I know a lot of political scientists and academics in other fields have been yelling "We tried to warn you!!" since the Capitol attack, and this *needs* to be a moment when academics and the academy think desperately about how they can make their research relevant to the public

And there's a lot of good work that's out there! I can't even begin to list the authors and papers and books that I've seen and though "whoo boy that's relevant"

It's not that the work isn't be done because it is

But I've studied in three countries and worked in the legislatures of two and the gulf between what's talked about in one forum and what's talked about in the other is HUGE. TL;DR: policymakers just don't think about you, academia

Part of this has to do with bigger problems of discourse (which is to say, it's not just you), but too often I've heard academics shrug and say something to the effect of "policymakers just don't care" and treat it like it's not their problem

Make it your problem

One place I'd start is the obsession with methodology - devising ever-increasingly abstract methodologies to produce ever-increasingly marginal findings. Which...ok, fine whatever if you want to do that for yourselves but don't complain when the public isn't interested

Next is the determination to make generalizations. That's fine for science, but if you want to explain these findings to the public you have to recognize that the Generalized is not a real place and has little to no relevance for the immediate cases everyone's worried about

I could go on but I'll put it this way - it's not always the public's fault that your findings aren't picked up. There's a big problem if you have the answers but no one is paying attention

(caveat caveat caveat nb nb nb not everyone is terrible at this some do well yes discourse has broader issues etc etc etc)

(guys.)

AND ANOTHER THING: even outlets that I like, that are better at doing this than most, whose mission is to make academic work accessible still can't help talking about survey design or empirical evidence or whatever. GET TO THE DAMN POINT