Last month, an amendment to the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Bill (H.R. 3547) lifted the restrictions to National Science Foundation funding, which limited research in the field of political science research. These provisions limited NSF funding to only political science projects that directly related to national security and economic interests.
Michael Cobb, an associate professor of political science, said Congress’s lack of funding to political science research is due to ”a fetishism for profitable outputs from science” Cobb said that on average, political science research does not generate sizable profits for companies.
Mark Nance, an assistant professor of political science, said the funding cuts last year represent a “signal that political science is less worthy of funding than other fields” and “senators make very subjective decisions when they decide the direction of the funding.”
Andriy Shymonyak, a junior in Political Science, said the field covers a spectrum from a humanistic and qualitative perspective to one that is more scientific in nature. According to Shymonyak, the latter quantitatively assesses human behavior through research such as exit polling and other forms of data collection.
Shymonyak said he is currently working on research related to political-party identification in Ukraine. Shymonyak said his funding was directed toward financing a research trip to Ukraine in order to conduct interviews with a variety of individuals but also used published results to acquire data.
“Congress’s lack of funding demonstrates a misplacement of values,” Shymonyak said.
Cobb said the benefits of research don’t have to be “pragmatic payoffs.”
“We benefit as a society from greater knowledge of self, and political science contributes to this,” Cobb said.
Cobb said his research emphasizes “how people form opinions about emerging technologies like genetically modified mosquitos”. Supported by the National Science Foundation in an Integrative Graduate Research Education program, Cobb helps to train graduate students in addition to other projects.
Cobb said he has also worked with the NSA analytics lab here at N.C. State to study how people are influenced by irrational factors on judgments such as information phrasing. Cobb said the cuts in federal funding did however delay the start of his research, but did not significantly affect the scope of his work.
According to Nance, NSF grants are extremely difficult to come by due to their competitive and prestigious nature regardless of the field. Nance said he has not applied for NSF funds for his research in a variety of subjects from maritime piracy to free trade agreements and said most political scientists go their entire careers without applying to the NSF for funding.
