Can SPSSI Serve as an Honest Broker
  in a Politically Polarized Environment?

   By Alice Eagly, PhD, SPSSI President





For the November 1967 edition of this newsletter, Thomas Pettigrew, then President of SPSSI, wrote a column titled “SPSSI as Honest Broker.” I sought out this statement in our archives mainly because I had seen it cited as expressing SPSSI’s policy aspirations. Also, Tom Pettigrew has earned widespread respect as having exemplified SPSSI values throughout his long career. And—to add a personal note—he taught the first college course that I took in social psychology. At the time, he was a young professor at Harvard, much involved in studying the civil rights movement as it was emerging in the American South. In this extraordinary course, he blended his stories from the front lines of racial integration with intelligent social psychological analysis.

As SPSSI president more than a decade later, Pettigrew analyzed the organization’s role in relation to racial inequality and other social issues of the day. SPSSI’s focus on the civil rights movement in 1967 is apparent in the newsletter’s printing of a report on Martin Luther King’s address to the APA Convention in the same issue as Pettigrew’s column on SPSSI’s social policy role.

In this historical context, Pettigrew proposed that SPSSI serve as an honest broker that would offer social science knowledge to guide policy makers. The specifics of this proposal involved SPSSI (then based in Ann Arbor, Michigan) opening up a satellite office in Washington, DC. He described this undertaking as “definitely not a lobbying office.” Instead, the office would help SPSSI to serve as a conduit between government and social science. Its representatives would work to inform relevant parts of the government about the expertise that SPSSI members could offer on policy issues and alert SPSSI members to governmental interests and needs for information.

SPSSI did not open a satellite Washington office at that time. Instead, it eventually moved its entire office to Washington. In doing so, has SPSSI fostered the honest broker role that Tom Pettigrew hoped that the organization would adopt? To answer that question, I offer some background on the honest broker concept and some reflections about the challenges of fulfilling such a role in our politically polarized contemporary environment.

The honest broker concept has attracted attention well beyond SPSSI. In particular, in The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Roger Pielke, Jr., a political scientist and policy expert, contrasted scientists’ honest broker role with three other roles that they might play in relation to policy: the pure scientist, the science arbiter, and the policy advocate.

The pure scientist sticks to doing science and avoids policy involvement. Such scientists leave it to policy makers to read the scientific literature if they choose to do so. Alternatively, the science arbiter offers information to policy makers only on questions that are clearly scientifically testable, providing results but offering no policy suggestions. Neither of these two roles is consistent with SPSSI’s mission, which involves joining science and public policy.

More relevant to SPSSI are the two other roles that Pielke discussed, the issue advocate and Pettigrew’s favorite, the honest broker. The issue advocate takes a definite stand and argues for a particular result by invoking supportive scientific findings. In contrast, the honest broker offers scientific information relevant to a range of policy options. Honest brokers work to expand policy makers’ thinking and do not advocate for a particular policy. Issue advocates do the opposite by working to narrow policy makers’ thinking to favor of a particular policy. In recommending the honest broker role, Pielke argued that issue advocacy tends to politicize science. Thus, as advocates, scientists’ values are usually important (albeit not necessarily acknowledged), and they may deploy science in a biased manner by (knowingly or unknowingly) favoring findings that support their advocacy and ignoring counter-evidence. Often, scientific advocacy produces contending factions of scientists, as has occurred in economists’ advising government policy makers. Some economists offer evidence that large government deficits are dangerous, and others offer evidence that, to the contrary, deficits spur economic activity. Pielke argued that such scientific discord lowers the public trust in scientists, who then may be viewed as mere “hired guns” for ideologically driven public policy—rather like lobbyists.

The politicization of science certainly can compromise the scientific voice in setting policy. An organization that becomes viewed as taking predictable positions and supporting them with a selective reading of scientific evidence diminishes its influence. Moreover, social scientists have reason to be cautious about their findings because of the many discoveries of methodological pitfalls in research and at least sometimes the difficulty of replicating findings that are confidently presented in our textbooks.

Serving as an honest broker is challenging, especially in the current political context. At least in the United States, most office holders and political pundits adhere to ideologies of the political right or left, and centrists are rare. The resulting political partisanship stands in the way of obtaining consensus agreements on urgent issues such as immigration and tax reform. Can social scientists guide policy makers toward evidence-based policy in these partisan environments?

Under these circumstances, the honest broker stance is very difficult to maintain—far more difficult today, I think, than it was when Pettigrew wrote his column in 1967. An honest broker on immigration, for example, could spell out options ranging from deporting all undocumented persons to welcoming all immigrants and supporting their integration into society and would consider nuanced positions that lie between these extremes. The consequences of policy options would be spelled out, based at least in part on relevant social scientific research. This type of work is already being carried out in congressional and other governmental offices and in think tanks, but most of these entities have a clear political stance and operate mainly as policy advocates. If scientists themselves also frame their analyses to fit liberal or conservative agendas, it may be difficult for them to contribute to a workable consensus on issues such as immigration. On this point, journalist and policy expert Thomas Edsall wrote recently in the New York Times that “all public policy set in the political arena is determined more by the balance of power than by evidence-based analysis or by humanitarian concerns.”

Given these considerations, how should we understand SPSSI? Certainly SPSSI engages in an expanding set of outreach efforts through its three journals, its congressional briefings, its books, its conferences and small group meetings, and numerous policy statements and reports. Across these many activities, does SPSSI act mainly as an honest broker or as an advocate of favored political positions? As I see it, SPSSI plays both roles. In the service of both of these roles, SPSSI members attempt to raise awareness by providing evidence of the seriousness of social problems—for example, by displaying the negative consequences of poverty or the dangers of environmental degradation. Beyond this consciousness-raising mission, SPSSI members sometimes advocate for selected positions on policy issues, and SPSSI offers workshops that train interested persons for advocacy work. Beyond fostering issue advocacy, SPSSI also serves as an honest broker by creating fact sheets and reports in policy-relevant areas such as the effects of media violence.

Do our advocacy stances compromise our honest broker role? Surely there are tensions between the two roles. This tension came to my attention at an APA Leadership Conference that I attended soon after becoming President-Elect of SPSSI. Casual conversation with a friendly APA staffer revealed her view that SPSSI is populated by “lefties.” Does such a label, if widely shared, compromise our mission?

I ask SPSSI members to think about our policy mission and invite comment. When we offer honest broker analyses, is the evidence we offer balanced rather than selective? Do we expand policy makers’ thinking or attempt to narrow it to our favored policy initiatives? When engaging in advocacy, do we consider crafting integrative policy positions that take into account views on the left and right of issues and therefore may have a better chance of being heard? Might SPSSI join its honest broker and policy advocate functions to help defuse political conflict in favor of integrative solutions that work?

The blending of honest broker and advocacy missions makes sense in terms of the dual purposes that are primary in SPSSI’s 2009 strategic plan: (a) A commitment to social justice and changing the world in positive ways, and (b) The premise that science should guide policy and practice. The first purpose puts SPSSI squarely in the camp of progressive politics, but the second purpose of guiding policy and practice should encourage us to analyze the political landscape with great care. If we advocate with awareness of what might be possible in the current political context, we may have a chance of appealing to policy makers on both sides of the left-right divide. I suggest that our voice would be stronger if we took this approach. Please let me hear from you on these important issues.

—Alice Eagly eagly@northwestern.edu