Scholars continue to debate the relationship of academic international relations to policy. One of the most straightforward ways to discern whether policymakers find IR scholarship relevant to their work is to ask them. We analyzed an elite survey of US policy practitioners to better understand the conditions under which practitioners use academic knowledge in their work. We surveyed officials across three different policy areas: international development, national security, and trade. We also employed multiple survey experiments in an effort to causally identify the impact of academic consensus on the views of policy officials and to estimate the relative utility of different kinds of research outputs. We found that policymakers frequently engage with academic ideas, find an array of research outputs and approaches useful, and that scholarly findings can shift their views. Key obstacles to using academic knowledge include practitioners' lack of time as well as academic work being too abstract and not timely, but not that it is overly quantitative. Additionally, we documented important differences between national security officials and their counterparts who work in the areas of development and trade. We suggest that this variation is rooted in the nature of the different policy areas.

中文翻译：

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社会科学会影响外交政策吗？来自美国国家安全、贸易和发展官员调查的证据

学者们继续争论学术国际关系与政策的关系。辨别政策制定者是否发现与他们的工作相关的国际关系奖学金最直接的方法之一就是询问他们。我们分析了一项针对美国政策从业者的精英调查，以更好地了解从业者在工作中使用学术知识的条件。我们调查了三个不同政策领域的官员：国际发展、国家安全和贸易。我们还进行了多项调查实验，以努力确定学术共识对政策官员观点的影响，并估计不同类型研究成果的相对效用。我们发现政策制定者经常参与学术思想，发现一系列有用的研究成果和方法，并且学术发现可以改变他们的观点。使用学术知识的主要障碍包括从业者缺乏时间以及学术工作过于抽象和不及时，但并非过于量化。此外，我们记录了国家安全官员与在发展和贸易领域工作的同行之间的重要差异。我们认为这种差异源于不同政策领域的性质。