The Road Not Taken: What Happens When a Political Scientist Hates Politics?

In this series of posts, Influencers explain how their career paths might have changed. Read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #RoadNotTaken in the body of your post).

I've been a political scientist for my entire career.

Today I put my expertise to use at Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy I founded back in 1998. We focus on the intersection between business and politics, explaining to clients how political turmoil can affect their investments. I also teach political risk at NYU.

But back when I graduated college in 1989, political risk wasn’t a discipline — and certainly not a trodden career path. Coming out of Tulane at the age of 19, options were limited. The job fair wasn’t exactly Harvard’s. The plum position for political science grads appeared to be the Macy’s Junior Executive program. I actually interviewed, yet couldn’t get too excited about it. (The fact that the interviewer never called me back was another small wrinkle…) I started a PhD at Stanford, even if a career in academia wasn’t my intention. I figured by the time I finished I could get a real job.

Once I got started in my doctorate program, inertia was taking me down the most common career path for a political scientist. Pretty much all of my colleagues were headed into academia, and the draws were very clear. We were already grad students, essentially professors in training. We loved the subject matter: now we would get paid to engage with it full-time. If we were excellent, our students would pretty much think we walked on water. Not to mention long summer vacations. What’s not to like?

But the more time I spent drifting into academia, the more problematic it became for me. Let me count the ways.

Relevance

I was studying the Soviet Union, right as it was collapsing — and the politics were coming alive. The rate of change, the sense of possibility… I remember Russian President Gorbachev coming to Stanford right in the thick of all this change. It was a fantastic time to be in the field.

But being in the field really meant living in the archives. Successful political scientists were supposed to publish in abstruse journals and books that other academics cited. I didn’t just want to learn about these exciting changes—I wanted to participate in them and make a difference. My field of study was becoming incredibly, even historically, relevant in the real world. That’s where I wanted to operate.

Experience

An even bigger problem was my own lack of experience. I had never actually done anything. I spent my entire life in the classroom with a little academic research to buck me up. On paper, that may have been proper training for a teaching job. But still in my early 20s, the idea of teaching before I acquired sufficient personal experience felt decidedly backwards. Sure, I could stir up a classroom with entertaining lectures, interwoven with the Socratic Method to add heft. But I didn’t feel like I was in a position to feed deep insight to hungry minds.

For me, the appeal of academia would come later in my career. I wanted to enter it laterally: first I would build up a career outside it, and then I would articulate that experience in the classroom some time down the road. But what would that career be?

Ideology

Most of the people who did achieve this combination of political relevance and experience did so through the world of policy — working within government to shape outcomes. I actually had two professors at Stanford (later my colleagues once I was teaching) who fit that bill. They were extremely passionate, connected, and impressive. Yet, they both had a policy inclination that embraced ideology: Condoleezza Rice, future Secretary of State for George W. Bush, leaned to the right. Mike McFaul, future U.S. ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, tilted to the left.

I liked and admired both of them then and now. But I couldn’t personally identify with the practice of injecting partisanship into these issues, especially before I had actually done the spadework. I wanted to emulate their real world experience and relevance… without the political allegiances that a policy role required.

And ideological preferences percolated well beyond the professors. My field of Sovietology was dominated by people who had picked favorites from the get-go. In fact, their strong opinions were often what drew them to the subject matter in the first place. The same was true in other disciplines. There are climate scientists with strong pre-conceived convictions about what should be done. The people most likely to study feminism have a strong opinion, one way or another, about feminism. It didn’t strike me as a good way to study a field if, like me, you were most interested in an objective understanding of what’s actually going on.

The Path I Took

I was quickly learning that I was a political scientist who hated politics. That may sound like an oxymoron. Let me elaborate. Politics is the process of influencing outcomes—it’s about amassing and allocating power in order to achieve certain objectives. The central aim of politics – “What should we do and say in order to win?” – just didn’t appeal to me. I was always fixated on political analysis rather than policy or advocacy, focusing on what would happen rather than what should happen. “Who will win and what are the ramifications?” Now that was a topic I could get excited about.

There was just one piece of the puzzle remaining: ‘the ramifications’ for who? I wanted to apply political science in a manner that would make it newly relevant beyond the classroom.

* * *

I have always loved the cold objectivity of markets. It is easy to determine winners and losers; you can’t escape the report card of your investment track record. What’s more, I thought Wall Street could offer me the practical experience that I lacked. And I was quickly learning how relevant political science was to the marketplace — even if businesses hadn’t caught on yet. They were vastly misinterpreting the risks and opportunities that geopolitics presented. I had the Ph.D., the passion, the niche. So I came to New York and began interviewing.

But this path was less traveled for a reason: the private sector didn’t really hire political scientists back in 1998. After a year of meetings and no jobs, I asked one of my contacts, "If I can’t assess the impact of political risk on markets in your company, would you at least become a client if I started my own?"

They said yes. I got to work.

Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and global research professor at New York University. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Photo: Hill Street Studios / Getty Images