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Out of the ivory tower: an explanation of the policy advisory roles of political scientists in Europe

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Abstract

The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the extent and type of policy advising activities political scientists engage in. This paper addresses this gap by adopting a classification that distinguishes four ideal types of policy advisors representing differing degrees of engagement. We test this classification by calculating a multi-level latent class model to estimate key factors explaining the prevalence of each type based on an original dataset obtained from a survey of political scientists across 39 European countries. Our results challenge the wisdom that political scientists are sitting in an “ivory tower”: the vast majority (80%) of political scientists in Europe are active policy advisers, with most of them providing not only expert guidance but also normative assessments.

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Data availability

The dataset is available online through GESIS: https://doi.org/10.7802/2564

Notes

  1. While we agree with one of the reviewers that the label “opinionating” could be perceived negatively by some, we want to highlight that it is not meant in a judgemental way. We kept the label for the sake of consistency with the initial conceptualization as proposed by Brans et al. (2022b).

  2. COST Action CA15207: PROSEPS Professionalization and Social Impact of European Political Science, see: http://proseps.unibo.it/

  3. Besides these two criteria, country experts could use additional criteria in accordance with the demarcation of the discipline in their country.

  4. As noted by one of the reviewers, of particular concern is that participation in our survey might be correlated with engagement in policy advice (i.e., that a political scientist more/less actively involved in policy advice may be more/less likely to fill out the questionnaire), which would obviously undermine the generalizability of our findings. A first look at our data suggests that this does not seem to be the case, as roughly half of the respondents in our sample are never or only rarely involved in policy advising. Nonetheless, in order to address this concern in a more “statistically principled” manner, we resort to propensity-based adjustments (Lee 2006) to account for potential selection bias. See the Online Appendix (Section B) for details.

  5. We also examined the robustness of our findings by implementing alternative specifications of HE impact regimes proposed by Bandola-Gill et al. (2021a, b). The main findings are not sensitive to the particular operationalization of this variable.

  6. Section A in the Additional file 1: Online Appendix provides country-specific summary statistics for the dependent and key independent variables included in our analysis.

  7. Some of the advantages of the Bayesian framework in this setting are that it allows for a detailed description of the parameters of interest via examination of their posterior distributions, and that it helps account for the uncertainty in these parameters while avoiding asymptotic approximations—a convenient feature given that the number of individuals assigned to each advisory type could in principle be rather small (e.g., Iaryczower and Katz 2015). Additional estimation details are provided in the Online Appendix (Section B).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Jens Jungblut & Pierre Squevin

  2. University of the West of Scotland, Glasgow, UK

    Athanassios Gouglas

  3. Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Cornwall, UK

    Gabriel Katz

  4. Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Justyna Bandola-Gill

  5. Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Louvain, Belgium

    Marleen Brans & Ellen Fobé

  6. Institute of Public Administration, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Arco Timmermans & Valérie Pattyn

  7. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Alexandra Anderson & Matthew Flinders

  8. Université Catholique de Louvain, Ottignies-Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium

    David Aubin

  9. Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Caner Bakir

  10. Centre of Science and Innovation for Development, Tirana, Albania

    Blerjana Bino

  11. Department of Government, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Ivar Bleiklie & Svein Michelsen

  12. Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Sonja Blum

  13. Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    H. Tolga Bolukbasi

  14. University of Milan, Milan, Italy

    Maria Tullia Galanti

  15. University College South Denmark, Sønderborg, Denmark

    Morten Kallestrup

  16. Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor Tamás Molnár

  17. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Andrea Pritoni

  18. University of Almería, Almería, Spain

    José Real-Dato

  19. Mediterranean University of Albania, Tirana, Albania

    Nevila Xhindi

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  1. Jens Jungblut
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  23. Pierre Squevin
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Correspondence to Jens Jungblut.

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Jungblut, J., Gouglas, A., Katz, G. et al. Out of the ivory tower: an explanation of the policy advisory roles of political scientists in Europe. Eur Polit Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-023-00440-x

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