Would Focusing more on Political Science improve the site?

Question

This site is nearly moribund, especially when compared to active SEs. The number of questions that gets asked and answered every day is well below the number that would be necessary for a thriving stack.

A large part of the problem is that there is not a sizable community involved in the site, and the focus of the site actually harms the effort to develop a community. People have raised issues of accepting literature questions to increase readership and including policy questions, and I believe that those are adequate, but not long term solutions to the problem. The majority of political boards get around this problem by allowing speculation, pontification and opinion based responses but that is neither desirable nor really possible here.

Is a potential solution to try to focus more explicitly on Political Science rather than the quotidian questions of politics, writ large?

Answer 1

The best, and most obvious solution, is to deliberately expand the site to include political scientists.

1. The primary audience for most stacks are academics, or pseudo-academics (meaning people in research positions but not at universities) because they have the most time and knowledge about the topic. One need only look at the success of TeX.SE and Academia.SE—both of which are almost exclusively populated by people in a research environment. This is a ready made source of answers as much as questions, and an active effort to interest them in the site is the single best audience for Politics.SE.

2. Drive-by participants are generally harmful to the health of the site and degrade the reliability. While asking questions by dilettantes is naturally encouraged by stacks, and trolls are a problem for every site, people only casually interested in politics tend to ask one of three types of questions: 1) a 'leading' question hoping for a certain kind of answer such as this and this (which can lead to up-votes or accepted answers because of political motivation) 2) incredibly specialized questions which would likely require a study to answer like this one, or 3) questions almost exclusively relevant to some specific current event, like this and this. These kinds of questions either fail to interest real experts or would take far to much time to answer to be worth joining the community, and create a question base for search engines that are mostly un-answered, un-helpful, or un-interesting.

3. Including Political Science will broaden the appeal globally. Politics is local, but Political Science is global. There are people in China right now taking classes on the U.S. government, but their questions are not about how parties could exploit turn-out differences caused by weather. In fact, the American Political Science Association just announced that its flagship journal [will be edited out of Germany]! Discussions about domestic politics such as regime type, democracy, elections use data and information from a wide variety of situations, and people are frequently interested in them, regardless of country of origin. In International Relations, the pull is even stronger, as it doesn't matter what country you are int, International Relations is the same and mostly the same people make up your reading list.

4. Including Political Science will improve the answers we get once there are enough people. Questions like this one about elections in Ukraine would likely have been answered almost immediately if we had a Ukraine specialist who frequented the board, even once in a while. There are dozens of them out there, either as faculty or grad-students, to say nothing of policy makers with back-grounds in the field. Answers which are backed up with legitimate citations, especially from peer-reviewed, or peer-reviewed-like sources, will be useful outside of answering general curiosity. A scholar can answer a question on SE in a way that someone in the Foreign Ministry could use, whereas many of our answers—mine included, sometimes—amount to "someone on SE said" which is useless to anyone who is serious.

5. Including political science will improve the questions we get. Political Science includes but is more than Politics. Political scientists know about what is going on in the world (or at least the good ones do) but they look at it and talk about it in a much more long-term way. For example, the Arab Spring is not a sui generis event, but part of understanding the way politics occurs, generally. Some articles decline in usefulness, and some were never useful to begin with, but very little is completely overcome by events. A question such as How can Iraqi Kurdistan become a state? is a subset of questions like "How is sovereignty defined in international law?", "Is international recognition essential for sovereignty?", and "What are examples of nations without states which gained states in the past 50 years?" That can all be answered, and which would be lasting and valuable for years if not decades into the future, but which are not currently the types of questions you see on this site.

6. Done right, questions and answers would emerge organically as a by-product of higher education around the world. Every day people type into google the prompt they received for their take-home exam/essay question/research project. If they were led to some questions here, as they were written on those questions, they may just a) answer the question if one didn't already exist, b) ask another. Furthermore, lots of scholars might add their 2-cents as they develop course work, or ask their own questions. This is part of what makes Stack Overflow so wonderful, while there are plenty of practitioners there, you also have people with PhDs in Computer Science answering questions, when the question is complicated or unique enough.