To: National Security Council, Department of State, Congressional Committees on Foreign Affairs and Education
From: the Constitutional Order Institute
Date: August 12, 2025
Subject: Recommendation to Dismantle the Department of Political Science in U.S. Universities
The integrity of the democratic world depends on accurately identifying and countering unaccountable governments. Yet a core intellectual driver of misdiagnosis — and thus of misguided policy — originates within U.S. universities: the Department of Political Science.
Through outdated doctrines such as realism and its regime-type blind spots, political science misclassifies autocracies as democracies (false positives) and democracies as autocracies (false negatives). These errors distort foreign policy, slow responses to authoritarian consolidation, and misinform the global democratic coalition.
This memo recommends dismantling political science departments as currently constituted, phasing out federal funding, and redirecting resources toward disciplines that prioritize institutional accountability, constitutional design, and evidence-based governance.
The United States invests heavily in political science programs through federal grants, student aid, and research funding. These programs shape the conceptual frameworks adopted by policymakers, journalists, and allied governments.
However, the discipline’s dominant approaches:
Treat states as profit-maximizing firms, ignoring the public trust function of government.
Fail to integrate institutional oversight into definitions of democracy.
Commit repeated classification errors, producing damaging foreign policy outcomes.
As a result, the U.S. unintentionally funds the intellectual infrastructure that shields unaccountable regimes and undermines democratic resilience worldwide.
Many academics framed the invasion through the lens of realism: NATO “provoked” Russia; Ukraine threatened Russia’s sphere of influence. This framing treated an autocracy (Russia) and an emerging democracy (Ukraine) as morally equivalent “players,” blunting the democratic world’s moral and strategic clarity.
Security studies model nuclear policy as if regime type is irrelevant, treating nuclear democracies and nuclear dictatorships as equally safe. This leads to failed arms control agreements with autocracies, misplaced trust in dictators, and underinvestment in democratic oversight.
Turkey under Erdoğan, Hungary under Orbán, and Venezuela under Maduro retained democratic façades while dismantling institutional checks. Academic indexes labeled them “partly free” for years, delaying sanctions and legitimizing authoritarian regimes within democratic alliances.
Political science’s flaws are structural:
Doctrinal Capture: Prestige is tied to entrenched theories that ignore institutional health.
Peer Review Insularity: The discipline self-replicates its blind spots.
Funding Incentives: Grants reward conformity to prevailing frameworks, not accuracy in regime classification.
These factors make meaningful reform unlikely. As long as political science retains its monopoly over the study of the state, the democratic world will inherit flawed analyses that weaken policy.
Phase Out Federal Funding for political science programs that fail to integrate institutional accountability into their core curricula.
Defund Think Tanks and Institutes whose research repeatedly misclassifies regime types or ignores oversight mechanisms.
Establish Replacement Disciplines in constitutional design, institutional diagnostics, and public governance health.
Tie Policy Contracts to Regime-Type Accuracy by requiring evidence-based classification methodologies for all federally funded political research.
Promote Interdisciplinary Oversight Studies linking law, economics, and administrative science to ensure governance frameworks are tested against real-world institutional performance.
Dismantling political science as currently constituted will:
Remove a major source of intellectual cover for authoritarian regimes.
Strengthen the democratic world’s ability to identify and respond to unaccountability.
Encourage the emergence of disciplines focused on institutional health rather than power politics spectacle.
Protect U.S. national security by aligning academic analysis with democratic resilience priorities.
The first principle of war is to know your enemy; the second is to know the mother of your enemy. For the democratic world, unaccountable governments are the enemy — and political science, in its current form, is the mother.
The United States should lead the democratic coalition by dismantling political science departments that perpetuate regime blindness and replacing them with disciplines grounded in oversight, institutional design, and evidence-based governance.
The democratic world will be safer without the Department of Political Science than with it.
