Making Political Science Matter: The Advisory Roles of Political Scientists in the United Kingdom

This chapter seeks to explore the role of political scientists within the UK’s policy advisory system through a three-stage process. The first stage seeks to map out the topography of the policy advisory system and assess the extent and nature of the discipline’s historical role and position. It concludes that a combination of demand-side and supply-side variables generally ensured that political scientists played a fairly limited role during the second half of the twentieth century. The second stage explores the twenty-first-century shift driven by the meta-governance of higher education that focuses on non-academic impact and engagement through the analysis of data collected from the impact case studies submitted to the Politics and International Studies panel within the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. This data provides significant insights into the role that political scientists have played within the UK’s policy advisory system. The third section presents, analyses and compares the data collected by the ProSEPS survey of political science with the REF2014 data. This chapter not only provides another layer to our understanding of the role that political scientists play in terms of policy advice but also broadens the analytical lens to a wider cross-section of scholars in its exploration of motivational drivers.