Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) wants to restrict NSF funding for political science research. Of course he does-- he's a Republican!

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Political science research offers better democracy
By Robert D.Putnam, July 10, 2013

This week, I was one of 12 Americans to receive a National Humanities Medal, based in part on research I began more than 40 years ago on civil society and democracy. Making Democracy Work has become one of the most cited works of social science in the past half-century, because it offered hard scientific evidence for the classic idea that grass-roots civic engagement — what the English conservative Edmund Burke called “the little platoons” of society — is the crucial ingredient in successful democracies. This work spawned hundreds of follow-on studies around the world.

Because my findings resonated broadly, American leaders from Bill Clinton to Jeb Bush and from Mike Huckabee to Al Gore have discussed the implications of this work for the challenges facing our country today. One of the harshest critics of National Science Foundation funding of political science has even praised my study as “one of the most influential pieces of practical research in the last half-century.”

Ironically, however, if the recent amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that restricts NSF funding for political science had been in effect when I began this research, it never would have gotten off the ground since the foundational grant that made this project possible came from the NSF Political Science Program. The NSF is now grappling with what Coburn’s narrow criteria mean for the $10 million of political science research it supports each year.

For a fledgling assistant professor with no coastal connections, and only a glimmer of an idea and a promising research design, the NSF was the only plausible supporter for my initial work. Forty years ago, it was impossible to foresee the far-reaching results of the research — certainly I didn’t! It was not at all clear that the research would have any practical implications for American citizens and policymakers — the nominal topic, after all, was local government in Italy. But my disciplinary peers carefully scrutinized the theoretical framework and the scientific methodology of the proposed work, just as they did with scores of other proposals that year. Fortunately for me, they concluded that the scientific promise of the work merited some modest — but indispensable — support.

Once the public significance of my research became clear, I was blessed with abundant support from private philanthropy for my work and the work of my students. American foundations are generous in funding research of demonstrated importance, so the modest initial NSF investment eventually was returned a hundredfold with follow-on support from the private sector, as is often the case with government-funded basic research.

Somewhere in America at this moment, young political and social scientists early in their careers are pursuing ideas at least as promising as mine 40 years ago, ideas that eventually could contribute to our national well-being. The Coburn amendment has the effect of turning off the oxygen in the incubator for those ideas. Do Coburn and his supporters really think that we don’t need more good ideas today about how to make our democracy work?
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