Policymakers follow pertinent academic research, but see much of it as irrelevant to their work

Last year, U.S. Congressman Eric Cantor called for an end to federal funding for political and social science, claiming that the funds could be better spent on medical research. The renewal of this contentious debate begs the important question, what do policymakers ideally want from scholars and their work? To answer this, Paul Avey and Michael Desch surveyed nearly 1000 former national security policymakers and found that while they follow international relations research, the prevalence of jargon as well as the focus on quantitative studies and techniques alienates many of these important readers.