Why political scientists aren’t writing about Russian hackers

Boatright continues:

There’s a lot about 2016 that didn’t quite make sense. A lot of campaign spending has not been documented — in part because, as Bob Bauer suggests, it has become easy for foreign governments or organizations to spend money to influence American elections.

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, as Bauer goes on to argue, 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.

At the same time, giving in to the temptation to wax poetic about the state of the world post-Trump too easily descends into political ranting, or to speculation about what might happen. There certainly is a market right now for dire prognostications about the future of democracy. The problem, however, is that this has probably always been the case — there was a glut of books on this topic in the 1990s, for instance, and it’s hard to prove that we’ve really learned anything since then, or that books from that era have been proven to be true or false. In other words, all of this speculation winds up not being particularly scientific, and it’s not going to age well.

I don’t mean to suggest here that there should be a lot of research papers on Russian interference in the campaign — we don’t know enough, yet, about what actually happened, and perhaps we never will. However, it does seem that taking elements of these two approaches might provide a way forward.

Our inability to measure much of what went on in 2016 may provide cause for more theorizing. What really counts as a campaign contribution? What is the difference between trying to influence a campaign and trying to influence the broader political environment? How should we change our understanding of what foreign interference is, given changes in technology and the market?

These are questions that sometimes have narrow legal definitions, but, whatever the result of the Russia investigation is, what we have learned so far suggests that we need to take a step back from measurement and ask some theoretical questions — not necessarily the big theoretical questions we have been asking so far, but questions about what, exactly, we try to define and measure in political campaigns.

Read the article: Robert G. Boatright, “Why political scientists aren’t writing about Russian hackers,” The Hill (13 August 2018)