Are we prognosticators?

I don't wish to provide a detailed rebuttal to Jacqueline Stevens' article in today's New York Times, as Henry Farrell has already done this extremely capably. But I do wish to focus on one of Stevens' central points: that political scientists are primarily prognosticators. As she writes,

[I]n terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money.

In other words, we are at our most scientific when we act as soothsayers. As Henry noted, prediction is simply not what we do. Thumb through any of our scholarly journals, and you will find almost no forecasts of future political events. We are in the explaining business, not the predicting business. The one notable exception is the round of scholarship that generally comes right before a U.S. presidential election, where a small number of us use a few different models to anticipate the outcome.

And the point of these forecasting articles is not to offer predictions so much as to test theories of how elections work. The claim being made is not "I can predict elections!" but "I can predict elections with just two variables!" There is an enormous difference between those two statements. The first claims the magical powers of a seer. The second makes an argument that elections turn on just a few key factors, and that other things that political observers tend to dwell on prior to elections (charisma, narrative, spending, etc.) may be just noise. Further, by providing those variables or explaining how they can be obtained, it invites other researchers to check their work and offer their own conclusions. The first statement is a boast, the second is scholarship. To the extent we do engage in forecasting, we are almost entirely engaged in the second form.

Obviously, I disagree with what Stevens wrote, and I find the piece disheartening on several levels. Of course, political scientists are not required to march in lockstep with their colleagues. We're free to disagree with each other -- and often do -- about the best ways to conduct our profession. My concern here, though, is that this piece will be used as a justification to cut support for political science, even though it is based on what I perceive to be a serious misinterpretation of just what our discipline does.