Healing the Rift between Political Science and Practical Politics

Policy—what government does, why it does it, and what difference it makes—deserves a more central position in political science, especially in the study of American politics. This paper outlines the advantages of such a "policy-focused" political science not just for the engagement of the discipline (and those within it) with pressing real-world problems, but also for the quality of research. My argument is not simply that a focus on policy will make political science more "relevant," although it will. It is that a political science without systematic attention to policy is a bad political science—a political science that fails to capture extremely important aspects of politics.