Considered opinion: Election questionsWhy political scientists aren’t writing about Russian hackers
Political scientists who study election mechanics — — campaign finance, what polling data have to do with voting, how different population groups vote, how effective political advertisements are — are yet to come to grips with the role Russian government agents played in the 2016 election. Clark University political scientists Robert Boatright writes that “We don’t have the ability to track exactly what went on over Twitter or Facebook in the election, which accounts were real and which were fake. And … we may not regain the sort of transparency that enabled us to study elections with the precision we once did. We don’t really have any precedent for studying what a foreign government might do to influence an American campaign in this way because it hasn’t been done before in the United States. Maybe we’ll get there in a few years, but for now, all we know is that our research is more likely than usual to be incomplete.”
There are many things that political scientists who study election mechanics — campaign finance, what polling data have to do with voting, how different population groups vote, how effective political advertisements are — got wrong about the 2016 presidential election.
“One striking thing about the state of research on American politics over the past two years, however, has been the uncertainty among political scientists about how to deal with the biggest question mark that hangs over the 2016 election — the role that agents of the Russian government may have played in the campaign,” Robert Boatright, a Clark University political science professor, writes in The Hill.
The American media has provided ample coverage of the unfolding Mueller investigation and of the congressional hearings on Russian interference, but Boatright says that what he has “found most striking about the academic meetings I have attended in 2018 has been the inability of political scientists to find a way to talk about such things.”
About 6,500 political scientists will attend the annual American Political Science Association meeting, held over the Labor Day weekend in Boston, but “only four presentations address the involvement of Russia in the 2016 election — and not a single one of these four is by a tenured American academic,” Boatright notes.
“If the conferences I’ve attended so far this year are any indication, efforts will be made to figure out exactly what was different in 2016 from past elections. More than one presenter will make an offhand joke at the end about Russian interference, but that’s all it will be — a joke — lest the presentation sound a little bit too conspiratorial.”
Boatright also notes that “there have been at least five national or international conferences on populism so far this year — and I’m sure there have been many others that I haven’t noticed. These conferences have drawn a large number of less quantitatively inclined academics from all sorts of disciplines, eager to try to apply what over the past decade has been a largely European literature on populist demagoguery to the Trump campaign — to explore ways in which Trump does, or does not, fit the same model as populist leaders in Hungary, Poland, or Italy.”
