Some polling outfit made the mistake of calling James Joyner. Hilarity ensues.

As you may have noticed over on the sidebar, I’ve accepted a one-year position as a visiting assistant professor in the political science department at Millsaps College (formerly known as BCITS), a private, selective liberal arts college in Jackson, Mississippi, starting in August 2004. I’m really looking forward to working with my fellow faculty and future students while I continue the search for that elusive tenure-track job in the fall—don’t worry, the “soap opera” will continue on that front, at least!

Alex Tabarrok links to a debunking of the rather lame “smart states voted for Gore” hypothesis—on the basis that there’s no state-level IQ data for anyone to reach such a conclusion.

However, there is individual-level data in the 2000 American National Election Study, conducted by the University of Michigan, and this data supports an opposite conclusion: the mean level of both intelligence and political information-holding for Gore voters was lower than for Bush voters. Not much lower, mind you, but the difference is statistically significant.

APSA wants $237 from me for my membership renewal and to register for the 2004 annual meeting. I should have stayed unemployed…

You can tell you’re a political science geek when you get all gushy about a review copy of a political science textbook…

Steven Taylor has apparently decided his life isn’t complicated enough, so he’s decided to rile up the legions of Confederate apologists in the blogosphere, using that whole “logic” and “documentary evidence” thing to prove—quelle horreur—that the Civil War, was in fact, about slavery, and there’s no way to explain it otherwise. Start here, then go to the front page, because there’s a zone-flood in progress.

Josh Chafetz asks the $64,000 question in American public opinion polling:

[W]hat, exactly, is the point of continually doing nationwide polls when all that matters are the states? I mean, I know nationwide polls are a lot cheaper, but just making up the results would be cheaper still, and only marginally more relevant.

Well, I don’t know that nationwide polling is truly irrelevant; the state-level poll results would be close to a simple linear function of the national polling number, although the effects of campaign advertising—concentrated in the “battleground states”—will cause divergence from linearity.

But due to statistical theory, and the closeness of presidential elections, you’d have to survey a lot more people to get accurate state-level data… realistically, a sample less than 500 per state is useless, which means polling 25,500 people (including D.C.) per survey—and you’re still getting a sampling error of ±4.5% per state. So the best that you can do is pretty much what’s done in practice—you do national surveys augmented by state-level surveys in states that are a priori believed to be close.

BCITS made me an offer today. I nearly drove off the road.

I think I’m home tonight. I may even get to stay in the same place for more than two days. The Big Hooding in less than 48 hrs.

Had a very nice visit at “the best college in [the state]” today* as my undergrad student escort proclaimed it, and had no reason to disagree with her assessment. Nice faculty (even if I’d be half the department), nice salary, nice teaching load (3–3), nice location (the prospect of a Rebel season ticket renewal is a definite plus), good students (whose idol-worship compares favorably with some ex-colleagues’ acolytes, and who didn’t even require a plaintive “Bueller?”), BMOC status, travel money, Division III competition against one of the alma maters. What more could a political scientist want?

Oh, yeah, tenure (the one thing the job doesn’t come with a shot at, at least not unless I were to get the tenure-track position when it is advertised in the fall)… which at TBCITS might actually mean something, contra the inactions of Mississippi’s illustrious IHL. (I mean, as long as the kids are getting their learn on, who cares about the faculty?)

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I will have time to deal with the bloody R&R and the damned impeachment paper and the thrice-cursed Hillary (Clinton, not Duff) piece. Then I’ll be stoked for Year II of “Chris on the Market.”

Will Baude, at the prompting of Jacob T. Levy, ponders the Three-Fifths Compromise. I don’t have a better theory than Will’s; I always just figured that’s the offer the southern delegates proffered after a few rounds and that’s what stuck.

I suppose another possibility is that it reflected the assumed ratios of voting populations around 1787—so as to balance voting between relatively free North with the more populous but part-slave South—but I don’t have the numbers in front of me to prove it.

David Adesnik has an odd standard for courage among political scientists:

It takes guts for a political scientist to actually predict something. That’s because all that political scientists really have are their reputations, and they can’t afford to put those on the line. So here’s a shout out to Larry Sabato, who isn’t afraid to put his money where his mouth is.

Other than referring David to my post on explanation and prediction, I’d only warn readers that what really takes guts is to get between Larry Sabato and a camera.

Lily Malcolm catches Washington Post writer David Finkel using a tone of “bemused ironic distance” in reference to a Texas suburbanite, in addition to commiting the cardinal sin of perpetuating the Red State-Blue State myth. I mean, at least Finkel could make himself useful and perpetuate obsolete but at least empirically-based theories of political culture, rather than crap peddled by two-bit media-hound hacks whose research doesn’t dignify the term.

My mini-contest garnered two entries. Brock proposed “alleged,” while my fellow Ole Miss alum Scott proposed “perceived.” Since “perceived” was the word I had in mind when I wrote the post, Scott wins the Signifying Nothing no-prize of having his name mentioned in my blog, along with my pity for knowing me well enough to read my thoughts.

I actually went with “public policy is a government plan of action that is intended to solve a perceived societal problem,” because I like adding words to definitions for amusement value. So, if you’re one of the lucky students in Dr. [redacted]’s American Government class at [redacted] University, you will be regaled with 50 minutes of quality lecture time on U.S. public policy from yours truly at 1 p.m. [redacted] Daylight Time on Monday, complete with color transparencies. Don’t forget reading material for the slow parts!

Hmm, maybe this phone interview isn’t going to happen after all… or it’s going to be about the shortest on record, one of the two.

Update: Shortest on record…

Jacob Levy notes that my papers page may be heading towards obsolecence, given that the Powers That Be in political science have joined forces to launch PoliticalScience.org.

Now, if they can only figure out how to make employers actually pay attention to the vitas posted on eJobs, this discipline might well be organized by the time I’m retired.

I planned to post about this Monday when I got my APSA April e-Newsletter, which helpfully arrived in my email box well after half the events it talks about have already happened, but when searching for my name turned up nothing (when I know for a fact there should be some of my stuff in there, at least if it includes—as advertised—papers from APSA 2003 and MPSA 2004), I concluded the site was useless as-is, being an egotistical snob and all.

“Public policy is a government plan of action to solve a social problem.”

“Public policy is a government plan of action intended to solve a societal problem.”

Three guesses which definition was in the textbook, and which was the one I put in my lecture notes. Bonus points if you can make the definition even more accurate by adding a single word.

Tyler Cowen links a New York Times piece on how researchers are using MRIs to look at how voters’ brains react to political ads, and it’s a pretty fascinating piece. Though I must quibble with this graf:

“These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven adages,” said Tom Freedman, a strategist in the 1996 Clinton campaign, later a White House aide and now a sponsor of the research. “They’ll help put a bit more science in political science.”

Dragging fancy machines into the room has nothing to do with whether or not you’re being scientific. Somehow people have this warped view that you can only do “science” when you’re dressed in a lab coat and goggles and there are a few bunsen burners in the room, which is simply not the case.

I’m taking a short break at my hotel before heading back to the conference, which I have to say has been a pretty good one for me—I’ve gotten to catch up with some good old friends from ICPSR and elsewhere, met some new ones, and had a few promising conversations about job prospects in The Discipline™. Now off to get a sandwich and head back.

(I saw Dan very briefly yesterday afternoon… otherwise, except for Dirk, it’s been a blogger-free weekend so far.)

My panel this morning ("Public Support for the Iraq War") was surprisingly well-attended (at least, compared to panels I’ve presented on in the past), and we had a good discussion despite the absence of our original chair/discussant due to a family illness.

You can browse the MPSA paper archive online; my panel was Section 13, Panel 13 (I can’t figure out how to make a direct link that won’t break); of course, if you’re only interested in my paper, you can get it here.

Dan Drezner takes a look at John Kerry’s “new and improved!” misery index:

Every index can be challenged on the quality of the data that goes into it, and the weights that are assigned to the various components that make up the overall figure. A lack of transparency about methodology is also a valid criticism. For example, in my previous post on the competitiveness of different regions in the global information economy, the company responsible for the rankings provides little (free) information on how the index was computed. That’s a fair critique.

Even when the methodology is transparent, there can still be problems.

This is a subject near-and-dear to my heart. In quantitative social science, your econometric model is only as useful as your indicators; a crappy indicator renders the whole model essentially useless.

Unfortunately, our ways of dealing with the problem of how well an indicator reflects a concept leave a lot to be desired; “face validity”—which boils down to “I think the indicator reflects the concept, so we’ll a priori assume it does”—is relied on, even by good scholars, to an extent that will make you blanch. Even seemingly obvious indicators, like responses to survey questions, are often woefully inadequate for measuring “true” concepts (in the case of public opinion research, attitudes and predispositions).

Building an index helps with some of these problems—if your measurement error—but introduces others (like ascribing valid weights to the items, as Dan points out). A few cool tools, like factor analysis and its cousin principal components analysis, are designed to help in finding weights, but even they have problems and limitations, most of which basically boil down to the fact that human judgment is still involved in the process.

As promised, I’ve had more of a chance to closely read and think about Gerard Alexander’s Claremont Review of Books essay, “The Myth of the Racist Republicans.”

The prècis of Alexander’s argument is essentially that, while Republicans were willing to run avowed and former segregationists on occasion as candidates in the South in the 50s and 60s, and while their candidates “from the 1950s on” for state and federal office were willing to “craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters,” this conduct—which Alexander concedes is expedient—does not rise to the level of making “a pact with America’s devil”—selling out the Lincolnian principles the GOP was founded on.

Alexander says that proponents of the “racist Republican” myth rest their case on an accomodation with Southern racism that is based on “code words.” He concedes that Goldwater’s call for “state’s rights” in 1964 may have been an instance of Republicans pandering to segregationists, but argues that other allegedly “coded” appeals to racism, such as the positions of Nixon and Regan “on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform” were designed to appeal to broad middle-class discontent with the Democratic Party’s approach to these issues, rather than being part of a deliberate strategy to court racists; more to the point, he writes:

In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn’t be a “code” for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today’s civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism.

Of course, given the strategic choice that Republicans have made to “craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes” of racists—a choice that Alexander himself acknowledges the GOP has made—it would seem that, at the very least, emphasizing these issues over (say) lower taxes or increased spending on defense, shows a willingness to cater to racist sentiment, which in itself borders on racism.

He then turns to why the GOP gained support from disaffected Southern whites; here he is on stronger ground, as it is fairly clear that the Democratic Party abandoned the tacit “New Deal” agreement to soft-pedal racial issues in favor of a more aggressive pro-civil rights stance beginning in the late 1940s with Truman’s integration of the armed forces, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His argument is essentially that Southern racists came to the GOP “mountain,” rather than the other way around—an argument that would be stronger if he hadn’t already conceded that the GOP was tailoring its messages to appeal to racists and win votes from the Democrats in the South. The “mountain” moved a bit on its own—he quotes Kevin Phillips as saying that Republicans didn’t “have to bid much ideologically” to gain the support of Wallace voters—but they did have to bid something, which arguably included “go slow” desegregation (in opposing busing) and opposition to affirmative action programs.

Alexander then looks at the pattern of GOP growth in the South, noting that the GOP did better in the Peripheral South than it did in the Deep South; he argues that this is further proof that the “Southern strategy” was essentially benevolent, and that the GOP‘s ideology was too moderate to appeal to hard-core segregationists, but an alternative intepretation is that the slowness in Deep South segregationists to move to the Republicans was a result of historical antipathy toward Republicans—who were, after all, the party of blacks (at least, the minority who had managed to evade the barriers to participation erected by segregationists) in the South until the 1960s—coupled with state Democratic parties that were more tolerant of old-line segregationists remaining under the Democrat banner.

It is, of course, overly simplistic to say that Wallace voters make up the bulk of today’s GOP in the South—the typical Wallace supporter from 1968 is probably a Constitution Party voter today, assuming his or her racial views remain intact. Nor is it necessarily the GOP‘s fault that some segregationists support it, any more than it is the Democrats’ fault that they have some support from eco-terrorists like the Earth Liberation Front. But I think it is valid to criticize the GOP for the “Southern strategy” that even Alexander concedes the party has used—and I also think it’s reasonable to believe that at least some of the Republican platform is motivated by an interest in appealing to those with unreconstructed racist views. Does that mean opposition to affirmative action is racist? No. But it does mean that the GOP‘s sincerity in being a non-racist party is somewhat questionable.

I also find it interesting that Alexander manages to write 3500 words on contemporary Southern politics without mentioning Trent Lott, which seems like a rather important oversight; however, that’s neither here nor there.

Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia takes on virtually all the existing scholarship on Southern politics in the latest Claremont Review of Books—and, IMHO, comes up a bit short of proving his point to my satisfaction, although a proper treatment of the article will have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

I will note that Alan Abramowitz came to virtually the same conclusion* in “Issue Evolution Reconsidered” (The Journal of Politics, 1994), which was a rebuttal to Carmines and Stimson’s Issue Evolution, which, along with Huckfeldt and Sprague’s Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics is probably the classic academic work that promotes the “southern strategy” explanation for the Southern realignment—the Black brothers, however, see dealignment rather than realignment to the GOP, and in a lot of their discussion, they actually support what Alexander says, at least to some extent.

Link via Lily Malcolm (a recent victim of a minor paring knife accident).

Well, at last, I have a real, bona fide campus interview, tentatively scheduled for the week after next, for a tenure-track job at a regional state university with a predominantly non-traditional student body in the lower plains (think “where the wind goes blowing…”). I already have a pre-interview scheduled for this weekend in Chicago (with a different school), but this is the first campus visit.

It actually seems like a fun job, where I’d get to play “big fish in a small pond,” and to be honest the idea of focusing on teaching rather than doing research is starting to appeal to me—not that research-oriented departments have been beating down my doors, mind you.

(Now to finish my preparations for the Chicago trip, including a couple of overheads for my paper presentation…)

Well, it’s not going to go down as the best paper I’ve ever written, but here’s the Midwest paper in all its glory. Now I have to prepare for those back-to-back phone interviews this afternoon…

Have I mentioned how much I hate writing the front half of research papers? I guess this means I should find a frequent collaborator who likes writing literature reviews but hates data analysis…

(On the other hand, maybe I should just publish in economics journals… that discipline apparently considers three sentences to be a long lit review.)