Barry Burden notes that party identification explains too much variance in vote choice these days:

The old Michigan triad of partisanship, issues, and candidate evaluations as an explanation for vote choices is proving less useful in recent days. The main reason is that party identification and the vote are practically one and the same. In the 2000 and 2004 NES data, better than 90% of partisans voted for the presidential candidate of their party. In 2004 only 40 respondents (7% of partisans) voted against their stated party identification.

He sets out a few intriguing directions for future research on party identification.

Orin Kerr:

[F]our years after the Patriot Act was passed, a meeting of everyone who thinks of the Patriot Act as actual legislation could be held in my kitchen.

Murray Edelman couldn’t have said it better himself.

U of C theory professor Jacob Levy talks about his tenure denial, breaking a two-month blogospheric silence; from his perspective, the fact that both he and Dan Drezner were denied tenure at the departmental level has nothing to do with blogging or ideology, but instead because “both political economy and liberal political theory are outside the emerging, Perestroikan, sense of what [Chicago’s] department’s about.”

My (strictly personal) sense is that any department that aspires to either be or continue to be considered at the top of the discipline needs to attract and retain the best faculty possible across the breadth of the discipline. My sense is also that the Perestroikans and their fellow travellers have at best a minimal conception of the actual breadth of the discipline. The intersection of these two senses is most disturbing, at least for those of us who’d like to think that Chicago ought to be an important center of political science research.

Prof. Munger makes a rare appearance in the blogosphere to recount his recent run-in with your Transportation Security Administration screeners (presumably) at RDU.

Part of an ongoing series.

Mungowitz may be ended in the blogosphere, but his alter ego lives on elsewhere: Robert Lawson of Division of Labour posts a link to Mike Munger’s recent talk at Capital University, entitled “Democracy is Overrated.”

Also, a Munger quote graces the front page of today’s Raleigh News & Observer in the latest article about my erstwhile colleague and administration advisor Peter Feaver—the latter link coming courtesy of the departmental mailing list, where there is some guffawing about the characterization of our department as “left-leaning” and the (apparently false) statement that mutual colleague Chris Gelpi’s door has “anti-war posters” on it.

Congratulations to David Adesnik on completing his D.Phil.; I think these words are pretty apropos of most finishers’ thoughts:

Afterward, I didn’t feel very much like celebrating. I felt like a survivor, not a winner. But when it comes to getting your doctorate, surviving is more than enough.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself.

I decided today to spend President’s Day weekend in Washington at the 3rd APSA Teaching and Learning Conference. Vita fodder, catch it!

The president’s poll numbers appear to be recovering as of late, and there are two major competing theories to explain the change. Charles Franklin appears to attribute the change to the new PR pushback from the White House, which we might term the Feaver-Gelpi thesis (see also Sunday’s NYT), while Glenn Reynolds says it’s the gas prices and the Mystery Pollster suggests good economic news in general.

It may be the most simplistic thesis, but I think the “pump price” explanation is probably the most plausible; unlike other information, gasoline prices are unavoidable information for most voters and not subject to partisan spin, unlike the presidential pushback on Iraq and news of the general economic recovery—both of which can be spun negatively in a way that falling gasoline prices really can’t. In a noise-filled informational environment, I suspect clear “pocketbook” signals like gasoline prices are much stronger cues for presidential support than the world of competing, ideologically-based claims over Iraq and interest rates.

Update: Al Qaeda appears to put some stock in the pump price explanation as well.

The interview with the place I thought might turn out to be Fundie U went somewhat better than expected, although I’m still not entirely sure why I got the interview in the first place—the job description listed two courses (and only two courses) that I’ve never taught before.

On the topic of the broader market, the prospects seem to have slowed to a trickle; things will probably pick up again in January, as some of the places where people have moved up in the world (usually the ones who can’t afford, logistically or otherwise, to do searches two years in a row) decide to take a crapshoot on the leftovers from the first wave.

In the meantime, it’s strangely liberating to have only sent one job application in the past month and only have a couple on the “I am seriously considering applying” pile—a two-year postdoc at a liberal arts college and a research-only job in my field that is quite a longshot but would be a ticket to the top of the Social Sciences Citation Index, the latter of which I just found out about today.

For those unable to read between the lines of my recent posts or comments, I’ve declined the offer. I won’t be publicly identifying the university in question, but let me say that I was treated well by them and my decision is in no way a reflection on the fine folks there—rather, in the end it boiled down to a question of whether or not it would be fair (to either party) for me to take a tenure-track position knowing in my heart-of-hearts that I wasn’t planning to stay.

I believe I’m still in a good position to secure a tenure-track job that is more compatible with my interests as a teacher and a scholar, and I have been assured I have a fall-back position here at Duke for the next academic year, should it become necessary. So… back to the salt mines (or at least Emacs).

As I alluded to in the comments of the previous post, the offer I was hoping would materialize in Frozen Tundra country seems unlikely to do so. Them’s the breaks; I guess that gives me an extra incentive to sell myself well on the phone interview with a relatively small private university on the west coast I have scheduled for Tuesday at noon. And it gives me the opportunity to do the complete revamp of my application materials—most notably, my thoroughly unsatisfactory statement of teaching philosophy—I’ve been thinking about for the last two weeks.

As of this morning, I have an offer for a tenure-track position (the one in Rams land, for those keeping score at home).

Apropos my newfound popularity, I just volunteered to take on a second section of Quantitative Political Analysis in the spring in exchange for a modest pay bump and a TA to handle the grading for the two methods sections. The only real downside is that it looks like I’ll no longer have Tuesdays off.

If you think the executive has a hard time controlling the bureaucracy it nominally heads, or that the Supreme Court has difficulty keeping the 9th Circuit reined in, just remember: these principal-agent problems could be worse. In the case of the Debian project’s constitution, much worse.

I just got back a couple of hours ago from Frozen Tundra country, where the weather gods almost managed to produce some real frozen tundra for my enjoyment. Instead, I just got bitterly cold winds and rain; I’d have preferred snow, to be honest. The interview process went about as well as can be expected, and of the Realistic Prospects™ I think it’s the place I’d enjoy working the most, but given the crapshoot nature of these things and the fact I believe I may have to give someone else (and maybe even two someone elses) an answer before these folks are in a position to make up their minds I’m not going to be getting my hopes up.

Even better, tomorrow afternoon I get to explore my fallback option at a nearby public institution: a demotion in academic rank and salary coupled with a doubling of workload, but a year-to-year renewable contract. Job security, it’s a good thing.

I currently have 11 students on the waiting list to enroll in my methods class in the spring semester (in addition to the 30 already in the class). Apparently my rep for evilness hasn’t propagated very widely around campus yet…

Steven Taylor is attempting to assemble a list of blogging political scientists; drop in and add your knowledge to the list.

Lest I be seen as an outlier, Daniel Drezner is similarly unimpressed with the recycled Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Alan Wolfe I was forwarded by a departmental colleague and complained about yesterday.

First off… a semi-apology to those of you who are getting bored with the “inside baseball” academe stuff.

On to the point of this post. Assume for the sake of argument that my “dream job” is to teach at a liberal arts college (which may or may not appear on the Wikipedia list), and also assume that by the time I have to decide on a job offer, I won’t have any offers from liberal arts colleges.

Question 1: Would accepting a tenure-track offer at a different sort of college or university improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 2: Would another year here at Duke (which is by no means guaranteed as of yet), teaching more-or-less what I am teaching now (two sections of undergraduate methods a year and two other courses), getting a bit more research done, and potentially getting a publication or two, improve or diminish the chances of landing a job at a tenure-track liberal arts college in the future?

Question 3: Would a second non-tenure-track job at a liberal arts college improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 4: Assuming I don’t get a job at a liberal arts college this year, is there anything in particular that is under my control that would improve my prospects of getting a job at a liberal arts college? Things that are under my control: research, teaching evaluations, future course selection, attending the APSA Teaching & Learning Conference, etc.; things not/no longer under my control: whatever my letters say about me, where I went to school (i.e. not at a liberal arts college), my past experience, etc.

Anyway, I know at least some of my readers are at liberal arts colleges, so I’d appreciate their feedback in particular—informed speculation from folks at other types of institutions may also be helpful, though.

Last but not least: if you are on a hiring committee at a liberal arts college that happens to have my file, you should also be aware that a tenure-track offer at a liberal arts college would “win” any competition with another offer, ceteris peribus.

As a counterpoint to my previous post, note this article in the other, less-relevant Chronicle to which I preemptively responded 15 months ago.

Note to self: grow a thick skin:

“The visiting professors are not up to the quality that the Duke professors are,” said senior Kate Abramson, a political science minor and public policy studies major. She added that she was deterred from majoring in political science partly because of the lack of professors.

After all, we all know that having 17 APSRs on your vita makes you a better teacher.

This time next week, I’ll be off for an interview at a secure, undisclosed metropolitan state-supported university in the former Northwest Territory (of Northwest Ordinance and Northwestern University fame). I am also cautiously optimistic about the prospects of an interview in the same general region (a bit norther, up in badger country, one might say) at a selective liberal arts college with a strangely familiar name, but such things have yet to be confirmed. Both, as it turns out, saw me first at the meat market. Score one for speed dating.

A job by Thanksgiving would be nice. Two competing job offers at Thanksgiving might even be nicer. A third (from left field, perhaps, or a blast from the past)—be still my heart!

Charles Franklin applies Zaller to the public’s reaction to the Miers SCOTUS withdrawal. Meanwhile, the post-Miers speculation centers on Samuel Alito and Michael Luttig, two potential nominees who are, in the words of Steven Taylor, “radically more qualified than Miers.” Then again, pretty much everyone who’s ever cracked the spine of a con law textbook probably falls in that category…

I’ve been doing some SPSS labs with my methods class this semester, and I stumbled upon a mildly interesting little finding: in the 2000 National Election Study, the mean feeling thermometer rating* of gays and lesbians is higher among respondents with cable or satellite TV than among those who do not have cable/satellite. It’s marginally significant (p = .057 or so in a two-tailed independent-samples t test). I’m not sure if the cable/satellite variable is standing in for a “boonies versus suburbs/urban areas” thing or something else.

It’s also fun because the test is significant at the .05 level if you do a one-tailed test (though, since I have no a priori theory as to why cable/satellite households would like gay people more than non-cable households, I’m not sure a one-tailed test is legitimate), but not significant at .05 if you do a two-tailed test, so it’s useful in illustrating that marginal case.

Tyler Cowen links a list assembled by Foreign Policy ranking the “most influential political scientists,” who—apparently owing to the sampling frame—seem to all be IR scholars.

Not that there’s anything wrong with IR, mind you…