I just sent out The Damn Impeachment Paper™ for the third and (hopefully) final time. To put things in perspective: when I wrote it originally for my Congress seminar, I was a first-year grad student, and now I’m almost two years post-PhD.

Anyway, read it here. If it seems harsh, consider the one-line review I got of the last iteration (paraphrased): “How is this different from Rothenberg and Sanders (2000)?” Uh, the difference is that they were wrong.

Did I mention how much I hate phone interviews?

One of the interviewers today made the mistake of asking me the question of what appealed to me about their job more than my existing one. I don’t think my answer went over big…

An interesting piece in this quarter’s issue of PS (sadly not online), by Daniel Fuerstman and Stephan Levartu of UW-Madison, looks at the factors that departments consider when hiring new faculty. Notably, everyone seems to care about a nebulous quality called “fit,” teaching is #2 at everywhere except national universities, and nobody gives a shit about conference presentations and awards. Perhaps most interesting: letters rank highly at all types of institutions, despite the common perception that recommendation letters are inherently undifferentiated and thus information-free.

One of the more positive outcomes of the Drezner debacle has been some more serious thought about the role of blogging in the academy, exemplified by this post from Michelle Dion and this contribution from Matthew Shugart. Herewith are a few thoughts from my little corner of the academic universe.

First and foremost, I think it’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have this job if I didn’t have a blog. No blog, no Public Choice panel in New Orleans on blogging in the academy with Dan Drezner and Mike Munger, no after-panel beers with Mike (and Dan and Leslie), and no Duke job for Chris. That isn’t to say I wouldn’t have any job (in the counterfactual universe, I don’t know who would have made me offers—I just know who I had to turn down for interviews when they called me)... but I doubt it would be quite as rewarding as this one has been thus far.

Second (and following from point one), it’s fair to say I wouldn’t have the academic network I have today without the blog. Dozens of political scientists know who I am solely because of Signifying Nothing, and I hope most of them have a positive impression. If academic blogging is going to be a “virtual conference,” a big part of that has to be the informal networking that conferences are at least supposed to encourage… indeed, blogging may do a better job of fostering networking than conferences, where the temptation is to go catch up with one’s grad school cohort rather than meeting new people.

Third, I don’t think the blog has demonstrably hurt my career. I think it’s reasonably common knowledge that I wouldn’t be at Duke (or, for that matter, anywhere else) if I’d been offered the tenure-track Americanist position at Millsaps. The person they hired instead had a blog too—and I am reasonably certain that the search committee was aware of it at the time.

Fourth, I think that the message (intentional or unintentional) that the U of C has sent to denying tenure to Dan is an unhealthy one. Our discipline is—rightly—often criticized for a failure to engage the real world and real political debates. It is very tempting for an academic to avoid those debates, and to either retreat to the world of models that have no bearing on reality or the comparably disengaged world of deconstructing the arcania of political philosophy. The best academic blogs have tried to bring the real and potentially useful knowledge that we have accumulated to bear on contemporary political debates. It is one thing to sit back and opine about politics from a partisan standpoint bereft of the benefits of any particular expertise (and certainly this is a popular tactic for many academic bloggers of all partisan stripes). Dan, to his credit, has rarely—if ever—taken that approach.

Finally, on the question of the academic study of blogging (versus the merits of academics being bloggers), I think there are noteworthy parallels to the beginnings of other research programs. Decades ago, the study of particular social and ethnic groups was considered fundamentally unserious—and certainly there are plenty of observers (mostly outside the academy, but also inside the academy as well) who still see these pursuits as unserious, or at the very least as backdoor mechanisms for hiring scholars who lack intellectual rigor in the “traditional” disciplines. The fact that the people who study blogging are, themselves, bloggers is something not lost on contemporary critics of this research program, and this is likely to be a difficult reputation for people who do want to study the role of weblogs in politics and society to overcome.

Of course, my contribution to this academic study thus far (beyond doing a few favors to colleagues doing research in this area) has been confined to some off-the-cuff comments at Public Choice and my upcoming paper on my use of blogs in my American politics class for SPSA—which manages to combine blogs with another topic “real” scholars refuse to take seriously, pedagogy. Maybe I should quit while I’m still ahead.

Hopefully the final post in this series: my ex-blogger boss pops up in comments at PoliBlog, Matthew Shugart (a political scientist at UCSD and the co-author of Presidents and Assemblies, one of my absolute favorite comparative politics books) points up the positive aspects of blogging in academe, and Jim Hu has more thoughts.

The good folks at ICPSR are trying to build up the endowment for the Warren Miller Scholars Fund, which provides a small stipend and free tuition for the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences to one or two promising grad students and junior faculty every year; thus far, there have been eight recipients of Miller scholarships, including myself in 2001. There’s more info starting on page 10 in the Fall 2005 ICPSR Bulletin; you’ll find a scintillating quote from yours truly plugging the fund.

As Steven Taylor notes, the Drezner story has made it to the New York Sun; for your own amusement, try to parse this non-denial denial from the department chair:

While refusing to go into specifics about Mr. Drezner’s tenure case, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Chicago, Dali Yang, dismissed the notion that his department considered Mr. Drezner’s blog in making its decision. “I can assure you it’s not specifically about the blog,” he said.

(There is no paragraph here. You may pass.)

I now have two phone interviews scheduled for next Monday for tenure-track jobs. That, for those keeping score at home, is two more phone interviews than I got last year.

That said, I despise phone interviews with a passion.

The University of Chicago’s decision to deny tenure to Dan Drezner has predictably led to quite a bit of discussion; the highlights (as far as I’ve seen):

• Steven Taylor expresses confidence that Dan will land on his feet and considers the question, “do we blame the blog?”
• Leopold Stotch emphatically says yes. Juan Non-Volokh is not so sure. Both (who are not tenured) will remain pseudonymous for now.
• Ann Althouse points out that ”[t]ime spent on a blog is visible in a way that time spent watching movies or talking with friends or reading mystery novels or engaging in physical exercise or playing with your kids or daydreaming is not.” (þ: PoliBlog)
• Matt Stinson reminds the gallery that Dan’s denial probably had nothing to do with his politics, as the U of C has historically been relatively friendly to conservatives and libertarians.
• Tom Smith extrapolates to the wider question of the value of tenure in the modern academy, and finds the case for tenure today to be wanting.

Stotch also raises an interesting point that is worth discussing at greater length:

Drezner made another huge mistake in trying to conflate blogging and scholarship, and I can only assume that his colleagues deemed this type of work unserious—a perspective with which I largely agree. Looking at his CV, however impressive, might have led his colleagues to believe that once granted tenure, his focus might shift away from his serious work toward more articles, books, conference papers, etc. about blogging—which I assume is hardly what they were looking for when they hired him.

I don’t necessarily believe that Dan’s primary area of expertise (international political economy) is any more “serious” than studying the role of weblogs in domestic political discourse, but it is quite definitely different, and to the extent that institutions hire people to “fill holes” (rather than based on their innate abilities or general competence) I think that could be an issue. Quite clearly, Dan was not hired by the U of C to be a political communications person. On the other hand, there’s no evidence that Dan has neglected scholarship in his primary field.

And I probably need not point out that plenty of tenured faculty take advantage of the security of tenure to spend more time with their families, stagnate scholastically, dodge professional responsibilities, and/or bed undergraduate and graduate students. Somehow the idea of Dan potentially doing research on blogs post-tenure seems like a de minimis concern compared to the other possibilities.

Dan Drezner was denied tenure on Friday. I have to say in my mind (at least, with the essential caveat that I am no expert on IR) that said decision reflects rather more poorly on the University of Chicago than it does on Dan, who I am certain will land on his feet elsewhere; my impression of the U of C is unlikely to recover so quickly.

Daniel Nexon has some interesting thoughts and advice on the whole job-seeking process, all of which would be well-taken by the novice job-seeker. I would particularly reiterate his point about not “build[ing] an imaginary life for yourself,” something that is admittedly hard to avoid when trying to tailor the cover letter to the particular institution you are applying to. Bear in mind, though, that cover letters—unlike notes on Christmas cards given to family members—are not going to be shared around among the recipients, so you don’t need to make them that original.

Dan Drezner, from whom I got the link, fairly cogently summarizes the state of the job market thusly:

The academic job market, as I’ve witnessed it, is a globally rational but locally capricious system. Some people will undoubtedly slip through the cracks—but on the whole, talent is recognized and rewarded.

Mind you, that equilibrium state takes a long while to arrive for many, and it’s one punctuated by frequent instances of blind panic as you attempt to get your various files in order.

October 1 has come and gone, which means the application deadlines for about half a dozen jobs I’ve applied for have now passed, with quite a few more coming in the next month. There isn’t too much to report thus far. It’s been strongly intimated in the past week that I will have an on-campus interview at an institution in the Midwest, not too terribly far from Messrs. Noggle and Fox. We shall see if this pans out, and whether others will take a similar shining to me.

My first real publication (broadly defined) in political science is now officially “forthcoming”; while it’s only a short piece in The Political Methodologist, the biannual newsletter of the Society for Political Methodology, I figure you have to start somewhere. It’s a brief overview of Quantian, a “Live Linux” DVD that’s geared toward use by social, behavioral, and natural scientists.

My co-author and Quantian’s developer, Dirk Eddelbuettel, has the current version of the piece up at his website, for the morbidly curious. The article probably will appear in the Fall 2005 issue, whenever that emerges.

The German elections have come and gone, and the results are Inconclusive; as expected, nobody got an outright majority, but less expected was the inability of the “natural” CDU–FDP coalition to gain a majority, thus leaving Germans with a series of rather unappetizing coalition possibilities:

• The rather-unlikely “red-red-green” coalition, combining the SPD (Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats) with his current coalition partners, the Greens, and the whole lot making nice with the Left Party splinter group (itself a motley collection of ex-Communists and malcontent Social Democrats, including Schröder’s main rival on the left, Oskar Lafontaine).
• The “traffic light” coalition including the SPD, FDP, and the Greens; also unlikely, as the FDP‘s leader has rejected it according to The Economist.
• The “Jamaica” coalition of the CDU (the Christian Democrats, led by Angela Merkel, along with their Bavarian sister party, the CSU), the FDP (the Free Democrats, “liberals” in the European sense of the term), and the Greens. Somewhat plausible, if the Greens are willing to put aside their materialist values in favor of the postmaterialist ones they share with the Free Democrats.
• A “grand coalition” of the SPD and CDU, with either Schröder or Merkel as chancellor. As Pieter Dorsman and Matthew Shugart point out, this is probably the worst of all possible worlds, albeit the most likely outcome.

And, to top things off, things aren’t really settled yet since a neo-Nazi candidate in Dresden died, requiring a postponement of the vote in that constituency; under Germany’s version of the additional member system, this will probably affect the final seat tally for both the CDU and the SPD, even if neither wins the seat.

Where to next? Pieter Dorsman thinks holding another vote may be the most sensible course of action, although I’m not really sure it would change much. My guess is that Germany will try to muddle through, with the CDU and SPD advancing some rather half-assed reforms that please no one… which, more likely than not, will bring us back to this point with another inconclusive election sooner, rather than later.

The comparative angle is advanced by Stephen Karlson, who notes that America’s coalition building is rather less explicit than that of Germany—of course, the muddled result in Germany, I’d argue, is largely because the SPD has failed to maintain its internal coalition. All effective governing parties are coalitions of interests—even in Israel, with easy entry into parliament for any disgruntled splinter group, both major parties (and many of the smaller ones) represent a range of opinion, not a single point in policy space. Here, I think Betsy’s Page gets the causality backwards:

Can you imagine some situation in America when we would have to have a coalition government of Republicans and Democrats running the government together. I’m not talking about divided government between Congress and the president. I’m talking about running the executive branch together. It is just unimaginable. The reason we have two parties is because they disagree fundamentally on how the government should run. And thinking of some coalition between a major and minor party would just move that party more to the extremes. [emphasis mine]

Leaving aside whether Democrats and Republicans “disagree fundamentally” about the operation of government (they don’t… try distinguishing the last four years of Republican rule from the Great Society, and you’ll find remarkable overlap), the two parties don’t exist because of this disagreement—at best, voters disagree, and the two parties try to maximize their number of votes by appealing to likely winning coalitions of voters.

More formally, the U.S. has two parties because of two major factors: our plurality (first-past-the-post) electoral system, and the loose federalism of the party system. Plurality elections do not inevitably lead to two-party systems (ask Canada or the U.K.); however, the added factors of having a relatively nationalized, largely unidimensional policy space (the key issues in America don’t radically differ between New York City and Philadelphia, Mississippi, even if the political position of the median voter in those places does, and people tend to dispute politics on a “left-right” dimension that is just similar enough to that of continental Europe to confuse observers on both sides of the Atlantic) and substantial local and state party autonomy (allowing the NYC and Neshboa County GOP establishment to largely define “Republican” for themselves), effectively ensure a two-party system—even where the barriers to ballot entry are low for new parties.

If the incentives for a two party system melted away, more likely than not our existing Republican and Democratic parties would melt away with them (or at least be transformed beyond recognition). And if you think our parties are bad now, wait until you see the parties led by Maxine Waters and Pat Robertson (or their acolytes) and comprised solely of their true believers. You’ll be begging for a grand coalition then…

For those following the SPSA saga who are not on the association’s mailing list: an update has been posted, indicating that the conference will meet in January in Atlanta at the Hotel Intercontinental in Buckhead.

I had seven groups in class today do the following: come up with a way to test whether peoples’ blaming of the government for an inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina was affected by media coverage.

I think I had about ten answers. Which is as it should be, letting many flowers bloom and all that, and which goes to show that a seemingly simple question can be answered by social science in lots of different ways—sometimes with different answers. One strongly suspects the group that would have exposed different experimental groups to Shep and Anderson Cooper would have found a bit different results than the group that measured self-reported media attentiveness in a sample survey.

New to “Chris’s blogroll” (distinguished from the “Active blogroll” on a basis I’m not entirely sure of, and probably a vestige of SN’s brief life as a group blog): Charles Franklin’s Political Arithmetik and the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science’s blog, both of which I first became aware of via Paul Brewer.

Can a blogospheric Perestroika movement be far behind?

Incidentally, I’ve had the distinction of having been taught by Prof. Franklin (albeit for only four days, during the Advanced Maximum Likelihood Estimation course at ICPSR in 2001), at a time when he was sporting a beard and looked like the spitting image of my father.

The meat of the latest update from the Southern Political Science Association website:

Intercontinental North America has excused us from the 2006 commitment without penalty. They have also asked their other properties in the South to try to step up and host our 2006 meeting under the same contract terms that we would have enjoyed in New Orleans. Detailed discussions are underway today (Friday, September 9th) with three beautiful Intercontinental properties. On Monday, we expect to announce the signing of a contract with the new host of our January 2006 conference. You can help in this process by honoring your commitments as we honor those that the association has made. Those of you who have attended The Southern since Savannah 2002 know that attendees will have a fabulous time and an excellent conference. You risk nothing by standing by the association while we stand by our corporate colleagues.

The candidate properties would appear to be three of the following four: Buckhead (Atlanta), Dallas, Houston, and Miami.

Given the givens (geography, air and road access, and the location of the association offices), Atlanta seems to be the most likely prospect, and perhaps the allure of Buckhead to potential attendees will be higher than that of the relatively uninteresting neighborhood surrounding the Sheraton that has been the site for several past SPSA meetings. With reports of attendees already bailing, SPSA had better have the situation resolved soon.

Paul Brewer asks Are Political Scientists Boring? Duh. Anyone who’s been to ICPSR knows that sociologists have all the fun.

I made my intro class do a group discussion exercise today; I had intended it as a debate over Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution” thesis, but I guess my questions were general enough to become a debate over non-economic self-interest too. The kids seemed to enjoy it—for the first time, they seemed as engaged as the methods kids—and it saved me from having to lecture as much.

The class also picked up one of our 50-or-so refugees from New Orleans today, a student from Tulane. I had planned to get the class to discuss the Katrina situation next week—we’re covering federalism and state/local government, so it seemed pretty apropos—but maybe that would be a bit insensitive. Thoughts?

Following up on yesterday’s post, David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy reports:

The head of the New Orleans convention bureau told NPR today that he is canceling all conventions scheduled to be held in New Orleans through March 2006.

The CVB site claims that this cancellation only applies to large conventions or those using the convention center space, but realistically if the Crescent City won’t be in good enough condition to host a large convention in April it probably won’t in good enough condition for any convention in January.

Via PoliBlog: the Southern Political Science Association thinks it will hold its annual convention in three months in New Orleans. Steven Taylor is unconvinced:

I certainly would not want the association to make a move that would take money out of the city, if, in fact, the meetings can take palce in January. However, I really don’t see that happening. The hotel, given its location and pictures I have seen is probably largely fine. However, what about the electrical grid, the phones, the water system, the roads, the police, the general support struture for tourists (restaurants, other hotels, etc.)? I just don’t see the city being able to host any events by the first week or so of January.

Considering that all that’s likely to be close to functional in New Orleans in three months (and, more than likely, for the forseeable future; the SPSA can only be delayed so long before it becomes moot) are the higher parts of the Jefferson Parish suburbs and some of the downtown area—bear in mind the Hotel Intercontinental, while on high ground, is only a few blocks from areas that are still flooded around the Superdome—I am forced to echo Steven’s skepticism.

A conference the size of SPSA should have no trouble finding suitable convention space elsewhere in the southeast, but these decisions need to be made sooner rather than later.

Well, I’m here, physically if not mentally. If you are too, drop me an email if you want to engage in the traditional (i.e. alcohol-soaked) conference activities.

Matt Stinson has a lengthy post on how conservatives and libertarians should attack bias in the academy. He starts out, however, with a point lost on many outside academe:

The notion that conservatives are inherently opposed to the scientific method seems targeted at ID proponents, but in my discipline, political science, the loudest “anti-scientific” voices come from the left. The “perestroika” movement, a group that rejects the behavioralist turn in the social sciences, is primarily the vehicle of postmodern leftists who deny the existence of objective truth and a scientifically verifiable reality. They have some conservatives on their side, mostly classicists who prefer historical analysis to number-crunching, but it is more generally an outgrowth of the rebellion against “reality” that has been a preoccupation of far left academics since the end of World War II. While the postmodernists are a grumpy minority at research schools, they utterly dominate and thus render “un-scientific” the entire discipline of liberal arts at the top colleges and universities in the United States. Would the Pitt professors similarly scorn left-wing academics for un-scientific views?

For further evidence of Matt’s point, see Jeff Goldstein. Or that Edward Said disciple Rashid Khalidi has a plenary speaking spot on the APSA program—the only plenary awarded to an organized section of the association (the Not New Political Science section).

That’s just a small snippet of Matt’s post; go forth and RTWT. And, while you’re at it, see Jim Lindgren and Stephen Bainbridge; note that a similar sort of the “file-flagging” Bainbridge refers to goes on in other academic fields as well, not just law.

There’s much discussion about a recent report sponsored by the NSF and APSA on the status of women in political science.

While I hate to be snarky (indeed, I largely concur that there is a problem with attracting women to the discipline and placing them in tenure-stream jobs—then again, there’s a problem with placing people in general in tenure-stream jobs, q.v.), the report has a rather odd mix of good social science and bizarre PC-ism, probably because it was written by committee. Case in point: this rather odd paragraph:

The atmosphere and working style of our profession can be changed for the better by work on women’s advancement. This would be no small achievement. For one thing, a truly democratic workplace could erase a damaging contradiction in our discipline, whose teaching of democratic principles has often failed in execution within our ranks. True, the worst years of exclusion and a chilly climate toward women in the profession are past—but that is partly because a critical mass of women colleagues is now in place; it must be maintained.

A “truly democratic workplace”? One would think that political scientists, of all people, would know what the word “democratic” means—the phrase I think they’re looking for is “diverse (but for only some values of ‘diverse’—all conservatives, please proceed immediately to the Econ Department or Heritage) workplace” or “descriptively representative workplace.” Or “workplace where bleeding heart liberals can be without feeling like hypocrites since they’re all white males who’ve run off all the minorities and women.” Not to put too fine a point on it.

Of course, the conclusion that the discipline sucks for all concerned, although women and minorities get the pointy end of the suckiness a bit more often, would be rather too obvious, but the report makes that conclusion nonetheless:

Men as well as women and minorities will not achieve their highest potential in an institutional culture lacking adequate support, mentoring, and recognition of the “whole life” demands its members confront.

Again, where is KGM in our time of need?