Developing the relevance potentialities of national security and foreign policy research: Some proposed criteria

While effective foreign and national security policy-making increasingly requires research that is produced outside government, little is known about how such research affects the actions of policy-makers, or why it may or may not be policy-relevant to them. This essay poses a number of criteria which can be used to weigh the policy relevance of applied social science research for national security and foreign policy issues. These criteria can be divided into content and process categories, the former including aspects of time, issue salience, format, and confidence; and the latter incorporating questions related to the origin of research, the strategy which informs it, and the tactics by which it is presented. Hopefully, such criteria can be applied to existing works, serve as guidelines for future research, and perhaps illuminate the general role of social knowledge in policy formulation.The authors wish to express their appreciation for the opportunity to participate in the National Security Education Seminar held at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 18–July13, 1973, directed by Fred A. Sondermann and conducted under the auspices of the National Security Program, New York University, Frank N. Trager, Director. This paper is a revised version of a report originally prepared for the seminar. The views presented here are those of the authors, and not necessarily of any of the institutions with which they are associated.     

Polarization and Issue Consistency Over Time

The polarization of the political and social environment over the past four decades has provided citizens with clearer cues about how their core political predispositions (e.g., group interests, core values, and party identification) relate to their issue opinions. A robust and ongoing scholarly debate has involved the different ways in which the more polarized environment affects mass opinion. Using heteroskedastic regression, this paper examines the effect of the increasingly polarized environment on the variability of citizens’ policy opinions. We find that citizens today base their policy preferences more closely upon their core political predispositions than in the past. In addition, the predicted error variances also allow us to directly compare two types of mass polarization—issue distance versus issue consistency—to determine the independent effects each has on changes in the distribution of mass opinion.