Dear Senators Wyden and Merkley:

On March 14, Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and John McCain (R-AZ) filed an amendment to the FY2013 Continuing Resolution bill that would eliminate National Science Foundation (NSF) Political Science funding and redirect the $10 million in program cuts to NIH research. We urge you to oppose the Coburn amendment and appreciate previous efforts to turn back these kinds of research threats.

In a society that values democracy, support of research on voting, civic institutions, citizen participation and the political enterprise is invaluable to our understanding of our nation and the improvement of our electoral process. NSF Political Science research also improves our knowledge and understanding of foreign nations and cultures, enhancing our national security. As a country that places our democratic ideals above all else, funding for research that will improve our understanding of voting, civic institutions and the democratic process should be cherished.

There are some excellent examples of this type of research at the University of Oregon that have benefited Oregonians and beyond.

•       Political Science Department Head and Professor Priscilla Southwell received an NSF grant in 1996 to analyze the impact of Oregon's vote-by-mail special election for US Senator in January of that year, the first federal election in the nation to be conducted by vote-by-mail. The results were and are still included on the Secretary of State 's website. She has since published 13 articles or chapters on this subject.

•       Professor Ronald Mitchell co-directs an NSF-funded project, the Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Climate Change Research (DISCCRS) that is a leadership program to train and equip early-career scientists from all areas of study with the critical knowledge, skills and tools to establish or strengthen interdisciplinary approaches in their careers. The DISCCRS initiative also includes maintenance of a public-access website (accessible at http://disccrs.org). This site contains an international Ph.D. dissertation registry with abstracts of dissertations related to climate change that have been registered with DISCCRS. Established in 2002, the site already contains nearly 2,000 submitted abstracts presented in a fully searchable electronic format.

•       Prof. Mitchell also received an NSF research grant to establish a database and conduct analyses of factors that foster the establishment and successful operation of international environmental treaties. Environmental treaties have been very important to creating global, long-term sustainable growth. NSF funding ended in 2009 but provided the foundation on which Mitchell maintains the database. Information from the data set has been used by OECD, UNEP, governments, treaty secretariats and other international and nongovernmental organizations as well as by various scholars and in many doctoral dissertations. These institutions and scholars have used the database to analyze existing international environmental agreements and identify those design features most likely to promote better performance in the future.

In terms of Senate consideration of the amendment, we ask that consideration of such a drastic step as the elimination of support of an entire field of peer-reviewed scientific research be subject to thoughtful and thorough discussion and debate. We are very concerned that not only would this amendment defund the NSF political science research program, but that it may embolden the movement among some in Congress to eliminate federal support for all social, behavioral and economics research.