TL;DR: As the discipline has become more and more rigorous, formal, and mathematical in the academic world, it has become less and less relevant in the real wor

TL;DR: As the discipline has become more and more rigorous, formal, and mathematical in the academic world, it has become less and less relevant in the real world. Key quote: > When political scientists seek rigor, they increasingly conflate it with the use of particular methods such as statistics or formal modeling... The sociologist Leslie A. White captured that ethos as early as 1943: "We may thus gauge the 'scientific-ness' of a study by observing the extent to which it employs mathematics — the more mathematics the more scientific the study. Physics is the most mature of the sciences, and it is also the most mathematical. Sociology is the least mature of the sciences and uses very little mathematics. To make sociology scientific, therefore, we should make it mathematical. Relevance, in contrast, is gauged by whether scholarship contributes to the making of policy decisions.