October 14, 2009
What's the Value of Political Science?
Republican Sen. Tom A. Coburn, of Oklahoma, has introduced an amendment to House Resolution 2847 that would eliminate support from the National Science Foundation for political-science research. Scholars in the discipline are understandably against this move. As a citizen who is a political scientist, I, too, oppose the initiative, which appears to be a form of populist vindictiveness.
Coburn's argument, such as it is, is to list odd-sounding NSF-supported projects—all of which
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