Month: September 2026

This Henry Farrell Substack post about AI and modern social science argues that we need to reorient much of our work toward the kind of “Big Structures, Large Processes and Huge Comparisons” that Charles Tilly advocated we study. Yet this is precisely not what a lot of political science (and more generally social science) research does these days:

“the social sciences now lay a much greater emphasis on identifying causal relationships, which tends to push away from the kinds of big secular shifts that he suggests we ought focus on.”

As a result, Farrell argues that “we don’t just need well funded and politically and economically independent social sciences to understand the consequences of AI, but also to reorient the social sciences so that they are again well suited to deal with big structures and large processes. We are in a world where it is urgently important to understand change at scale, since it is just such change that we are going through.2 The social sciences need both solid funding, and a lot of internal work to reorient themselves towards the questions that matter.”

This reminded me of a recent PS article by Guy Grossman, William Dinneen, and Carolina Torreblanca with tons of fascinating data on the nature of books and articles published in Political Science between 2003-2023. Their bleak summary:
“Our analyses show that publication volume has tripled during that time, driven by new entrants and increasing collaboration. The field has become increasingly quantitative but remains substantively diverse, even though individual papers have become more topically focused. Younger scholars publish more articles but fewer books and book chapters, signaling strategic adaptation to institutional rewards. Although novel research attracts, on average, more citations over time, it does not consistently translate into higher journal placement, encouraging safer, incremental publication strategies. Together, these patterns depict a discipline that is larger and more productive than ever yet is increasingly organized around measurable outputs, rather than intellectual risk-taking or theoretical innovation [emphasis added]”

If Farrell is right, this suggest that doing work on “the questions that matter” may be a real struggle for the discipline, which is increasingly accustomed to making its judgments largely a matter of mechanistically counting lines on a CV rather than reading and evaluating the content of those CV lines. I’m not a political science pessimist – there is lots of great work being done in the discipline of various kinds – but I do think the trends Grossman et al. point to are deeply worrisome. This is especially true in a context of crises of higher education that focuses PhD students and junior scholars (understandably) on pumping out as much as humanly possible as quickly as possible in a desperate bid to a land some career security.

This is a smart piece by Daniel Drezner on how Daniel Diermeier and Vanderbilt University’s political accommodation to the Trump era has ended up – even if popular with donors and a subset of parents – leading to bizarre and unworkable understandings of academic freedom. It seems like Vandy has decided Trumpism is the new normal and the only appropriate response is to fully accept its critique of higher ed (as opposed to acknowledging serious problems, but not entirely giving in).

If Trump’s approach to higher ed becomes hegemonic, then this will be justified as a clever tacking to the wind to aid Vanderbilt’s mission to move up the rankings; if instead it fragments and falters (perhaps in the face of a midterm wave or the 2028 election), then it will look like a craven miscalculation.

The post quotes a piece by Inside Higher Ed‘s John K. Wilson:

“Absolutely none of these extraordinary measures are “standard academic processes.” They are clear attacks on shared governance and academic freedom, and they are direct violations of institutional neutrality because the administration is favoring one ideological side in academic disputes over another. . . . the Vanderbilt declaration goes far beyond what the Trump administration dreamed of proposing for colleges, imposing an extreme attack on academic freedom, shared governance, international scholars, and free speech that may be unmatched in the history of statements by American college boards.”

Drezner concludes:
“Rather than embracing more restrictions on such speech, it sure would be great if Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier — a political scientist no less [Paul note: Diermeier’s time at UChicago was not great on the “broad-minded initiatives for the greater good” front, as opposed to the “move fast and break things in order to quickly become a university president, regardless what messes end up being left behind for others to deal with” front]— read Levy’s article. Because as much as Vanderbilt’s trustees might lament the decline of trust in universities, this kind of overt interference into the daily lives of academic will simply rode that trust even further.”

Whenever I teach my PLSC 26800 class (originally “Insurgency, Terrorism, and Civil War” and now “Political Violence”), I wander over to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute of Oslo websites to update my slides on trends in armed conflict. UCDP has particularly useful maps and graphs.

This year, PRIO has published a very valuable report that summarizes trends in armed conflict and battle-related deaths. Looking at its summary of battle-related deaths since 1989 and 1946 (see both figures below), we can see a lull in the 2001-2011 period that is quite striking. At the time – with 9/11, the Iraq war, etc – it certainly didn’t feel that way, but it now appears to have been the most peaceful period of the post-Cold War era by quite a margin.

Their (grim) conclusion:
“This PRIO Paper confirms that the level of violence is increasing, that this now is part of a longer trend and not just a peak, and that a new, higher baseline of global violence has emerged. 2025 was the third most deadly year since the end of the Cold War, and we see that the period post 2013 has overall been more violent than the period prior to 2013 during the Cold War era”