So does anyone want to take up the mantle of the table guy?

Update: He/she’s back.

The power outage at least had one silver lining for me: it forced me to spend some time in my office with minimal distractions, which allowed me to wrap up most of the textual revisions of the strategic voting paper.

I also am continuing to fiddle with the data analysis; I’m still not happy about the 2000 results, and I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about that (beyond getting a time machine, increasing the NES sample size, and figuring out some way to get more people to fess up to voting for Nader), but the 1996 results turn out to be stronger with the IRT measure of sophistication than they were with the interviewer evaluation. Plus I got the multiple imputation stuff to work.

So hopefully during the black hole between now and student paper grading time I can get this thing polished and ready for submission to a decent journal… and have time to spare to hack together about 8 bits of my dissertation and my job talk into a SPSA paper.

In other “I actually get work done, believe it or not” business in recent days, I took care of a paper review for a journal… I wish I could say it was punctual, but in fairness the first time they sent me the paper for review it got bounced from my SLU account because I was either over my mail quota or the mail system was mid-meltdown. I also wrote two recommendation letters.

Leopold Stotch shares a highlight from a recent phone interview. And apparently anonymous people know more about my employment status than I do, maybe.

I now have a phone interview scheduled for a position at a midwestern state university. More please.

For the first time in my life, the spirit moved me to create flyers for the Congress class that I am teaching next semester. I’m not entirely comfortable with advertising “no prerequisites” as a selling point, but then again there are no prerequisites—indeed, I don’t think our intro to American politics class, despite its popularity with undergrads, is actually required for anything at all in our curriculum at present.

The next step is to finalize a syllabus; I have an outline that I think will work well, but I’d like to nail down the dates for each topic and the content of the assignments.

Incidentally, I haven’t taught a MWF class since my days as a graduate instructor—if even then—and next semester I’ve lucked into two of them (Congress and intro). I am not at all a fan of the 50-minute class, and it's going to play havoc with my in-class exams in intro, but I suppose I will adapt. At least methods is only scheduled MW…

I get an inordinate number of Google hits looking for the political science job market blogs… so here are the links that I’m aware of (as of October 2009):

• Political Science Job Rumors: the discussion board that’s not really a blog.
• 2009-10 Jobs Wiki
• Public Policy/Public Administration Jobs.
• The IR Rumor Mill.
• Methods discussion blog.
• Political Theory/Public Law.
• REP (Racial/Ethnic Politics)

For the record, I have no responsibility for any of the above blogs or wikis, although I have commented on some of them on occasion. I will be happy to add any additional links that are germane to this post.

Today went better than Wednesday, largely because (a) it was shorter and (b) I didn’t spend 90% of it walking or standing. I feel reasonably good about how things went, all things considered—and certainly better than I did yesterday morning, when I was both tired and in one of those depressed moods.

I think the bar is now set pretty high, at least if the dimensions that appear to matter to this department and university are the ones on which this position will be filled. But we will see; it is early days yet.

Day one of the interview is over, and I am basically brain-dead.

There is something immensely odd about interviewing for what is essentially one’s own job: the pronouns get muddled, as do the tenses, and (putting on the shoes of the interviewers) I’m not sure there’s much comparability between what an outsider might say and what I would.

Maybe it just doesn’t feel like an interview “should” because (a) I am basically comfortable with the people I am talking to and (b) I have resigned myself to knowing my fate is essentially out of my hands; I can fiddle at the margins, but essentially whether or not I get the job is largely determined by whether or not they find someone “better” than me who also accepts this offer, neither factor being under my control.

The analogy in my mind that keeps replaying itself is something that came up during one of my feeble attempts at a relationship with another political scientist† who explained to me that for all my swell features her existing boyfriend had “incumbency advantage.”*

Well, the one time previous to this when incumbency advantage should have accrued to me on the job market it did me very little good—partially my own fault in that case, since I was still in “meek new faculty member” mode—and I am no more optimistic now than I had right to be in the past.

If you’re looking for detailed election commentary, look elsewhere.

But in the meantime: have some pretty graphs looking at the 2006 midterms in historical perspective. I need to add the 2006 numbers, but my brain is barely functioning at the moment. But in a nutshell:

• The GOP losses at midterm are remarkably consistent with the historical expectations for presidential parties.
• However, party control will change in the 110th Congress in both chambers due to the Republicans’ failure to build a cushion—the Democrats could afford to take 20–30 seat losses on average with Democratic presidents, because they could retain the majority and regain the losses in presidential years, while the Republicans did not have that luxury.

If you buy that the GOP is a natural minority party that only occasionally will muster majorities, there is a reasonable case to be made that the GOP made no strategic errors in this election or in the process of building its slim majority. However, if the GOP does have the potential to be a majority party in the electorate over the long haul, its failure to use the redistricting process to create enough safe GOP seats is a strategic blunder.

Maybe when I’m more coherent tomorrow I’ll have some thoughts on a remedy for the GOP that would revive the “strange bedfellows” alliance that got them the House in 1994: an alliance with minority interest groups to gerrymander House seats for both at the expense of white Democrats, only this time looking to another mutually-beneficial solution than gerrymandering.

My review copy of Stewart’s Analyzing Congress showed up today in the mail (I actually had it suggested to me by a professor at Lawrence during my interview there last year), and I liked it so much it went in my book order and on my Congress syllabus. Maybe I’m just overcompensating for having virtually no formal theory training in grad school.

I accomplished item #1 on the list today. Here’s the result. Item #2 should be feasible tomorrow, since my Monday schedule is currently clear, particularly if I get my intro exam written tonight.

Unfortunately, I think someone set the building alarm on Fitzgerald Hall about 30 minutes ago with me still inside, so getting home tonight may be interesting.

Oddly enough, the graphics package code that I was using to add error bars to my dotcharts has mysteriously stopped working since upgrading to R 2.4.0. I can still make the dotcharts using dotchart, but the error bars don’t show up after adding them using segments. This clearly worked last month, or otherwise I wouldn’t have had a presentation to show at Mizzou.

Luckily enough I found another solution using dotplot in lattice instead in an article by Bill Jacoby in the most recent edition of The Political Methodologist… which I probably should have read before hacking together the code the first time around. So now it works… at least until R 2.5.0 comes out, at which point all bets are off.

Halfway through the weekend, I’m 0–6 on the agenda, although I did get out 11 job applications. Sunday’s plan is to go into the office to do real work, since clearly I won’t get anything done if I sit around the apartment.

I am resolving in public to spend at least six hours this weekend doing research stuff (hey, it seems to work for vegreville). Here’s my “to do” list through SPSA:

1. Rerun the 1992–2004 NES IRT models and add the slides to the new job talk.
2. Finish up the strategic voting paper revisions, update the results and fancy graphs, and send it out for review (again).
3. Hack together a new draft of the heuristics paper after adding the McCain data analysis Rachna and I worked on over the summer during her independent study at Duke.
4. Put together a submittable draft of the coalition performance paper.
5. Write the paper that goes with the job talk for SPSA and Midwest.
6. Put together a proposal for APSA? (Do I really want to go to APSA? Do I have any new ideas for APSA?)

Items 1–2 should be feasible by Monday. 3 and 4 may get reversed in order. 5 probably needs to get done before both 3 and 4 happen, depending on how busy November ends up being.

Update: I suppose some more job applications should be in that list too.

Advising students is really hard to do without a paper copy of the catalog in front of you.

I’m still waiting for a review copy of Charles Stewart’s Analyzing Congress before deciding on my textbook requests for the Congress class I’m teaching in the spring—like most of my syllabi, this class has been historically heavy on CQ books (Congress and its Members, Congress Reconsidered, and Unorthodox Lawmaking), but teaching my American government class using Kernell and Jacobson’s Logic of American Politics has me in the mood to be a little more explicitly rat-choicey in the Congress class too. Last time I taught the class I also included Jacobson’s The Politics of Congressional Elections, but I’m getting a bit price-sensitive to the reading list so it may disappear. Or maybe I’m just bored with teaching elections stuff, since that’s what I’ve been doing this semester in my upper division seminar.

In other news, one of my loyal(?) readers has apparently taken to posting links to this blog on the various and sundry political science rumor mills out there. I suppose I ought to be flattered, but really the market isn’t about me: just ask any of the upwards of a dozen schools—some I would have given my left arm to teach at, some I would have been more ambivalent about—where I applied but (at least according to the rumor mills) shouldn’t expect to receive phone calls from. As for SLU… let’s just say I’m reasonably confident that the department is entertaining the possibility of hiring other candidates in preference to me, and on some level I’m fine with that; someone whose research and teaching interests didn’t overlap as much with Drs. Warren and/or Puro would probably be preferable to someone with more overlap (like me).

As for the market otherwise, this evening I did my first real cruise around the job listing sites in about a week and found the first genuinely exciting listing I’d seen in several weeks. We’ll see if my enthusiasm for the position translates into interest from the institution; somehow, judging from the past few months, I’m not overly optimistic. But, as they say in the lottery ads, you can’t win if you don’t play.

If there is a recurring fall “theme” here at Signifying Nothing, it’s my belief that the political science job market is fundamentally broken; the only candidates who are well-served by the market appear to be the 3–4 “star” ABDs every year and established scholars (the latter of whom don’t actually participate in the same job market), and the only employers who are well-served are those who ultimately get their pick of the litter from those categories. For everyone else, there’s the obscenely stupid APSA meat market that (except for the earliest-deadline institutions) really doesn’t work except as an impetus for a run on the hotel bar by candidates and search committee members alike.

Unlike political scientists, the economists have actually thought about these problems, and continue to refine their processes. A case in point: Stephen Karlson reports on the new ‘signaling’ mechanism that allows candidates to credibly indicate up to two positions that they are particularly interested in, getting around the problems of both private (every application including the boilerplate “I really want to teach at [Institution mail-merge name here]”) and public signals (the candidate declaring on his/her website what job he/she really wants, which probably doesn’t help the candidate with other job applications)* in cover letters and recommendations. Greg Mankiw and the AEA website explain the details.

Obviously getting political scientists to adopt a similar process would be like herding cats—but there is a strong case to be made that the lower-tier R1s and other schools would be best served by banding together and either getting the APSA to sponsor an AEA-like hiring event, or organizing their own event, in the November-January time frame where more serious interviews could take place than at the APSA meat market and departments would have a clearer idea of their needs and realistic prospects for attracting the top candidates.

Even absent a hiring conference, though, APSA could provide a similar credible signaling system for candidates in eJobs—if it were so inclined. Doing so, while a baby step towards a more useful market, would probably at least help a few candidates get on the shortlists they want to be on as opposed to the ones that departments think the candidates want to be on.

* As for me, I’ve made no real secret of my preferences, but if an R1 wants to pay my salary for a few years on the tenure track while I try to find a good liberal arts college that will take me I’m certainly not going to complain.

I found out today I made the shortlist for at least one other job. More please.

I’m 99.8% sure the department decided on an interview list for “my” job today. Of course if it’s like typical faculty meetings I may be jumping the gun slightly, since the meeting only began an hour and a half ago.

My presentation on measuring political sophistication with item-response theory models is here; it’s something of a work in progress, as I haven’t put together the pretty graphs for the American NES data yet.

E. Frank Stephenson on evidence that various New York politicians sought to promote their candidacies through the publication of private college guidebooks with their pictures on the cover:

One more data point for the public choice view of politicians over fantasy that pols are selfless public servants.

I didn’t realize that public choice had some sort of a monopoly on considering politicians as having baser motives than serving the public good.

Inspired by the discussion of ‘Moneyball’ hiring in economics at George Mason, we have discussion of whether this is a good way to build a department from Dan Drezner at Open University and one entry in the burgeoning network of political science rumor blogs. I’ll own up to my contribution to the debate:

The commenter on Dan Drezner’s article makes a good point, in that we’re not really talking about “Moneyball” here [in the blog]—Moneyball is taking people that are undervalued by the market at large (like non-top-X PhDs who may have other indicators of strong potential, or top-X PhDs who look weak due to being in a large cohort) and making the most of them while you can until they find greener pastures (in baseball, free agency; in academe, accumulating the publication record to offset their previous undervaluing and get a higher-positioned job), which fits [Southern Illinois University-Carbondale’s political science department] to a tee. Moneyball isn’t bringing people in for lifetime tenure, which is what most people think a “top-X” department should look like.

It’s not entirely a dead-end strategy… if you get enough ex-faculty out there, your department may look comparatively stronger by word of mouth than one that largely retains its initial hires. Certainly SIU gets better WoM than a lot of other non-top-X departments for that very reason, and over the long term that may build SIU vis a vis other low-to-middling tier PhD departments.

As the commenters at Open University note there are some other key differences between baseball and academe (notably the absence of locked-in long-term contracts, which allows for more “free agent” poaching in political science), but I’m not sure they matter much except for the most “movable” prospects—once on the tenure track, the modal number of job changes is either 0 or 1 in political science. That does suggest, however that departments trying to play Moneyball may need to consider intangibles that might reduce candidate mobility, so they can keep people longer than the market would normally allow.

Obligatory disclaimer: I have applied for positions at SIUC in the past, and have zero offers to show for it (else I wouldn’t be sitting here); whether this indicates some lack of Moneyballing skill on their part, or just good taste, is left as an open question.

I’m off tomorrow for a day trip over to Columbia to give a talk on measuring political sophistication… so don’t expect a lot of posting from me while I browbeat R and LaTeX into producing my slides this evening.

And, no, before anyone asks: this isn’t a job talk—just a practice run.

Here is a list of everything I’m trying my hardest not to work on today:

• Grading methods homework and labs. (did that, alas)
• Grading American politics exams.
• My presentation on measuring political sophistication that I have to give on Friday afternoon at Mizzou.
• Converting the LaTeX version of the Damn Impeachment Article™ into Word format to make the editors of PRQ happy.
• Job applications.

A singularly unproductive afternoon, if I do say so myself.

Jeff Gill perceives some salutary changes in the labor market for political methodologists:

Last Fall I counted 51 faculty methods jobs posted in political science. I paid close attention because I was on a relevant search committee. This was particularly interesting because equilibrium in past years was about five or so. Right now there are 39 methods jobs posted (subtracting non-tenure/tenure track positions). Now some of these are listed as multiple fields, but one has to presume that listing the ad on the methods page is a signal.

Apparently we have US News and World Report to thank for fundamentally changing the labor market by making methodology the fifth “official” field of the discipline. A number of (non-methodologist) colleagues believed that I must be exaggerating since an order of magnitude difference seems ridiculous. Actually, it turns out that I was underestimating as Jan Box-Steffensmeier (president of the Society for Political Methodology and the APSA methods section) recently got a count of 61 from the APSA. I think their definition was a little broader than mine (perhaps including formal theory and research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions).

So an interesting question is how quickly does supply catch up to demand here? My theory is that it will occur rather slowly since the lead time for methods training seems to be longer than the lead time for other subfields. This is obviously good news for graduate students going on the market soon in this area. I’m curious about other opinions, but I think that this is a real change for the subfield.

I concur in part and dissent in part.

I am less convinced that we can attribute this change to US News (although I’m not one of those academic US News haters) than simply to the broader market: people with superior methods training are more likely to get jobs than those who don’t have it, which means that methods training is more important at the graduate level—and increasingly the undergraduate level too. The booming enrollments at the ICPSR Summer Program, including from top-ranked schools that traditionally considered their own methods training sufficient for graduate students, are indicative of this trend as well.

As far as the supply-demand equilibrium works, I think there is a perception out there (perhaps unfair) of the existence of a methods clique—one, that if it exists, I am decidedly not a part of. Thus far, in-clique supply seems to have been sufficient to satisfy demand; we—and perhaps during this hiring season I—shall see whether this continues to be the case. My perception is that high demand is somewhat illusory; several unfilled methods jobs in the past two years have not reappeared, suggesting that filling these jobs is less of a priority than one might think.

The broader issue is a question of definition: what is a “methodologist”? As someone who generally doesn’t live to maximize my own likelihood functions, I’d self-identify as an applied method0logist at best—and certainly don’t consider methodology my primary field of inquiry; tools are great, but I gravitate toward more substantive questions.

As for why Gill thinks “research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions” shouldn’t count, I really wouldn’t hazard a comment. But I do think that if he wants to increase the supply of methodologists, getting more undergraduates (particularly at BA-granting institutions like liberal arts colleges) in the pipeline early so they can do advanced work out of the gate at the graduate level would seem to be a key part of the strategy.