The good news is that the state of Arkansas won’t have Chris Lawrence to kick around any more. Or at all, for that matter. At least I got enough credits out of that interview from Southwest to put me over the top for a free ticket.

The tote board now stands at 0-for-3 for Fall ’07.

Update: If the wiki is to be believed, make that 0-for-4.

Another update: The title of this post is a semi-paraphrase of the third quote down.

There’s something vaguely Soviet about trying to come up with a written plan of what one hopes to achieve over the next n years as an academic. Particularly when said plan is contingent on a hypothetical (like, say, being hired) that, while not of negligible likelihood, is certainly not a Sure Thing™.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m certain there is value to the exercise, if only because it’s useful to be able to rattle something off in response to a question on an interview.

I should be in bed since I have an 8:45 flight tomorrow to Charlotte for the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference. In addition to seeing Michelle and a fellow Ole Miss grad at the conference, I’m being put up (with?) by Frequent Commenter Scott and his family during my stay, so I’m only out my airfare, the absurd $190 conference registration fee, and my rental car.

I’m particularly looking forward to hobnobbing with all the people who got the jobs I wanted this year. That’s going to be great fun.

Rick Hasen and Jonathan Adler note the passing of prominent American politics scholar Nelson W. Polsby, probably best known for his study of American political institutions such as Congress and the presidency.

I need to complete the following tasks today (now that I’ve recovered from my early morning Monday):

1. Apply for four new jobs that just appeared on various and sundry job sites.
2. Prepare for my Congress class Wednesday morning. (I can prepare for intro before class in the morning and methods between classes, since those are classes I taught last semester and not a lot has changed in either, but I haven’t taught Congress since July 2005, when I was using different books, so it’s essentially a new prep.)
3. Prepare for a teaching demonstration in a methods course Friday at a university in Texas. (I have something canned for this, so it won’t be too much additional work.)
4. Finish revisions to the strategic voting paper so I can send it out.

Now, if you had to guess, which one of those do you think won’t get done today?

Newmark’s Door links federal income tax liability data by county and congressional district. A map would be nice too… perhaps I can dig out the code I used for the census maps I made in R a few years back and use that.

Jacob Levy senses a disturbing trend in the job market force for political theorists, based on the APSA’s (in my opinion, decidedly rose-colored) statistics on political science hiring in recent years. I can’t say I’m very surprised by those findings. My sense from four years on the market is that new hiring, particularly outside the research universities, is trending in a very pragmatic direction, with more emphasis on applied and borderline vocational subfields such as policy and public administration (and, to a lesser extent, quantitative political analysis as applied to those fields) and rather less on the theoretical study of politics, normative or otherwise.

On the other hand, I’m not sure many R1s are planning to follow the lead(?) of my graduate alma mater and Florida State by completely eliminating the subfield… which means that the supply of theory PhDs will probably decline slower than collegiate demand for such jobs. Good news for penny-pinching chairs and deans, perhaps, but alas not-so-good news for good folks like Nick.

Update: Mr. Troester posts his thoughts on the matter.

Tomorrow will be my first full day of the semester after having to miss two days (including the first two days of my Monday-Wednesday methods class). For reasons I don’t quite understand, even though my teaching schedule has a lot more cancelled days on it this semester than last (due not just to the interviews I knew about when I was making the syllabus, but also to Midwest and APSA T&LC), I don’t actually seem to be losing any class days in methods compared to last semester. I suppose those rumors about spring terms being longer than fall ones are actually true…

Tyler Cowen links a blog whose mission I can wholeheartedly support… and not just because my experience with the Duke IRB made me decide to kill off the experiential learning part of my methods course.

I have slept for all of four hours in the last two or three days. That was far more fun to do when I was an undergrad, let me tell you.

The interview at [location redacted] by and large went well, but I think I need to go back to doing my old job talk. I think even the “big picture” version of the sophistication measurement talk is just too abstract for most audiences; it’d work at an PhD-granting department, but since I’m not interviewing at those sorts of places, and not all that terribly interested in making my career at an R1, it just doesn’t work as well.

So mostly sleep and class prep tomorrow, then teach Friday, then get ready for another interview Sunday and Monday at [location also redacted] which isn’t that far away from [location redacted]. I’m also trying to figure out scheduling for an interview at [yet another location] that doesn’t necessitate me returning from T&LC in Charlotte and hopping immediately on a plane to [airport near yet another location]. Life could be worse—I guess I could not have these sorts of problems in my life.

After being about the only American today to successfully reach his destination on time by commercial aircraft, I am now in [location redacted] for a job interview. Since they didn’t put me up in a barely-renovated former hospital, they’ve already won some mild positive cred from me.

James Joyner posts on the ubiquity of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato in the mass media. Like Joyner, I think part of the explanation is media laziness (and part of it is Sabato’s self-promotion), and I expect research on media expert use in various subdomains would find similar patterns in other areas of media coverage.

That said, I think citations to experts within each subdomain are distributed according to a long tail function, suggesting that while Sabato seems dominant because of his frequent citation by media outlets (and our human cognitive bias that makes events that occur 1/4 to 1/20th of the time seem more frequent than they actually are), the “field” actually predominates over him.

New Jersey to allow idiots to vote. (þ: Democracy in America)

Jacob Levy takes note of some new rankings of PhD-granting departments in political science published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, using a methodology that does not incorporate institutional reputation. I’m not going to say that they’re implausible, but the fact that there’s one UC school ranked in the top ten and it’s not located in Berkeley or San Diego makes me a mite skeptical.

Update: Jacob has updated his post with some details about the methodology behind the rankings; as he notes, it probably gives too much credit to books for article-driven subfields like American and methods, and to a lesser extent IR.

I’d also comment that reputation, which most political science ranking systems to date have been largely based on, is by and large a lagging indicator; perhaps these rankings represent a useful leading indicator, particularly in book-driven fields like theory, but I wouldn’t find them of much use on their own.

I am finally on the return leg of the grand roadtrip—I have one more day in Memphis before I finally get back home to butt-numbingly cold St. Louis. I enjoyed my visit to New Orleans. Both of my SPSA panels went well, although they were, alas, lightly attended; I am certainly more confident about the publication prospects for the paper, although now it needs a blog nickname—perhaps “the damn measurement paper” will suffice.

I also enjoyed catching up with Steven, Dieter (the rock upon whom ICPSR is built), Andrew (all too briefly), and Kelly.

Steven Taylor and I had lunch today at Mother’s Restaurant, self-declared home of the “world’s best baked ham.” I have to say that the ham and cheese po-boy was excellent, if on the pricey side ($9!).

In other SPSA conference news, my morning panel at the Hotel Intercontinental was relegated to a tiny conference room with a hand-printed sign adjacent to a service elevator. You’d think the public opinion section would get more respect from the conference powers that be…

The SPSA paper is here for the morbidly or otherwise curious.

I think it’s time for a new New Year’s Resolution. Instead of my annual resolution to lose weight—which feels like tilting at windmills these days—I hereby resolve to stop being as much of a perfectionist, particularly when it comes to my research. I will now make things good enough, send them out, and hope for the best, rather than trying to anticipate and address every last objection some anal reviewer might have to the piece.

The moral of this resolution, of course, is that I should have sent out the strategic voting paper months ago, rather than continuing to fiddle with every last detail. So I shall end my fiddling, stick the latest results in the current draft, and send the damn thing out before Christmas.

(This is easier said than done, I suspect, although I’m told committing to these things is an important step in ensuring they get done.)

I now have a campus interview tentatively scheduled for mid-January at a southern liberal arts college. More please.

I’m not sure where in my application materials someone at a teaching institution got the impression that I’d prefer a position in a research-oriented department (although I doubt it was in anything I wrote, nor in my letters of recommendation), but since potential employers are apparently hanging on every syllable that appears on the blog, let me reiterate a few points:

1. Beggars can’t be choosers, particularly in March, when I accepted my non-tenure-track positions at Duke and SLU.
2. I have never taught a graduate-level class, despite having opportunities to do so.
3. In six semesters of full-time teaching, including spring 2007, I have carried a three-course teaching load in all but one: my first semester at Duke. At Millsaps, my effective teaching load was higher (an additional directed readings course each semester, along with supervising an honors thesis).
4. If I didn’t want to teach, there are ample research opportunities in the private sector for someone with my skills and interests with far better job security and remuneration. And, by definition, I wouldn’t be applying for your job that requires a lot of teaching and advising.

I now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

Leopold Stotch explains how to buy student worker loyalty. I suppose that’s slightly more ethical than selling desk copies on Amazon or to the textbook buyers… and at least more altruistic.

Jeff Gill looks at the plethora of terminology surrounding multilevel models:

There is a plethora of names for multilevel models. Sociologists seem to prefer “hierarchical,” many statisticians say “mixed effects,” and there is heterogeneity about usage in economics. It seems reasonable to standardize, but this is unlikely to happen. ...

Some prefer “random intercepts” for “fixed effects” and perhaps we can consider these all to be members of a larger family where indices are turned-on turned-off systematically. On the other hand maybe it’s just terminology and not worth worrying about too much. Thoughts?

Silly me thought the plethora of terminology was a deliberate obfuscation effort by methodologists to make them look like they know more stuff than they actually do. For example, smarty-pants methodologists could say in casual conversation, “I know hierarchical models and mixed effects!” And unless you knew that they were the same thing, the smarty-pants methodologist would look like s/he was two things smarter than the non-smarty-pants methodologist who didn’t know either.

I may try this myself in interviews… “I know logistic regression and logit!” “I know dummy variables and fixed effects!” I feel smarter already…

Have I mentioned lately how much I despise phone interviews?

As a few readers are already aware, I learned (under highly suboptimal circumstances) that SLU has offered the tenure-track equivalent to the position I currently occupy to someone else, although it is unclear at this point whether or not said someone else will be accepting said position; it is also unclear whether I might possibly receive an offer should this offer be turned down.

The good news? Three phone interviews next week, and one more I’m very confident of getting in the near future. Some of them even at places that I’d rather be than SLU… admittedly a list that has expanded somewhat since Friday.

After a three-month drought, I have now three phone interviews scheduled for two days next week. I have no clue what this means, but I guess it’s good.