I finally got around to ordering John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars and read it last night at the hotel in Dallas. Agent is an eminently enjoyable read, and it does for Hollywood what The Android’s Dream did for government bureaucracy (which is to say, skewers it mercilessly). Definitely strongly recommended.

von at Obsidian Wings writes:

I’m fairly confident that the US would respond with overwhelming military force if the de facto government of Mexico was randomly firing rockets at Laredo and McAllen, TX.

People in Laredo have problems dealing with such basic things as rain and temperatures below 80 degrees; I can’t imagine how they’d react to mortars and rockets.

I would like to thank CNN for giving me the ultimate example of the Worst Web Poll Ever for my semi-annual classroom rant about self-selected Internet surveys:

Huzzah and kudos to Burt Monroe (via Facebook) for the link. If the EPOVB section of APSA ever makes a T-shirt, this should be the picture on it.

Cassandra at Villainous Company points at some real data that indicate that a large chunk of Americans really, really dislike Rush Limbaugh. While perhaps this is the result of false consciousness or just uninformed judgment, my gut feeling is that it stems from Rush being a self-important, loud-mouthed blowhard who gets far too much credit among the party his continued existence on the face of this earth (or at least in the media) is increasingly a liability for due to his marginal role in rallying Republican support in the 1994 midterms that led to the GOP takeover of Congress.

Prompted by the Wisconsin Lutheran story, PTJ at The Duck of Minerva objects to the current state of scholarship in political science:

Once people are hired, they also have to figure out what to assign to their students; for that purpose, they need books and articles. Naturally, people want to assign the current, contemporary research in their field if they can, but not only does that not say much about civic engagement or the future of the political landscape, but it doesn’t even say what it does say in a way that is particularly accessible to undergraduate students. “The Role of Parties’ Past Behavior in Coalition Formation,” to pick just one of the articles from the most recent issue of the American Political Science Review, doesn’t exactly sound like a page-turner. And yes, I know full well that other disciplines also have a dichotomy between their contemporary research and the kinds of things that one assigns to undergraduates, but the gulf is particularly pronounced in contemporary Political Science. (At least Anthropology and Sociology have classics that can be profitably read by undergraduates; once one gets outside of the social sciences, the humanities have works of art and literature, and the natural sciences have textbooks and laboratories.) I remember serving as a TA for an American politics class while in grad school; the professor told a lot of stories about how actual politics worked, but the reading material talked about such scintillating topics as fire-alarms versus trip-wires in governmental oversight regimes. So the students, not surprisingly, ignored the reading and listened to the stories.

I think the students were on the right track. If one wants to actually do much serious thinking about civic life and one’s individual responsibility within it, one would be well-advised to stay as far away from the last several decades of Political Science scholarship as possible. Undergraduate education in politics shouldn’t be about learning how to solve extensive-form games; it should be about learning how government works. But contemporary Political Science isn’t much help to that task. This implies that if we want students to come to articulate their own sense of civic engagement, we ought not send them to the Political Science department, but could achieve the same effect by sending them elsewhere. And to make matters worse, people trained in Political Science probably aren’t likely to know how to facilitate this for undergraduates, which further undermines the need for a Political Science department in a liberal arts college.

Now, I’m not saying that every liberal arts college ought to go around eliminating its Political Science department. (In fact, Political Science departments at most liberal arts colleges I know are actually quite far removed from the mainstream of the discipline; I don’t think this is an accident.) But I am saying that the decision makes a certain amount of sense, since the discipline of Political Science is so far away from the goals of a liberal arts undergraduate education. And that’s too bad—bad for Political Science, not bad for the liberal arts.

Laura at 11D voices her concurrence to this line of thinking. And while it is tempting to agree, I think this is a symptom of a larger problem with political science as a discipline. Nobody, for example, would suggest that a physicist studying muon decay in a particle collider should somehow make his or her research directly relevant to people building nuclear reactors, yet somehow we (or some of we) expect cutting edge political science research to be directly relevant to the average citizen, and if it isn’t then it’s the fault of the research agenda.

I think this results from fundamental confusion about the endeavor of political science: political science is not civics, just as psychology is not Dr. Phil. Yet in “Intro to Psychology” they don’t teach Dr. Phil—they explain the basic findings of psychological research. So why do we teach civics in our introductory courses rather than teaching political science? (And the answer isn’t just “the Texas legislature says we have to,” because in point of fact we could make up 6 hours of anything related to U.S. and Texas government to fulfill the Texas gen ed requirement, yet we all end up doing the same old civics-based crap for the most part.)

To the specific points made by PTJ: yes, there are accessible, “classic” works in political science that can be fruitfully used with undergraduates. I’ve used works such as Key’s Southern Politics, portions of The American Voter, and excerpts from other scholarship from the 1940s-1960s successfully in a number of undergraduate courses. Yes, undergraduates do like “stories” instead of theory… but they prefer that in virtually any discipline. Math students would much rather listen to stories about Newton fleeing Cambridge during a plague rather than learning the calculus he co-derived,* yet I don’t think any serious person would think that the students are right in that circumstance.

Moreover, animating the theory of fire alarms versus police patrols in congressional oversight is part of the responsibility of a professor, and could be easily be tied to real contemporary political concerns (think of the treatment of detainees in the War on Terror, where Congress reacted to dramatic media coverage much more readily than to, say, John Yoo’s memoranda on the topic), just as explicating the whole business going on with the cave is the job of a professor who’s trying to explain Plato. And I dare say the APSR‘s normative theory articles are no more penetrable to the average undergrad than the game-theoretic stuff, so this isn’t an issue of the “teched up” research agenda oft-lamented in the discipline. And, no, I don’t think undergraduates need to “solve extensive-form games” but I think it’s reasonable to expose them (at least at a very simple level) to theories like the median voter model or spatial models of realignment that do explain how “actual politics” works. And, no thanks to the rewards structure of our discipline, there are quite a few good books out there for students that do these things for students at the junior and senior levels.

On the broader question of whether political scientists should be inculcating a sense of civic engagement in students rather than publishing research, I am probably one of those odd ducks who doesn’t think it’s our job to push students to engage in political activity without some evidence that the student is actually interested in doing so. (I think it’s a perfectly legitimate position for a citizen in a liberal democratic republic to not want to have anything to do with politics.) But I realize I’m an outlier in this regard, and there is certainly no lack of research and writing by prominent scholars on youth participation and civic engagement (both Russ Dalton and Martin Wattenberg have books on the topic, and they’re both in the same R-1 department, to say nothing of the whole Putnam coterie) and other “practical politics” concerns, even if it’s not appearing in the contemporary APSR.

* Although modern calculus is more derived from Liebnitz’s approach that Newton’s; Newton’s notation is better reflected in differential equations.

I enjoy Nate Silver and Andrew Gelman’s writing most of the time… so why I am I so bored with FiveThirtyEight.com’s content these days—to the point of having dropped my feed subscription—even when I agree with the substance of the content, even if not the aggressively Obama-cheerleading tone? (Or, to be fair, a link to a Nate Silver post.)

Maybe I’m in the minority—hell, I probably am—but I guess I subscribe to the philosophy of “dance with whomever brung you.” Silver at least has a keen analytical mind that probably would be better spent on his comparative advantage of data sifting and presentation rather than armchair political analysis from a perspective that’s available from, and done more thoroughly and thoughtfully, by folks like Kevin Drum.

Orin Kerr and Eugene Volokh are talking up the likely run for state attorney general by Ted Cruz, the state’s former solicitor general. While I can’t say I’m thrilled about all of Cruz’s political positions, particularly on the social conservative dimension where Cruz makes much of his advocacy for Ten Commandments tomfoolery and takes pride in undermining foreign relations, he does at least seem to be eminently qualified for the post.

As a semi-related aside (perhaps brought on by my learning-more-about-while-teaching Texas government this semester), while in general I’d favor taking a rather large scythe to the number of statewide elected offices in Texas in favor of more gubernatorial appointees in line with the federal model, I’d probably favor keeping the attorney general’s office a separately-elected post, mostly to better promote checks and balances on executive power in a more transparent way.

Laredo managed to wedge its way up to the trough to get $31.5 million in stimulus money (along with $57.2 million in other funds) to build the Cuatro Vientos project in south Laredo, which is basically a bypass for U.S. 83 (Zapata Highway). Hopefully TxDOT can move relatively quickly on this project, since I know based on the MPO long-range planning workshop I went to last month that folks on the south side have been looking for some traffic relief.

Inside Higher Ed reports (as does the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) that Wisconsin Lutheran College has decided to eliminate its political science department and, with it, two apparently-tenured faculty members to better focus on its “liberal arts mission.” I find myself in agreement with the thoughts of Michael Brintnall, executive director of the APSA:

“It would be thought to be a central component of a liberal arts education,” [Brintnall] said. “The subject matter is too central to civic life and understanding where we are going in the world to not offer the content.”

There is an argument to be made that the political dimensions of life can be explored in other social science and humanities disciplines—principally, through history, economics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology—but somehow I doubt Wisconsin Lutheran will be devoting the attention those dimensions deserve in a well-rounded education.

Then again, Wisconsin Lutheran may have made the right decision in its current circumstances: according to the Journal Sentinel article, the abolition of political science only affects 5 majors directly. Considering that we had political science majors beating down the doors at Millsaps, which isn’t much bigger than Wisconsin Lutheran, I’m not sure what is going on with that.

þ: John Sides and Steven Taylor.

As you might expect, I am in complete agreement with my occasional co-bloggers James Joyner and Steven Taylor that while in principle the residents of the District of Columbia ought to have the right to vote for representatives (and, for that matter, senators)*, the proposed way of doing so—by passing a piece of ordinary legislation, allegedly pursuant to Congress’ plenary police powers over the District—is so blatantly unconstitutional I’m almost surprised members of Congress can vote for it while maintaining a straight face.

While I’m not convinced that we actually need a separate capital district in this day and age—other federal republics, such as Canada and Germany, seem to function perfectly well without a distinct federal district—as long as we have one we really ought to follow the rules. And, as I’ve noted before, the rules themselves are not so onerous as to justify bypassing them—if they were, the Constitution never would have been amended to give D.C. residents the right to choose presidential electors in the first place, during an era when the idea of granting voting rights for the district’s largely African-American population was much more politically contested than it is today.

* Note that this is a subtly different statement than “D.C. should have the same representation as a state,” a dubious proposition at best; there is no reason why D.C. residents couldn’t be treated as residents of Maryland (or for that matter Virginia or Wyoming or California) for the purpose of reapportionment and voting in federal elections but not otherwise be subject to state law.

Amber Taylor wonders aloud if she’ll ever vacation in Belize again. Certainly combating nacrotrafficking and human smuggling across their borders can’t be keeping all of the Guatemalan armed forces busy.

Nate Silver has a nice explanation of the rationale behind the “jungle primary,” which is apparently headed to the ballots of Californians as a result of the state’s recent budget compromise. While the system has its flaws—particularly for those who believe in strong, programmatic political parties, although I’d argue that the American political system as constituted really can’t deliver programmatic parties—it does seem to reduce political polarization between the two parties driven by the gulf between primary and general election electorates.

See also: Soren Dayton and Rick Hasen.

From the description of the memisc package for R:

One of the aims of this package is to make life easier for useRs who deal with survey data sets. It provides an infrastructure for the management of survey data including value labels, definable missing values, recoding of variables, production of code books, and import of (subsets of) SPSS and Stata files. Further, it provides functionality to produce tables and data frames of arbitrary descriptive statistics and (almost) publication-ready tables of regression model estimates. Also some convenience tools for graphics, programming, and simulation are provided. [emphasis added]

How did I miss this package before? It makes analyzing NES data—heck, any data with value labels and missing values—in R an almost sane thing to do.

The entitlement society marches on:

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. [Jason] Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

It will come to no surprise to any observer of contemporary collegiate culture that Mr. Greenwood is a kinesiology major, often a refuge for future gym teachers and meathead football coaches who think the education school’s curriculum is far too challenging. “Doing everything the teacher asks of [you]” isn’t A-worthy; doing everything the teacher asks of you better than most other people do it and achieving mastery thereof is A-worthy. And I say that as someone who has historically been a relatively lenient grader.

Bonus quote:

Sarah Kinn, a junior English major at the University of Vermont, agreed, saying, “I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”

Via QandO, Critical Mass, Orin Kerr, and Jacob Levy, the latter of whom dissents in part.

Snark aside, I think “consumer demand” by students is a less compelling aspect of the problem—or at least the dimension of the problem I see at TAMIU, which is rather different than the dimension I observed teaching at selective private institutions—than the complicity of faculty and—particularly—administrators in encouraging faculty to reward students for occupying space and going through the motions in a misguided effort to retain students (and, perhaps more importantly, their associated free money from state and federal coffers—the marginal cost of student instruction is essentially zero from an administrative perspective) in college who have neither the interest nor actual need to complete a four-year degree.

My past thoughts on grading in general can be found here and here.

Over at OTB I tackle a new lawsuit seeking to strike down Alabama’s 108-year-old state constitution on the basis of vote fraud.

As an aside, it’s only when I dragged out my copy of Key this afternoon that I remembered how much I missed teaching this stuff.

Apropos the recent return of debate over the filibuster, I’ll just point you to the Signifying Nothing archives for my proposed reform thereof:

What I’d do: tweak the Senate rules slightly, to require 2/5+1 to vote to continue debate upon a call for cloture, except when a unanimous consent agreement is in effect otherwise limiting the debate (this part allows for normal floor debate without gratuitous cloture votes). That would properly place the burden of sustaining the filibuster on its supporters, but not otherwise limit its use (unlike Bill Frist’s fundamentally silly “supermajority countdown” proposal).

Incidentally, the nice thing about having an ancient blog is that I’ve probably already discussed to death every topic under the sun. Now back to the dryer.

Herein I present a rant on one-tailed tests in the social sciences; feedback welcome:

Unless you have a directional hypothesis for every coefficient before your model ever makes contact with the data, you have no business doing a one-tailed statistical test. Besides if your hypotheses are solid and you have a decent n, the tailedness shouldn’t determine significance/lack thereof.

Thought experiment: assume you present a test in a paper that comes out p=.06, one-tailed. That means you have a hypothesis that doesn’t really work to begin with (sorry, “approaches conventional levels of statistical significance”). More importantly, if you just made up the tailedness hypothesis post facto to put a little dagger (or heaven forbid a star) next to the coefficient, you really did a two-tailed test with p=.12 and then post-hoc justified it to make the finding sound better than it really was.

Now here’s the center of the rant: I really don’t believe you actually knew the directionality of your hypothesis before you ran the test and were willing to stick with it through thick and thin, since I know that you’d be figuratively jumping up and down with excitement and report a significant result if the “sign was not as expected” and it came out p=.003 two-tailed (p=.0015 one-tailed, opposite directionality), rather than lamenting how it turned out with p=.9985 on your original one-tailed test. I dare say nobody has ever published an article claiming the latter (although I might give it a positive review just for kicks).

And I really don’t feel the need to have these discussions with sophomores and juniors, hence why I prefer books that just talk about two-tailed tests (aka “not Pollock” [a textbook I really like otherwise]) so I don’t feel the need to rant.

“I have witnessed members walk up to other members on the floor and simply start yelling at them for having cast a certain vote or committing some other perceived misstep.”—Rep. Daniel Lapinski, “Navigating Congressional Policy Processes.” In Lawrence Dodd and Bruce Oppenheimer, eds. Congress Reconsidered, 9th ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009.

For my on-the-market readers who haven’t swung by the rumor forum yet, I have a short post about our International Relations and/or Political Theory position (originally it was two positions, hence the weird combination… but that’s a long, boring story) that allegedly is winding its way towards eJobs soon.

The bottom line: I’m happy to meet (informally—this ain’t an interview or even a APSA meat market session) with anyone who’s interested in the job this weekend at TLC in Baltimore; drop me an email if you’re interested in talking.

Short “pimp this job” FAQ: the pay is good for the region, the load is a 4–3, I think we’re willing to hire in IR or theory or both (frankly I don’t think we can usefully narrow the pool to and only, although there’s a chance the theory part is more non-negotiable since we’ve lived a while without an IR person but haven’t lived without a theorist until this semester), there is some research support, we don’t have the kind of “identity politics” issues that you see at other minority-serving institutions, and all your colleagues would be really nice folks. Playing nicely with others is essential; we do have our disagreements, but starting or engaging in pitched battles over ideology, qual/quant, pedagogy, etc. will not earn you a fan club, nor will free-floating hostility towards (as opposed to occasional mere frustration with) students. Last, but not least, it’s probably easier to live in Laredo and teach at TAMIU if you can tone down (or just bear with) any “Type A” tendencies in your personality.

My APSA Teaching & Learning Conference paper co-written with my colleagues Lynne and Marcus is now done; I’m looking forward to my quick trip to Baltimore to present it and catch up with the methods-teaching crowd this weekend.

Like Alex Knapp and Jim Henley I’m wondering about this whole stimulus thing; the more I think about it, the more I think that “recapitaliz[ing] the middle and lower classes” might actually be the more sensible stimulus. Pour $800 billion into a payroll tax holiday (probably the fastest way to inject money into the economy—it could be implemented and have money in peoples’ pockets by April 1st if passed today) of some form* and there are basically four outcomes I can see:

1. People spend the money. This stimulates the economy.
2. People save the money. This provides more money for banks to loan to stimulate the economy.
3. People pay off debt. The banks become better capitalized and less likely to go belly-up at taxpayer expense. This also provides more money for banks to loan to stimulate the economy.
4. People remit the money to relatives overseas. This improves our balance-of-payments and increases demand for stuff we export to those countries.

Then again, politicians can’t easily take credit for any of those outcomes, hence why it’s more fun to spend the money on things that we’d spend money on anyway at a later date.

* I’d exclude all income below the social security earnings limit from the “employee” contribution to FICA, Medicare, and self-employment taxes; at current rates we could have a 2-year employee contribution holiday for around $900 billion in extra IOUs for the various trust funds.

I think a good time was had by all at my (first annual?) Super Bowl party at the humble abode on Sunday; the company was nice and the game didn’t disappoint, despite KGNS forgetting to hit the “HD switch” in the control room until near the end of the first quarter, a glitch I called in advance in my invitation email. And while I predicted the final score exactly wrong all-in-all it was a pretty good evening, capped by a classic Office episode. A win-win-win, I’d say.

I am inclined to agree with Steven Taylor (and, by extension, disagree with Nate Silver and Kevin Drum) that it’s a bit early to assume that the House Republicans are just voting “no” in lockstep for the sole sake of being obstructionists.

For starters, the Republicans didn’t kill—merely delay—the ill-advised push to pretend* we’re delaying the digital TV transition. I also think this fits into the larger theme of a protest against Democratic efforts to circumscribe debate in the House; even if Senate Republicans agreed with Senate Democrats on the content of the DTV delay bill and it passed by unanimous consent (which isn’t a “unanimous vote” by the way), that’s no excuse for the House Democrats to rush it to the floor the next day under suspension of the rules—which allows exactly 40 minutes of debate followed by zero amendments—especially when there is a real consensus behind passing a “clean” bill providing coupon funding without the fake-delay provisions.

The fact of the matter is that pace Silver nobody is likely to remember either vote, particularly since the stimulus bill is going to bounce around the Hill several times, after which plenty of House Republicans will hail whatever (likely minimal) changes come out of conference as satisfying their concerns, and we’ll all go back to obsessing over Sasha Obama’s taste in hoodies or something much more important to the future of the republic.

Steven Taylor, Nate Silver, and Alex Knapp are all on-board with an amendment proposed by Sen. Russ Feingold to the U.S. Constitution to strip governors of their power to make long-term “temporary” appointments to the Senate. Since Feingold hasn’t released the text of his proposed amendment yet, I can’t consider the merits of his specific proposal, but in general I am supportive of the idea that a special election to fill a vacant seat should be held within 60–90 days of a senatorial vacancy. I’d also amend Article I, Section 2 to specify a similar, specific deadline for filling vacancies in the House of Representatives, but that is hardly a deal-breaker if omitted. Assuming there are no hidden catches, I hope Congress acts quickly to propose this amendment to the states, where I suspect it will be received warmly by the state legislatures—who, after all, do not require gubernatorial approval to ratify constitutional amendments.

At the same time, I hope this amendment (if it is ultimately successful, which I suspect it will be) helps dispel the modern myth that the Constitution is excessively hard to amend. In point of fact, throughout much of American history politically controversial amendments were proposed and ultimately adopted, including both the adoption and repeal of Prohibition, the extension of the right to vote to women, the abolition of the poll tax, the Civil War amendments (particularly the 14th and 15th amendments extending citizenship rights to ex-slaves), and the indirect taxation amendment that led to the federal income tax. Just because the Supreme Court in recent years has been willing to reinterpret the Constitution to better suit the often-evolving values of society (witness, for example, the magical constitutionalization of the Equal Rights Amendment absent its ratification*) does not mean that the document is too hard to amend and thus the Nine must reinterpret it instead, merely that it is easier to file an amicus curiæ brief than to work through the amendment process in Article V.

Our beloved Congress, having spent the last year or so steadfastly ignoring reports from the FCC regarding potential problems with the upcoming digital television transition, has finally decided to do a 180 and delay the mandatory transition date at a point so late in the process as to invite unmitigated chaos.

I’ll gladly concede that Congress needed to fix the accounting rules that made the converter box coupon program “run out of money” (on paper at least) but fixing those rules easily could have been done anytime over the last year (when Congress was doing exactly nothing worthwhile that I can remember) without any impact on the transition date. Instead, now we have a situation where a billion-dollar public education campaign—still ongoing as of today—that has been drilling into Americans’ skulls the date “February 17, 2009” for months will be rendered moot because a small percentage of the population can’t find it in their annual budgets to find $50 for a box to make their TVs still work and can’t plan ahead enough to get a coupon to shave that down to $10.

The best part of this bill, however, is that it’s going to create a 120-day “half-transition” period during which some stations will switch off their analog signals and some won’t. So the folks without boxes are still at least partially screwed, since there’s a good chance they will need the boxes anyway on the 17th, and folks with a box or a digital TV will get to play the fun game of “make the TV rescan for channels” every time over the next few months a local station decides it’s had enough of spending $20k/month broadcasting its analog signal and goes digital on its own whim.

At least there are some winners. The cable and satellite industries must be loving every single minute of this nonsense.