WHEN I reply to someone that I am a graduate student in political science, their response would be “Oh, then you can be a good politician!” or “Good! You can fix all the problems with our country”. This happens quite often.

To be fair, being misunderstood in terms of the nature of one’s vocation is rather common. I am sure doctors frown when the TV series Grey’s Anatomy is used to frame their lives, and detectives roll their eyes when people expect crime-solving to be done just like in an episode of CSI. What prompted me to write this piece is the observation that some politicians, and political scientists themselves, are misinformed – at times utterly deluded – as to what the profession actually entails. There are grave consequences to such misunderstanding.

So, what do political scientists do? To put it simply, they study politics, a wide field where the subjects range from political institutions to electoral patterns, from international relations to social movements. The empirical material covered is equally expansive. It can be in the discursive form, from rhetoric to propaganda, to political ideas and theories. Or, it can be outcome-oriented in terms of policy design and implementation, or state-society interactions if one is interested in variables at the structural level.

Considering how wide the field is, the idea that the political scientist can “solve” all of a nation’s problems is practically moot. For example, someone researching ethnic politics would have very little to say about public health. To add, the fundamental inquiry of political science is, more often than not, geared at understanding how politics in one setting takes a particular form, and not how it “should” be (such normative concerns usually belong to the domain of political philosophers).

Political scientists can strive to understand why Malaysia continues to run contrary to global examples by not having local government elections, but they can’t really prescribe a way that forces such practices (unless it’s with guns and cannons, but I don’t think that’s a feasible option in a democracy, either). Some people might ask, what’s the point of studying something if you can’t fix it? This sentiment is equally dangerous.

Going back to the example of local elections – it is a combination of the Cold War legacy, interracial distrust within Malaysian society, our federalism structure, and the incentive structures within the party system that brought us to this point. In other words, it is a process moulded by thousands, if not millions, of people, dead or alive, some more important than others. To think that the political scientist – a one-person “army” – could be the primus inter pares and undo all of that is, frankly, a travesty of the democratic spirit, if not an oversubscription of technocracy, which is a danger in itself.

The political scientist is, at best, the better detective of the hows and whys of political phenomena, and not by default a better citizen or politician. The latter two require different sets of skills and priorities, just like how a good chef does not necessarily make a good waiter.

When politicians misunderstand the vocation of political scientists, in that the latter become academics because they can’t excel in politics (channelling the misguided “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” notion), they demand from political scientists things that are irrelevant to their expertise. For example, the politician would think that the political scientist with a doctorate would give them the best advice on winning elections, when in fact, the political scientist is more interested in why elections, including terribly lopsided ones, are held to begin with.

When politicians have a low opinion of political science, the field is further stigmatised through funding cuts, the aggressive steering of universities towards STEM subjects, and an unfriendly attitude towards political scientists, who often depend on politicians and political institutions to give them access to data for research. This creates a negative feedback loop. The harder it is to conduct quality political science research, the more “justified” is the politician’s lowly opinion of the profession.

Politicians, too, benefit from good political science scholarships. A good comparative study is often the place where policy ideas come from. The nuance expected of any good political scientist means that even if the scholar is usually against ideas like affirmative action or not holding local elections, their detailed study would show the upside to these institutional outcomes. These findings enrich public discourses, although the political scientist would have no control over their use or abuse.

Nevertheless, it’s a stretch to say political scientists alone possess the wisdom as to what is good for the public, as if they are the philosopher king. They are not accountable to the public, hence, their decision is not binding. It is bad enough that politicians and the public don’t get this, but when it comes to Malaysia, the biggest problem is that some political scientists themselves seem to be the most confused about their public role.

While many of us try our best to distance ourselves from acting like politicians, there are those who write and talk as if they are. The best example was when the then opposition leader had to confront an academic for basically politicking 24/7. One wonders why even the politicians are confused!

The major fault of some political scientists – or those who claim themselves to be – is that they can’t differentiate between what constitutes an expert opinion and a private one. They seem to think that just because they have a PhD, all their views are automatically upgraded to expert status, even though any scholar worth their salt would know that expertise is earned through sustained research, not titles.

Here’s the thing. Being a political scientist doesn’t rob you of your citizen’s rights. I know dozens of good American political scientists who are extremely vocal in their political views. But they do so as citizens, not academics. When they write as academics, they honour the profession by providing only informed, dispassionate analyses. They also maintain a good work-life balance, if you will. And when academics formally enter the political process, as what Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren did, they don’t expect to be treated any differently. They are just another politician who needs to win public confidence.

While academics are often denigrated when they join politics, there is nothing wrong with them doing that, as in a democracy, it is the right of citizens to seek office. It is more despicable when academics who choose to stay in universities remain engaged in partisan politics with the expectation of special treatment because they are, at least in name, “political scientists”.

This is an abuse of intellectual integrity because these people tend to conflate their personal views with expert ones, and seem keen to have the public do so, too. And, it is quite easy to identify such views because their purveyors rarely publish them in academic outlets, meaning the due process of peer review is completely ignored. An unexamined opinion is not an expert one. Facebook is definitely not a substitute for academic journals and portals. By all means, exercise your freedom of speech, but be clear about who you are speaking as – the citizen or scholar?

This is not to say political scientists shouldn’t criticise the government. If the government reneges on its promises, the political scientist can, and certainly should, point it out. But those are first-order questions any engaged citizen can ask. The more profound questions deserving of the political scientist, in my opinion, are, why do political parties continue to make promises and break them with few consequences? What can be said of the voting public’s role in this? The political scientist’s job, first and foremost, is to ask interesting (and challenging) questions, from which they can hopefully provide an informed explanation.

Don’t trust any political scientist – or any social scientist, for that matter – who acts as if they alone have all the answers. – July 9, 2019.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.