The Columbia Journalism Review has an article on political science and journalism. It cites the Monkey Cage blog as an example and explains:
[P]erhaps The Monkey Cage’s greatest influence has been in fostering a nascent poli-sci blogosphere, and in making the field’s insights accessible to a small but influential set of journalists and other commentators who have the inclination—and the opportunity—to approach politics from a different perspective.
That perspective differs from the standard journalistic point of view in emphasizing structural, rather than personality-based, explanations for political outcomes… [C]onsider the president. In press accounts, he comes across as alternately a tragic or a heroic figure, his stock fluctuating almost daily depending on his ability to “connect” with voters. But political-science research, while not questioning that a president’s effectiveness matters, suggests that the occupant of the Oval Office is, in many ways, a prisoner of circumstance. His approval ratings—and re-election prospects—rise and fall with the economy. His agenda lives or dies on Capitol Hill. And his ability to move Congress, or the public, with a good speech or a savvy messaging strategy is, while not nonexistent, sharply constrained.
These powerful, simple explanations are often married to an almost monastic skepticism of narratives that can’t be substantiated, or that are based in data—like voter’s accounts of their own thinking about politics—that are unreliable. Think about that for a moment, and the challenge to journalists becomes obvious: If much of what’s important about politics is either stable and predictable or unknowable, what’s the value of the sort of news—a hyperactive chronicle of the day’s events, coupled with instant speculation about their meaning—that has become a staple of modern political reporting? (emphasis mine)
Political science can, at its worst, be hopelessly abstruse, cliquish, and regressive. But at its best it can illuminate our thinking about issues, up to and including raising the possibility that certain things may be unknowable (at least by a journalist’s or policymaker’s deadline), or that things may be structurally determined. As the snip above suggests, journalists, for understandable reasons, tend to privilege what you could call “agent-based” explanations for phenomena. They tell Americans that the president’s poll numbers are rising or falling on the basis of some speech he gave (or didn’t give), or that some particular point of a political campaign determined the outcome. Turn on a cable news program and you see this sort of uninformed and unfalsifiable popping off all the time. In most cases, those claims, and even those sorts of claims, are completely wrong, as political scientists know. On the other hand, journalists’ incentives do not lead them to highlight the latest political science research or write articles that could be headlined “Economic Conditions Set to Determine Another Election.” People like stories, so that’s what journalists give them.
Question: What political science articles should journalists and policymakers be forced to read–and comprehend–before writing about/making policy on their particular issue area?