Suchergebnisse

Over the past fifteen years, a narrative has developed that IR scholars have become a "cult of the irrelevant," with declining influence on and engagement with policy debates. Despite these assertions, the evidence for limited policy engagement has been anecdotal. We investigate the extent of policy engagement—the ways in which IR scholars participate in policy-making processes and/or attempt to shape those processes—by surveying IR scholars directly about their engagement activities. We find policy engagement is pervasive among IR scholars. We draw on theories of credit-claiming to motivate expectations about how and when scholars are likely to engage with practitioners. Consistent with our expectations, much of this engagement comes in forms that involve small time commitments and provide opportunities for credit-claiming, such as media appearances and short-form, bylined op-eds and blog posts. However, sizable minorities report engaging in consulting activities not for attribution/publication and writing policy briefs, and a majority of respondents indicate they engaged in these activities several times a year or more. We find only small differences in engagement across gender and rank. Our results demonstrate that, for IR scholars, some form of policy engagement is the norm.

Abstract
We report the results of a survey of international relations (IR) scholars on the use of an increasingly common policy designed to close recognition gaps in IR: gender balance in citation (GBC) statements. GBC statements remind and encourage authors submitting work to peer-reviewed outlets to consider the gender balance among the works they cite. We find that these policies enjoyed wide support among IR scholars in our sample countries soon after journals began instituting the policies, but women were more supportive than men of the policies. We also report the results of a question-order experiment that allows us to study how raising awareness of gender gaps in the IR discipline affects the proportion of women that scholars list among the most influential IR scholars in the last 20 years. The effects of exposure to the gender treatment vary, however, by respondents' gender and whether respondents teach in the United States. The treatment effects were much larger for women than for men in the United States, but the reverse was true outside the United States.

Abstract
Scholars continue to debate the relationship of academic international relations to policy. One of the most straightforward ways to discern whether policymakers find IR scholarship relevant to their work is to ask them. We analyzed an elite survey of US policy practitioners to better understand the conditions under which practitioners use academic knowledge in their work. We surveyed officials across three different policy areas: international development, national security, and trade. We also employed multiple survey experiments in an effort to causally identify the impact of academic consensus on the views of policy officials and to estimate the relative utility of different kinds of research outputs. We found that policymakers frequently engage with academic ideas, find an array of research outputs and approaches useful, and that scholarly findings can shift their views. Key obstacles to using academic knowledge include practitioners' lack of time as well as academic work being too abstract and not timely, but not that it is overly quantitative. Additionally, we documented important differences between national security officials and their counterparts who work in the areas of development and trade. We suggest that this variation is rooted in the nature of the different policy areas.