Laura McKenna of 11D links and discusses an interesting New Yorker piece by Louis Menand on political scientists’ research on public opinion. It’s good as far as it goes (focusing largely on Converse, Fiorina, and Popkin), but I think it would help to have incorporated more recent research like Zaller’s Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and Alvarez and Brehm’s Hard Choices, Easy Answers, not to mention the whole “affective intelligence” approach, all of which take issue—in important, but differing, ways—with the Conversian public incompetence thesis.

I’d also argue that Converse’s more important and lasting contribution was “Attitudes and Nonattitudes,” (1970) rather than “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” since I think most contemporary political scientists who study public opinion would reject the concept of “constraint” as an indicator of political expertise or competence.

Funnily enough, my American politics class decided to support the continued existence of the Electoral College by a margin of 13–7, with 1 abstention, after a 20-minute debate.

Perhaps more interestingly (and surprisingly), nobody put forward a partisan argument either for or against its abolition.

What Chip Taylor said. Unlike Elvis, I can’t afford to use a revolver as a remote, so I’m just going to stock up my TiVo with Stargate SG-1 episodes to watch instead.

Update: Dan Drezner has a better reason to abstain from blogging the RNC, although I personally think watching Amanda Tapping is a perfectly good one myself.

I sometimes wonder what our students would think of us if they knew what their professors did at parties.

Then again, it would probably just reinforce their stereotype of us as nerds who sit around and talk a lot, even considering the presence of a margarita machine (which, alas, I did not partake of, since I drove to the party) and various incredibly obscene discussions.

There’s been some discussion of late of Ray Fair’s model, and particularly its prediction that George Bush will walk away with 57.5% of the two-party vote in November. Bill Hobbs and Don Sensing find this to be interesting—and, at some level, I suppose it is. But I have to mention a couple of caveats:

1. I seriously doubt either major-party candidate will get 57.5% of the two-party vote. A few numbers for comparison: Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1984 against Walter Mondale netted 59.2% of the two-party vote, while Bill Clinton’s pounding of Bob Dole got 54.7% of the two-party vote. I’d frankly be surprised if Fair’s forecast is even correct within his stated margin of error (±2.4%). To be gracious to Fair on this point, he does candidly acknowledge that there could be specification issues that would inflate the forecast.
2. I think forecasting models do a poor job of explaining the causal mechanisms that take place. The national economy doesn’t vote—rather, about a hundred million Americans do, and the effects of the national economy on individuals are for the most part weak (but, admittedly, can be quite strong for voters in particular industries and regions).

Of course, a third caveat is that forecasting the national vote-share is (in my opinion) a misspecification of the institutional conditions under which the election takes place; there are 51 elections (in the 50 states and District of Columbia) that allocate representation in the electoral college, and I generally think that understanding those 51 elections is much more important than forecasting the headline figure, which only has a tenuous relationship with the substantively meaningful outcome (who wins the election).

Also (potentially) of interest: back in my slightly-more-prolific days, I posted a brief exposition of my distaste for (and disinterest in) election forecasting models.

I have five Gmail invites up for grabs, and I can’t think of anyone offhand who’d want one (that probably doesn’t have one already). Drop me an email (lordsutch@gmail.com) if you want one.

Kids are funny, and Sheila O’Malley’s nephew is no exception. Even without visual aids, it’s a great story.

William Sjostrom detects a hint of bias in the speaker selection for the upcoming APSA conference. Dan Drezner, while acknowledging the potential bias, also points out that the speakers’ appearances will be lightly attended, largely because political scientists have better things to do. He also manages to summarize part of my research methods class last night:

[T]here’s a difference between political science and politics. Most of the presentations and papers given at APSA do not address normative debates about the way politics should be. Instead, they are more detatched analyses of why things are the way they are. Sometimes the answers can be ideological, but most political scientists just care about whether their answer is correct—or more precisely, whether someone else can demonstrate that their preferred answer is wrong.

That said, something I didn’t mention last night is that many scholars’ normative beliefs drive their scholastic inquiry; witness the cottage industry of campaign finance scholarship, the whole “peace science” coterie, or most inquiry into racial and ethnic politics in America. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Update: Meanwhile, Nick Troester notes that people disagree what “political theory” means. Most often, I see it used as a synonym for normative theory, rather than formal theory, which I gather is Nick’s conception of the term—the latter is sometimes referred to as “formal modeling” to reduce potential confusion, and occassionally (erroneously, in my opinion) as “positive” theory.

Our long national nightmare, the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson saga, may finally be nearing an end. The Kerry front organizations left wing of the blogosphere claims there’s an indictment of “Scooter” Libby on the way, while the Bush stooges InstaPundit (and the Washington Post) reports that Libby is cooperating with investigators by waiving his right of confidentiality in dealings with Time reporter Matthew Cooper.

I once described (off-handedly) Bill Clinton as the first postmodern president—and I think that was a pretty valid description, considering he managed to create public debate over the actual definitions of such straightforward words as “sex,” “is,” and “alone.” Today, Steve at Begging to Differ makes a pretty convincing case that postmodernism has pretty much taken over political discourse.

Conrad is busily planning a takeover of the Philippines. As someone who’s taken a mild interest in Philippine politics over the years, I can authoritatively say he’s probably got a better plan to solve the country’s problems than the extant administration.

Having said that, I’m less willing to blame the voters than some commentators—Philippine politics somehow manages to combine the worst traits of Huey Long, Richard Daley, and E.H. Crump without producing any of the benefits one typically finds in a machine-politics regime, and until that is sorted out I’m not sure the voters will make that much difference.

Alex Knapp, Steven Taylor and Ted Barlow all agree that President Bush’s apparent call for regulation of all political speech is idiotic, although John Fund argues (somewhat, but not completely convincingly) that it’s the inevitable result of McCain-Feingold, while James Joyner notes that it’s not like the Bush campaign has changed its position on the 527 phenomenon lately.

I get the feeling my intro class is going to have a fun debate over campaign finance regulation and the first amendment; I just wonder what side I’m going to have to play devil’s advocate for.

James Joyner and N.Z. Bear both ponder an alternative universe in which John Kerry has a campaign message that doesn’t revolve around what he did (or didn’t do) in the Mekong Delta before I was born. Left unpondered is whether or not “parallel Kerry” has one of those cool-looking goatees like Spock did in “Mirror, Mirror.”

Also worth reading, linked from the same InstaPundit post, is Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond’s devastating critique of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, including its hamhanded handling by the former Coalition Provisional Authority, from the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs.

Alex Knapp ponders the assumptions underlying Dahlia Lithwick’s op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times calling on Democrats to act like George W. Bush is an adult—not so much because Bush isn’t an imbecile, but because such talk alienates swing voters. Alex writes:

Of course, swing voters (like myself) probably don’t take kindly to discussions about how best to manipulate them (I know I don’t).

With that in mind, there seem to be two unspoken assumptions in this article.

1. That most Kerry supporters really do see Bush as an idiotic, bumbling child.
2. That swing voters don’t read New York Times op-eds—Kerry supporters do.

Alex doesn’t think either of these assumptions are necessarily true. Certainly statement 1 need not be true; notably, even a small minority of Kerry supporters could damage his cause. For example, one suspects most Kerry supporters aren’t sending their hard-earned cash to prop up 527s like ACT and MoveOn.org, instead free-riding on George Soros’ pocketbook.

But I think statement 2 is true; swing voters, by and large, don’t read the Times. Most politically-aware people (essentially, the Times’ audience) are partisans of varying degrees of strength; politically sophisticated fence-sitters like Alex Knapp and Dan Drezner are relative exceptions.* To the extent the Times influences mass opinion, it does so as an elite signaling mechanism for writers at the newspapers and wire services that swing voters do read. If the Times chooses to bury the Swift Vets as partisan hacks instead of leading with the fact the group has already caught Kerry in a lie about his presence in Cambodia, it gives the “all-clear” signal for the Commercial Appeal or Clarion-Ledger to do the same. Thus, if Lithwick (and, by extension, the Times) can influence some Kerry supporters to alter their rhetoric, their “team” will probably come out ahead, even if a few fence-sitters have their noses tweaked in the process.

Because we considered Signifying Nothing‘s pages insufficiently cluttered, we have added the manual trackback link to individual post and daymode pages, as requested by James Joyner.

And, before you ask, no, we wouldn’t jump off a cliff if he asked us to.

Sorry, I’ve been busy with this stuff for the past few days, plus I have a parent in town. More blogging this weekend, hopefully.

The blog revolution has apparently reached this corner of academe; one of the topics of discussion at lunch (not raised by me, mind you) among our group of incoming faculty members was whether or not faculty members could set up class blogs on the college server.

That said, I’m still leaning against using blogs for any of my classes, although I do think it would be a good way to help fufill the whole “writing across the curriculum” thing that the college is pushing in some courses.

Well, half of orientation is over. I think I’m starting to recover my enthusiasm for the job (see here and here), in no small part because of the warm welcome I have received from my new colleagues. My fellow new faculty members (numbering seven total, including me) are a pretty interesting and diverse group. So far I’ve been invited to dinner, been interviewed via email by the editor of the campus newspaper, and gotten a new computer for my office (replacing the steam-driven Gateway monstrosity that was there before), in addition to various and sundry activities.

The only real irritant so far is the heavily Microsoftized campus computing environment—I am quickly learning to despise Outlook with a passion, and I suspect my laptop will be getting a lot of use for getting actual work done.

Anyway, I probably should be off to bed so I don’t doze off during Day 2.

Last month, I wrote the following:

Not to start a big brou-ha-ha like the recently-raging conflict over the relative “hotness” of libertarian women, but I‘ll put any five randomly selected young Mississippi women (18–35) against a comparably-selected slate of native Michiganders any day.

A couple of minor clarifications are in order. In general, the above statement is empirically valid, but one should not make the ecologically-fallacious assumption that all young native Michiganders are less attractive than all young native Mississippians, a statement that would be quite untrue. The second clarification is that, ceteris peribus, Michigan girls have somewhat cuter accents (in this gentleman’s opinion, at least), which may or may not be “hot” in your particular book.

This will probably be my last post from Ann Arbor; the hovel doesn’t have Internet access (or any other communication facilities), and Sprint gets annoyed when I use my cell phone to connect to the Internet. I think I’ll have Internet access in the motel tomorrow night, so I’ll probably have something to say tomorrow night.

Russell Arben Fox has some thoughts on living and working in the relative boonies of academia that may be a worthwhile corrective to the attitudes articulated here by other friends and colleagues.

From my office in Ann Arbor, I scheduled a recording of Virginia Postrel’s appearance on Booknotes this weekend on the TiVo in my living room in Jackson, over 1000 miles away. I have to say that’s pretty cool.

Now, if only I could watch all the programming I’ve recorded at home while I’ve been away on my laptop here. Actually, I probably could, although it’d probably take a month or so to download all the shows.

I’d love for someone to review the last 48 hours of my life and explain to me how, exactly, I got conned into driving two entirely different groups of people out to eat at the exact same restaurant twice in 24 hours. I really, really want to know this. I can’t possibly be that gullible.

Incidentally, I’ve about had it with today; it’s been one lousy day from start until this exact moment. Thankfully, tomorrow is only 6 hours and 25 minutes away.

Tomorrow couldn’t possibly be worse… or could it?

Update: The guy who takes on the role of “surrogate older brother” in my life emailed the following theory:

Answer: there was a chick Chris thought was cute in one or both groups; a situation, like a black light on bodily fluids, that brings out the word "Doormat" on Chris' head.

While the latter part of the statement is sadly true, I’m afraid all seven people (actually six; one Danish guy talked his way into both groups) whose asses I hauled to dinner were male. What may be even sadder is that I enjoyed both events.

Robert Garcia Tagorda questions the Bush team’s strategy of talking up its chances in California, noting (correctly) that Arnold Schwarzenegger is hardly offering up his 65% approval rating for a coattail effect. However, a look back at 2000 would be instructive—in that campaign, too, the Bush campaign talked up its chances in California and devoted more than token resources to the state, which forced the Gore campaign to follow suit, diverting ads from the battleground states that Bush was truly focusing on.

One suspects that Kerry will not fall for the same trick again, and—unlike in 2000—his surrogates supporters ABBers at MoveOn.org and other 527s can devote virtually unlimited resources to counteract any Bush spending in the state without hurting the campaign elsewhere, while the Democratic party organization is more free to devote resources to get-out-the-vote efforts than in the past (mainly because it can’t spend its money on much else, thanks to McCain-Feingold). But, nonetheless, it’s not a completely bad strategy, because there’s absolutely no way Kerry can win the White House if he loses California.

James Joyner received spam* from the Kerry campaign. Hilarity ensues.