Why can't social scientists and politicians communicate?

I'm not a communication expert, but I do know that communication requires:

• a shared language of some sort
• a desire to communicate 
• channels for communication

I believe in the principles behind the campaign for social science, even if I'm not convinced of everything on their website. So I do believe that social scientists and politicians (and the general public) need to be communicating.

I think there are barriers in the three communication ingredients I listed.

Social scientists have developed their own language. This includes specialise words, important for conveying precise, complex concepts in a single word or phrase (aka a good use of jargon). The same is true for politicians. but there is far more to the language than that. Parts of the language come from generations of social scientists playing safe and copying the language of their supervisors. Parts come from doing what you think needs to be done to get published in  peer-reviewed journals. And parts, I fear, do come from enjoying using language in a way that shows you are an insider (aka a bad use of jargon). Politicians do the same. 

Poor old Jo(e) Bloggs doesn't speak either language, so generally misses out on how social science and politics are relevant to his and her daily life. 

So perhaps the key is for social scientists and politicians to both learn how to convey their information using the kind of language people understand. This is going to mean settling for "good enough" rather than precise, and will almost definitely mean using visuals and cartoons to convey more complex information. But this way, everyone gets a rough idea of what's going on.

Is there a desire from social scientists and politicians to communicate. Well, perhaps. Maybe it's a bit one-sided, as I've heard a lot of social scientists wanting to communicate better with politicians but I haven't heard politicians clamouring to communicate better with social scientists. Maybe that's partly down to vested interests? After all, politicians control funding; social scientists need funding. Social scientists can provide ideas and evidence to inform political policies and actions; politicians may prefer to be able to profess ignorance and stick with their own ideas. 

And what about a channel for communication? It's unlikely to be either Hansard or peer-reviewed academic journals. Maybe everyone needs to take a leaf out of the book of the Speaker's commission on digital democracy and start thinking about how to get blogging, tweeting and facebooking our ideas - assuming we remember that they are called social media and not broadcast media. 

Out of these, I think the key is shared language (or lack of). If social science is serious about having impact outside the Academy, then there's a lot of work to be done on what is acceptable as "good enough" communication of research ideas and findings. Please don't start by developing better channels for communication. All that will do is mean that more people get the wrong impression of social science as Ivory Towers stuff with no relevance - and the same advice goes for politicians too.