Scholars Poking Their Noses Into Why People Don’t Run for Office Trigger Protests

Congress loves to throw money at research on all manner of things--from breast cancer to alternative fuels to swine breeding. But when nosy scholars start poking into politics, lawmakers can get pretty touchy.

That’s one lesson learned the hard way recently by two political scientists who won a federal grant to study why a lot of qualified people decide not to run for Congress.

The owlish inquiry has provoked extraordinarily fierce complaints from some members of Congress, who understandably like to think of themselves as the best qualified candidates in their own districts.

Portraying the research as a backdoor attempt to recruit candidates to run against incumbents, Rep. William “Bill” Clay (D-Mo.) has put out a scathing press release comparing the study to the Tuskegee experiment, the controversial project in which the government intentionally neglected to treat some black men suffering from syphilis.

Clay circulated a letter of protest among his colleagues, and 70 signed it. He’s demanded a review of the project by National Science Foundation, the federal agency that funded it, as well as investigations by the General Accounting Office and two congressional committees.

That’s a lot of heavy artillery to aim at a couple of little-known academics--Walter Stone of the University of Colorado and Sandy Maisel of Colby College in Maine--who are working with a $175,000 grant.

Stone, rising to the defense of the project, says much is known about the kinds of people who do run for Congress, but little research has focused on why many people with the potential to be good candidates choose not to run. Is it because Congress is held in such low esteem? Because incumbents are so hard to beat? Whatever the reason, decisions by potential candidates not to run have great impact on the political system, he says.

“If you have strong candidates systematically opting out, then the choices voters face are limited,” said Stone in an interview.

Stone and Maisel have sent out queries to top political activists in 200 congressional districts asking them to identify up to four potentially strong congressional candidates. In the next stage of the study, the researchers will survey those who do not run to see what influenced their decision.

The plot began to thicken after Clay and other members of Congress got wind of the initial inquiries about potential candidates in their districts. Clay, a 14-term veteran from St. Louis, denounced the project as a waste of federal funds at a time of budget cuts in more essential government services.

“I’m outraged to learn that our tax dollars are being wasted on a study to find candidates to run for office,” Clay said in his press release, which called for a suspension of funding for the project.

Stone says the study has no political motive and categorically is not an effort to recruit candidates. In fact, he said, the whole point is to identify people who don’t want to run.

“These attacks . . . are based upon a misunderstanding,” Stone said. “We are not partisans. We are political scientists and only political scientists.”

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Two House members who control the National Science Foundation’s pursestrings--Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the agency’s budget, and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Louis Stokes (D-Ohio)--have asked foundation officials to look into whether the scholars are using their grant in the way they stated in their funding application.

“Our guess is that there are no problems,” said David Stonner, the foundation’s head of congressional affairs. But if critics are not satisfied, he said, there may be an effort to kill the project’s funding when the agency’s overall appropriations request comes before the House in the coming weeks.

Stonner said he regrets that the agency did not do a better job of explaining the project to members of Congress. Even if lawmakers seem a little thin-skinned, Stonner said, “We should be sensitive to their thin skins.”