I won’t spoil the whole Midwest paper for you, but here’s the pretty path diagram of the LISREL model. Guess the coefficients and standard errors—it’s fun for the whole family!

Actually, the most amazing thing about the paper is that the model works, despite the suboptimal polling data it’s based on—almost all of the manifest variables are dichotomous or trichotomous.

Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy summary of an article from February’s American Political Science Review, “Election Time: Normative Implications of Temporal Properties of the Electoral Process in the United States,” by Dennis F. Thompson.

Unlike my usual practice when it comes to the APSR (which is to scan the table of contents, find nothing of immediate interest to my research agenda, and then dump it onto the stack of journals—yes, I’m a bad political scientist when it comes to journal-reading), I actually read the article, and while I’m not quite as enthusiastic about Thompson’s conclusions as Russell is (particularly because I don’t at all buy the argument that campaign finance regulations, no matter how strict, will put an end to the “permanent campaign”), I agree that Thompson does make some worthwhile contributions to the debate, including a strong argument that partisan gerrymandering is fundamentally antidemocratic.

I do wonder, however, where one buys a single copy of the APSR, as Russell implores his readers to do. My advice: go to your local college’s library and read it for free.

Eugene Volokh points out a law professor who’s integrating a blog into the classroom experience. I’ve personally wondered whether that would be appropriate for an undergraduate course; presumably, the privacy issue isn’t problematic (or, at least, no more problematic than requiring students to give oral presentations). I guess the main issue is whether a professor can expect students to be technically competent enough to use a blog properly—though I suspect the undergraduate who can’t use a word processor, a harder task than blogging, is few and far between.

Of course, before a practical implementation for LSblog, I’d have to add all the security code I’ve been meaning to add behind the scenes (to make a distinction between users and administrators—at the moment, anyone with a login can hose the blog). Projects, projects…

My more immediate concern, however, is writing a paper for the Midwest conference. I figure if Dan Drezner can spin his blog posts into an article in Foreign Affairs, I can spin this into a conference paper. I’ll post more about it when I actually accomplish something on it…

The idea of “Deliberation Day” is back in the press, and Steven Taylor—a former student of James Fishkin at UT-Austin—finds the whole idea rather wanting:

There is also the problem of what will be told to the citizens-for-hire during that 24 hour period. I know for a fact that both Ackerman and Fishkin are both rather focused on the issue of distrbutive justice (read: economic distribution) in the context of the liberal state (and not, specifically a classical liberal state but the liberal-welfare state that emerges as a strain of liberalism in the twentieth century). For example, Ackerman’s Social Justice in the Liberal State (1980) while well-written, highly readable, and fun to discuss in class, is a remarkably impractical (and, to me, utterly unpersuasive) attempt to justify economic egalitarianism (at least at the start of each generation).

As for civic competence in general:

Further, if we want better citizens, how about just providing better and more complete American Government classes in High School? How about having someone other than the basketball coach teach government and history? These seem more auspicious places to start.

You can read Brendan Conway’s critique of Ackerman and Fishkin at OpinionJournal (or, quite possibly, in the actual Wall Street Journal), which contains this rather devastating passage:

To test things out, Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin conducted experimental “deliberative polls” to simulate DDay. To be sure, the weekend-long events seemed to make participants know more. But they also ended up as more vocal advocates of government activism. Perhaps this wasn’t a coincidence.

Foreign aid, energy-conservation schemes, the United Nations and revenue-sharing all became more popular over the course of the polls. Is this because smarter, more informed citizens arrive at activist, liberal positions? It is impossible to avoid the impression that the authors think so. “Participants entered the Deliberative Poll as citizens of the United States and left, to some measurable degree, as citizens of the world,” they write approvingly. Maybe the briefing materials had something to do with this transformation. They were “typically supervised for balance and accuracy by an advisory board of relevant experts and stakeholders.”

This claim raises an interesting question: Just who decides who it is who decides what is balanced and accurate? Maybe Messrs. Ackerman and Fishkin do, or experts they trust. But isn’t that in itself a problem? Indeed, the whole notion of DDay is, in its essence, nondeliberative. Its rules and forms and structures—not to mention those briefing materials and the advisers who supervise them—are handed down from on high rather than arrived at through democratic, um, deliberation. This is a rich irony of which the authors are seemingly unaware.

I previously took issue with Ackerman and Fishkin’s idea here and here.

Update: Robert Musil has more.

Both Steven Taylor and Eric Lindholm note that John Kerry was on both sides of the supplemental appropriations bill for Iraqi and Afghan reconstruction. In particular, Eric notes this rather curious position by Kerry:

Mr. Kerry has indicated that he might have voted [in favor of final passage of the bill] had his vote been decisive.

Now, it is arguably rational for voters to behave differently when their vote is decisive (or pivotal) than when it isn’t; voting is both a symbolic act and part of a decision-making process. The normative question is: given that most votes are not inherently pivotal, should citizens nonetheless expect sincere voting behavior from their representatives, rather than the symbolic behavior that Kerry essentially admits he demonstrated? Given that representatives are supposed to be accountable for their votes—hence the use of non-secret ballots—my gut feeling is that citizens should expect sincere voting by the legislators they are represented by, whether we’re discussing procedural motions or votes on final passage.

Tim Sandefur points out that James Madison would be 253 today. Although the term “political scientist” wouldn’t be coined until much later, Madison was among the first American political theorists. Of course, he also managed to provoke the British into kicking our asses in the War of 1812, New Orleans notwithstanding . Still, when compared to the other “political scientist” president that we can claim as our own—the not-quite-as-infamous-as-he-should-be racist Woodrow Wilson, whose hopeless idealism in some matters of international relations has earned him a free bigotry pass in the history books—Madison is vastly preferable using virtually any metric.

Oddly enough, as they say, I was born in the now-no-longer (thanks to the newfangled abomination that is Nashville-Davidson County) town of Madison, Tennessee.

James Joyner isn’t quite convinced of Jeff Jenkins’ argument that John Kerry is more conservative relative to Democratic presidents (historically) than George Bush is liberal, using Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s NOMINATE method. James writes:

The problem I have with Poole’s coding methodology is that it’s excessively time bound. To compare Bush 43 to Reagan or Kerry to Carter ignores massive shifts in public opinion during those time periods. The “center” is not a spot on a map; it’s a median of current attitudes.

There are actually two versions of Poole and Rosenthal’s methodology. The version Jenkins apparently used for his analysis (from the description in the article) is called W-NOMINATE, and only looks at a particular Congressional session (e.g. the 107th Congress, from 2001 to 2003). There’s a second version, called DW-NOMINATE, that allows comparisons over time between Congresses. In other words, using W-NOMINATE is inappropriate for comparisons over time.* James goes on to write:

I’d think the ACU/ADA ratings are much more useful than Poole’s, since the comparison is made against one’s contemporaries.

Actually, ACU and ADA ratings are essentially interchangeable with W-NOMINATE first dimension scores. But I think James is critiquing Jenkins for something that Jenkins actually didn’t do (even though the article might lead you to think he did).

It seems to me there are two related questions here: is Bush more extreme than Kerry? and, are Bush and Kerry more extreme relative to their partisan predecessors? The first question was pretty clearly answered by Jenkins in the article. The second can’t be answered by the W-NOMINATE method that Jenkins used—which, given his indication that he deliberately simplified the analysis (by using W-NOMINATE instead of DW-NOMINATE), makes it seem odd that he tried to make comparisons over time. The question I think Jenkins answered is “are Bush and Kerry more extreme relative to predecessor presidents vis à vis the Congresses they faced”—and, for that comparison, W-NOMINATE or ADA/ACU scores would work equally as well.

Update: Jeff Jenkins has a comment at Dan’s place that clarifies the situation; he did use DW-NOMINATE for the interyear comparisons, but that point was lost in the editing process. So ignore the above paragraph. ☺ He has some interesting points too in regard to Poole and Rosenthal’s book, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting.

Also worth pointing out is the forthcoming APSR piece by Doug Rivers, Josh Clinton, and Simon Jackman, “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data”. There's also a recent issue of Political Analysis in which all of the articles were on ideal-point estimation (which is the technical term for NOMINATE and the Rivers-Clinton-Jackman approach). And, if you want to do it yourself, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn have included the Rivers-Clinton-Jackman procedure in their MCMCpack package for GNU R.

I previously discussed Kerry’s ideology here. Dan Drezner also discusses the article in question here.

Tom Maguire suggests that the National Journal finding that John Kerry is the most liberal member of the Senate isn’t supported by Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE scores, at least not over the last two Congresses. He also quibbles:

Any fool can ask a question that ten wise men cannot answer: Dr. Poole bases his rankings on all recorded roll call votes, including the straight party-line organizational votes – for example, all Republicans voted for Bill Frist as Leader, and for the various Republican committee chairpersons. My suspicion is that the results give a good ranking within parties (so Kerry is really a centrist Dem), but the border between Republican and Democrat on substantive votes is blurrier than these results suggest. Objectivity and simplicity might suffer, but has this been looked at?

My (admittedly fuzzy) recollection of NOMINATE is that the results are fairly robust when you exclude pure party-line votes from the input data. A second approach to this question is a recent paper (released Monday!) by Joshua Clinton, Simon Jackman, and Doug Rivers that uses a Bayesian item-response theory model to approach the question (the same method used in their forthcoming APSR piece, a variant of which I used to measure political knowledge in my dissertation); the abstract follows:

We reanalyze the 62 key Senate roll calls of 2003, as identified by National Journal, using a statistical procedure that (1) is sensitive to different rates of abstention across senators and roll calls; (2) allows us to compute margins of errors on voting scores and the ranks of the legislators, as well as compute the probability that a given senator occupies a particular rank (e.g., is the “most liberal” senator). The three Democratic senators running for president in 2003 have markedly higher rates of abstention than the rest of the Senate, leading to considerable uncertainty as to their voting score (particularly for Senator Kerry). In turn, we find that contrary to recent media reports, Senator Kerry (D-MA) is not the “most liberal” senator, or at least not unambiguously; as many as three Senators could plausibly be considered the “most liberal“, with Kerry third on this list behind Senators Reed (D-RI) and Sarbanes (D-MD).

The note lacks any high-powered math, and should be accessible to anyone with an interest in politics and a modicum of statistical knowledge. Incidentally, their method does show a closer overlap between Democrats and Republicans than NOMINATE does (in part because they restricted the analysis to 62 “key” votes rather than all of the roll calls). One other thing to note: the whopping error bar around Kerry’s position, a direct result of his absenteeism from the Senate over the past year.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber demonstrates the well-known flaws in Borda vote counting quite vividly. The Borda count is probably best known as the counting mechanism used by the Associated Press and ESPN/USA Today college basketball and football polls in the United States—to my knowledge, it is not used in practice by any governmental body.

Dan Drezner’s latest TNR essay deals with Sam Huntington’s recent Foreign Policy essay on the “threat” of unassimilated Hispanics to the United States. Read the whole thing here and all the footnotes at Dan’s place.

Update: Two Matthews weigh in: Stinson and Yglesias. Neither is impressed by Huntington’s argument, while Matt Stinson helpfully points out that whatever Huntington is, he isn’t a neoconservative (whatever that is…).

Tonight, I attended the 2004 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Public Lecture by Wisconsin political scientist Virginia Sapiro; her topic was, “What Does Civility Have To Do With Politics?” It was a rather wide-ranging talk that engendered a pretty good discussion from the audience, and not one that is easily summarized—particularly by someone who wasn’t taking notes. She came at the question from the perspective of the impact of politics on norms of civility rather than (as you might expect) the impact of the norms of civility on political discourse.

I did ask Dr. Sapiro her thoughts on reconciling our empirical knowledge that people learn more from negative campaigning with calls for civility, like the “I approve this message” requirement in McCain-Feingold, and she pointed out that it is possible to have a civil campaign that nonetheless compares candidates’ positions. I wonder about the relative effectiveness of that approach versus the more classic “incivil” negative campaign—do voters learn as effectively from “civil” ads—and whether civility is really more in the eyes of the beholder. Ads like the infamous mushroom cloud from 1964 or Willie Horton in 1988 probably weren’t considered uncivil by the campaigns (or, in the case of Horton, nominally unaffiliated groups) that produced them, but Barry Goldwater and Mike Dukakis probably didn’t agree with that assessment. Definitely plenty of food for thought.

I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but in case you haven’t heard—Ralph Nader will run in 2004 as an independent presidential candidate. What does it mean? Juan Non-Volokh and Glenn Reynolds think it might invigorate efforts to improve ballot access for third parties; some Democrats are apoplectic; Robert Garcia Tagorda thinks it may help Democrats; and Steven Bainbridge, Steven Taylor, and James Joyner used the occasion to dump on third-party candidates in general.

Greg Goelzhauser at Crescat Sententia considers the use and abuse of behavioral economics by legal scholars, jumping off from this interview with Berkeley economist Matthew Rabin. Greg writes:

That humans fall prey to a variety of heuristics is nothing new or extraordinary. What is important for law and economics is if some of these heuristics lead the relevant actors to systematically err in their decisionmaking. Unfortunately, many of those writing in the behavioral law and economics field care little about whether the actors they are concerned with actually rely on the heuristics attributed to them or, if they do so happen to rely, whether reliance actually leads to systematic error. The reason? These are often difficult empirical questions.

I’m not sure that this is an accurate characterization of what a heuristic is; it’s not simply a matter of “falling prey” to them, as many are reasonable shortcuts. You assume that the store with the cheapest price on a product is advertising it, rather than calling every store in town. Instead of digging through the platforms to find the most stridently anti-war presidential candidate, you assume the candidate making the most noise about the war is that candidate.

Now, as Tversky and Kahneman have pointed out, some heuristics do lead to systematic, non-random error. And some of those errors are big enough that the cost associated with the error is larger than the deadweight loss of not using the heuristic (calling every store in the world or spending hours reading the minutae of Lyndon LaRouche’s campaign platform).

Greg’s larger point—that social scientists and legal scholars often assume away the “difficult empirical questions” associated with determining whether systematic error exists—is well-taken, but I think characterizing heuristics as something we “fall prey” to assumes away the more important question of whether the systematic error involved in using heuristics outweighs the costs we avoid by using them.

Alex Tabarrok endorses an econometrics text that makes two rather bold simplifying assumptions:

Stock and Watson use a “robust” estimator of standard errors right from the beginning. This means that they can dump an entire chapter on hetereoskedasticity and methods of “correcting” for hetereoskedasticity (these rarely worked in any case.)

They do not waste time discussing the difference between the t-distribution and the normal-distribution. Instead, they assume reasonably large datasets from the get-go and base their theorems on large-sample theory.

I can sort-of-see the value of always using heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors (although I think it’s better to model the heteroskedasticity if you can), but dispensing with the t distribution seems to be a bridge too far. Large sample theory is nice, but (a) common econometrics software (e.g. Stata, LIMDEP, and R) uses the t distribution even into sample sizes in the 100s, so you need to discuss it anyway, and (b) there are plenty of theorems that can only be tested with small samples due to data limitations. Now, these may be less problematic in the large-n world that economists inhabit, but I’d have real trouble justifying such a text for a graduate seminar in political science methods (undergrads rarely get beyond bivariate regression).

An interesting new working paper crossed the POLMETH list today by Daniel Ho (Harvard) and Kosuke Imai (Princeton), entitled “Shaken, Not Stirred: Evidence on Ballot Order Effects from the California Alphabet Lottery, 1978–2002.” Here’s the abstract:

We analyze a natural experiment to answer the longstanding question of whether the name order of candidates on ballots affects election outcomes. Since 1975, California law has mandated randomizing the ballot order with a lottery, where alphabet letters would be “shaken vigorously” and selected from a container. Previous studies, relying overwhelmingly on non-randomized data, have yielded conflicting results about whether ballot order effects even exist. Using improved statistical methods, our analysis of statewide elections from 1978 to 2002 reveals that in general elections ballot order has a significant impact only on minor party candidates and candidates for nonpartisan offices. In primaries, however, being listed first benefits everyone. In fact, ballot order might have changed the winner in roughly nine percent of all primary races examined. These results are largely consistent with a theory of partisan cuing. We propose that all electoral jurisdictions randomize ballot order to minimize ballot effects.

If that seems interesting to you, go read the whole thing.

It also follows the “cute colon” convention previously discussed here at SN.

Prof. Jim Lindgren of Northwestern dropped me an email responding to this post*. Lindgren writes:

I appreciate your thoughtful comments on Somin's note posted on the Volokh Conspiracy.

As you know but your readers might not, the two leading academic cross-sectional surveys are the American National Election Studies (ANES) from the Univ. of Michigan (which Somin used) and the General Social Survey (GSS) from the University of Chicago (which I used in my note to Instapundit). Political scientists naturally tend to use the ANES, while sociologists tend to use the GSS, with the rest of the social sciences using both to a substantial extent.

Each have their advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, because the ANES is taken around the time of national elections, it is better for understanding elections and voting. Because the GSS is not taken around election time, it is better for understanding how large political groups, including Republicans and conservatives, tend to think at times other than the few months on either side of a national election. For this reason, the GSS trends in political orientation tend to be far more stable than the ANES data on this question, which are unreliable in their high variability from election to election. [Greg Caldeira (political science, Ohio State) and I are doing a paper on this phenomenon.]

Your observation about independent leaners behaving more like party adherents than weak identifiers as a Republican or a Democrat is true of voting as revealed in the ANES. It is not true as a generalization for issues across the board (it varies by issue).

For example, in the 1994–2002 GSS, independents who lean Democratic are like Republicans in their high performance on vocabulary and analogical reasoning tests. Leaners to either party tend to fall between Republicans and Democrats in their educational level. Independents who do not lean either way usually score down with the Democrats, either below them or between strong and not too strong Democrats.

That is why my analyses usually discuss types of people, rather than treating liberalism/conservatism and party identification as left/right ordinal or interval variables.

First, I’d like to thank Prof. Lindgren for his correspondence.

Second, I’d like to clarify that I advisedly used the word behavior; opinionation (such as issue positions) and attitude-holding are not behavior, and it is true that the relationship Bartels notes between party identification as measured by the “standard” 7-point scale and voting behavior may not apply to opinionation or attitude-holding.

I think the observations about Democrats are interesting, because I suspect they reflect a bifurcation in “strong Democratic” identifiers: on the one hand, you have groups who are identified with the Democrats on the basis of social affiliation, such as the poor, most minority groups, the working class, and organized labor; on the other, you have highly-educated people with “social consciences” who have a more psychological attachment to the Democratic party on the basis of ideology. This certainly doesn’t seem like an original observation, although I’m not sure anyone has shown it empirically rather than impressionistically (citations welcome).

In other viewer mail, another Chicago correspondent—Debian developer/economist Dirk Eddelbuettel—notes an article in a recent week’s Economist ($) on statistical significance versus substantive significance, a distinction social scientists probably need to pay more attention to. (Also see this week’s letters page.)

Somehow I missed Eugene Volokh’s post on the whole “conservatives are stupid” kerfuffle. There are a few caveats in order with this use of ANES data:

1. Partisanship is not ideology. While the two concepts are correlated highly in the United States, a “strong Republican” is not necessarily a conservative. (The correlation has improved over time, however, as the South has dealigned.) The ANES does include an ideology item.
2. The partisanship scale used by the ANES has a weird inflection point noted by Larry Bartels several years ago: “weak identifiers” are generally more independent in their behavior than “independent leaners.”
3. Political knowledge is not general knowledge (as Volokh’s correspondent notes). Again, while general knowledge is correlated with political knowledge, the latter is only one component of the former.
4. There are numerous disputes over whether “quiz-type” political knowledge questions properly tap overall respondent knowledge about politics. Read chapter 2 of my dissertation if you need all the morbid details. Read the appendix of chapter 4 if you want to see how various types of questions performed in a 1998 Dutch election survey that uses a larger battery of questions than the contemporary ANES (I suppose the Dutch are more willing to subject themselves to quizzes than Americans, although Delli Carpini and Keeter disagree).

The GSS data cited in this InstaPundit post is more dispositive, although I am not as familiar with the GSS—and there may well be caveats that Prof. Lindgren does not mention or is unfamiliar with.

A lot of people have egg on their face over this one. Lots of bloggers staked their reputations, in some way, on it, and we utterly failed. The latest, and perhaps the most high-profile, blogger to acknowledge it, is Dan Drezner.

No, I’m not talking about WMD in Iraq. I’m talking about John Kerry’s cakewalk to the Democratic nomination. A month ago, everyone thought that Dean was going to win this thing, even though (as we now know) his poll numbers started eroding about that time.

This is, no doubt, the point where our good buddies the Perestroikans will come out and say this proves, once and for all, that attempts at a science of politics are futile (one suspects they might also think a science of chemistry is futile, but that is neither here nor there). And, if I were someone who believed that the ultimate test of science is prediction rather than explanation, I might agree with them. But in all good science, when our observations don’t conform with our theories it’s a good time to revisit our hypotheses. The hypothetical reasons why Dean should win were sound:

1. Dean will win the nomination because he’s got the support of the base: This was the clearest argument for Dean’s candidacy. He had a massive fundraising advantage. Dean had captured the energy of the Internet and young people. He captured the anger of many Democratic rank-and-file voters against both Bush and the Iraq war.
2. Dean has organization: Dean had spent all of 2003 setting up a formidable organization in Iowa; the only candidate who was close was near-native-son Dick Gephardt.
3. The primary schedule favors Dean: Coming off an anticipated win in Iowa, most observers expected him to surge into New Hampshire and create an air of inevitability around his campaign.
4. Dean was a governor: Three of the last five Democratic nominees were state governors. In a field where Dean was the only governor, the prediction that Dean would win would be reasonable.
5. Dean has elite support: Throughout the fall, establishment Democrats jumped on the Dean bandwagon. Elites don’t generally hand out endorsements, particularly in primaries, unless they’re pretty sure they won’t be shown to be incorrect.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to Boston. As we now know, none of these things came to pass. Why?

1. We overestimated the base: Dean’s base was deep, but not very broad—perhaps 20% of the Democratic electorate. Dean’s gambit to widen his appeal—being the hardcore “anti-war” candidate not named Kucinich—backfired when Saddam Hussein got dragged out of a foxhole in mid-December. Dean correctly recognized that Democrats were anti-war, but not why they were anti-war: much of the Dem base doesn’t really oppose the war on principle; instead, they oppose it mostly because George W. Bush called the shots. I’d call this the “process” critique of the war, and one that John Kerry was able to capitalize on by being downright shifty with his votes and rhetoric.
2. Organization didn’t matter in Iowa: Somehow a lot of Iowa Democrats got excited about the campaign without getting very excited about the candidates themselves, and when it came time to vote the undecided voters chose Kerry and Edwards—two candidates whose operations in Iowa were weak.
3. The primary schedule favored a New Englander: Kerry essentially borrowed the Dean playbook—convert a win in Iowa to unstoppable momentum coming out of New Hampshire as a “favorite son.” Kerry also benefitted from the unexpected nature of the Iowa win—a Dean victory in Iowa would have been expected, and the momentum bump would have been far smaller.
4. Endorsements don’t matter: The big kahuna, Bill Clinton, stayed out, so the endorsements Dean picked up from has-beens like Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and (maybe) Jimmy Carter were devalued.
5. Dean pissed off the Iowans: Not just in making stuff up when asked about his connection with military veterans, but in old videotapes where Dean had an all-too-candid moment in revealing that the Iowa caucuses are mainly an excuse for presidential candiates to go and kiss farmers’ asses for months on end.
6. Finally, Democrats recognized that Republicans were teeing up for Dean: Anyone with half a brain knew that Dean was Karl Rove’s dream candidate: an inexperienced opponent, prone to displays of short temper and highly vulnerable on social issues and defense policy. Democratic voters, who are desperate to be rid of Bush, siezed on electability as the one and only issue that matters—and decided a patrician senator from Massachusetts, like party idol/martyr JFK, was preferable to the thumb-shaped Vermont wonder in that department.

I think the bottom-line lesson here is that peoples’ political behavior is both idiosyncratic and hard to predict. Perhaps more importantly, I won’t call for an investigation of my fellow political scientists for blowing the search for the Democratic nominee if you won’t.

This is today’s entry in the OTB Beltway Traffic Jam.

Tim Sandefur is collecting nominations for “the canon” —as he puts it, “the ten Supreme Court decisions every American (not lawyers or law students!) should read.” So far, Scipio’s list seems the most complete:

1. Marbury v. Madison
2. Dred Scott
3. Plessy v. Ferguson
4. The Slaughter House Cases
5. Brown v. Board of Education
6. Erie
7. Wickard v. Filburn
8. Texas v. Johnson
9. Printz v. US
10. (tie) Mapp v. Ohio and NY Times v. Sullivan

He also lists, as honorable mentions: Korematsu, Roe v. Wade, Flood v. Kuhn, Lopez, Bowers v. Hardwick, and Harper’s Lessee.

Turning first to the Top Ten: my recollection is that I’ve never mentioned Erie, Wickard, and Printz, and I’ve only mentioned Slaughter-House in passing (trying to explain why the privileges or immunities clause is in the 14th Amendment) in intro. From the honorable mentions, Flood and Harper’s Lessee didn’t make it either; nor, I think, does Korematsu (no doubt to the chagrin of Eric Muller) or Lopez, but it’s been two years since I last taught the class (Fall 2001—I taught methods in Spring of 2002) so it may have been mentioned. All of the cases that don’t make it in (except Korematsu and Lopez) are ones I’d have to stop and think about before remembering what they’re about.

Notable omissions from Scipio’s list that do make it into the lecture: Griswold, McCullough v. Maryland, Casey, some of the gerrymandering cases (Baker v. Carr, Shaw v. Reno, Thornburg v. Gingles spring to mind), Washington v. Davis, Bakke, Miller v. Johnson, and Bowers v. Hardwick. Chandra v. INS (the line-item veto case) may or may not get a mention when we talk about the executive branch, as might U.S. v. Nixon. Romer v. Colorado might be in there too. If I were lecturing today, I’d have to add Texas v. Johnson, of course.

This might (or might not) tell you something about the biases of the writers of political science textbooks. Intro, mind you, isn’t a con law class; I have 375 minutes in the semester to talk about civil rights and liberties, and a lot of that time is devoted to things outside the courts. Nor is con law really in my general field of expertise, although I could probably teach it to undergraduates in a pinch if absolutely needed.

Leave it to Michael Totten to write a post I have to respond to right before I feel like losing consciousness for the evening. Hopefully I’ll remember to say something about it tomorrow.

Dan Drezner has a post looking at a piece in today’s Chicago Tribune on the high dropout rate of Ph.D. students (registration required; use your favorite combo). Dan writes:

So, if there’s to be reforms to ensure a higher yield of graduate school entrants earning their Ph.D.s, there would also have to be a radical change in the culture of most academic departments. Faculty would have to tell their Ph.D.s that it’s OK to get a job in the private sector. That won’t happen soon—for tenured faculty, a key measure of prestige is how well they place their students. The more students that get jobs at top-tier institutions, the better it looks.

I think a higher yield would also require a reduced intake. Certainly at lower-tier schools, programs take in quite a few grad students on “spec,” who eventually wash out because they plainly don’t belong in grad school. That doesn’t happen so much at places like Stanford and Chicago, who have their choice of qualified potential grad students, but out here in the boonies of academia it does.

And, this gives rise to a second question: assuming all these grad students stick around, where are they going to get jobs? It’s a bitch placing the survivors now, even in fields like political science that have good placement rates (on the order of 80% and up for applicants with Ph.D.s in hand). If you think the job market is arbitrary and capricious now, just wait until departments have twice as many applicants per entry-level position—and the burden of that is going to fall squarely on the shoulders of potential professors like me, who have the same (or better) skills as students coming out of “big name” programs but whose degrees come from institutions without that name.

The only realistic solution I can see is to start revoking accreditation from Ph.D. programs to get supply and demand closer to being in check, even though I suspect the results would be monumentally unfair to many potential grad students who have the ability and interest to succeed in grad school. It’s not a solution I particularly like, but if we’re going to encourage students to stick around I think we also have to ensure they have a decent shot at a job at the end of the process.

Update: James Joyner says, “If one doesn’t fit into the academic culture in the comparatively collegial graduate school environment, one is almost certainly not going to be happy as a professional academic. This is a winnowing process that should be hailed, not cause for alarm.” And, Laura McK* thinks Dan underestimates the degree to which grad students are often treated like crap. (Speaking just for myself, I’ve had it much better than the horror stories would have you believe is typical; then again, it’s possible I just have a thick skin.)

I’ve spent most of today writing syllabi for courses that I’ve never taught, and probably will never teach (most notoriously, a syllabus for southern politics—a great class, and one that I’d love to teach, but one that nobody will offer north of the Mason-Dixon line). And I’m not done yet… still got a few more to go.

How this exercise proves I could teach these classes is beyond me. Gotta love being on the job market…

Alex Tabarrok has just had a co-authored paper published that uses a simulation-based approach (using simulated “placebo laws”) to help test whether the effects of certain types of dummy (binary) variables in a time-series are statistically significant. It seems like a fairly interesting approach, which I’ll have to bear in mind next time I do any time-series stuff (most of my data tends to be cross-sectional, however).

And, the substantive topic of Alex’s paper will no doubt be of interest to those who want to fight over John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime.

VodkaPundit Stephen Green plays with Excel’s mapping feature to draw some electoral college maps on the (not unreasonable) presumption that the relative strength of the Republicans and Democrats in each state is unchanged since 2000. Fun stuff.

Marybeth links a Joel Klein piece on the fun and excitement that is the Iowa caucuses. Classic quotes:

To explain how it all works, Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver is going around the state holding practice caucuses. At his workshop last Tuesday at the library in Clive, a suburb seven miles west of Des Moines, about 50 people showed up, several of them young enough to be my parents. Most of these folks already knew how caucuses work and just wanted a refresher course. Clive needs to get itself a bowling alley.

As Culver, 37, a former history teacher, began with an hour-long PowerPoint presentation on the history of the caucus going back to 1846, a sign-language interpreter flashed signs — even though not a single person in the room was deaf. It hit me about 15 minutes into the speech that the sign-language guy must have realized no one there was deaf, but by that time it was too embarrassing to just stop. So he kept going, his bravery a further testimony to the lengths Iowans go through just to get David Broder to visit.

At least Bob Putnam would approve!

For the second hour, Culver had the audience stage a fake caucus. It turns out the Republican caucus is really simple. They pass around ballots, count them and go home to watch Everybody Loves Raymond while the Democrats are still reading their rules. I predict the state will eventually be 100% Republican.

Once all the candidates have at least 15%, a formula Culver describes as “needing a Ph.D. in math to understand” is used to determine how many delegates each candidate gets. The percentage of delegates each candidate gets is the number reported in the media. Then the media, for reasons that are unclear, pretend that has something to do with whom the country wants to be President.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of shit Ackerman and Fishkin want to foist on America. Thanks—but no thanks.