A recent bill passed by the U.S. Senate could affect the University of Wisconsin’s political science department because it includes an amendment that will cut funding for research in the political science field at institutions around the country.
The bill, which passed in the Senate on March 20, will restrict the National Science Foundation from providing funding for political science research at large research universities.
Terry Devitt, UW Communication spokesperson and a specialist in research communications, said the cuts affect the ability of individual researchers to hire staff, fund graduate students and plan research projects.
UW political science Professor Barry Burden said this is not the first time the government has specifically targeted political science research for funding cuts. According to Burden, there have been multiple efforts to specifically cut funding to political science research, rather than any other social science research.
Burden added what the Senate passed actually does not cut the money out of the federal budget completely, but instead moves the money to another part of NSF to use for other research funding.
Burden said he feels that politicians who are targeting political science research at universities may have misunderstood what the research is going toward compared to other types of research.
“[Politicians] see the titles and abstracts of these studies that are funded by the government, and to them, it sounds like a headline in a newspaper or something from a talking head on a cable news show,” he said.
Burden said NSF funding is the “gold standard” for researchers to obtain, and the research projects that the money goes toward positively benefit not only the universities receiving the funding and carry out the research, but also other universities which will use the findings for educational purposes.
Donald Downs, a UW political science professor, said the cuts in political science funding could have an immense impact on those universities that may rely heavily on NSF funding for their political science research.
“[These cuts] may now encourage people to begin to apply elsewhere than where they had wanted to go,” Downs, a Herald advisor, said.
Burden said at UW, graduate students in the political science department receive NSF funding for their graduate fellowships and students also receive funding from NSF for their dissertations.
The amendment in the bill also states funding for NSF for political science research may be provided as long as the research may result in an improvement to national security or economics, a statement Downs said was vague.
He said people research things they are typically interested in and want to find more out about the topic, but with this definition of how political science research may be funded, it might result in new focuses in research.
Burden said people may now turn to private organizations for funding. He added larger and wealthier private universities, such as Ivy league schools, may now have a much larger advantage for this research, since they may be able to allocate funds for their research from another portion of their university’s budget, putting public universities at a disadvantage.
