Peter Feaver at Shadow Government ("Notes From The Loyal Opposition") got to the nuts and bolts of the town vs. gown policy gap.
Money quote(s):
"(A) topic near and dear to my heart: the gap between academic political science and the policy world. This is a longstanding concern that has been the subject of much talk and some action my entire professional life. Since I am also a card-carrying yakademic (a term one of my National Security Council colleagues introduced to me back when I worked in the Clinton White House -- he always smiled when he said it so I am sure it was a term of endearment), I sympathize with much of what they and numerous others (see here and here) have to say."
"(Y)akademic." I love it!
"In my experience, academics are just as biased as, and in some cases more biased than, policymakers. Policymakers have a partisan bias, a worldview bias, and a policy commitment bias (eg., if a policymaker advocated for a policy initially he may be predisposed to support it despite evidence that it is faltering, and vice-versa).
Academics also have a partisan bias and a worldview bias. The chief difference is that academics tend to give jargon terms to their worldviews and they tend to reinforce them with an additional layer of method bias -- that is, viewing the world primarily through the narrow lens of whatever methodological tool they have mastered in the academy. Academics also have policy bias -- if they supported or opposed a policy" (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)
Everyone has biases. Academics as much as policy-makers; nobody gets to pretend to an utterly detached and "objective" opinion. Good intelligence analysts identify their biases upfront.
"Academics have a further source of bias that is not as prevalent in the policymaker world: a skewed marketplace of ideas where the people they spend the most time arguing with come from a very narrow slice of the ideological spectrum."
The non-diversity of worldviews in academia has been done to death in certain circles. Which doesn't mean it isn't real.
"(M)ost of my academic international relations/security colleagues (that is people who do not focus on a specific country or region) do not have any firmer grasp on factual knowledge than the best people I have worked with in government; indeed, for reasons I get to below, they might even have less. What they can bring to the table, however, is a rigor that comes from making theoretical claims explicit and using appropriate methods to evaluate them. The very best academics also can bring to the table a healthy respect for the limits of their methods, and thus for the limits of the claims they and others can make. The chief difference in this regard between policymakers and academics is that policymakers use theory and method implicitly whereas academics use them explicitly (or at least they should)."
The line between academics and policymakers isn't as bright and shining as some would have you believe. Most policymakers, even if they were not tenured professors or even successful grad students, were at least trained by academics at the undergraduate level (or beyond).
And if they lack academic rigor and methodology, exactly whose fault is that?
"Academic research is a good contribution to the policy debate, but it hardly settles the matter (and, in this case, it would hardly surprise the policymaker who knows full well that Iran is unlikely to capitulate through economic sanctions alone). Policymakers have to factor in many more considerations than even very thorough academic research tends to weigh, such as: the need to cultivate political support for a policy line; the need to demonstrate that all avenues, even unpromising ones, have been explored; the need to sequence and/or link measures that an academic study might treat in isolation (or try to "hold constant" in the analysis); the need to consider the possibility that the immediate case might be the exception rather than the rule; and so on." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)
7/25
