Political Science papers

I’ve sent the chairwoman of the Swedish Political Science Association – and a couple of other guys (hmm…?!?) – a note about the initiative.

We shall see if the Swedes and the Danes will descend upon you.

I have often lamented the shortage of blogging political scientists, although our number has certainly grown in the last year or so.

The idea of have a place to post working papers for a more general audience is a really terrific idea.

The new blog is a good start. Things that would make it better:

– reader comments allowed
– if a subscription is required for the article, then some discussion in addition to the abstract (interactivity rather than just an index)
– more contributors (to ease the burden and diversify)
– links to think tank stuff in addition to journal articles

and finally: more ‘thinking out loud’ (not just polished (and referreed) content, along with relevance of professional output to current events.

Forgive my ignorance, but just how is political science “relevent” to contemporary political questions? Last time I checked, a political science major was just a liberal arts major who took bit more political history and philosophy and a bit less art and literature. Is there any question that a contemporary policy-maker might want to pose to a political scientist? I mean one to which he could give a positive answer that represents the rational consensus of the field, not just his opinion.

For david wright:

You ought to check again. At the graduate/faculty level political science is all about empirical research, with a strong (but not universal) bent towards quantitative approaches. Heck, in my PhD program I took six semesters of quantitative courses and zero philosophy. Unlike economics though there is also plenty of qualitative research that tries to be rigorous and generalizable, not just bloviating opinion.

Some examples:

IR: work by people like Meagan O’Sullivan and Dan Drezner on the detailed conditions under which economic sanctions (and which types of sanctions) are effective at coercing governments.

Comparative: There’s a large literature on democratization, post-conflict reconstruction, and “nation-building” that is absolutely on point for Iraq and Afghanistan, everything from how many troops in what sort of situation to how to design constitutions in multi-ethnic societies.

As for relevance, I’ll use this anecdote: after several days teaching this material to a group of Army and Marine colonels, the general reaction was, “I wish to hell someone had shown me this *before* commanding in Iraq!” and “If all this was already known by you PhDs in 2002, how come the guys in charge screwed things up so badly?”

American: Want to assess/predict the effects of campaign finance reforms, redistricting plans, electoral changes like vote-by-mail, the effectiveness of different campaign techniques? Plenty of literature on any of those questions.

Political science has a very hard time defining itself. As a past president of the APSA once put it, everyone sits at “separate tables” divided by differences over topic and ideology and methods. I know some political scientists who are very much in the positivist/behiorist mode (they usually work at large midwestern universities–there is a definite geography of appropriate methods) who have no time for political philosophers. I have a friend who’s a political philosopher who’ll cross the road to keep from coming into contact with a rational-choice theorist. I could go on, but why bother?

The problem with political science is there’s no there there.

P.S. I work in a political science department, although I don’t consider myself to be a political scientist. That’s something else that seems to happen more in the PS (and sociology) departments.

Henry, that’s an excellent initiative. I would like to contribute by emphasizing what I consider to be its major weakness, which is already visible in the comments to this post: its American ethnocentricity.

For instance, about your categorising: “Comparative Politics” actually compares politics everywhere in the world but the US, where it designates “ROTW Politics”.

Identically, the justification of polisci through quanti-training (comments 10;12) is preposterous outside Am. polisci, which is only one specific configuration of the discipline, dominated by p-valued journals (APSR/AJPS/JOP) and sub-disciplines. European polisci (although I can speak only for the UK and France, plus Germany by hearsay) is weberian in theory and historical in practice, and works with words, which apparently count as mere “opinion” for some readers.

I am sure you have read about these differences, since you must have read the same (rather recent) issues of, say, CPS about quali-quanti barriers, or the JPH on APD. The bottom line is that Am polisci is one intellectual configuration of the field among others.

I really like this initiative. Your blog could move closer to this model (short papers using recent events to build policy mini-reviews), what do you think?

Interesting. I’ll have to add it to my “to-read” pile.

The abstract on the politics of the DH entry makes it sound like there was some sort of prevailing mythos that Republicans favored the DH over Dems…who knew!?

I’m also interested because I’m suspicious about the interactive effect of age + party affiliation. I’m curious to find out if the Dem-Rep divide highlighted in the abstract is due to a bias against party identification among younger people (i.e. more “independents” these days). That’s not to say they aren’t as ideological (or more) than the older folks.

Please let me know how I can contribute my pair of eyes to the blog. I’ve often felt the same lack in the “blogosphere” of representation of my own field.