authors work hard to establish how much Trump’s celebrity era mattered for his later electoral performance in the GOP primaries:

[a] one standard deviation (4.83) increase in the (instrumented) Apprentice ratings would lead to a roughly 1 percentage point increase in county-level vote share for Trump. In the context of a competitive primary election with more than 10 candidates, these effects are not insignificant. In the Iowa caucus, the difference in vote share between Trump and Rubio was 1 percentage point. In Arkansas, Trump’s overall vote share was 33% whereas it was 31% for Cruz. Considering the winner-take-all delegate allocation in Republican primaries, these increases can lead to dramatic changes in primary outcomes

This is smaller than I would have guessed but, as the authors say, probably important—even decisive! I definitely think that the election of Donald Trump was so ex ante unlikely and ex post consequential that we should be pursuing more than armchair guesses about how his earlier career mattered. (And I also think these are lower bounds because I never watched The Apprentice but I saw a hell of a lot of ads for it.)

Again, however, my goal isn’t to refute this report point-by-point. (If you want to commission that, my fees are very reasonable!) Rather, I want to show that this is directly connected to a much bigger political agenda. The core of the report isn’t to criticize the Feminist Collective but to use that criticism to justify taking over peer review.

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The Goldwater report is at pains to establish that peer review and journals should be treated as a legitimate target of political action. If a scholar received taxpayer funding (grants or salary), if an editor is employed at a public university, and even if taxpayer-funded research is judged by these entities—and if these decisions are used for hiring and firing decisions—the report argues that they should be brought to heel:

To reduce the waste of taxpayer resources for the corrupt academic research enterprise in non-STEM fields, state legislatures and/or boards of regents of public universities should reform faculty work expectations and create an alternate pathway for faculty advancement focused on instructional excellence rather than research. Such proposals are modeled in the American Higher Education Restoration Act proposed by the Goldwater Institute, Defending Education, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Basically, this is a call for trustees, state legislators, and federal bureaucrats responsive to Congress and President Trump to wield their influence to undo DEI and promote MAGA. And this is no idle call! It really could be done—the legal authorities and pressure points exist to make this, or something like it, a reality!

Much of the report talks about how research is a waste of time, especially the woke kind, and how scholars need to go back to teaching; in particular, it argues that outlandish and extremist research is the result of the corruption of peer review. The obvious next step is an anti-corruption drive.

In this regard, the report singles out APSR and political science. Why?

The discipline of political science should be of particular interest to policymakers and citizens concerned with public universities. These institutions ought to prepare students to be thoughtful citizens of the American republic. Political science should provide students with essential knowledge of American government, including the institutions and ideals that shape our constitutional republic.

(Geez, and I thought APSR was hostile to International Relations! These guys don’t even want to regulate me!)

The pitch is clear: state legislators and trustees should rein in the silly but threatening leftist professors:

Public universities should make it clear that (non-STEM) faculty are paid by taxpayers primarily to teach, and that any reduction in teaching responsibilities for the purpose of research should occur only where it is actually advancing human knowledge.

How to accomplish this? Pass the new model legislation that the Goldwater Institute and the James G. Martin Center have put together for state universities:

• creating tenured teaching-track positions for Excellence in Americanism and Western Civilization

• enshrine student feedback (course evaluations) as the measure of teaching effectiveness

• mandate a standard 3-3 teaching load for non-STEM faculty and faculty teaching the Western Civ course (!)

• bar automatic taxpayer-funded support for non-STEM faculty

• restrict non-STEM course releases

• let trustees approve all new faculty job postings

Non-Goldwater initiatives along these lines include measures like federal encouragement to stop participating in DEI organizations and reviewing public institutions’ membership in other professional and scholarly organizations. See also coverage of similar actions at Ohio State University and, more notoriously, Texas’s inquisition of university classes.

The Goldwater report seems to have gotten some play—there’s a (remarkably fair, under the circumstances) write-up of the report in National Review, for instance, and a senior Harvard professor has given it an endorsement—but not a huge splash, yet. On the other hand, it’s still early days, and the well-funded institute can always provide seed capital for policy entrepreneurs as state houses around the country begin their legislative work.

2025 saw universities come under the greatest scrutiny and pressure from state and federal governments in my memory. The next three years (at least) will break those records even if the Goldwater report in particular leads nowhere (although if it gets action by even one state legislature, that’s still a nontrivial effect!). We should expect that political science, in particular, will be a convenient and frequent target (at least until someone reminds people that public policy schools exist or mandates pro-American history courses).