4. Nothing but politics?

4. Nothing but politics?

Money, honey
If the funding for science comes from government, political influence is almost inevitable. If the Bush administration has politicized science, that is not a shock to David Guston, who will become professor of political science, and director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University in January. "There are all sorts of plausible examples of precedents for the politicization of science," he says. "Back in 1973, "a principal example" occurred when Pres. Nixon cashiered his science advisor and deleted the Office of Science and Technology, after the advisor failed to support Nixon's quest for a supersonic airplane.

Money and power both matter, Guston adds. "From top to bottom, science is shot through with politics, whether it's the politics behind the $130 billion public R&D [research and development] spending or the politics of doctoral dissertation or the tenure committees that create the next generation of scientists." To Michael Gough, editor of Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, money goes a long way toward explaining why today's complaints over the politicization of science are not surprising. "Many people believe politics should play no role in science, but once government funds science, and since World War II it has funded about 50 percent of American science, the funding decisions can become political, and I think they have always been political."

A second cause of complaint, Gough says, is the occupant of the White House. "Politicians may embrace positions that are anathema to some scientists, and with the George W. Bush administration, those politicians are in power, they control the White House and both houses of Congress, and they are angering the scientists, who have been favored by the elected politicians in Democratic administrations and in the Bush Sr. Administration."

Always political
Social scientists who study science see science itself as a social institution, says Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science and public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Sociologists, anthropologists, regulatory analysts, lawyers, all have interests in not only what is science like as an institution, but what have its connections been with the rest of society. It's almost axiomatic in these fields that science is itself a social institution. People do it, it's about stuff people want to find out about, it has applications for their lives, it is embedded in social structures like universities, corporations."

Yet while science may be a social institution, it is an unusual one. In most social institutions, disagreements are settled by arguments. Scientists, in contrast, can use experiments to prove or disprove theories. Science, in other words, is testable. It's also self-improving. If a better explanation for the real world can be found, it eventually will replace inferior explanations.

Science may be a political creature. But does it need to be politicized?

Not always politicized
But saying science is always political is not the same as saying that science has been politicized in the more ominous sense of the word. This type of politicization, Jasanoff says, becomes evident once you ask the right questions. "Is it the case that people are structuring the inquiry purposely to prevent certain knowledge from coming out, or to support a predetermined outcome? Or is somebody blocking certain teachings, maybe research into evolution, because they do not want to produce more evidence related to human development?"

These examples, she says, reveal a "preformed intention to push a political debate along certain directions, and science is either used or not used for that. That is the kind of politicization that people like Kurt Gottfried [of the Union of Concerned Scientists] are talking about. "I would separate those two varieties: One needs to have a way of counteracting the second kind [of politicization], but the first kind is inevitable."

Surf on over to our "political science" bibliography.

There are 1 2 3 4 pages in this feature.
Bibliography | Credits | Feedback | Search