Political science and conservation biology: a dialog of the deaf.

Political scientists have largely ignored conservation biology and its central concern, biodiversity. Consider two indicators and an anecdote. The indicators concern publication trends and faculty hiring in political science. In the past 20 years, the top five political science journals, as measured by their impact factor scores, have published one article focusing on biodiversity conservation (out of more than 2000 published papers). And in the top five political science departments in the United States (arguably, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and Chicago), not a single faculty member considers biodiversity conservation to be among his or her research interests. The anecdote concerns reflections on the discipline by 12 recent past presidents of the American Political Science Association. In remarking on the blind spots, research accomplishments, and needed directions for the discipline, biodiversity was entirely absent; indeed, even the environment was. These facts should rightly generate pessimism about the past and future of conversations between political science and conservation biology. Political scientists and their discipline value work on biodiversity at best only to a limited extent. To the extent that political scientists consider conservation biology and biodiversity, they must do so by working against the disciplinary incentive structures that reward research and teaching. The reasons political scientists neglect conservation biology and biodiversity may lie even deeper than incentives related to publication and hiring. They may have more to do with what political scientists view as the most important issues and the appropriate scale at which to study them. Electoral systems and practices, democracy, political institutions, international regimes, public opinion, state-society relations, conflict, war, violence, race and ethnicity, policy making, strategic behavior, and policy outcomes are properly the province of their discipline