I’m waiting to hear back from one job interview; once that happens, I’ll either have a very tough decision to make, or a very easy one… and even though professionally a tough decision might be better for me, personally I’d rather just have it all be over with for 2007 so I can get on with doing what I need to do for 2008.

Paul Gronke and Free Exchange both address how the use of a majority-runoff system in French presidential elections has produced in 2007 a runoff without the presumptive Condorcet winner on the ballot; neither is inaccessible enough to bring the good Marquis in by name, but Free Exchange mentions Ken Arrow and Paul Gronke discusses Gary Cox, which are certainly good starts in that direction.

I just got back from the Midwest conference in Chicago; Frequent Commenter Scott and I shared a rather palatial room on the nosebleed level—at a price significantly below the conference rate to boot. I can say that all three panels I participated in were intellectually stimulating and full of intriguing papers, the choices of food and beverage destinations by FCS were all excellent, it was great to catch up with a few Signifying Nothing groupies readers in the discipline, and Southwest Airlines did its usual quality job of shuffling my derrière from point A to point B with minimal fuss. Given my time constraints on Wednesday, I had to abandon my earlier plan of riding the train, although the CTA did get a healthy chunk of change from me while in Chicago (to/from Midway and on our gastronomic touring).

Now I just need to track down a local source for 312 and Honker’s Ale.

This working paper by Holger Lutz Kern and Jens Hainmueller just crossed the POLMETH wire and may be of some substantive interest—particularly for those who are debating the use of state-subsidized broadcasting into authoritarian states, like the U.S. broadcasts into Cuba and many of the BBC World Service’s foreign-language services:

A common claim in the democratization literature is that foreign free media undermine authoritarian rule. No reliable micro-level evidence on this topic exists, however, since independent survey research is rarely possible in authoritarian regimes and self-selection into media consumption complicates causal inferences. In this case study of the impact of West German television on political attitudes in communist East Germany, we address these problems by making use of previously secret survey data and a natural experiment. While most East Germans were able to tune in to West German broadcasts, some of them were cut off from West German television due to East Germany’s topography. We exploit this plausibly exogenous variation to estimate the impact of West German television on East Germans’ political attitudes using LARF instrumental variable estimators. Contrary to conventional wisdom, East Germans who watched West German television were more satisfied with life in East Germany and the communist regime. To explain this surprising finding, we demonstrate that West German television’s role in transmitting political information not available in the state-controlled communist media was insignificant and that television primarily served as a means of entertainment for East Germans. Archival material on the reaction of the East German regime to the availability of West German television corroborates our argument.

So, I have this job interview… and the university in question decides to use a car service instead of having a department member shuttle me to/from the airport, which a perfectly rational decision on their part—and probably better for candidates’ sanity anyway, but nobody asked us what we think of being interrogated by a search committee member just minutes after enduring airline hell. But I digress.

Anyway, I arrive at the airport and get in the guy’s van, and I get to spend an hour listening to the guy’s treatise on the global monetary system (his issues with debasing the currency, fiat money, the whole nine yards). He drops me off and I go on my merry way. Same guy picks me up after the interview and, in the course of the airport journey, asks me if I’ve thought about 2008 and I try to steer the conversation to about the driest, most academic discussion of front-loading known to man. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work—and at this point, the driver tells me in no uncertain terms that the only candidate for 2008 who’s a “real American” is Ron Paul (his distinct lack of popularity—like the low prices of gold and silver the previous day—being attributed to The Man keeping him down).

Robert Axelrod has belatedly discovered the blogs, and he’s missing the forest for the trees. Quoth our esteemed leader:

In discussions with APSA colleagues, I have learned that a number of private web sites and blogs have emerged recently that are widely used by political scientists, particularly graduate students, to discuss the academic job market. In their best form, such sites afford a new vehicle for the “grapevine” discussions that have always accompanied the academic labor market. However, I have also been shown anonymous postings on these lists making racist, sexist, and homophobic attacks on political scientists. The context makes clear this language is coming from within our discipline. There is little we can do to respond directly to these anonymous postings. We can speak out however. I urge you to stay attentive in the departmental communities you lead to gauge whether there are incivilities in the exchanges among your students and colleagues. Where you hear evidence of them, directly or indirectly, confront this behavior in whatever ways you consider appropriate and best. I truly believe these events are infrequent and at the fringe of our community. But the integrity of our professional exchange is the bedrock of our community. I hope you’ll agree with me it is our obligation as leaders of the discipline to sustain the respectful and civil treatment of colleagues.

Since Bob’s late to the party, I’ve had my response prepared for nine months:

In terms of wider disciplinary conversations in the blogosphere, I think the truth of the matter is that there are some serious grievances about the discipline among political scientists that simply will not be aired in non-anonymous public fora. That inevitably means there is going to be some nastiness, as those with private agendas use anonymity to attack others. I am unsure what the proper balance is, but I do know that the same themes raised at the American/Comparative jobs blog are the subject of whispers in the hallways of conferences and other gatherings.

The bottom line, I think is that if we are going to have more “openness” and “reform” in political science, we are going to need some brutal honesty about issues beyond methodological pluralism in the APSR—things like overproduction of PhDs, hiring practices (including the fundamentally broken hiring process), the dominance of doctoral-granting departments on the boards of the APSA, journals, and regional associations, differing standards for what is considered “quality” scholarship among subfields, and more. And I think that brutal honesty is going to need people who are willing to speak up about these issues non-anonymously without the protection (not from outside interference as originally intended, but from our own colleagues) of tenure. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon, but I would love to see someone prove me wrong.

Except for the overuse of scare quotes, I think it still basically applies today. Anyone who believes that “racist, sexist, and homophobic” attacks are solely motivated by a lack of civility—rather than being based on (quite likely falsely-held) beliefs about widespread non-merit-based decision-making in hiring, tenure, and promotion at most institutions and within APSA itself—is quite simply dangerously naïve.

According to this table, the median 2006-07 academic year salary for a first-year political scientist was $50,207. I’m told the same researchers also found that every six-year-old girl in America got a pony at Christmas, just like she asked for.

Dan Drezner seeks eyeballs for a chapter on blogging in the upcoming “APSA Guide to Publication,” which is worthy of your input for reasons beyond the fact that my name appears sandwiched between those of Leslie Johns and Jacob T. Levy in the acknowledgments.

While the mystery table dude(tte) sorts out his/her issues with Blogger, you can get to the political science jobs wiki here. And, no, I’m not the table dude(tte), in case you were wondering.

I can’t imagine why my big news hasn’t appeared yet… but maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internets on April 1.

My connecting flight from Memphis to St. Louis last night was canceled, so I got to spend the day today with mom and my step-dad before flying out this evening. While I was in town, Mom and I went to see Blades of Glory, which was highly amusing.

I also had the distinct displeasure of having a relatively well-known political scientist go after me for having the temerity to treat Daron Shaw’s measure of campaign resource allocation as valid. I’m not sure if I scored any points by standing my ground or not, to be honest—I pointed out that it appeared in a top-3 journal, so presumably the reviewers lent some credence to the measure; that Shaw was a tenured professor at the University of Texas, so presumably he wasn’t an idiot; and that his results were consistent with other scholars’ measures.

A textbook called Looking at Movies mysteriously arrived for me today. I say “mysteriously” because I don’t teach any classes that have anything to do with film, although I’ve always wanted to teach a course on depictions of politics in the mass media—not a “politics of film” course per se, more a course looking at how the political system is portrayed in a variety of movie and TV genres.

Certainly one segment would be on speculative fiction, wherein most political systems shown are implausible or ridiculous (the new Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 being far less absurd than most). It’s a shame there’s no movie of Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, for its “Jefferson Mark-3 Constitution” would be worth some serious mockery, although I suppose wags might say after the 2004 election that any two randomly-selected Americans would have made better candidates than the two foisted upon us by the GOP and Democrats.

Timothy Burke advocates moving away from “writing-intensive” courses in favor of a requirement for courses that include assignments that emphasize the development of information literacy and library research skills. Now if we only included such a course in each major—perhaps one that also included instruction in, oh I don’t know, the appropriate methodologies for the given discipline—perhaps we might get somewhere in the academy.

I’ll pitch a couple of items from the Harvard Social Science Statistics Blog worth mentioning.

First, Sebastian Bauhoff plugs a number of summer quantitative methods programs. My overall review of ICPSR would be more positive than his, but as he mentions much depends on the courses you choose: Charles Franklin’s MLE class is generally a subject of rave reviews, and I can personally vouch for Bill Jacoby’s class in scaling and Doug Baer’s class in latent variable structural equation modeling (LISREL models). I’ve also heard that the advanced MLE course has vastly improved since I took it in 2001 (when it batted around .500 while rotating four instructors). Other advanced classes that seem to get good reviews include Jeff Gill’s Bayesian class and the simultaneous equations class. Historically I know time series and categorical data analysis were somewhat hit-and-miss; the latter was regarded as excellent when taught by Jeremy Freese, but I’m told it has gone downhill since.

Second, James Griener expresses concern that people may start applying statistical models willy-nilly to explaining lower-court decision-making, on the basis that decisions are not iid but instead controlled largely by precedent. Certainly sticking circuit court opinions in as the dependent variable in a logit would be stupid without paying some serious attention to the error structure. But that hardly forecloses interesting analysis.

Also, my vague applied notion of the ideal-point model is that items (decisions) are not actually believed to be iid (there is at least one latent variable explaining them, so by definition they are not truly independent of each other), so I don’t think using an item-response theory model would be problematic—however, you’d certainly end up recovering a “respect for stare decisis” dimension in addition to the ideology dimension(s) you recover from the Supreme Court, which might actually help contribute to interesting substantive debates.

A public service announcement: anyone who needs to know my employment status for 2007–08 would be best advised to ask me directly. But as of this moment I have not accepted any job offers and do not expect to do so in the next two weeks, barring some unforeseen circumstances (i.e. a new offer).

James Joyner notes that the public opinion numbers on Congress have reverted back to their long-term average of 28% approval after a brief “100-hours” honeymoon where “approve” only trailed “disapprove” by a mere 18 points.

What may be more interesting is the dropoff among Democrats; their approval of Congress is already almost down to the last year’s lows among Republicans. I have a good hypothesis as to why that might be the case (my guess is that Republican identifiers tend to have lower expectations of Congress, and therefore rate it more highly than Democrats, when you control for who’s in the majority party), but no real time to spend on the analysis to demonstrate it, or for that matter the journal search to find out if it's already been done.

Somehow a conference call for an interview today turned into a series of conversations involving me, the relevant search committee, and my voicemail. Hopefully I was at least somewhat coherent during the interview, after being interrupted by busy signals, voice prompts, and “off hook” tones, but I wouldn’t wager a lot of money on that.

I suppose it could have been worse; I could have ended up having a conversation with two search committees simultaneously. Clearly that would violate some fundamental physical law of the universe, or, at the very least, certain provisions of the UN Declaration of Human Rights relating to cruel and inhumane treatment.

Still no sign of a written offer letter… presumably spring break (there, not here) is to blame for that. No news on any other recent interviews either, which makes me a little antsy.

From today’s Inside Higher Ed stories:

Intermediate algebra at the University of Alabama used to be your basic introductory class — lecture format, little interaction.

When Joe Benson, senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, looked at the grade distribution in the Math 100 course in 1999, he was displeased. Fewer than 40 percent of the 1,500 students who enrolled during that academic year received a C- or higher, and many were unable to move onto the next course in the math sequence.

“It was a situation where students, particularly at that level, had a difficult time learning the math in that format,” Benson said. “Their engagement in the course wasn’t as high as we would have liked.”

By fall 2004, the grade distribution was markedly different. Seventy-five percent of students received either A, B or C grades in the course.

What gave?

Early in 2000, Alabama was selected to take part in a course redesign project set up through the National Center for Academic Transformation. The nonprofit organization consults with colleges across the country on how they can improve student academic performance while reducing costs. It advocates more use of technology in large-enrollment, introductory courses, and in some cases replaces lectures with lab time that allow for more individual interaction between professors and students.

With an $8.8 million grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the center provided grants to 30 two- and four-year institutions to take part in its program in course redesign from 1999 to 2004. NCAT reported that student learning, measured through tests before and after, improved at 25 of the institutions and remained equal at the other five. All colleges involved reported cost savings — money that goes back into a department’s general fund, according to the center.

Will it work in political science? n=1 thus far.

I have a job offer; the terminally bored probably already learned that (along with other details, probably down to the dollar figure of the offer) from the wiki or one of the rumor sites already. The Magic 8 Ball says “situation cloudy—check back next Monday.”

“I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member.” – Groucho Marx.

In unrelated news, I’m going to EITM at WashU in June.

Laura of 11D has been trying out PowerPoint in her classes lately despite some initial reluctance to do so. I have to say I’m generally in the anti-slideshow† camp, with a few exceptions:

• I always do my job talks with a presentation if I can. It keeps me organized, it avoids handouts and fiddling with overheads, and (with a remote) I can wander around more freely.
• I do the “math” part of methods with presentations; I can’t draw most Greek letters to save my life, and overheads are just too fiddly for me.

The big downsides are the lack of spontaneity, which affects all classes, and showing steps in figuring out a problem—the “here’s one I baked earlier” problem—that I think detracts from student learning in methods if you don’t structure the presentation right (usually I break from the presentation to work out problems on the board).

I couldn’t see using a presentation in a seminar; anything I’d write on the board in the seminar would be too hard to predict in advance anyway. But if I end up at a place with large introductory classes, I’ll probably use more presentations for the self-interested reason that “PowerPoint = good evaluations” and the more practical reason that I’ll probably end up teaching multiple sections of the introductory course at such a place anyway.

† Even when I use presentations, I normally don’t use PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or Keynote; instead, I use the über-secret slideshow features of PDF viewers like Adobe Reader or xpdf with LaTeX.

Arnold Kling takes apart the book The Logic of Political Survival by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al. A taste of the critique:

In my opinion, the authors of The Logic of Political Survival should not be criticized for mishandling data.

They should be arrested. Imprisoned. Only released back into the community with warnings to neighbors to protect your children. ...

[I]t is only interesting to tests constraints on the data that are imposed by theory. In this case, the constraints are being imposed by simple incompetence.

The Logic of Political Survival is a stimulating and provocative book. I was impressed by the authors’ use of historical examples, particularly the use of King Leopold’s different approaches to governing Belgium and the Congo as a “natural experiment” demonstrating that institutional characteristics matter more than the leader’s personality. However, in my view, the attempts to introduce formal game theory and econometrics did more harm than good. Rather than bridge the gulf between political scientists and economists, they widened it—as far as I am concerned—by their shameful and unseemly conduct with the data.

þ: Dirk, via email, who by virtue of his educational background represents the winning side in this argument.

Timothy Burke talks sense about Institutional Review Boards and federal oversight thereof, at least as applied to the humanities and social sciences.

Incidentally, many IRBs (including those at SLU and Duke) have asserted that the use of secondary data on human subjects is also subject to their oversight, even if completely anonymized as is the case of the American National Election Studies and General Social Survey. Apparently this requirement exists just in case junior faculty members on the tenure clock didn’t have enough useless paperwork to fill out… or maybe it’s just bureaucratic turf-building by non-academics who wouldn’t recognize social scientific research if it snuck up behind them and interviewed them for six hours.

Screen your potential job applications against the list of ICPSR member institutions. Data: don’t take a job without it.

0-for-5 and counting…