Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline

From 1965 to 2020, the National Science Foundation constituted the single largest funding source for political science research. As such, the NSF played a central role in de ﬁ ning the cutting-edge of our discipline. This study draws on historical records of the American Political Science Association to examine the political and administrative contexts that shaped the funding priorities of the NSF Political Science Program. Additionally, the study presents a new dataset and analysis of the nearly three thousand projects funded over the 55-year life of the program. The dataset shows that NSF funding was principally channeled toward quantitative research, whereas qualitative methods received little support, and work advancing normative, critical, or interpretive approaches received virtually no support. The archival record and awards-level data make visible the material forces that shaped knowledge production, and they underline the NSF ’ s instrumental role in consolidating behavioralism and marginalizing non-positivist approaches. The study sheds new light on the history of the discipline and helps to contextualize some of the distinctive features of American political science.


Substantive Research
In the category of substantive research, $483,374,000 (74.9%) was provided for quantitative analysis, $29,474,000 (4.6%) for formal theory, $17,179,000 (2.7%) for qualitative research, and $12,772,000 (2.0%) for experimental research. 7A further $102,653,000 (15.8%) supported projects that utilized more than one research method.If one reapportions the dollar value of these mixed-methods projects equally to the different methods employed, the relative shares for NSF support rise to 81.6% for quantitative, 7.7% for formal theory, 5.4% for experimental, and 5.3% for qualitative. 8In other words, the approaches most favored by the NSF-quantitative, experimental, and formal theory-accounted for 94.7% of funding for substantive research.
The Dataset provides further insight into NSF support for the four traditional subfields.Within the American subfield, 84.3% of funding flowed to quantitative-only research versus just 1.2% for qualitative-only (table 1).This 70:1 ratio was the highest among the subfields.NSF-sponsored projects ranged from longitudinal datagathering enterprises, such as the massive American National Election Studies (ANES), to hundreds of studies on Congress, public opinion, and voting behavior.Across its 55-year history, the Program funded 21 qualitative-only awards in the American subfield, totaling $5,008,000.These figures pale in comparison to the 830 in total for American politics, the majority of which used a quantitative-only methodology.If we widen the scope to projects that employed both quantitative and qualitative methods, an additional 54 awards totaling $12,036,000 come into view-a still small fraction of the overall allocation for American politics.
The dataset also reveals declining support for qualitative research in American politics (figure 1).The five-year period with the highest support for qualitative-only projects came in 1971-1975, when six projects were funded for $2,491,000.This sum was barely exceeded over the next 45 years, with only 14 more qualitative projects funded for a total of $2,517,000.The decline in qualitative research is widely recognized and occasionally lamented in the study of American politics (e.g., Pierson 2007).The reasons cited typically include the exponential growth and accessibility of quantitative data, new technologies that facilitated data analysis, and changing disciplinary norms and incentives.However, the role of the NSF in directly  stimulating each of these transformations has yet to be fully recognized.The Political Science Awards Dataset underscores the magnitude of this quantitative push.
In contrast to declining support for qualitative research, there was an increase in funding for experimental methods in the study of American politics.Much of this support was directed to survey experiments where controlled treatments are embedded in traditional survey instruments.In particular, the NSF invested heavily in TESS (Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences), which supported Americanists conducting survey-based experiments via computer-assisted telephone interviewing and the Internet.Between 2001 and 2020, five awards totaling more than $15,000,000 supported 442 TESS projects fielded by 647 principal investigators. 9TESS is an important example of how a single NSF-supported project served as a vehicle for hundreds of smaller research projects, most of which yielded multiple peer-reviewed articles. 10omparative politics received a smaller but still significant share of NSF research support.Compared with American politics, there were fewer massive data collection endeavors, at least at the outset.There was also a higher proportion of qualitative only (7.5%) and quantitativequalitative research (9.6%).The ratio of quantitative-only to qualitative-only studies was 8:1, a vast difference from the 70:1 ratio in American politics.Context-rich singlecountry studies received some funding, including the occasional project that employed ethnographic methods.For example, an award in 1974 supported research leading to James Scott's Moral Economy of the Peasant. 11Another in 1978 funded the research for Scott's Weapons of the Weak. 12However, NSF support for qualitative research in the comparative subfield dropped in the 1980s (figure 2), mirroring the decline in support for qualitative research in American politics.From the 1980s, large-N data-gathering exercises commanded a larger share of support among comparative politics projects.Major projects included the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) 13 and Inglehart's World Values Surveys. 14he volume of funding for the international relations subfield was modest relative to the American and comparative subfields (figure 3).Nonetheless, the Political Science Program gave a tremendous boost to IR research.Quantitative IR was in its infancy in 1962 when the NSF made its first award to the Dimensionality of Nations project.This was an effort by Harold Guetzkow, Rudolph Rummel, and colleagues to systematically measure the attributes of states, including their interactions over time. 15Their project was  16 Morton Kaplan's 1969 award for "Computer and Mathematical Explorations of International Relations Theory" had a less enduring impact, but the title exemplifies the type of research that was most frequently supported. 17Quantitative-only studies received the highest share of research dollars (60.8%), followed by projects that combined quantitative analysis and formal theory (13.7%) and research that engaged only in formal theory (10%).Qualitative-only funding registered at 2.7%.
These allocations are especially striking when compared to the research practices of IR scholars.The Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project provides important insights into IR research practices through six successive surveys of IR scholars since 2004.In the 2017 faculty survey, 56% of U.S.-based IR scholars reported their primary methodological approach as "qualitative analysis" versus 26% who reported "quantitative analysis" (Maliniak et al. 2017).For research epistemology, 33% of respondents characterized their work as either "non-positivist" or "post-positivist," while 67% characterized their work as "positivist."These practices stand in stark contrast with NSF funding for IR projects, which supported quantitative, formal theory, and experimental research over qualitative research by a ratio of 13:1 and funded positivist epistemological approaches in IR exclusively.Notably, among the 273 substantive research awards in IR, none of the abstracts refer to "constructivism"-even in recognition of rival epistemological approaches.These allocations raise questions about the role of the NSF Political Science Program in deepening the methodological and epistemological rifts that define International Relations scholarship (Li 2018).
Political philosophy came last among the four traditional subfields.Over the 55 years of the NSF Political Science Program, only two awards were made to political philosophy projects.These supported Bruce Ackerman's Social Justice in the Liberal State and John Gunnell's Imagining the American Polity. 18These two exceptions underline the near-complete exclusion of political philosophy from NSF funding.One may argue that political philosophy is distant from the mandate of the NSF Political Science Program.However, as elaborated in the second half of this study, this distinction is itself a political construction.It is a form of boundary work that is not operative in similar government-sponsored funding agencies abroad.
Stepping back, one notes a skewed distribution across subfields (figure 4).American politics received the lion's share of support (68.3%), followed by comparative politics (22.8%) and international relations (8.9%).At 0.02%, political philosophy appears as a rounding error.These resources bolstered the dominance of quantitative methods in the American subfield and propelled a similar trend in the comparative and IR subfields.

Research Infrastructure
The NSF Political Science Program also invested heavily in research infrastructure.This category comprised 4.5% of the total program budget and includes items such as research equipment, support for data archiving, and the development of research tools and software.As with substantive projects, spending on infrastructure was primarily directed to quantitative research.
The most notable early investment supported the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) 19 at the University of Michigan. 20The ICPSR was founded in 1962 to facilitate quantitative research among its twenty-two founding member institutions and would eventually grow to over 750 institutions globally.The first NSF grant to ICPSR supported its new quantitative data repository. 21This 1963 award for $95,000 ($865,000 in 2021 dollars) was followed two years later by another for $260,400 ($2,240,000 in 2021 dollars) to accelerate data acquisition and acquire computer software to process data more efficiently. 22The ICPSR grew swiftly, with periodic infusions of capital from various NSF programs.Data was gathered and stored from federal, state, and local elections; census data was archived; national and international opinion survey data were cleaned, organized, and integrated; congressional roll call voting records were systematized, and so on.The ICPSR enabled efficient data storage, data sharing, and statistical analysis across a growing universe of conceivable variables.With the high cost of computer equipment in the mid-twentieth century, the ICPSR played a critical role in making quantitative data analysis accessible to more political scientists.And the ICPSR capacity grew exponentially over the years as various data collection projects-many of them NSFfunded-found a home in the ICPSR's centralized repository. 23eyond the ICPSR, the NSF supported dozens of other research tools ranging from machine coding technologies for increasing data acquisition speed to specialized software designed to advance extensive-form game theory and agent-based modeling. 24One of the most popular Other NSF awards opened new research pathways that were subfield specific.For example, Americanists benefitted from software designed to automatically collect and disseminate data on city council and mayoral elections. 26Other software was developed to analyze congressional redistricting. 27And many grants were dedicated to cleaning and archiving federal and state roll call data. 28As previously noted, TESS (Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences) facilitated survey-based experiments via computer-assisted telephone interviewing and the Internet.Without the research infrastructure provided by the TESS common platform, far fewer survey experiments would have been conducted, and at a far greater cost. 29omparativists also benefitted from significant investments geared toward cleaning, organizing, and storing already existing quantitative data, including comparative measures of socioeconomic development, comparative public opinion, data on foreign elections, and the like.For example, major funding for the Luxembourg Income Study made data from dozens of countries readily accessible to researchers. 30Another project funded the acquisition and recoding of Eurobarometer data into a cross-national standardized form. 31A similar project built a repository for roll call data from legislatures worldwide. 32R scholars similarly benefitted from EUGene, a Windows-based software program that enabled the customization of datasets from a growing universe of data sources.EUGene grew from a substantive research project, "Comparative Theory Testing and Interstate Wars, 1916Wars, -1984." 33 ." 33 The software proved useful for IR scholars to create, merge, and manage datasets in preparation for statistical analysis.In recognition of EUGene's utility as a research tool, the NSF supported its further development through a series of awards. 34igure 5 illustrates the increasing investments in quantitative research infrastructure via the Political Science Program.It is important to note that this is a limited view of NSF investments because a great deal of infrastructure support came from programs and budgets other than the Political Science Program.These included the Program on Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics; the NSF "Special Projects" budget; and funding through other social science programs and divisions.Moreover, as already noted, many awards entailed infrastructure development as a secondary objective, or they produced research tools as an unanticipated by-product of their primary research undertaking.
No similar investments were made for qualitative research infrastructure for the first five decades of the NSF Political Science Program.The first award devoted to qualitative infrastructure was for the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University in 2011, followed by additional support in 2014, 2016, and 2019, totaling nearly $5,000,000. 35Modeled on the ICPSR's quantitative repository, the qualitative repository is meant to facilitate data sharing and research transparency.However, given the nature of qualitative research (documents versus datasets; ethnographies versus econometrics; confidential interviews versus confidence intervals), it is doubtful that the Qualitative Data Repository will catalyze qualitative research in the same way that the ICPSR fueled the explosion of quantitative work.
Moreover, there is considerable concern among many scholars working in the qualitative tradition that Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) principles may act as barriers to the publication of qualitative research due to the various challenges of conforming to the conventions developed by and for quantitative researchers (Monroe 2018; Jacobs and Büthe 2021). 36lthough there is broad recognition in principle that quantitative and qualitative research require different frameworks for data storage and research transparency, applying standards is more ambiguous and less certain in practice.Journal editors and manuscript reviewers may not always be familiar with the "best practices" of various qualitative methods, and especially interpretive approaches.For those who find DA-RT problematic on these grounds, investments in qualitative data repositories are viewed as a potential threat to their work rather than a catalyst.Recent NSF support for qualitative research infrastructure should be understood with this significant caveat.

Institutes and Conferences
Another award type covered by the database concerns NSF allocations for conferences, workshops, and summer institutes.This category comprised 3.7% of the program budget.The most significant expenditures in this category supported training in quantitative research methods.The ICPSR's Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Science Research, first launched in 1963, provided the prototype.The first summer brought 41 graduate students and 21 (mostly junior) faculty from across the country (ICPSR 1964).According to the ICPSR proposal to the NSF, "the seminars have the potential for a strategic contribution to the revolutionary changes now taking place in political analysis and research."The pitch did not oversell the ICPSR's potential.By the early 1970s, the program enrolled 300 participants annually.By the early 1980s, enrollment expanded further to nearly 800 each summer.Training in quantitative methods proved especially crucial in the first decade of the Summer Program when access to computer technologies was limited and training in quantitative methods was unavailable beyond a small group of graduate programs.In this context, the ICPSR provided a vital opportunity for young political scientists to learn the tools of the trade.Even after quantitative training became a regular part of most graduate programs, the ICPSR Summer Institute remained an important avenue for younger scholars to access training in increasingly advanced quantitative methods.Less formally but perhaps equally important, the Institute helped graduate students build research networks that would endure throughout their careers.
The ICPSR provided a model for similar institutes and conferences focusing on methodology.The Society for Political Methodology received NSF support to field its annual conference almost continuously from 1986. 37Despite its rather general title, which suggests a big-tent approach to research methods, the Society for Political Methodology focused squarely on quantitative methods.Another summer institute modeled on the ICPSR is the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) Summer Training Institute, which bridges formal theory and empirical analysis.The venture was conceived and planned under the auspices of an NSF workshop (NSF  2002) and received robust NSF support from its inception. 38The NSF eventually sponsored a similar initiative to bolster training in qualitative methods.This started with a small exploratory award to Colin Elman in 2003 to support an Institute in Qualitative Research Methods. 39our additional awards totaling $630,000 supported the effort under its new title, the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR). 40eyond these regular summer institutes, there were stand-alone conferences and workshops.Surprisingly, many were focused on methodology rather than substantive political topics.Even when conferences focused squarely on substantive issues, quantitative methods or formal theory were often specified as the guiding methods of the workshop.The top-line finding in this category is striking.Among awards with an identifiable methodological approach, 91.6% of research dollars were allocated to quantitative methods or formal theory.Support for qualitative methods comprised just 6.2% of the total.Epistemological diversity was narrower still.A solo conference in 2009 that focused exclusively on interpretive methods was a clear outlier. 41igure 6 illustrates the allocations for institutes and conferences guided by a distinct methodological approach.Quantitative-only approaches dominated for the first several decades.Qualitative approaches received no funding until a workshop in 1997 on the history of social and behavioral sciences, and then nothing until the first exploratory grant for the IQMR in 2002. 42Qualitative methods subsequently show a steady, if modest, increase in funding beginning in the new millennium.Finally, EITM initiatives are presented as a separate line to impress on the reader the scale of the NSF investment in the endeavor, primarily through the EITM Summer Institute.
Even modest awards for conferences sometimes yielded significant results.For example, the NSF funded the first two meetings of what would become known as the Public Choice Society, and the NSF provided the start-up costs for its journal, Public Choice. 43By 1979, William Riker credited the Public Choice Society and NSF support with "giving coherence to the [rational choice] movement." 44nd within a decade of Riker's remarks, rational choice moved from the margins to a central feature of political science scholarship, discourse, and debate.

Dissertation Improvement Awards
Dissertation Improvement Awards comprised 1.6% of the program budget.In this category, the largest share of support was directed to projects that combined quantitative and qualitative methods (34.4%), followed by quantitative-only (25.9%), quantitative and experimental (15.6%), experimental-only (10.3%), qualitative-only (7.9%), and quantitative paired with formal theory (3.5%).This distribution differed from the faculty awards, and the divergence grew stronger over time.
Figure 7 illustrates the swift increase in support for dissertation research combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, particularly from 2000 onwards when it exceeded the allocation for quantitative-only projects.There was also a pronounced increase in support for research that employed quantitative and experimental methods, much of it large-N survey experiments.Experimental-only research also increased.And, although Subfield-specific variation is also apparent (table 2).Dissertation awards in the American subfield were inclined to quantitative-only research (35.9%).This was nowhere close to the 84.3% quantitative-only emphasis of faculty awards but more pronounced than the dissertation awards for comparative or IR.Dissertation awards in the American subfield also had a stronger tilt toward experimental research (13.7%) and projects that combined quantitative and experimental approaches, including large-N survey experiments (24%).Among comparative and IR projects, there was a remarkable embrace of research combining qualitative and quantitative methods, reaching 46.7% in comparative and 30.3% in international relations.Finally, for reasons that are unclear, nearly two-thirds (61.5%) of dissertation support dollars were directed to the comparative subfield, and about one-third (32%) was directed to American politics.One might assume that research methodology did not constitute a salient aspect of the activities undertaken in this category.Yet among the diversity-enhancing projects that received NSF support, 77.4% had a significant methodological component and 85% of those projects focused on training in quantitative methods.Figure 8 compares spending on quantitative methods training as a diversity-enhancing activity with spending on other diversity-enhancing activities without a methodological component.Examples of activities without a methodological focus include efforts to track and document the status of underrepresented groups in the profession, professional mentoring programs, and projects designed to elevate the visibility of women and faculty of color, such as the "Women Also Know Stuff" Project. 47Although both forms of support generally increased over time, at no point did the "other support" category exceed allocations for training in quantitative methods.The Diversity Programming category is surprisingly insightful because one might not expect methods training to make a strong appearance.Yet it does, which underlines the overall influence of the NSF in defining and advancing a particular vision of research excellence.There appears to be a conflation between the goal of advancing diversity in the discipline and the presumed need to "tech-up" women and faculty of color in select research methods.
Figure 9 illustrates the total distribution of research support across all five award types for the full life of the NSF Political Science Program. 48When considering this figure, it is worth recalling that most support for qualitative research came at the end of the 55-year program.Were it not for the support of initiatives such as the IQMR Summer Institute, the relative share devoted to qualitative research would have been skewed further.Likewise, qualitative methods hardly registered in the category of research infrastructure until NSF support was provided for the Qualitative Data Repository in 2011.

The Politics of Knowledge Production
Having established an awards-level view of NSF funding, the second half of this study probes why NSF support skewed so strongly toward projects that employed quantitative methods.Here, I draw on APSA records, insider accounts from the NSF, and the work of historians of science to shed light on NSF funding for political science.These sources reveal that NSF priorities were profoundly shaped by political context and the epistemological expectations of an NSF administration dominated by the natural sciences.Although these sources are essential for understanding the history of knowledge production in Larsen (1992) and Solovey (2020) provide the most comprehensive and detailed accounts of the early politics of the National Science Foundation vis-à-vis the social sciences.They show that even before its establishment in 1950, proposals to include the social sciences in the NSF were met with resistance.Natural scientists of the midtwentieth century were skeptical that social phenomena could be studied in a scientific manner, with the natural sciences providing the benchmark for "real" science.Opposition from conservative members of Congress also raised concerns that the natural sciences would be caught in the crossfire of polarized congressional debate.
Otto Larsen, a sociologist who served as Director of the Division of Social and Economic Research at the NSF from 1980-1982 and Senior Associate for Social and Behavioral Science from 1983-1986, wrote the first book-length study of NSF funding for the social sciences.Larsen provides rich accounts from multiple sources to establish that worry over the broader NSF budget was paramount among members of the National Science Board (NSB).Harvey Brooks, a physicist on the NSB from 1962-1974, explained that "many of the physical scientists who were most influential in shaping the NSF … feared that an active social science research program would produce a political backlash in Congress that would hurt the natural sciences as well" (Larsen 1992, 13).Another NSB member commented that "we have to face up to the fact that the social sciences … are a source of trouble beyond anything released by Pandora" (43).
Historian of science Mark Solovey marshals further documentary evidence to show that, in addressing these doubts, advocates for the social sciences emphasized aspects of social science research that most closely resembled the natural sciences.Specifically, advocates for the social sciences highlighted social science research that embraced positivist epistemological assumptions of valueneutrality, hypothesis testing through the measurement of (quantitative) empirical data, and the importance of replication, verification, and generalizability.This "unity of the sciences" positioning facilitated the inclusion of the social sciences in the NSF.However, doubts and concerns persisted among those natural scientists who came to control the new National Science Board. 49The NSF's own historical accounts (England 1983; Mazuzan 1994) confirm that the National Science Board worked to slow the development of social science programming to mitigate the possibility of threats to NSF funding.As a result, the social sciences came to occupy a modest and dependent position within the NSF. 50olovey shows that this weak structural position was "deeply consequential for the evolution of NSF policies, programs, and practices" (2020, 294), a finding that aligns with the numerous accounts of NSF insiders from the period.Henry Riecken, the first head of the Division of Social Sciences, provides firsthand explanations of how he and his predecessor incrementally expanded the scope of social science programming by strategically stressing "the 'hard science' aspects of the social disciplines" (1986, 215; 1983).At an operational level, this meant directing initial funding to non-controversial areas, such as econometrics and experimental social psychology.Riecken explains, "at first the social science program at NSF grew slowly, expanding its scope almost on a grant-by-grant basis and continuing to shun 'controversy.'The emphasis remained positivistic, the preference was for supporting quantitative, data-based research" (1986, 217).Solovey shows that this approach cemented "a scientistic framework for understanding, evaluating, and supporting the social sciences" (2020, 6). 51This approach was apparent in the NSF Political Science Program.
Findings from the APSA Records Collection APSA's administrative records contain extensive documentation of the Association's efforts to secure an NSF Political Science Program.NSF support was a major preoccupation of the APSA Executive and APSA Council through the 1950s and early 1960s.Still, the program was founded only in 1965-years after other social science disciplines had secured support-due to reservations among the NSF leadership that political science posed unique liabilities to the overall NSF budget.The Association's records make clear that APSA eventually prevailed through a Faustian bargain, wherein NSF funding was secured at the price of stringent controls over which types of research would be funded and which would not. 52PSA pursued two parallel strategies to overcome the reticence to political science research at the NSF: 1) to impress upon the NSF leadership that the discipline was part of a unified scientific enterprise, sharing the same commitments to objective and verifiable research, and 2) to apply political pressure on the NSF by way of Congress.In pursuit of the first strategy, the Executive Director of APSA, Evron Kirkpatrick, urged leading political scientists at dozens of universities to write the NSF about the state of the discipline. 53The APSA records contain letters from leaders in the field, including Robert Dahl, Robert Lane, Morton Kaplan, Warren Miller, Lucian Pye, and others. 54Joseph LaPalombara's letter sums up the general tone conveyed in all the letters: I think you are probably aware that, for the last seven years, we have been moving as a group in the direction of more systematic theory building in research activities.As a matter of fact, there are a number of my colleagues who have much more sophistication in the field of mathematics and statistics, or in the business of research 'objectivity, verifiability and generality' than do many of the people around the country who are acquainted with such [NSF funded] areas as geography demography, sociology, and so on. 55ch letter emphasized the cutting-edge research being conducted in their departments and nationwide.Stress was placed on the aspects of research they believed would be most compelling to the natural scientists who dominated the Foundation: quantitative data collection, statistical analysis, the importance of objectivity and replication, and the like.
Simultaneously, Kirkpatrick mounted a robust campaign to pressure the NSF by way of Congress.Kirkpatrick met or corresponded with over one hundred senators and representatives, many repeatedly over the years.Other meetings took place between the APSA leadership, NSF officials, and members of Congress.From our perspective six decades later, one might assume that the APSA had few levers to pull in Washington.That was not the case.The APSA and its membership had direct connections and sometimes strong personal relations with members of Congress.The APSA records show that these relations afforded Kirkpatrick considerable resources for leveraging political pressure on the NSF.
A letter from Kirkpatrick to Robert Dahl in October 1963 suggested that Dahl use his connections with Emilio Daddario, the chair of the subcommittee that oversaw the NSF. 56Similarly, Wayne Merrick of Allegheny College informed Kirkpatrick that he was the Chairman of James D. Weaver's Legislative Advisory Committee for the 24th Congressional District."He is, of course, a member of Representative Daddario's Subcommittee on Science Research and Development," wrote Merrick. 57he APSA records also contain correspondence between Kirkpatrick and Stephen Horn, the Legislative Assistant to Senator Thomas Kuchel, concerning pressure that should be placed on NSF Director Leland Haworth. 58As it happens, Stephen Horn was an early participant in APSA's Congressional Fellows Program.Kirkpatrick writes, "You suggested that I send you a draft of a letter for the Senator to send to Haworth; it is attached.Now is an excellent time to send it.The Foundation is beginning to feel a little pressure and is considering reviewing its policy.A little nudge right now would be extremely valuable."Two days later, a strongly worded letter from Senator Thomas Kuchel was dispatched to Leland Haworth, nearly identical to the proposed draft that Kirkpatrick had provided. 59irkpatrick was not shy about letting the NSF know he was actively lobbying the congress members overseeing the NSF.In a letter to Social Sciences Director Riecken, Kirkpatrick explains: "I have now had letters from or talked with quite a number of members of the House and Senate.To date, those I have talked with have expressed the view that the NSF policy should be changed ….It seems to me quite clear that the situation can easily be remedied ….I hope very much that these changes will be made." 60The letter is copied to each member of the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development, the body to which the NSF must answer.
Kirkpatrick's lobbying through United States Senator Hubert Humphrey, which is touched on by Solovey  (2020), is seen from another angle in the APSA records.Kirkpatrick was Humphrey's professor at the University of Minnesota.Upon Humphrey's graduation, Kirkpatrick encouraged Charles Hyneman to provide Humphrey with a graduate fellowship at Louisiana State University, where Hyneman served as department chair.Two decades later, Kirkpatrick (APSA Executive Director) and Hyneman (APSA President) lobbied Haworth (NSF Director) via their former student, Humphrey, now a United States Senator.
The pressure through Congress was relentless, and the results were clear.In a remarkably candid four-page, single-spaced letter to Humphrey, Haworth acknowledged that the NSF had withheld funding from political science due to political considerations.
There is one ground on which the Foundation has been cautiousperhaps overly cautious.It has been extremely anxious that its programs not become involved in controversies over public policy, especially in the sense of seeming to imply advocacy or opposition to any particular point of view ….As nearly as I can ascertain, it was largely this caution that led the Foundation in the past to omit political science from the subjects covered in its fellowship program. 61rkpatrick's persistence paid off.In March 1964, Kirkpatrick received a draft policy statement that included political science as a named discipline at the NSF.This was a breakthrough, but it was not an unqualified success.The NSF committed to funding only research that met its strict criteria.
In designating eligible areas for support the Division of Social Sciences is guided by the over-all mission of the Foundation to support basic scientific research.As interpreted in the social science programs, this is a directive to support research on problems that can be studied by objective methods; that will yield independently verifiable results; and that will produce results with general implications rather than findings relevant principally to a particular time, place, or event.The aim of these programs is to support research aimed at the scientific understanding of social and behavioral processes and phenomena, but not studies designed to evaluate social policies or to advocate or oppose particular solutions of social problems.
The draft continued, "the investigator is free to choose any methods of investigation, including quantitative, experimental, and other techniques, as long as they are scientific and appropriate to the projected study." 62ith this draft statement, Haworth resolved the conundrum of responding to the political pressures bearing down on the NSF while safeguarding the Foundation from controversial research.The express purpose of the policy is stated clearly in an internal memorandum wherein Riecken explained to Haworth that "the danger of a negative Congressional reaction is minimized by holding to a stringent definition of eligibility in terms of basic nature and scientific (rather than policy) orientation." 63Haworth articulated the same view in his letter to Senator Humphrey: "Fortunately, [avoiding controversy] is reasonably well assured by virtue of the criteria that limit our support to basic research." 64The "basic and scientific" criteria provided a rubric for supporting some (politically benign) research projects while sidelining others that might generate difficulties for the Foundation.Proposals would not be solicited and vetted with an openness to the diverse modes of inquiry practiced across the discipline.Instead, positivist epistemologyalready ascendant in political science in the behavioral movement would be used to sideline political risks to the NSF.
This preemptive damage control fortified a binary understanding of "rigor" associated with specific research methods and epistemological commitments.The final policy is explicit about the methods that constitute scientific investigation: "this is a directive to support research on problems that can be studied by methods that will yield independently verifiable results … including quantitative, experimental, and other techniques, as long as they are scientific."Epistemological assumptions of objectivity and replicability are considered essential features of scientific research, and the methods associated with the natural sciences are fully conflated with rigor itself.
As might be expected, the NSF draft policy elicited a range of reactions, from celebratory to critical.The critical comments, preserved in the APSA records, anticipated the impact the NSF policy would have on different modes of political science research.Former APSA President James Pollock commented, "I don't see why it's necessary to so flatly exclude large areas of our discipline." 65Another former APSA President, Charles Hyneman, lamented that "tests for determining the scientific character of studies" would exclude much of political science. 66A. LeRoy Bennett suggested that "while the NSF statement is about all that we can expect from an organization heavily influenced by natural science methodology, it circumscribes severely the types of research in the social sciences for which support is readily available and it may result in a narrowing of such fields as Political Science." 67Yaroslav Bilinsky commented that NSF resources would likely flow to certain projects, such as studies of electoral systems and public opinion, "but this is not all there is to Political Science.On the discipline as a whole, it might have an unbalancing effect." 68Kirkpatrick transmitted the full range of reactions to the NSF. 69However, no records were found in the APSA archive suggesting that any effort was made to push for broader eligibility criteria.The records concerning the lobbying activities of APSA go cold from the moment the NSF agrees to establish a program for political science.

The NSF Political Science Program
The years-long campaign ended in victory for the APSA.It had secured a seat at the NSF table.But it was a partial victory at best.From its inception, the Political Science Program was explicitly designed to bolster positivism, elevate nomothetic over idiographic modes of knowledge production, and sideline critical and normative work.These orientations were continuously reinforced by administrative structures and processes within the NSF dominated by the natural sciences.This is not to say that NSF funding priorities were an exclusively top-down imposition on the discipline.The political scientists who staffed the review panels and vetted proposals generally embraced the NSF's vision for the discipline.It is significant that among NSF Political Science Program directors and advisory panel members, none represented political philosophy, none were known for critical, normative, or interpretive research, and precious few worked primarily with qualitative methods.What is more, review panelists without extensive quantitative or formal theory backgrounds became outliers within a decade.
The taboo around "controversial" research and the administrative realities of an NSF leadership dominated by the natural sciences provided an ongoing rationale for program directors to allocate a greater share of resources to projects with an increasingly narrow set of methodological tools.In an open letter in the pages of PS, Political Science Program Director David Calhoun Leege (1976, 12)  recounted the politically charged circumstances that surrounded the establishment of the Political Science Program and the long shadow that it had cast on the fledgling program: Features about the origins of the Program which Foundation officials found distasteful still linger in their memories and are passed on in institutional memory.Within the Foundation the view seems to have been held that the sensitive subject matter of political science spelled trouble and that not very many political scientists were scientists.In gaining clarification of the discipline's status, considerable pressure was put on the Foundation by Capitol Hill sources.Resentment developed.In the minds of some, it was not scientific merit but political pressure that forced creation of the Program.
Leege stressed that these existential threats were ongoing.His sober appraisal did not shy away from underlining the worst-case scenario: "the feeling lingers that, under severe congressional pressure, the Foundation would abolish social science programs to salvage support for physical and biological sciences and engineering" (13).The blunt message that Leege impressed on his readers was that if the Political Science Program was to survive, let alone grow, its applicant pool should start looking and sounding more like the programs in economics, psychology, and the natural sciences.
According to Leege, a transformation in the political science applicant pool was urgently needed to establish the scientific basis of the discipline vis-à-vis NSF administrators.He reported that "Foundation officials have argued … over 50% of the [political science] proposals cannot be considered competitive under any scientific merit argument" (11).Leege recognized that "such assessments are by their nature judgmental and depend in part on the breadth of understanding possessed by planning officials who have come from other disciplinary backgrounds" ( 11).Yet Leege agreed with these negative assessments and provided copious examples of his own.He then detailed the efforts that he and previous NSF political science program directors were undertaking to shape the applicant pool: "The present and immediate past program directors have considerably reduced the number of formal proposals received by the Program by sending clear signals on inquiries and proposals" (11).Leege reported that these signals were fortified by "tough" selection panels and "tough" program directors seeking "better statistical and mathematical techniques … greater rigor in theoretical formulation and greater awareness of measurement problems" ( 14).According to Leege, these efforts had paid off: "Fortunately, these shortcomings now characterize a much smaller proportion of our proposals.The picture of the discipline the Foundation should form from proposals in the last few years should be very different from the one it had in the mid-to late-1960's." Leege stated that his approach was "not intended to restrict the types of proposals which will compete well."The program "is seeking strong proposals in any substantive and/or methodological area."But the force of the entire report suggests otherwise.For example, priority areas outlined for the program emphasized "mathematical models," "n-person games," "psycho-physical measurement," "large data archives," "interactive computing with large memory," and "new modes of modelling the polity and of measuring behavior."No similar research agendas were specified that would entail ethnography, historical/archival work, small-N comparative studies, context-rich case studies, or other qualitative methods.No possibilities were mentioned for funding normative, critical, or interpretivist work.Instead, this open letter in the pages of PS served as another avenue to deliver "clear signals" about what the NSF Political Science Program was prepared to fund.As Leege candidly explained, the efforts to shape the applicant pool were achieving the intended effect.Indeed, the data presented in the first section of this article illustrates the share of the Program budget allocated to qualitative research continued to decline in subsequent years.
An APSA Committee on Research Support recognized this shift and sounded an early alarm that the NSF was serving a particular constituency of political scientists: [T]here is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work within the research community of political scientists.Believing that only very quantitative or highly mathematical proposals have a chance of winning support, those doing research in such areas as American national government and public administration whose focus is primarily institutional or historical, tend not to write proposals for the NSF.Since the NSF can hardly fund non-existing proposals, the image of a strong quantitative-mathematical focus persists (Zinnes et al. 1978).
The APSA Committee on Research Support had identified an important feature of the problem: the dwindling number of proposals for non-quantitative projects.But by placing the onus on political scientists who were not applying, the Committee misdiagnosed the root problem.The suggestion that "the NSF can hardly fund non-existing proposals" sidestepped the methodological biases evident in NSF policies, practices, and statements.Political scientists employing qualitative methods had read the "clear signals" as they were intended, and they looked elsewhere for research support. 70A similar APSA committee report issued over two decades later was more forthcoming about methodological bias at the NSF."We would hope that the relevant offices at NSF would resist advice, wherever it comes from, to equate science in political science with mathematical or statistical sophistication" (Davenport  et al. 2000).

Discussion and Conclusions
In the first issue of the American Political Science Review under its current leadership team (2020-2024), the incoming editors voiced concern that political science is not sufficiently engaged with the full range of tools and approaches that are needed to understand the politics of our time."We worry that all too often our discipline operates with an overly narrow view of what counts as political science" (Notes from the Editors 2020, v).The editors acknowledged that overreliance on a select set of research methods has narrowed the questions political scientists ask, the research agendas pursued, and the insights learned."As political scientists, we like to tell ourselves that our data and methods are cutting-edge.But all too often, we let our data and methods dictate the questions that we ask.We let our tools tell us what we can and cannot study, when we would be better served by acknowledging the ways our toolkit is incomplete and seeking to expand it."This was not the first such acknowledgment from leadership in the discipline.APSA Task Force reports have examined the effects of narrowing methodological toolkits (e.g., APSA 2005; APSA 2011).These concerns have also come from below, most visibly from the Caucus for a New Political Science in the 1960s (Barrow 2008) and the Perestroika Movement four decades later (Monroe 2005).Recent studies have gone so far as to characterize the imbalance in graduate methods training as "a disciplinary crisis" (Emmons and Moravcsik 2020, 258).
One of the clear costs of a methodological and epistemological monoculture is the neglect and marginalization of research on a range of important substantive political issues.Paul Pierson (2007) shows that within the American subfield (2000-2005), approximately 85% of publications in the top journals employ statistical methods alone, and 60% of these focus on only four areas: public opinion, voting behavior, campaigns and elections, and Congress.This compares with 6% of publications in the top journals that are based on qualitative methods alone, wherein 80% of those articles focus on issues other than public opinion, voting behavior, campaigns and elections, and Congress.This wider range of subject matter includes issues of public policy, public administration, race and gender, urban politics, federalism, social movements, law and courts, and the like.In other words, Pierson found that the range of substantive issues examined with qualitative methods tended to be far more diverse, yet those qualitative treatments were crowded out of the leading journals. 71id the NSF Political Science Program contribute to this narrowing of the discipline?We know that the NSF worked to define the discipline's cutting edge, that it funded quantitative and positivist-oriented scholarship to the virtual exclusion of other approaches, and that it enjoyed a cumulative budget of nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars.To be clear, this study does not attempt to measure the effect of NSF funding on American political science generally or to weigh this influence against myriad other factors that shaped the trajectory of the discipline. 72 measure of disciplinary change would be difficult to operationalize.And more to the point, such a measure would not adequately capture the manifold ways that NSF investments stimulated new pathways for research.A more extensive qualitative treatment is necessary to do justice to the rich and complex story of how the NSF shaped the discipline, not only in terms of research method and substantive focus but also in terms of the identity and practices of American Political Science. 73Nonetheless, a study by Canon, Gabel, and Patton (2002) provides some indication of the NSF's influence on scholarly output.They examined the relationship between research support and publication in eight leading political science journals for the five-year period 1991-1995 (N=1,394).They found that 81.1% of articles in the top eight outlets were grounded in quantitative methods, formal theory, or rational choice.Among the subset of articles supported by the NSF, 96.2% were grounded in quantitative methods, formal theory, or rational choice.These figures suggest that NSF worked to consolidate this methodological dominance in the top-tier journals of the discipline. 74his study has made two principal contributions.First, the Political Science Awards Dataset established an awards-level view of NSF-funded projects over time.Before this dataset, our knowledge of the NSF's funding record was anecdotal, impressionistic, and incomplete.
The dataset revealed that the Political Science Program allocated 94.7% of its substantive project dollars to quantitative methods, formal theory, and experimental research, whereas 5.3% was allocated to research utilizing qualitative methods.A similar preference is apparent across all five funding categories examined: substantive research, research infrastructure, workshops, conferences and institutes, and diversity programming.
The second contribution of this study was the discovery of new evidence addressing the puzzle of why the NSF Political Science Program support was so strongly skewed in the first place.Findings from the APSA records align with research by historians of science and firsthand accounts of NSF insiders (e.g., England 1983; Larsen  1992; Mazuzan 1994; Riecken 1983, 1986; Solovey  2020).The correspondence illuminates the strategy and intensity of APSA's campaign to leverage pressure on the NSF.The documents also underscore the political considerations that animated the Foundation's reluctance to sponsor political science research.Furthermore, they show that the NSF resolved this conundrum by authorizing and supporting only a narrow subset of political science research.Finally, the APSA archive recovers the differences of opinion among political scientists of the era regarding this Faustian bargain.
While the APSA succeeded in its effort to secure a fullfledged political science program at the NSF, it did not secure equal opportunity for all political science research.Instead, the APSA accepted the strict limitations imposed by the NSF on eligibility for funding.NSF-supported research was to be divorced from policy; projects were to embrace positivist values of replication, verification, and generalizability, typically through quantitative methods; and sponsored research was to avoid critical or normative approaches.Prominent individuals in the discipline objected to these criteria, but APSA ultimately accepted these conditions as the price of securing access to NSF largesse.The fears of APSA presidents Pollock, Hyneman, and others that the NSF criteria would exclude much of the discipline proved prescient, as borne out in the data presented in the first part of this study.This critical juncture in the history of American political science is preserved in the APSA records through hundreds of pages of letters and memos.Together with the program's funding data, these documents shed light on the NSF policies and practices that shaped new knowledge production in American political science for decades.
This role in shaping the trajectory of American political science is by no means unique to our discipline.In a review of NSF funding through the History and Philosophy of Science Program, Vaesen and Katzav (2019) find that NSF awards were instrumental in building the dominance of logical empiricists who espoused value-free philosophy of science while marginalizing rival approaches that engaged with social, political, and moral concerns.Indeed, Larsen   (1992) and Solovey (2020) show that similar dynamics were at work across a range of NSF social science programs.
What these NSF programs share in common is usefully contrasted with the practices of similar research funding agencies abroad.Government agencies outside the United States do not universally share the methodological biases illustrated in the first part of this study.The Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) exemplifies a more inclusive approach.When I applied the same coding scheme to a three-year sample of awards from the SSHRC Political Science Committee (2018 to 2020), the exercise found that 56% of SSHRC awards supported qualitative research, 24% was allocated to quantitative research, 14% to mixed quantitativequalitative methods, and 6% supported experimental methods.Continuing with this comparison, a critical or normative dimension was identified in 16% of SSHRCfunded projects.Finally, 8% of SSHRC-funded projects were in the political philosophy subfield.Although this is a modest share of the total projects funded, it approximates the rough proportion of political theorists in Canadian political science departments.What is more, political theorists serve on SSHRC selection panels.In sum, Canada's SSHRC offers a "big tent" funding model that broadly represents the methods, questions, and research agendas with which political scientists in Canada are engaged.
An important question for political scientists to grapple with is the counterfactual: If NSF funding had been allocated without the strict requirement of valueneutrality; without prejudice to research embracing critical or interpretive approaches; without a virtual exclusion of political philosophy; without an overwhelming emphasis on quantitative methods; and without an insistence on replication, verification, and generalizability, what might NSF Political Science Program support have looked like?And what effect would an inclusive funding model have had on the trajectory and shape of the discipline?Presumably, most of the same research would have been funded under more inclusive selection criteria, but it would have been supported alongside a more eclectic range of political science research, contributing to a more varied and diverse research landscape.

Figure 1
Figure 1 Program Dollars by Research Method, American Politics Subfield, 1961-2020

Figure 3
Figure 3 Program Dollars by Research Method, International Relations Subfield, 1961-2020

Figure 4
Figure 4 Program Dollar Totals for American, Comparative, and IR Subfields

Figure 5
Figure 5 Program Dollars for Research Infrastructure by Research Method, 1961-2020

Figure 6
Figure 6 Program Dollars for Institutes and Conferences by Research Method, 1961-2020

Figure 9
Figure 9 Total Program Dollars by Research Method for All Award Types, 1961-2020

Table 1
Share of NSF Program Dollars for Substantive Research by Method and Subfield

Table 2
Share of NSF Program Dollars for Dissertation Improvement Awards by Method and Subfield Diversity Programming Diversity Programming Awards comprised a mere 1% of the Political Science Program budget.Examples include support for the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute 45 and Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE).