PSR and Sexual Harassment: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

Political Science Rumors made the academic news at Inside Higher Ed with some quotes from anonymous moderators.  In its lifespan, PSR had only one non-anonymous moderator: me.  I dropped out last summer mostly because the signal to noise ratio had changed over the years, making the place less valuable and thus the time spent on it less worthwhile.  Oh, and trying to delete the worst stuff just took far more time.  The topic of sexual harassment was a tricky one, so here's how it evolved for me as a moderator of that place.

The starting point for much moderation, besides stuff that was blatantly sexist/racist/homophobic which were easy deletions for me (I got increasing flak over the years for cutting this stuff, but it seemed like a no-brainer for most of it), is that attacks on individuals should be deleted.  At first, this was a rule about attacks on grad students and junior faculty, with the notion that senior faculty were less vulnerable, but much of the community at the time pushed back saying that no one should suffer attacks, especially the way this place tends to pile on.

But what is an attack?  Accusations of sexual harassment were a lightning rod, with a noted philosopher getting much attention (not in our field, but close enough, I guess).  I tended to delete stuff about non-political scientists because of the PS in the PSR.  But the larger question was challenging--does one allow anonymous accusations to stay?  I never could figure this out as I could see the merits of folks outing sexual harassers, given how difficult it is to pursue complaints within universities and the backlashes that can ensue (see the Rebecca Gill case in the article above).  But it seemed problematic as well to let anonymous accusations stay on the board.

And then I posted on my own blog about a sexual harasser at my old place.  This led to a long discussion at PSR about many things, including my apparent hypocrisy of posting an accusation while deleting those at PSR.  Because I knew beyond a reasonable doubt the case in question and because I was not doing it anonymously, I left comfortable (that word has a special meaning for my place at PSR that goes back to its origins) doing one thing on my blog and another thing at PSR.

I think I would behave some differently now as the #metoo movement has educated me a bit about the tradeoffs and challenges.  I would let the accusations stand, and I would delete those who seek to trash the accuser when they are known.  There are, apparently, threads attacking Gill, and I am not surprised.  I would have deleted those posts and threads that attack her personally and tried to keep those that address the challenge of how to deal with sexual harassment in the discipline.


I don't go to the site much anyone, although I do look in from time to time to see if the testable hypotheses hold up (would the place lose credibility and disappear without me, would the marketplace of ideas work without my interference).  And what I find is that I am glad I left--the place has not disappeared, but I do think that the current moderators are not quite as aggressive as I was in getting rid of the crap.  It was always a losing battle, but it seems to be worse now.

In the twitter discussion this morning, folks have called for APSA to provide its own discussion board.  Well, one does exist: https://connect.apsanet.org/.   And it has not gotten any traction.  I don't have any solutions, just my experience that this stuff is really hard.  Anonymity does provide some protection for those who want to out those who do harm, but also gives much protection for those who want to do harm.  Definitely a dual-edged sword, and after several years, I never did figure out how best to shield the community enough but not too much. 

Sadie Out

Today, I announced at PSR that I am out.

No joke. I am going on a largely wifi-less vacation next week, so it makes sense to use that as a point of departure as any.
Moderating here has become far more time intensive over the past year, and, as one of my friends put it, there is far more noise and less useful signal here. I have had a hard time focusing on my work over that time frame thanks to the daily crises in DC, so I need to cut out some of the noise. Also, on the occasion of my recent birthday, I resolved to have more positivity in my life--that I was getting to be too whiny on the ultimate field. The same applies for my internet life. One could say that I am just not as comfortable as I used to be.
This will be a chance for a natural experiment or two to test the claims that I have never believed--either that this place would collapse without my lending it whatever legitimacy I gave it or that the marketplace of ideas will function adequately.
Over the years, I have enjoyed many of the conversations and give and take. This place has inspired me to think about a variety of aspects of the profession, so I am grateful for that.
Anyhow, if folks want to ask me stuff, rather than go to the Ask Sadie thread, you can find me via twitter or email. I wish y'all heaps of tenure track jobs and publications in the 20 top 3 IR journals. Good luck!

Moderating became too much of a slog as the election and folks linking to PSR at some of the more toxic places on the internet led to far more crap than before.  We shall see if I can still be easily trolled when I am no longer spending much time there. 

Update: That the place crashed for a while after I posted my message was a fun coincidence, but I had nothing to do with that. One consistent false belief over the years was that I have any technical ability to run that place or do anything more complicated than pushing delete buttons.

Political Science is Dead, Long Live Political Science

There is a lot to think about in the aftermath of Trump's win.  Lots of early hot talks will be wrong.  One of the first reactions has been to wonder about the value of political science:

"Should we just bury political science as a discipline?" Some of this week's best reactions to Trump's win: https://t.co/OD707adPkR

— OpenCanada (@OpenCanada) November 11, 2016

To be clear, folks in my discipline will be thinking about this election for some time to come, trying to figure out why most political scientists (and everyone else) got it wrong.  But the idea that this is an indictment of the discipline is foolish.  It presents the entire discipline as predictors of elections.  Because my thoughts are still scrambled by anger, fear, sleep deprivation and shock, I will just listicle why this claim about political science is so very bogus:

1. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote as predicted.  Oops.  What we got wrong was the distribution of the vote--that the rust belt states went red.  But only barely so.  It does not take too many people to show up in a few states to flip the narratives.
2. Ours is a probabilistic social science--we can and should indicate how uncertain we are.  I pooh-poohed Nate Silver's discussions of uncertainty because I hated the metaphors, but he was right to indicate that there was significant uncertainty.  The race was too close to be so confident (I will be issuing mea culpas for years).  And there were models that predicted Trump winning.
3. The claim that we couldn't predict the election and what that says about the discipline reminds me of what people said about the collapse of the Soviet Union.  That is, political science may be bad at predicting singular events.   This election had a lot of stuff going on that was far from normal, and we are less good at explaining outliers.  Never before had an outside power (Russia) and a non-state actor (wikileaks) conspired to favor one candidate.  That does not mean that political science is bad at explaining.  More on that below.
4. Most people are forgetting (thanks to folks like me who wrote out of their lane) #notallpolitical scientists are elections experts. We are a big discipline addressing all kinds of political phenomenon.  Real election experts are a small proportion of those who study the US--lots of Americanists study Congress, the courts, Con law, public policy, and on and on.  Oh, and Americanists are not all political scientists, despite how it sometimes seems in department politics and when picking up certain journals.  Comparatives, IR scholars, and theorists have much to say that is not related to electoral behavior.  
5. Oh, and there is plenty of political science that can explain what has happened and what the effects are LIKELY (but not guaranteed) to be.  
1. There is much work on populism that can explain the rise of Trump and why he played so well.
2. There is much work on ethnic conflict, especially on ethnic outbidding, which explains why homogeneous parties nominate ethnic nationalists and why heterogeneous parties have a hard time balancing appeals to the largest group in the country with appeals to the smaller groups.  In short, Sri Lanka and India may be better models for US politics now than ever before. 
3. There is much work on how democracies creep into authoritarianism.  This was a growing business for poli sci, thanks to Turkey, Hungary, Poland and others, before, but will get more energy (although probably not more NSF money).
4. There is much work on how non-violent protest is better than violence for achieving outcomes, and that is more relevant in the US today than perhaps even during the civil rights movement.
5. There is much work on the impact of uncertainty on alliances.
6. There is much work that I am not mentioning here--because my reading of my discipline is as incomplete as Luke's training before Bespin.  But the key point is that the field is fast and election prediction is a very, very small part of it.

 Some might say that it is too soon to defend political science against the criticisms, that doing so appears to be defensive.  And as usual, my answer (which explains why I am easily trolled) is that if someone attacks you, you either fight back or flee.  I tend to prefer the former, at least when it comes to arguments on the internet and elsewhere.

We all have much work to do after this election.  Some will organize protests, some will figure out ways to ameliorate the worst impacts of Trumpism.  The primary job of political science, as always, will be to explain what is happening, to make sense of it, and, contrary to the hot takes, it is something we do very, very well.

PSR Diaries, Continued

It has been a particularly combative few days at Political Science Rumors.  Folks are not pleased that some ISA goers engaged in a bit of fun as they cosplay-ed a panel on Game of Thrones and IR.  They think it hurts the profession, and got especially upset when I defended (perhaps not articulately) those who engaged in the supposedly shameful behavior. This devolved into accusations that I hurt the profession by lending legitimacy to PSR because I mod and post there under my own name (nearly everyone else is anonymous). 

I have gotten that from time to time--that I am just an attention seeking hound and that my participation at PSR is bring shame upon me and the profession.  The former is true, the latter is not.  Of course, I don't participate at PSR for the attention or for the strange and disturbing cult of Sadie that pops up.  I get plenty of attention via blogging and twitter, thanks. 

I started because people were being incredibly wrong about the job search where I was employed.  Denying the rumors didn't work so well from a position of anonymity.  After that, people asked me questions, and I felt like being a voice of reason was not a bad thing, even though it was occurring online at a place where there was much unpleasantness.  I eventually started moderating at the old site (PSJR) and then the new (PSR) so that I could delete attacks on my students as well as students elsewhere (I leave nearly all of the attacks against me alone--I post there so I accept the consequences). 

This led to some attacks upon me on the site, and when I asked the community whether I should stay or go, I got much support to stay.  So, I have stuck around.  I now get emails from people who ask for particular items to be deleted, and I do so.  So, perhaps some folks in the profession view me negatively because I am active at PSR, but others are thankful that I am there, the only moderator that is not anonymous, that can be reached.

Someone today raised the possibility that I make the place worse, that trolls are there because I moderate and post there.  My response?  Well, the place had much negativity before I started, so unless the place has a Benjamin Button kind of dynamic, the person has a bad grasp of social science.  Plus PSR is hardly alone on the internet in producing some toxicity from the brew of anonymity and a lousy job market/anxious graduate students.

I try to be myself there--a combination of earnest desire to help (which probably annoys the hell out of some folks), a weakness to trolls (I have a hard time not responding when folks poke at me or at things I care about), and a tendency to snark.  Indeed, I have been tempted to post this in response to all of the concern that cosplay at the ISA might be damaging to the profession:






I actually don't think that PSR does much damage to the profession either, although it certainly is more problematic than a handful of people dressing up at the ISA.  Any accusation that I am hurting the political science profession is giving me far more influence than I actually have.  I would argue that the Putin apologists in the NYT are doing far more damage to our kind.

The Logic of Invidious Comparison: Political Science Edition

One of the books that most influenced me has been Donald Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict.  He borrows heavily from social psychology to argue that ethnic group politics is heavily conditioned by social psychology.  That individuals base their self-esteem on how their group is doing and how other groups are doing relative to their group.  Denigrating other groups makes one's group and oneself seem better. 

He calls this the logic of invidious comparison, and it helps to explain not just ethnic conflict within countries and conflict among countries but also less serious stuff like how much we end up caring about how well our sports teams do and how badly their rivals do.

Why do I raise this now?  Because the website where aspiring and practicing political scientists can trade insults anonymously, Political Science Rumors, has become so obviously a place where Horowitz's logic (and that of the social psychologists he borrows from) applies so strongly.  The general tendency is to focus on the rankings of schools and their performance on the job market--which means that people's egos and their incomes are potentially at stake if reputation matters so much more than the work. 

Lately, the focus has shifted, perhaps because we are in between job markets (the poli sci job market starts to kick into gear in the fall with the first applications due in mid September and the first interviews taking place mostly in October and beyond), we now see heaps of posts taking shots at different subfields.  People are trashing Political Theory, then they pile on International Relations and so on.

Given that most people are not that competitive beyond their subfield, why should they care about which journals matter to those in another subfield?  If people get tenure in place x because there are many respected IR journals that count towards tenure, how does that matter to anyone else in another subfield?  If these people at place x get denied tenure, it is very, very unlikely that the new job that might emerge from this denial would be in another subfield.  So, there is no real rational reason to care so much about what each subfield tends to value, yet the subfield trashing goes on. 

The logic of invidious comparison seems to make the most sense to me.  One denigrates IR to make one feel better about one's own subfield and improves one's own self-esteem, and IR people denigrate other subfields to make themselves feel better.

Of course, making sense of anonymous posts is a waste of time, but it is my time to waste ;)  Still, Horowitz's stuff gives me a good understanding of not just ethnic conflict, but the World Cup and posts by unnamed people.  So, woot for Horowitz!

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Boxes

After my talk at the University of British Columbia, I was asked about where I stood between the subfields of Comparative and International Relations.  The observer noted that some of the theory behind NATO in Afghanistan is built on comparative politics, but the subject is very much IR--alliances and war.  So, what am I?  An IR person or a comparativist?  Basically the former with a willingness to use the tools of the latter.

Outsiders may see this as strange, but as social identity theory will tell you, it matters to you and it matters to others how one is identified.  The questions that have always interested me the most are those that cross borders--who gets involved in someone else's conflict (book 1), why do some wars happen and others not (book 2), how do alliances operate in wartime (book 3).  I have always taught IR classes, such as Intro to IR.  However, I have written on topics that fall squarely within comparative politics: why some groups want to secede, how do institutions ameliorate ethnic conflict or not, and so on.  More to the point, my understanding of IR almost always hinges on how I think about domestic politics, and because I am almost always interested in more than one country, I end up applying comparative politics.  That is, theories from the field of comparative politics have often been useful to me as I seek to understand why countries vary in how they do their International Relations.

Perhaps some folks are confused about me.  I do think that this might have been a problem at the start of my career, but I am pretty sure that people have gotten used to folks working at the intersection of the two fields.  I had some senior colleagues who had outdated views of what IR people do, but they had outdated views on pretty much everything else.  For me, the basic thing is that I go where the questions lead me and my curiosity tends towards IR, and then I go to where I think the answers are, which because of my biases, in domestic politics.  

Still, we have the boxes.  They make it handy for studying for comps, for defining job ads, for allocating responsibilities and so on.  I am now in an interdisciplinary place where the distinctions are not between IR, Comparative, Theory and American/Canadian Politics but between Conflict Analysis, Development, and National Security.  I am so confused about my identity these days!

Field Guardian: Brave Heroes of Yesteryear

In today's Political Violence at a Glance, Christian Davenport and Scott Gates address a key problem in the study of intra-state conflict--the inter-state people often don't take it that seriously.   I am not that surprised as I faced much hostility from some of my colleagues at a previous department (hint, that would be McGill) for daring to teach Civil War as a course.  That was a comparative politics class that I should not waste scarce IR time teaching, they argued.  One even would question anyone who suggested that intra-state conflict was an important issue in international security.  So, I have seen "Field Guardians" at work.

A Field Guardian is someone who seeks the field or subfield as sacrosanct--that the stuff inside the field or subfield should be studied without thinking or invoking or borrowing concepts and arguments and skills from other fields or subfields.  They see it as their job to protect the field or subfield from being tainted or diluted.  Their identity may even become wrapped up in the purity of their subfield--"we do not do that" whatever "that" is. 

To be sure, having fields and subfields is inevitable and even desirable as it helps us organize that which is common or common enough and facilitates conversations.  But they were never meant as barriers that must be guarded against the hordes of deviant thinkers.  One of the first hunks of IR theory I found most interesting was the work by Robert Jervis, who did many good things including helping IR folks get some clues about cognitive psychology.  But that required reaching out over the barriers between disciplines.  The fool?!  No, obviously not. 


Whenever I open up the front page of my old address book, I am reminded of this as I was trying to figure out my dissertation project on the IR of secession, and I had a brain wave that I wrote down--think about ethnicity.  Ever since my work has been at the juncture of IR and CP.  Even my latest work on NATO and Afghanistan very much relies on both subfields as it became an exercise not just in International Organization but in Comparative Civil-Military Relations.

Comparativists and IR folks do tend to see the world differently, as they are trained differently, as they are socialized differently and so on.  And this is not a bad thing, as we should not all have the same lenses--that way leads to big blind spots.  However, we need to build upon these differences, share the varying perspectives to see what one misses by focusing on a single perspective. 



The good news is that most of the really interesting work being done these days crosses sub-field lines, whether it is the stuff on civil war or political economy.  Many of these folks are young punks who have little respect for the self-appointed Field Guardians and are finding much success.  Yet old habits and institutionalized behaviors remain.  The key, of course, is to keep ask interesting questions and figure out which theoretical apparatus and methodologies are the most useful for the question at hand. 

To be sure, rebelling against the Field Guardians can have some costs if they happen to be reviewers of your article or book or if they are senior faculty at your institution.  But the primary reason to do this job is to pursue your curiosity to wherever it leads you, which means sometimes having to push back against those that have limited imaginations.

Going Wuffle on Some Hiring Stats

Lots of rankings have problems--based on perceptions or various indicators such as articles that might be biased (some places produce books).  So, here is a ranking based on hiring: what are the pedigrees of the profs who have jobs?  Using the US News list of schools as the employers, a group of scholars has found unsurprisingly that a small handful of schools dominate.  Namely Harvard and Berkeley.

The main figure has two columns--total placements and those folks who are still assistant professors.  The latter shows the more trendy trends, whereas the former reflects the legacies of the past as much as more recent performance (I mean, some folks are still employed yet received their PhDs in the 1950s).  I like the column focusing on the more recent folks mostly because it allows me to indulge in Wuffle's Law.  Yep, focusing on the assistant prof placement column puts UCSD in the top ten, having the second biggest disparity in rankings from total to just assistant professor (my friends at FSU are one placement ahead).  The schools with the biggest drops from total to recent history: MIT by far and then Ohio State and Chicago.

Of course, this raises a heap of questions.  If one does the math and guesses that it takes about five to six years to get tenure, having 25 profs in the category of assistant professor might mean on average that one is placing five a year or so.  Alas, such a school, like UCSD, is not admitting five per year.  On the other hand, there are another couple of thousand institutions of higher education in the US, not to mention those elsewhere.  Sure, some US jobs are filled by folks trained elsewhere, but all that I am familiar with suggests that the US exports more profs than it imports. 

So, this really does not tell us much about the overall picture, but it does suggest which programs have better histories and better recent records of putting their students where they hope to be.  Of course, we are still lousy guild, producing more Phds than can find jobs (see this site for some depressing adjunct graphics).

Sara Mitchell Rocks!

For the twitter impaired, I tweeted thusly:

This post shows why Sara Mitchell is so very impressive http://t.co/5L7MhcF9Di and a great citizen in the profession
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) August 27, 2013

Her post demonstrates not only that she has studied the gender challenges in the poli sci profession but has done much to address it.  Of course, she is almost uniquely qualified, given her poker skills, her sharp poli sci work, and her great sense of humor.

So, I must conclude that Sara Mitchell not only rocks but should keep on rocking this profession!

Mac without Cheese

My absolute favorite quote by any political theorist has to be this one from Machiavelli:

"It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them."  The Prince from here*

* Because I am too lazy to go to school and get my Machiavelli and re-type the passage.

Exactly 600 years ago, Machiavelli diagnosed the essential dilemma of politics.  If you want to change anything, the fans of change will generally be uncertain and unenthusiastic and opposed strongly by those who benefit from the status quo.  This explains so much of today's politics and provides much of the stickiness of path dependence.  It is why I found punctuated equilibria to be an interesting idea (thanks to Stephen Krasner). 

This is why, although I claim to be Liberal, in the sense that history can be progressive rather than just a cycle, I still tend to be surprised when there is change, when progress does occur.  Sure, I can get cocky and claim that some event or politician is now on the right side of history, but that old Machiavelli quote is always bouncing around my head.  Change is really, really, really hard.  Yet it happens.  Which is why politics can be so very interesting albeit frustrating.

A Nice Take on the Discipline

See Melissa Harris-Perry on how political science is different from punditry:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Well said. 

Democrats are Weenies

The Senate Democrats are weenies.  Why?  Because not only did they let the GOP propose an amendment that would cut or restrict NSF funding for political science (and only political science) research, but they let it be a voice vote.  What does that mean?  We do not have a record of who can be blamed for voting with the forces of ignorance. 

The double unaccountability to this: (a) political science research is one way to assess how politicians are doing their jobs [indeed, some of the opponents of Poli Sci research cite exactly those studies that ponder whether politicians represent their constituents] so cutting this undermines accountability; and (b) a voice vote limits our ability to blame individual Senators. 

Brilliant.  Democracy in action.  No wonder Americans have a great deal of contempt for their national legislature.

Too Many Political Scientists?

Check out this figure:

Law and Courts

Will Moore (who posted the link first), Christopher Zorn and I have been tweeting about this.  To me, this looks awful, given how the academic job market has been, especially of late.  Will suggests this is a post 9/11 thing, which implies that more interest in government, government jobs and such may be playing a role here.  Christopher suggests that the numbers include folks entering MPA programs--Master's in Public Administration.  This depresses me further, because we have seen heaps of government job cuts the past few years. 

What is going on?  I have no clue, but the bump from 2008 to 2009/10 levels might be as folks flee the law school market.  We know that one is collapsing.  Overall, we have seen a near-doubling of people in MA/MPA/PhD programs in Political Science/Public Administration in a bit more than a decade.  Does the Dept of Homeland Security require MA's?  Department of Defense?  Are these all new military officers needing some extra PME (professional military education) in the enlarged military? 

I surely hope that this MA figure is really just that--MA figures and do not stand for a similarly upward trend in political science PhD students.  That would suck bigtime for the profession.  Given the stability in Anthro and Sociology along with the relatively steady increase in Econ students, it could very well be that the big change is at the MA level and not the PhD level.

Ah, too much and too little information all at once.  Any better guesses than mine?  And yes, that would be any guess.

Documenting the Games

Oxford University Press's twitter account has provided quite the public service: Storify-ing #APSA2012HungerGames.  So, if you don't have twitter or missed the fun, you can hit the first link to follow the stream of silliness.

Again, I hope that New Orleans dodges the storm and that the folks who go to APSA have no problemos.  But in times like these, a little silliness to make fun of a stressful situation is a good thing.

Political Scientists Play Hunger Games

As the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association may face cancellation due to Hurricane Isaac, there is only one thing to do: wildly speculate how APSAHungerGames would play out in 2012.  Spawned on twitter by @whinecough, an ABD (all but dissertation) on the job market, the idea is that in a hurricane-swept New Orleans, the APSA convention-goers must compete to survive.

The best line of the night, but the most inside baseball might be this one:

#APSA2012HungerGames Short break in carnage so everyone can agree that Thomas Friedman has no idea what he's talking about.
— W. K. Winecoff (@whinecough) August 27, 2012

While some would think the Neo-Realists would do well, since they focus on security or power (depending on the time of day), they might get distracted by blaming some heretofore ignored domestic actor for the policy failures.

Much of the money by the "sharps" in Vegas moved to favor the comparativists who have fieldwork experience and study contentious politics.  Will Reno, with much experience hanging out with warlords, working in places like Somalia, and known to have the biggest biceps in the profession, is currently the favorite at 4 to 1. But he does have some challenges as there is a whole new generation of hip kids who not only study insurgency and have done fieldwork in Afghanistan, but also have survived the worst academic job market in history.  And they do not lack confidence:

@texasinafrica @danatgu @smsaideman I have 2 kids under 2.5 years so I've been training for #APSA2012HungerGames for years. Reno is mine.
— Jason Lyall (@jaylyall_red5) August 27, 2012

The longest odds? Post-materialists.  They will find that in the Hunger Games that it is not so much the intersubjective meanings applied to arrows and bullets but the accuracy and power of the weapons launching them.  Blood may have all kinds of symbolism, but when it drains out of a post-modernist, the logic of consequences will dominate the logic of appropriateness.

Alas, the formal theorists will be killed first.  Why? Because they will have very difficult time getting their LaTex to work in all of the rain and wind.

I am not going to the conference, so I can only grieve the losses and then participate in the next twenty years of study, where we fight about:

• whether the games being played were chicken, stag hunt, prisoners' dilemma, or deadlock;
• whether the actors were pursuing relative or absolute gains;
• whether the rational actor assumption is useful or appropriate (the Phil Arena fixation);
• which pop culture best describes the games, and, yes, many will argue against the conventional wisdom that the Hungar Games best applies.  Indeed, Drezner-ites will insist that Zombie movies and books provide the most insights into APSAHungerGames 2012.  Somehow, Charli Carpenter will blame The Machines instead.
• the scholars of civil war will debate about whether the Hunger really mattered, as grievances are over-rated. 

So, the bad news is that the profession may lose some of its best and its brightest in #APSA2012HungerGames.  On the bright side, the next job market might be a bit better and there will be new cottage industries of scholarship.

Politicology? Um, No Thanks

Last month, I blasted a Political Scientist, or perhaps a Politicologist, Jacqueline Stevens, for her piece in the New York Times.  This past week, she took issue with her critics, including me.  So, the conversation continues.  I don't want to address everything in her latest post or in the entire debate, but I would like to clarify a few things and respond to a few things.

First, she takes a bit of umbrage at the title of my post: Self-Hating Political Scientist.  She points out that this is a phrase often used to Zionists against less passionate defenders of the Israel, and that was not my intent.*  However, I used the phrase not with Israel in mind but because I was already frustrated with the folks attacking political science from the Right with Representative Flake at the front of the battle, seeking to de-fund political science and only political science.  Why?  Because he had problems with our epistemology?  With our definition of our discipline is?  No, because political scientists are asking questions that make him and other reality-averse folks uncomfortable, like the quality of representation and the politics of climate change (these are the examples Flake raised: "So what kind of research is NSF charging to our credit card? $700,000 to develop a new model for international climate change analysis; $600,000 to try to figure out if policymakers actually do what citizens want them to do.").

* Zionist ideologues are probably not huge fans of my posts (here or here), either, given that I consider Israel not to be the center of anyone's foreign policy universe except for Israel.  Oh, and conservatives are not so thrilled with me either.

Stevens wrote her piece criticizing the discipline in a particular time and place--this June in the NYT--essentially giving aid and comfort to the enemy.  The enemy?  That would be forces of ignorance--as the Flake Amendment, singling out political science, was aimed at reducing the funds available to do political inquiry.  By taking our intra-discipline squabble about what our discipline is to the editorial section of the NYT, Stevens was giving these folks more ammunition.  Hence my ire.  Hence my labeling her as a Self-Hating Political Scientist when I could have used other labels with right-wing associations as well--such as fellow traveler. In her most recent post, she quite clearly hates the label of political science, as I discuss below, so I don't think the title to my previous post was all that off the mark.  To be clear, I am not invoking the whole "I am sorry if you offended" non-apology because I am not apologizing, just clarifying.

Second, Stevens repeats the idea that some of our arguments and findings are not worth the investment of public dollars because they are "re-representing journalistic observations through equations and not producing new knowledge."  Journalists often get it right, but they often ascribe to events dynamics that are perhaps less than crucial.  For instance, heaps of coverage of political debates but most social science find these to be of marginal influence.  Newspapers report all kinds of stuff and some of our findings concur with the banal, everyday understandings.  But our work also (a) disagrees with much that is asserted in newspapers (see the hardly conservative views of media coverage by Chis & Will Call 'em Out); (b) covers stuff that media does not assert; and (c) adjudicates between the conflicting conventional wisdoms in the news media.  Since when have we seen security dilemmas raised in newspapers as the causes of arms races?  Speaking more closely to Stevens' area of interest: conventional newspaper accounts usually use ancient hatreds--that ethnic groups hate each other--as a central explanation of any civil war.  Does that mean we should ignore studies that show identity to be more complex than that?  I get back to identity further below.

Political Science Vs. Conservative Folks

One of the reactions to my post on how negatively viewed politicalscience is these days focused on party identification or ideology—that political science is negatively viewed by conservatives because political science ridicules conservatives.

And then I ridiculed conservatives.  Damn.  Let me try to do two things here:

1) Explain my view of contemporary “conservatives” and why I find it hard not to be very critical of them.

2) Explain why political science is inherently neutral but also inherently controversial.*

* I have loved the word inherent since facing it on my first Intro to IR paper.  Pardon me if I over-use it.

In my tweeted reaction, I basically suggested that conservatives should not have a problem with political science if they were the folks I remember from the 1980s rather than the contemporary conservatives.  Why is that?  Today, that label has lost a heap of its meaning in my less than humble opinion.  When the folks who were seen as right wing two decades ago (Bob Dole) are now seen as on the left fringe of the party, that raises questions.  If people calling themselves conservatives today cannot recognize the rightward shift of the Republican Party and of the standard bearers of the conservative movement, then we may have an unbridgeable gap in perceptions.

Vehemence and refusal to compromise are not Conservative values even if they are required to be considered conservative today.  I have always thought of Conservative as meaning preservation of the status quo and/or a desire to return to some previous status quo that was seen as being better, say the 1950s.  Today’s loudest but perhaps not most representative conservatives do not really harken back to a post-World War II time that might be felt as better than the present day.  Instead, they seek to move things much further backwards to a reality that either existed in the late 1800’s or not at all.  As a result, I have a hard time arguing with these folks or taking them seriously if they are represented by Perry, Bachman, Palin, Paul, or Gingrich.  When folks argued that they would rather see Obama fail than have him and the country succeed, well, that is Radical, not Conservative. 

So, there is my bias.  But that is separate, I think, from my views of how political science can be, more or less, ideology neutral.  I do think that people’s ideologies shape the kinds of questions they ask.  For instance, one can consider the threat of failed states to human security or one can ask whether state failure facilitates terrorism.  Ideology might shape one’s disposition towards focusing on the former or the latter.  Which set of theories one finds most attractive will also be shaped by one’s political outlook.  Chances are that Marxist type theories will appeal more to those on the left,** for example, and public choice ones might appeal to those on the right.  The real key is this: no matter what your biases are, if one is doing political science as it is ordinarily conceived in the US (and parts of Canada and less consistently in the rest of the world—that is a positivist approach), one is compelled by the evidence.  That is, you can have whatever theory you want, but if it does not hold up against the evidence (experiments, surveys, quantitative analyses, simulations, case studies), then you are going to have to address that.

** However, one of my favorite books, Gilpin's War and Change, was very much Marxist in the way it juxtaposed the distribution of power (akin to the class structures) with the rules of the game/institutions (the superstructure), creating tensions that inevitably lead to ... war and change.  Gilpin was hardly a Marxist ... or was he?

When it comes to International Relations, things get surprisingly clearer because the theories themselves (with some exceptions) do not line up with the Conservative/Liberal, Right/Left split.  Are Realists Conservatives?  Well, the most prominent ones (Walt, Mearsheimer) are most frustrated by and opposed to Neo-Conservativism.  However, Realists often take stances that traditional Conservatives would like—that the pursuit of national interest should be unfettered by humanitarian impulse.  The left hated Kissinger who was the most avowedly Realist scholar/policy-maker (of course, the far right hated him as well).  Likewise, Liberalism may seem to be most compatible with the Liberal end of the American political spectrum, but that is not necessarily the case.  Liberal IR theory focuses on the competition among groups within countries to define interests and then the effort by countries to pursue such interests when they conflict or overlap with others.  The interests involved may or may not be those that folks on the left-wing would find appealing.  The content of those interests that win may make American conservatives weep or sing.  Until recently, most constructivism was pretty much driven by left of center impulses--to understand how not to use nuclear weapons, to understand where environmental movements come from, to figure out when humanitarian norms matter.  But as constructivism became more mainstream, I think that political outlook mattered much less.

Much of IR is none of these but “non-paradigmatic” or mid-range theory, focused on addressing puzzles.  Again, these puzzles may be of interest due to the scholar’s ideological dispositions or due to where the grant money is buried, but the answers they get are those that are the product of the analyses.  We may want to find x, but the data may tell us y.  If we are doing “science”, then we are stuck with the results we find.  Yes, we can lie with statistics, but most of us worry about being found out and most of us have some integrity, so most of the time, the results will tell the tale. 

Consequently, political scientists tend to be pains in everyone’s rears because we report what we find, and what we find may not be what people want to hear. 

I do think political scientists as a breed are more annoying to contemporary Conservatives since our work is reality-based.  We deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.  When political scientists speculate about the future without basing it on the real world, we produce stuff that might be wildly popular but shaky at best, such as the Clash of Civilizations.  And we call that “Bad social science.”

We've Got Here is a Failure to Communicate

Political science, alas, has been facing much hostility as of late.  Selected out by a Republican for de-funding, attacked by one of our own in a highly publicized and reputed piece, it is time that we wielded our tools to figure out what is going on.  Thankfully, Huber, Dowling and Hill have done some social science: surveys with some random selection to assess how people feel about Political Science compared to Psychology and Computer Science.  They find that people in general support NSF funding for political science less than for the other two with independents and Republicans far more negative to political science (although Republicans are not that fond of NSF funding of any of these dark arts) and psychology is only slightly preferred.

The scholars asked a batch of questions with these findings about what kinds of stuff people will support, broken down by party id:

Support for Different Purposes of NSF Funding
	Overall	Democrats	Independents	Republicans
To develop new technologies, products, and therapies	0.70	0.82	0.74	0.60
To improve basic understanding in the natural sciences	0.68	0.77	0.73	0.56
To train students	0.67	0.76	0.71	0.55
To improve basic understanding of human behavior	0.64	0.77	0.66	0.52
To support faculty and student research	0.63	0.73	0.67	0.52
Note: Cell entries are mean scale scores (weighted), where 1=Strongly support, .75=Somewhat support, .5=Neither support nor oppose, .25=Somewhat oppoes, 0=Strongly oppose

What we see here is an 7-8% preference for new technologies over faculty/student research or improve understanding of human behavior.  The authors conclude:

In the abstract, however, Independents are more supportive of understanding human behavior than they are of Political Science funding in particular, suggesting political scientists would do well to highlight their contributions in that area. Likewise, training students and supporting faculty and student research are reasonably popular among Independents. Perhaps the more general point is that it is hard to know what the mass public thinks Political Science funding supports, nor what elements of that work it finds objectionable. These results suggest, however, that the public, even Republicans, are more supportive of NSF funding of academic research than opposed, especially when evaluating the abstract goals that the NSF pursues. More effort highlighting these contributions, perhaps related to new technologies and the training of students, might be a fruitful way to foster support for continuing NSF funding for academic research in the social and behavioral sciences.

Interesting stuff.  I do think that political science is very much misunderstood, which may have something to do with this.  That is, we study politics, and politics is seen as dirty and unpopular.  In my experience, when I tell someone I study politics, their responses are usually focused on my ambition to be a politician or my interest in being a lawyer.  Given how much disrepute those two professions are in, it should not be surprising that we are not held in the highest esteem. 

To be clear, I think our discipline has been targeted by Republicans of late because of two basic realities--we are low-hanging fruit, and we end up presenting inconvenient truths.  First, because of the existing PR problem that people don't know what we do, we are easy to attack.  A politician hostile to any government funding of research finds it easiest to attack political scientists because we do not provide patents and other obvious markers of benefits to humankind.  I would not be surprised if Flake and others did some polling before they proposed attacking NSF funding of political science--that it plays better than cutting cancer research, for instance.  Second, we ask some damned inconvenient questions like: do politicians actually represent their constituents? what is the impact of foreign aid on repression? Why do people have political opinions that are counter to their interests? 

Aside from making fun of lawyers, what can we do?  In the short run, not a whole hell of a lot.  Everything we have borrowed/stolen from the cognitive and social psychologists tell us that it is awfully hard to persuade people to change their minds.  In the long run?  Well, we are all dead, or so the economists tell us.  In the medium run, we can perhaps do a better job of connecting our research to the problems in the world.  The whole academia/policy gap that we make much noise about--the more we bridge that gap and bridge it visibly, perhaps our added value can be more apparent. 

The good news is that we seem to be doing far more outreach now than in the past.  I have lost track on occasion of all the places on the net where I write stuff.  I am not alone--more and more political scientists are blogging, tweeting, and podcasting.  This is all to the good, as the more and more people see what we think, get snippets of research in more digestible forms, and hear our arguments, they can see that we are not aspiring politicians or lawyers but scholars seeking to understand the political world.  That politics is the making of decisions big and small that affect how communities are run (why Montreal's roads are akin to World War I battlefields), that determine that the response to the current economic crisis should be austerity, that shape interventions into Syria and other conflicts or not.

My realization tonight is that my blogging and my media appearances are not just for my own narcissism but are for the good of the profession (as long as I am not too mistaken).  The more the public sees political scientists providing some insight, some perspective, the more we can change the perception of what we are and why our work is worthy of some public support if governments are going to be in the business of supporting research.

Of course, we disagree with each other as much or more than economists disagree with each other.  That noise sometimes makes it hard to appreciate what we bring to the table.  All we can do is convey our perspectives and hope that people see some value in our views.  They don't have to agree.  They certainly will not much of the time.  But the more we step out of the ivory towers, the more we can influence how we are perceived.  Or at least, that is my wishful thinking for this night.

What else can we do to change how political science is viewed?

Self-Hating Political Scientist

I tried, I really tried, to ignore the screed at the NYT against political science (especially of the quant variety), but Jacqueline Stevens's rant is such a poor effort that I know it will be widely read and influential.  Why?  Because bad ideas often spread further and faster than good ones (see Clash of Civilizations).

There are so many things wrong with this piece that it is hard to know where to start.  First, I am , of course, much of what this women hates about political science.  I have actually worked not just with Department of Defense dollars but actually in the Pentagon and, dare I say it?, liked it.  I have taken National Science Foundation [NSF] money--about $4,000.  I have used .... data!

Ok, with that disclaimer aside, I guess the only way to address this piece is to go through it from the top..  Otherwise, I might write something as incoherent as Stevens's piece.  Ok, one more disclaimer, I am mighty miffed to see a left-wing political scientist end up being a fellow traveler with the right-wing ones that are trying to de-fund NSF's political science program.  I don't know this person as her work is in political theory, a subfield that I do not know well.

Stevens argues that "it's an open secret" that the creation of "contrived data sets" has failed to produce "accurate political predictions."  Oh, really?  Yes, anyone creating a data set understands that coding political behavior means making assessments and assumptions.  But any other methodology that seeks to generalize about politics also has to make assessments and assumptions.  So, quantitative work will vary, just as qualitative work will, in how well they are performed.  Yes, there are alternatives to using the past in either slices of numbers or in case studies, such as experiments and surveys and game theory--but they will have the same problems.  So, either we go ahead and try to test our hypotheses and figure out whether there are generalizable dynamics or we don't.  If we don't, then we don't need federal grant money or any funding, as we can just think and write without doing the hard work of gathering data via coding or via interviews or whatever.

The second problem with this sentence is this: most of us do not aspire to provide accurate predictions of single events.  Most of us seek to understand the causes of outcomes, which leads us t be able to predict that y is more likely or perhaps only possible if x is present (which she ultimately condemns in her conclusion).  This can lead to predictions.  Indeed, having more understanding should allow us to develop expectations.  Having less understanding or no understanding is probably not the pathway to predicting anything.

Ignorance Wins

The good news is that ignorance wins just the day but perhaps not in the long run.  The GOP, on a party line vote, singled out political science research to be cut from the National Science Foundation.  Apparently, they think it is better to know less than more.  That makes sense for a party that can relies heavily on a shrinking base--rural white people. 

Sure, I am being defensive about my discipline, but regardless of what I study, the fact that these guys singled out one field for de-funding speaks volumes about their desire to be held unaccountable.  The job of political science is to understand politics, right?  Why would a party want to get in the way of that?  Because it has something to hide?  The funny thing is that political scientists are not journalists--we seek to understand the broader patterns and not the scandal of the day.  However, the broader patterns might just include the impact of gerrymandering on political extremism.  Ooops.

This cut may not make it out of conference when the Senate and House reconcile the various differences, but at least this amendment is appropriately named.  Flake?  Too appropriate for parody, too perfect for fiction.  The only more perfect name for this amendment would be the Ignorance Amendment.

Update: I wanted to add what I said on my facebook stream about this:

For me, it comes down to this: political science was singled out. One can argue about public goods, one could argue about whether poli sci is more liberal, that we communicate our added value poorly, but the reality is that the other folks funded by the NSF have many of the same characteristics. The only thing that distinguishes Poli Sci from the rest of the folks getting NSF money is our subject. What is it about politics that makes it unworthy of analysis that is publicly funded? Is it less important than society (sociology)? Sure, this is among the least worst stances (least damaging) the GOP in Congress have taken but it is also, in some ways, the most revealing.