Author Archives: William G. Nomikos

On Kenneth Waltz

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Ken Waltz, arguably the most influential scholar in International Relations of the past half-century, passed away last night. He was 88. It is tough to find anything to say that does not sound contrived. Instead, I wanted to share a lasting memory of mine from John Mearsheimer’s seminar on realism at the University of Chicago. We were reading Waltz’s Theory of International Politics and after a couple of hours of discussing the basics most  are familiar with (balancing, the benefits of bipolarity, etc.), we had gotten into some of the more obscure parts of Theory (there is a fascinating discussion of the meaning of power towards the end that is always worth a re-read). At the end of the latter discussion, John admitted that even though he had read the book countless times (and written insightful analyses of the work), the day’s seminar had brought out something new from the book for him. Years later, reading Theory for the nth for my comprehensive exam in IR, I finally understood what John meant. It’s amazing how much insight Waltz packed into one work. Every new reading truly produces something new for the reader. And this is true not only of Theory but also of much of his other work, including Man, the State, and War.

I met Waltz for the first and only time at a small conference at Yale last year. Not only was he incredibly nice to me and my fellow graduate students (always appreciated!) but tremendously incisive and sharp during the substantive portions of the conference. It was difficult not to be star-struck. Rest in peace, Professor Waltz: you will be missed by generations of students of international politics.

Choosing a Ph.D. Program in Political Science

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Every April, hundreds of prospective students choose to pursue a Ph.D. in political science. The choice is an important and serious one that usually entails a multi-year commitment to a place, its professors, a set of people, and a program. For these reasons, many prospective students often struggle to come to a decision about what program to choose. Others have written extensively about the application process. However, we at The Smoke-Filled Room wanted to offer advice, from the perspective of political science Ph.D. students, exclusively about the process of choosing a Ph.D. program. To that end, we solicited our contributors for their advice. Here’s what they had to say:

Lionel Beehner, Yale
The best advice I received was to go into grad school with an open mind, cast a wide net, and find scholars whose work you like. I didn’t know what the difference between a R1 school or a policy-focused school was when applying (I probably should have), having already had a policy degree from SIPA and done some think thank and journalism work. I knew nothing about methods. I only knew I was interested in was security studies broadly conceived as well as civil wars. There is no such thing as a “perfect” school, since every program you apply to will entail tradeoffs. No grad student can “have it all.” But overall, you should get a keen knowledge of the program, its top scholars, and determine if the school is a good fit. Also, talk to as many grad students as possible, which I found was invaluable.

Matt Eckel, Georgetown
Think about the money, and not just yours. It’s probably not news that a guaranteed stipend can make a world of difference in the time, mental energy and caloric output you can dedicate to your academic work. It can be tough to stay focused on research when every semester brings a new search for rent and grocery money. If you are lucky enough to have multiple funded offers, though, don’t just consider what each department is offering you. Consider what it’s offering your future colleagues. How many get fellowships? How much funding is available on a semester or annual basis for those without guaranteed funding? This advice doesn’t come from some grad-students-of-the-world-unite sense of class solidarity (though if you’re inclined toward such thinking we should chat), but rather from intellectual self-interest. You’ll have a more enjoyable, productive, rewarding experience in graduate school if you’re surrounded by colleagues who can devote as much time, energy and attention to their research as you can.

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Condemned to Repeat It: Revisiting the War in Iraq

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On the ten year anniversary of the War in Iraq, Peter Feaver “celebrated” with a post on Foreign Policy about five “myths” that pervade views about the war. Lists are fun. And this is a fun list. I say this because I hope nobody is taking this list seriously. I appreciate Feaver’s effort to try to clear up what happened in the build-up to the war. To be honest, I am still not sure exactly why the war in Iraq occurred. I do agree with Feaver’s implicit claim that monocausal explanations of the war are doomed to fail; this is a complicated policy issue that evolved in unpredictable ways from 2002 through 2004 that now cloud our ability to judge what happened.

All that being said, I don’t think Feaver’s attempt to clear the air makes a significant contribution to our knowledge about the war for three reasons. First, some of the “myths” are strawmen with which no serious observer of international politics would actually agree. Consider, for instance, the following myth:

The “real” motivation behind the Iraq war was the desire to steal Iraqi oil, or boost Halliburton profits, or divert domestic attention from the Enron scandal, or pay off the Israel lobby, or exact revenge on Hussein for his assassination attempt on President George H. W. Bush.

Feaver then proceeds to debunk each of these in turn. This is not necessary. Evocation of such arguments against the war come about only through serious misreadings of The Israel Lobby, Rise of the Vulcans, and, perhaps, Orientalism. In Feaver’s defense, he does admit that these are opinions held by “far left (and right) fringes.” But is this really who Feaver is targeting with this post?

The second type of myths are oddly-timed reaffirmations of some of the same arguments used in the build-up to the war a decade ago. For instance, Feaver rebuts John Mearsheimer’s claim that the Bush administration lied about the al-Qaeda-Iraq link as follows:

The first is the question of links between Iraq and al Qaeda. As I noted above, while the Iraq files contain no “smoking gun” of an active operational link, the record includes ample evidence of overtures originating from either side — each pursuing precisely the kind of enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend alliance of convenience that Bush worried about.

Ok. So, in conclusion, then: no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. I sincerely hope that this country’s national security apparatus does not consider “overtures” proper casus belli.

Finally, Feaver correctly addresses the myth that the Bush administration wanted to democratize Iraq from the start with two fairly persuasive points: (1) learning from Desert Storm, Bush officials were only committed to Saddam Hussein’s forcible removal from power, and (2) once Saddam had been removed, the administration promoted democracy as the best option for a post-Saddam Iraq. Obviously, the administration was woefully underprepared for this endeavor. Nonetheless, Feaver’s description of the timing of the motives is sound. However, he offers little clarity in his description of the primary cause of the war:

Bush was committed to confronting Iraq because of the changed risk calculus brought about by 9/11, which heightened our sensitivity to the nexus of WMD and terrorism (believing that state sponsors of terrorism who had WMD would be a likely pathway by which terrorist networks like al Qaeda could secure WMD)

This sentence barely means anything. Mostly, it’s just national security buzzwords strewn about a couple of proper nouns and “WMD” to lend an air of credibility to a nonsensical policy decision. It’s especially curious that Feaver would call Iraq a “nexus of WMD and terrorism” given the overwhelming evidence that it had neither in the spring of 2003. While it is important to clear the air surrounding some of the overtly biased arguments against the War in Iraq, it is equally important not to revert back to the same myths that led us into this mess to begin with.

For more of his thoughts on US Foreign Policy, follow William on Twitter.

Does China Want Change?

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(Ed.: The following is a guest post by Rory Truex, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Yale University. Rory is currently conducting field work in China.)

Among China watchers, there is an ever-louder group of voices singing the imminent downfall of the country’s political system. The chorus goes something as follows: “The faux representation afforded by the National People’s Congress, the empty channels for public participation, the meaningless village elections— these shell institutions do little to stem the CCP’s growing legitimacy deficit. Protests are already on the rise. Sooner or later, something will happen and the people will rise up and demand real democracy. It’s only a matter of time.”

For many in the prediction game, that time has already come and gone, or it is rapidly approaching. In 2001, Gordon Chang predicted The Coming Collapse of China, asserting that underperforming loans would break China’s financial system and trigger the fall of the CCP within a decade. In a 2011 editorial, Chang revised his estimates to say that the system would fall within one year’s time. This has also proven false. In 1996, Henry Rowen used economic data to predict that China will become democratic “around the year 2015.”

Perhaps the reason the “fall of China” prediction has fallen flat to date is that it rests on the notion that Chinese citizens actually want a new political system. A simple glance at the data, or simple discussions with a few citizens, would make us reconsider this assumption.
Confidence in Government (World Values Survey)

The figure above shows summary data from the fourth wave (2005-2008) of the World Values Survey (WVS). Among other attitudinal questions, the WVS asks respondents their level of confidence in their government on a four-point scale. The bars reflect the fraction of respondents responding “a great deal” or “quite a lot.” With the exception of Vietnam, Chinese citizens voice greater support of their government than any other country in the world.

Of course, we should take this fact with an oversized grain of salt. Cross-national surveys of this sort are notoriously bad and suffer from a host of biases— incomparable sampling procedures, poor translations, different cultural interpretations of question wordings, among others. Most importantly, respondents living in repressive political contexts— like China and Vietnam, for example— may be unwilling to voice their true opinions when asked sensitive questions about government. It may be that Chinese citizens have confidence in the CCP, or it may be that fear leads them to systematically bias their answers.

At the risk of sounding like a party mouthpiece, my guess is that the truth is probably closer to the former than we would like to believe. China scholars have long documented that Chinese citizens have a deep reservoir of trust in “the Center.” Many ostensibly subversive activities— protests, non-compliance with rules, petitions— are actually ways for citizens to communicate their grievances to the central government, which is perceived as responsive. The “fall of China” crowd likes to point to rising protest figures as evidence of a desire for change, but the vast majority of protests have nothing to do with political reform. Peter Lorentzen has argued that the regime deliberately allows this “regularized rioting” to help monitor lower level cadres.

In the end, public opinion in authoritarian contexts is difficult to gauge, and so we are left trying to blend imperfect survey data with more impressionistic anecdotal evidence. To build my own impressions, I have taken to asking a simple, direct question among my closer Chinese friends.

If you could change China’s political system today, what would you do?

There is no shortage of demands— more transparency, more freedom of speech, an open media, unregulated internet— but I’m always struck by how often multi-party competition is missing from the list. When probed on this issue, most will give a reply of the sort “this is not appropriate for China.” Some will flip the conversation back at me and point to recent Congressional debacles over the debt ceiling and fiscal cliff. These events are smugly broadcasted by China’s state media outlets, and they undermine the very credibility of the American system. If this is what democracy is, we’ll stick with our one-party system, thank you very much.

So does China want change? It is impossible to know for sure, but there seems to be a societal current pushing for limited liberalizing political reforms. Full-blown multi-party democracy and the “coming collapse” of the CCP?

I’m not sure we should be singing that chorus just yet.

(Democratic) Peace in the Middle East?

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Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Michael Poznansky, Ph.D. Student in Foreign Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics, University of Virginia

The Middle East is in trouble. If the ongoing civil war in Syria, fears of nuclear proliferation in Iran, and a tenuous cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas were not enough, Egypt has recently passed a constitution instantiating the precepts of Islamism. In a recent article in the New York Times, John Owen suggests that proponents of Islamism—a brand of political Islam forged by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s—are thriving in the new Middle East, espousing an alternative to the secular tradition of Western liberal democracy. In this post, I explore the future of Egypt’s regime and its impact on any potential democratic peace with the U.S. In the remaining space, I address three issues: (1) the state of the Egyptian regime and its implications for democratic peace; (2) what history and theory can tell us about analogous situations; and (3) how these lessons inform the future of U.S.-Egyptian relations.

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The Liberal Case against Chuck Hagel

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Much metaphorical ink has been spilt writing about President Barack Obama’s nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. In this climate, I was initially a bit skeptical of adding my voice to what is increasingly becoming a tired cacophony. However, a vast majority of what has been written has been either in firm support or in firm opposition of Hagel’s nomination. While those in favor have offered well-developed arguments (a prominent example), skeptics have presented mostly incoherent attacks centered either on Hagel’s supposedly dovish views, particular in regards to Iran, or Hagel’s less-than-complete commitment to Israel. Opposition from the left, usually reduced to Hagel’s comments about openly gay former ambassador James Hormel, has become lost in the oft-hyperbolic opposition from the right.  This is unfortunate. As Hagel attempts to reassure Senators, especially Democratic ones, before and during the confirmation hearings, I suggest that there remain some key issues surrounding Hagel of which foreign policy-minded liberals should be aware.

Barack Obama and the nominee for Secretary of Defense, former Senator Chuck Hagel

Undeniably, there are obvious reasons to support Chuck Hagel’s nomination for Secretary of Defense. His clear stance on Israel and the two-state solution marks a refreshing shift in the establishment foreign policy discourse about Israel-Palestine. Moreover, his steadfast opposition to hasty military action against Iran suggests that the Pentagon might offer an important veto should relations break down to the point that the White House would consider a strike. However, these are two big picture issues over which Hagel is likely to have little influence if Congress and the President are already determined to pursue a certain policy. Rather, Hagel as Secretary of Defense under President Barack Obama, like Robert Gates and Leon Panetta before him, is much more likely to affect relatively minor policy issues and day-to-day Pentagon operations. Since these decisions will probably include key civil rights, civil liberties, humanitarian, and legal (domestic and international) issues on which Hagel has a less-than-stellar record, progressives should, at the very least, be wary of Hagel’s nomination. While I don’t think outright opposition is appropriate, I also do not think full-fledged liberal support is warranted without addressing these key concerns first.

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Why Did “We” Accept Petraeus’s Resignation?

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I had just finished playing basketball with some colleagues when I saw a text on my phone from Niloufer Siddiqui, my co-editor-in-chief at The Smoke-Filled Room: “Petraeus just resigned.” My response, in complete ignorance and shock at this point, was simply “Benghazi?” Almost two weeks later, it seems that one of the few things we know with certainty is that it was not, in fact, Benghazi-related. This has not stopped talking heads from asking questions that seem to have irrelevant answers or refuse to accept relevant answers to more pertinent questions. However, this should subside sooner rather than later. Or so one hopes. Indeed, we face far more critical questions in light of this affair, the answers to which are much more important to how we think about national security policy in this country.

First and foremost, are national intelligence officials different from the military and other civilians? The answer here appears, unfortunately, fairly straightforward. Members of the national intelligence community must take care not to share sensitive information with those that do not have the requisite clearance. It is this that distinguishes them from other civilians and, to a certain extent, our men and women in uniform. If it is true for those working entry-level jobs at Langley, it should be true for the CIA Director. Or so the logic goes.

But should Petraeus have resigned? Good generals are a precious commodity and it seems like a waste to have Petraeus resign over something potentially so minor. Again, it is not clear to what extent national security was or will ever be compromised by this affair. While I agree that potential security breaches must be kept under close watch, it seems as if the administration moved awfully fast without a lot of information available in this case. I am not entirely sure that Petraeus was comfortable at the CIA–a general without a war. Moreover, I believe that the policies that have come out of Langley over the past year or so, particularly the drone program, deserve greater scrutiny than both Benghazi or with whom the Director was sleeping. But it is not evident why we should excommunicate Petraeus based on something presumably apolitical.

The no-drama Obama administration is notoriously scandal-averse and excellent at cleaning up messes quickly. And, indeed, the Petraeus affair could potentially have reflected very poorly on this administration. However, to blame the President for accepting the resignation of a talented military leader would be unfair. After all, the Obama administration’s actions in scandal containment are conditioned entirely by what the public considers a scandal. This, in turn, begs the question: why are we so concerned with Petraeus’s personal life? Is it truly because there might be a national security breach or is it because, as with Anthony Wiener and countless others before him, it suggests a moral failing that we Americans deem unacceptable from our public figures?

The idea of an absolute morality that distinguishes our leaders from the rest of us is, of course, a bit ridiculous. We are all human, after all. In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik tied in this element of the affair with the central lesson of Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain: we are all “flawed” in the same way.

Presumably, it is a bad idea for spies to have embarrassing secrets that other spies might learn—and what goes for the smaller spies should go for the big spy—and so the resignation of General Petraeus may have been necessary. But the rest really did seem to be nobody’s business but the General’s and his family’s. If there is a small truth to cherish here, it lies in the reminder that Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner and all the other earlier, undecorated sinners were not heated by undignified lusts because they were baby boomers or Democrats, or because they lacked the moral core of real men making real decisions, or because they had spent too much time on Twitter, or whatever the latest explanation for self-destructive sexual behavior is. The truth is that the force which through the not so green fuse drives all our flowers, and much else besides—the force of wanting that can cause women of substance to send pestering e-mails, leaving distinguished generals caught in the middle—is the force of life.

But, for some reason, we expect more from our public officials  We expect moral perfection. We gloss over this by attempting to bind Petraeus to a (potential) national security breach. In reality, we care less about the fact that he may have had compromising secrets than the fact that Petraeus was not, as we thought, perfect. And, sadly, the imperfection of the man seems to matter much more than the imperfection of the policies he helped craft. Perhaps more importantly, even as Petraeus’s time at the CIA ends abruptly, these policies resume, unscrutinized by public discourse.

For more of his thoughts on the Petraeus’ affair, follow William on Twitter.

The Return of Israeli Moderation?

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Not too long after the Israel-Hezbollah war, George Packer wrote an excellent profile of Israeli author David Grossman for the New Yorker. Grossman is an Israeli author who, along with several of his liberal cohort, has been engaged in a full-front assault on Israel’s hawkish foreign policy. Packer describes, in detail, how Grossman’s political opinions have evolved, like that of many Israelis, over the past few decades:

[At the time of the Yom Kippur War], his political views were conventional: Israel, surrounded by enemies, was destined to fight an eternal war, and the only imperative was survival. In 1967, the year of his bar mitzvah, Israel won the Six-Day War and occupied Gaza, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. In “The Yellow Wind,” Grossman wrote of his generation, “The surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire country; the conquest, the confident penetration of the enemy’s land, his complete surrender, breaking the taboo of the border, imperiously striding through the narrow streets of cities until now forbidden.” At the beginning of the occupation, Jewish families used to drive through the West Bank and Gaza on weekends, on tours organized by transportation companies like the one where his father worked; they would buy Arab kaffiyehs for next to nothing and wear them triumphantly in the streets of Hebron and Jericho. The Palestinians were crushed, and the Israelis were seduced by what Grossman calls “the temptation of strength, the temptation of arbitrariness.” At thirteen, he felt unambivalent pleasure about Israeli power. As he grew older, though, he became troubled by it; when friends or Army comrades urged him to join an outing to the occupied territories, he refused, saying, “They hate us, they don’t want us there. I cannot be like a thorn in the flesh of someone else.”

Much time have passed since this profile and since Grossman began his campaign. For years, it seemed, to those of us on the outside, that such pleas for moderation fell on deaf ears. While the settlements issue is not resolved, it appears that the Israeli “consensus” on a hardline against Iran is far from unassailable. Israel’s policy is already shifting away from military action. In a recent editorial in the New York Times, Graham Allison and Shai Feldman argue that the change of policy comes as the result of internal divisions within Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, primarily between Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Indeed, several prominent Israeli political figures, including President Shimon Peres, have spoken out against unilateral military action. Moreover, as Allison and Feldman point out, the Israeli military establishment has unified in its opposition to military strikes.

Several obstacles remain, however. Most pressing, perhaps, is the possibility of a re-emboldened Netanyahu emerging from the January elections. Possible permutations of center-left coalitions consistently poll lower than Netanyahu’s coalition. In the last elections, in 2009, Netanyahu was able to form a rightist coalition despite receiving the second-most seats in the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. The centrist Kadima party, which received the most votes in 2009, was unable to form a governing coalition. It is unclear whether they will be able to unify various other centrist parties in order to succeed at this task in January. Much hope rests with Ehud Olmert, the former embattled Kadima Prime Minister. However, as Judy Rudoren argues in a Times op-ed, he faces many complicated challenges–some political, some legal, some moral–in his attempt to become prime minister once again. The titular question then can only be answered by a cautiously optimistic “maybe.”

No matter the outcome, these developments emphasize the non-unitary nature of Israeli domestic politics and foreign policy. In many ways, this mirrors a critical analytical hurdle that the field of International Relations faced several decades ago. As a recent “state-of-the-field” review article in the Annual Review of Political Science by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith argues, IR has more or less overcome this crutch. Scholars have made countless important contributions to our understanding of international politics by exploring domestic political developments explicitly.

Perhaps nowhere is this domestic turn in IR more clear than in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s controversial work on the US Israel lobby. Moreover, this analysis more or less reflects the public view of US foreign policy-making, whether true or not. It is not clear why this understanding has not extended to Israeli politics, which continues to be black- boxed in public discourse. Whatever the result of the next few months’ debate and politicking in Israel, the critical lesson for the rest of us should be not to essentialize Israeli foreign policy positions based upon the hard line it has taken so far.

For more of his thoughts on developments in Israel, follow William on Twitter.

Election’s Outcome is Huge News for Georgian Democracy

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By Daniel F. Wollrich

On October 1, Georgia held parliamentary elections that were sure to be a victory for President Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement party. Except they weren’t. In fact, challenger Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition—“a group of progressive opposition forces in the Republic of Georgia”—prevailed and will enjoy a parliamentary majority. Even before all the ballots had been counted, President Saakashvili gave his concession speech, overtly accepting the shift in governmental control. The symbolic power of the election and the results’ acceptance by the leadership, however, is far more important and indicates a strong Georgian embrace of democratic governance.

Georgia, a post-Soviet state located in the historically conflict-ridden Caucasus region south of Russia and north of the Middle East, has a short democratic history. With two centuries of explicit Russian dominance (save a few years following the violent collapse of the Russian Empire and during the early consolidation of the Soviet Union), Georgia only reestablished its independence in 1991. While not immediately embracing a democratic institutional framework like the Baltic States, Georgia under Eduard Shevardnadze—former Soviet minister of foreign affairs and Georgian head of state from 1992 to 2003—experienced a mild improvement over the Soviet regime. The country’s politics were marked by stuttering liberalization and weak, often merely symbolic, democratic institutions. Fraud and corruption continued to mar the country’s government, sparking the Rose Revolution following the fraudulent November 2003 parliamentary elections. Shevardnadze was cast out and the Saakashvili era began. This marked the shift to a truly post-Soviet Georgia, establishing enough democratic institutions to earn the title “democracy” from Western observers (even if not a “full democracy”).

Of course, Georgian democracy has been far from flawless. Saakashvili, elected president in 2004 and re-elected in 2008, had seen his popularity wane in the past few years. Accusations of authoritarian rule had sprouted, derived from the strong hand he has played in instituting changes to Georgia’s political landscape. Saakashvili’s most overtly disturbing move, at least internationally, was his attempt to remove his challenger, Ivanishvili, from the political scene by revoking his Georgian citizenship. A law was invoked—driven by Saakashvili—that forbids Georgians from maintaining multiple citizenships. Since Ivanishvili was also a citizen of Russia and France (he has since renounced his Russian citizenship), he was stripped of his status as a Georgian citizen. A constitutional amendment introduced in May, however, may pave the path for a non-Georgian citizen (under certain conditions) to become prime minister. The legal battle remains unresolved, and when—or whether—Ivanishvili can become prime minister is yet to be determined.

More recently, the scandal surrounding abuse in Georgia’s prison system has deeply tainted the carefully cultivated righteous image of Georgian leaders. The torture, taunting, and sexual assault of prisoners sparked angry demonstrations, resulting in the resignation of recently appointed minister of interior Bacho Akhalaia. Moreover, defense minister Dmitri Shashkin was minister of penitentiaries after 2008, indicating the depth—and height—of the scandal in the government. The Georgian regime was struck at its heart, immediately prior to elections, and the evident overstretch of high-level governmental power suggested that Georgian authorities might reveal themselves unwilling to play by rules of fairness and democracy, should they lose the popular vote.

Yet, a warmer light shined upon Georgia’s future this month. The election’s winner was the democratic process. When Saakashvili conceded in spite of expectations that his party would prevail, he showed by action what his words had claimed for years: his rule was for bringing democracy to the Georgian people. In 2008, Georgia held what the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe called the “first genuinely competitive post-independence presidential election,” and this year, the country enjoyed its first democratic change in power.

Predicting where this leads is difficult. One key challenge not yet discussed here concerns Georgian sovereignty over its entire claimed territory and relations with its northern neighbor, Russia. Throughout his rule, one of Saakashvili’s primary goals has been shoring up the country’s autonomy and establishing territorial integrity, noting that he inherited autonomous or semi-autonomous regions in the northwestern Abkhazia, the north-central South Ossetia, and the southwestern Ajaria. Although he quickly and successfully reintegrated Ajaria, stoking optimism for the remaining two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia would prove more resistant. These difficulties stemmed in large part from these regions’ mighty benefactor to the north. This territorial problem continues to haunt Tbilisi, with no apparent solution. It will disrupt Georgian efforts at reconciliation with Russia, regardless of Ivanishvili’s desire to warm relations, and it will obfuscate any paths to NATO membership and official alliance with the West.

Domestic problems also trouble Georgia’s immediate political future. Opposition rallies have continued beyond the election and threaten domestic tranquility and the peacefulness of the transition, in spite of Ivanishvili’s calls for their end. In addition, as discussed above, the question of Ivanishvili’s citizenship and whether he can even become prime minister presents a peculiar and unfortunate case of domestic institutional  manipulation interfering with democratic system processes. Regardless of who assumes the role of prime minister, the probability of political wrangling and the possibility of stalemate between the Georgian Dream coalition in parliament and Saakashvili and the United National Movement in the presidency until next year loom threateningly.

Nevertheless, one cannot underestimate the power of commitment to an idea and especially, as in this case, democracy. Although Saakashvili and Georgia’s political future once seemed intimately intertwined, the president’s prompt and willing concession suggests that Georgia’s governing ideology is not Saakashvili-ism but rather democracy and the rule of the people. Going forward, numerous factors must be watched: Will the Georgian Dream be a dream of democratic consolidation? Will the press be open and liberated and will transparency infiltrate the government?  How will the new government relate to the West, Russia, and its other immediate neighbors? Will the dilemma of South Ossetia and Abkhazia prove obstructionist to international integration and domestic stability? These and other questions illustrate the challenges before Georgia’s new government. But the peaceful, legitimately democratic change of power in Kutaisi bodes well. This election is indeed huge news for Georgia’s democratic endeavors.

Editor’s note: Daniel F. Wollrich is a PhD student at the Ohio State University and a guest contributor for the Smoke-Filled Room. 

Do Policymakers Heed the Advice of Academics?

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Traditionally, the archetypal image of American political science has been that of scholars locked away in a proverbial ivory tower, far removed from Washington, literally and metaphorically. This image is crumbling. I would cite examples of recent works in political science that accomplish the always-difficult task of outlining the real-life policy implications of the research findings but our servers would crash from the sheer amount of text I would have to devote to this post (I would also never finish my dissertation, but that’s another matter). Yet, politicians still make policy as if extensive political science research on the matter has not been conducted. If academics really are reaching out to these policymakers, then what’s going on?

There is plenty of reason to believe that, in 2012, it is now policymakers, not academics, who are the cause of the storied disconnect between academics and policymakers. In a recent piece in the New York Times, David Leonhardt suggests that the fatal economic mistake of the Obama administration was underestimating the severity of the financial crisis, against the advice of academic research, in particular that by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

…By late 2008, the full depth of the crisis was not clear, but enough of it was. A few prominent liberal economists were publicly predicting a long slump, as was Mr. Rogoff, a Republican. The Obama team openly compared its transition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and, in private, discussed the Reinhart-Rogoff work.

So why didn’t that work do more to affect the team’s decisions?

Do policymakers heed the advice of academics? I’m not so sure.

Three points can and should be mentioned in the defense of policymakers. The first is that the vast majority of policymakers must take into account domestic considerations when weighing policy options. Although practitioners and academics are both accountable to their respective audiences, the former deal with much higher stakes on a practical level (i.e., they could lose their jobs in the next election). One clear-cut yet public example of a politician agreeing in substance to one policy but choosing another for electoral reasons came earlier this spring when President Obama assured Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that a new missile defense deal could only be struck after his presumed re-election. Such considerations must obviously factor significantly in the decision-making process of elected officials. Academics are, by design, exempt.

To make matters more difficult for politicians hoping to incorporate academic know-how, the academic community is often divided, with research from similar sources producing contradictory advice. For instance, Leonhardt is quick to emphasize that the voices arguing that the recession would be longer than expected, albeit influential, were a minority. This makes policy-making a lose-lose proposition. Whatever the choice, if the choice leads to an undesirable outcome, there will almost certainly exist academic research arguing against it. This is a fair point. Indeed, this process reflects the perhaps most difficult aspect of making policy.

Moreover, we only witness the outcomes of whatever deliberation process results in the formation of policy. In reality, practitioners must weigh several options, of which academic advice might be one. Sometimes these deliberations result in the formation of policy that resembles political science conventional wisdom, majority opinion or even consensus. Other times it might not. To conclude that policymakers never heed academic advice because of the existence of the latter would be to select on the dependent variable and, in the process, make a fundamental inferential error. In other words, the mere fact that politicians make decisions with which many academics would disagree should not lead us to believe that they ignore political science research. But even if they don’t ignore it, do policymakers heed it? Although we cannot know definitively, political scientists testifying in Congress, public deliberation of policies, and government white papers and memos citing academic findings lend credence to the argument that they do consider academic opinions in the decision-making process.

Consideration aside, one wonders how seriously academic voices are taken. The notion that domestic considerations or disagreements within the academic community prevent politicians from making policy in accordance with academic advice relies on this point—that policymakers do indeed take academic opinion seriously behind the scenes. For instance, consider the lively debate around Kenneth Waltz’s controversial argument, published in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, that a nuclear Iran would be a force for stability in the Middle East. Thus far, the United States has taken a relatively hawish stance toward Iran, with some people—chiefly conservatives—promoting an even harder line that emphasizes military strikes. Is Waltz really taken seriously in policy circles?

It is an ongoing mission of academics to make their research speak to the policy community. The extent to which political scientists accomplish this task is, admittedly, up for debate. However, the entire enterprise is premised on the assumption that when political scientists talk, someone will listen. Recent history casts doubt upon whether this is always the case. Even more disconcertingly, the decision-making process itself often does not appear to consider research that is considered important and impactful within academia, disagreements notwithstanding. Since politicians establish the bounds of public discourse on policy, this can have the unintended consequence of making important political science seem out-of-touch, extreme, and, at worst, irrelevant.

All is not lost, however. As I have suggested here, there exists a great degree of variance of academic incorporation across Presidential administrations, Congresses, and policies. And indeed, many policies–especially on a day-to-day basis–do ostensibly integrate the advice and research of political scientists. Moving forward, academics must continue to reach out to policy community as we increasingly have over the past couple of decades. Policy-makers may not always come calling but when they do, we should be ready.

For more of his attempts at reaching out to the policy community, follow William on Twitter.