Political Science

I am working on the Introduction to an edited volume on the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes work involved in empirical social science research (to be published by The University of Michigan Press in 2008). While each chapter in the book gets into considerable detail about how to approach various types of projects (from sampling online populations to interviewing hard-to-access groups, from collecting biomarkers to compiling cross-national quantitative data sets), I want to address more general issues in the introductory chapter.

One of the topics I would like to discuss concerns larger-level lessons learned after conducting such projects. The motivation behind the entire volume is that unprecedented things happen no matter the quality and detail of preparation, but even issues that can be anticipated are rarely passed along to researchers new to a type of method. The volume tries to rectify this.

I am curious, what are your biggest lessons learned? If you had to pick one or two (or three or four) things you really wish you had known before you had embarked on a project, what are they? I am happy to hear about any type of issue from learning more about a collaborator’s qualifications or interests, to leaving more time for cleaning data, from type of back-up method to unprecedented issues with respondents. If you don’t feel comfortable posting here, please email me off-blog. Thanks!

Erik Olin Wright has a nice short piece on his website forthcoming in the UK left-of-centre magazine Soundings, called Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias. It is a very useful outline and discussion of the rules we ought to observe when trying to come up with better institutional alternatives to the status quo, viz:

1. Evaluate alternatives in terms of three criteria: desirability, viability, achievability.
2. Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability.
3. Clarify the problem of winners and losers in structural transformation.
4. Identify normative trade-offs in institutional designs and the transition costs in their creation.
5. Analyze alternatives in terms of waystations and intermediary forms as well as destinations. Pay particular attention to the potential of waystations to open up virtuous cycles of transformation.

Although any of our readers will find it interesting, I especially recommend it to, and request comment from, the political philosophers and theorists who think of themselves as doing, or interested in, non-ideal theory.

Via “Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2007/04/post_3392.html#016205, I see that Jonah Goldberg has lapsed into what Ezra describes as a “weird revery over how the rugged individualism of Americans makes them totally unsuitable for social welfare programs.” In Goldberg’s own words:

I find interesting about the liberal defense of European welfare states (They really work! No Really!) is how they leave culture out of the equation almost entirely. … liberals are uncomfortable discussing the reality and constraints of culture for a host of reasons, from multiculturalism to vestigial hangups about seeing the world through prisms of class. … Maybe, just maybe, France and Denmark can handle the systems they have because they have long traditions of sucking-up to the state and throne? Marty Lipset wrote stacks of books on how Canadians and Americans have different forms of government because the Royalist, throne-kissing, swine left America for Canada during the Revolutionary War and that’s why they don’t mind big government, switched to the metric system when ordered and will wait on line like good little subjects…. If government systems are the only variable, or even the most important and decisive one, then how come it’s so damn hard bringing third world countries into the first world?

Now it’s a bit rich for a _National Review_ hack to be talking smack about “long traditions of sucking-up to to the state and throne.” But even if we were to pretend for a moment that Goldberg’s argument is serious, it’s terrible. First of all, it gets Lipset’s thesis badly wrong. While Lipset was keen on enduring American values, he didn’t pretend for a moment that they were the only force shaping US politics. Indeed, he explicitly documented how American values became more ‘European’ as a result of the institutional innovations of the New Deal (funnily enough, Goldberg seems to have missed that bit in his doubtless extensive reading on the topic). But more generally, sweeping claims about the all-determining-power of fixed national cultures have a godawful reputation in the social sciences these days. Values change, and sometimes change dramatically. Individuals are more than the passive bearers of cultural traits; they, like, make choices, and sometimes change their minds about things. The institutions that surround them change, and when these institutions change, so too, very often, do political beliefs, values etc.

There are respectable and serious scholars out there, who make more limited and specific contentions about how culture matters to politics (I tend not to agree with many of their arguments, but I obviously don’t have a monopoly on the truth). However, sweeping, half-assed claims that Culture is Destiny simply don’t feature in serious argument any more. Instead, they enjoy a sort of zombie-like half-life in some corners of the rightwing punditocracy, where their explanatory deficiencies are outweighed by their political usefulness in providing a higher justification for selfishness. Which is what seems to me to be happening here.

“Marc Lynch”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark/2007/03/endings_and_beg.html is finally able to announce that he’s coming here to GWU this fall; he’ll have a joint appointment in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science. We’re incredibly happy to be getting him (for me, not least because it’ll be a lot of fun having another blogger in the dept).

It’s probably getting on towards bedtime in the Netherlands, so Ingrid may not have seen that Michael Brintnall, executive director of APSA, has “responded in comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/07/papers-for-sale/#comment-189268

The annual meeting papers are not meant to be sold, and All Academic is taking them down. It was a mistake that caused them to be up for sale at that site, and we regret it. … The papers are on-line at www.politicalscience.org as part of the PROl initiative. This is an open-access site, operated as a collaboration of APSA and a large number of other political science associations. It’s an extension of APSA’s PROceedings site, where papers are posted for each annual meeting, and it brings together scholarship from a host of other annual meetings too. It’s a good place to search for early scholarship, and I encourage you to use it. All-Academic is the contractor that we use to set up the site. There was some recent confusion about their including our papers in their own for-sale data base. None of the papers from the politicalscience.org project is meant to be at the All Academic site for sale and they are removing them. … I hope this hiccup with All Academic doesn’t fuel any cynicism about making early scholarship like this available on an open access basis – it’s the purpose of the politicalscience.org project, and it’s what academic discourse is about.

This seems to me to be a perfectly gracious response and explanation. As noted in comments, I would like to see APSA consider a different technology – politicalscience.org’s current system has session specific links, which means that e.g. bloggers can’t easily link to interesting political science papers. A system with permalinks like arXiv would allow for much better circulation of political science papers in the general public conversation. But that’s a topic for a different day.

The TRIPS survey of over 1,000 international relations faculty members is now “available in full”:http://www.wm.edu/irtheoryandpractice/trip/surveyreport06-07.pdf. I suspect that much or most of the public attention it gets will be paid to the answers to Question 74: Do you agree or disagree with the statement, “The ‘Israel lobby’ has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy.”

Which suggests either that (a) some two thirds of US and Canadian IR faculty members are conscious or unconscious anti-semites on the definition of anti-semitism that “some people”:http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/16639101.htm are trying to push, or (b) there’s grounds for a serious public debate about the US-Israel relationship. Since that serious debate ain’t going to be happening in the comments section here on past form, I’m keeping comments closed.

From the acknowledgements page of Christopher Howard’s _The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=christopher%20howard%20hidden%20welfare%20state&PID=29956 has cheap hardbacks).

No one in his right mind would choose to study and write about tax expenditures (better known as tax loopholes) knowing in advance that it entailed a ten year commitment. Investigating the ins and outs of the byzantine U.S. tax code is simply not its own reward, which is why many people pay lawyers and accountants good money to do it for them. If someone were going to study tax expenditures for longer than a day or two, he or she would need to come upon the topic by accident. Over time, that someone might develop a curious affection for tax expenditures, much as one does for a stray dog or cat that keeps hanging around the house. Even then, one would have to remind oneself constantly that studying tax expenditures was not the ultimate goal, but a means of saying something interesting about a larger issue, like U.S. social policy. At least that has been my experience.

Many thanks to everyone who chipped in with comments on my reading list; I enclose the final (assuming that I can track down a scannable copy of the DiMaggio JITE reading for Week 1) version beneath the fold. Also, the syllabus that I linked to for Jonathan Zeitlin’s course on institutions at UW Madison last week was apparently incomplete; the full version is “here”:http://wage.wisc.edu/uploads/Courses-Fall06/soc%20915%20syllabus%20(5).pdf.

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I’m teaching a Ph.D. level course this semester on institutions and politics, which is intended to provide our students with an introduction to the three main varieties of institutionalism as I see them – rational choice, historical institutionalism and sociological and ideational approaches – with a few classes at the end devoted to comparing the different ways in which they tackle the same, or similar phenomena. I’d be grateful to any interested CTers who have comments on things that I should or shouldn’t be including in the syllabus – it’s the first time I’m teaching it, and there may likely be interesting stuff out there that I’m not aware of. NB that the reason that I include a couple of pieces of my own in the syllabus isn’t because I think that these are classics of modern thought on the topic, but because I’m better aware of the strengths and flaws of these pieces as applications of institutional theory, and can thus use them to provide guidance for students contemplating how to deal with their own dissertation projects etc. The reading list is beneath the fold.

Update: This “syllabus”:http://wage.wisc.edu/uploads/Courses-Fall06/Soc%20915%20syllabus%20_1_.pdf for a course that Jonathan Zeitlin teaches in sociology is a very helpful alternative, covering some debates in depth that my syllabus only touches in passing, if at all.
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dsquared’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/01/08/trust-in-me/ below reminds me of this “post”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_10_29_atrios_archive.html#116222547954644309 that Duncan Black wrote last year, which I meant to write something about, and never did.

[Mallaby] starts with the basic premise that well-functioning societies require a degree of trust, something I agree with … But then he moves from the issue of shared social capital – trusting each other – to the need for people to have faith in the ruling class … Mallaby’s arguing that society functions much better when the ruling class is unfettered by the pesky masses. Yes, yes, the ruling class shouldn’t abuse its trust – that would be wrong – but when it does the real tragedy is that then they get subjected to pesky oversight from the dirty fucking hippies which prevents them from achieving their true awesomeness as our unaccountable overlords.

A lot of my “academic work”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/distrust.pdf is on the relationship between trust and interests. Like much academic writing, a fair amount of it consists of spelling out the obvious at laborious length, but given how badly notions of trust are abused in current debate, perhaps it isn’t entirely useless. Simply put, the political argument that you should trust people who don’t have a good self-interested reason to behave trustworthily is at best naive and at worst dishonest apologetics. In particular, powerful people by and large don’t have much interest in behaving trustworthily to weaker ones in the absence of external sanctions; while in some cases they may be trustworthy nonetheless (perhaps they’re genuinely noble and disinterested types), you wouldn’t want to count on it. None of this is exactly rocket science, but given the amount of guff from pundits about social capital, loss of trust in government etc, you wouldn’t know it.

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003001.html disagrees with “Chris Hayes”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/citations/06/061108.sanderson-itt.pdf about whether Econ 101 is a form of right wing indoctrination, saying that his own first micro class waxed rhapsodic about the joys of technocratic intervention, and that he didn’t discover the public choice critique of government until grad school. Now public choice _is_ an unabashedly ideological approach to the world, at least if the co-editor of the flagship journal in the field, Charles Rowley, is to be believed. In his introduction to the Edward Elgar public choice reader, he describes public choice as a “program of scientific endeavor that exposed government failure coupled to a programme of moral philosophy that supported constitutional reform designed to limit government,” and suggests that its opponents are “scholars who had rendered themselves dependent on the subsidies of big government and whose lucrative careers in many instances were linked to advising … agents of the compound republic.”

There is a strong strain in economics more generally that is unabashedly ideological too. Take “this effort”:http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2006/10/the_society_of_.html to figure out a sort of Nicene creed that would allow ‘real economists’ to profess their faith and thus distinguish themselves from “bluffers”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/002605.html like Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. “Real” economists apparently believe that demand curves always slope downwards, even when empirical evidence tells you that they don’t (I’ve always preferred the “Apostles’ Creed”:http://www.thesharpener.net/2006/08/10/mea-culpa/ myself). Now this doesn’t say, _contra_ both some economists and some of their sillier critics, that a commitment to the kinds of models that economists use _necessarily_ makes you predisposed to be right wing (Jack Knight and Jim Johnson, two rational choice lefties, have an interesting forthcoming piece discussing how rhetorical slippage between general equilibrium and partial equilibrium models provides a bogus ideological justification for many pro-market arguments). But it does mean that many people who take economics courses, as they are typically taught in this country, end up coming out of these courses more right wing than they were going in, and perhaps more right wing than the actual theory itself would support, if it were looked at carefully. I think (although I can’t find it using Google, so I may be wrong), that there’s actually empirical evidence supporting the first of these claims – a survey someone did a few years back measuring the political opinions that people had entering graduate programs in economics, and their political opinions after a few semesters of coursework, which found that there was a pronounced and statistically significant shift to the right (if anyone knows where this survey is to be found, feel free to point to it in comments).

Update: I’ve found the survey via Google Scholar, although it isn’t a longitudinal study as I thought it was; the findings are reported in “The Making of an Economist Redux”:http://www.atypon-link.com/AEAP/doi/abs/10.1257/0895330053147976 in the _Journal of Economic Perspectives_.

The large majority of [students surveyed in seven top ranked econ grad programs] (80 percent) felt that their political views did not change in graduate schools, although that changed by year, with 10 percent of first-year students reporting a change in their views, but 32 percent of fourth- and higher-year students reporting a change in their views. In particular, 10 percent of first-year students considered themselves conservative; by the fourth and fifth year, this number had risen to 23 percent. There was also a large drop by year in students who considered themselves radical; that percentage fell from 13 percent of first year students to only 1 percent of fourth-year and higher students.

In many (most? all?) Universities, the research output of the staff is evaluated every couple of years (every 4 or 5 years, for example). This is also done at a more aggregate level, for example in country-wide Research Assessment Excercises. For such evaluations, an unavoidable question is: what determines quality, and how should we weigh publications of different quality levels? In order to simplify matters a little, let us just look at journal articles and not at books. One possibility is to make three categories of journals, A, B, and C, where A would give you double points compared with B, and B double of C. The difficult question then becomes: how should one decide which journals to classify in which group?
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I’ve been involved with Imprints — once subtitled “A Journal of Analytical Socialism” but now “Egalitarian Theory and Practice” — for about ten years now. And a very friendly venture it is too with regular meetings up and down the UK, long sessions in the pub or in various Indian restaurants, and short but businesslike meetings. And, on the whole it has been a pretty successful project too. I don’t think there’s any other journal of its type with a similar bank of interviews with leading left thinkers. But as we smugly enjoyed our combination of conviviality and intellectual excitement we forgot to renew our web address which was poached from us within days of its lapsing. I sought Maria’s advice on the problem and contacted the friendly UK cyber-police at nominet. Perhaps we had a case against the poacher, perhaps not. Either way it would cost time and money to fight. So I went ahead and registered a new address www.imprintsjournal.com . So adjust your links … and subscribe if you don’t already (generous terms on back-issues available on request).

Via “Marc Lynch”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark/2006/11/brookings_iraqi.html, some “Congressional testimony”:http://www.stanford.edu/group/ir_workshop/fearon%20testimony.pdf (PDF) by Jim Fearon applying lessons from other civil wars to the Iraq conflict. Fearon suggests that the prospects for Iraq are pretty dreadful – civil wars tend to go on for a long time, and are usually resolved when one side or another gains a decisive military victory (less than one in six ends in a power-sharing arrangement). The reasons for this are rooted in the strategic situation that actors find themselves in – both sides in a civil war are organized so as to fear that the other side will try to grab power, and both are likely to be tempted to try to grab power for themselves. Given this, the least-worst strategy for the US to follow is to withdraw troops gradually, seeking to prevent major massacres of civilians while it does this, but recognizing that a Lebanon-type civil war is highly likely to break out when it does withdraw completely. This is a pretty bleak assessment, but I’m not seeing very many countervailing reasons for optimism.