Steve Verdon explains Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, one of the most important theorems of economics and “rat choice” political science. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain one of the key assumptions—the independence of irrelevant alternatives or IIA assumption—in much detail, which is a shame because I’ve never found a good explanation of it that doesn’t talk about the colors of buses. (It’s often called the “red bus, blue bus” problem for that very reason—that’s the classic example used to explain IIA, which leads most people to correctly ask, “but what if my problem has nothing to do with buses?”) Despite that (very insignificant) shortcoming, it’s an interesting post.

Glenn Reynolds has the latest from our friends at the International Society of Political Psychology. He notes this email received from the group’s president by anti-left gadfly John Ray. Both are probably correct that no scholar with a right-wing bias would have written such an email; however, I’d attribute it more to a failed attempt at humor than to ideology per se.

I will note two empirical datapoints: my dissertation, which straddles the boundary of political psychology and mass political behavior, doesn’t have a single citation to a piece that appeared in Political Psychology, the society’s journal, despite citing nearly 250 distinct works—by comparison, the similarly obscure journal Political Behavior, which has significant overlap in scope, received 8 citations. A colleague, whose dissertation was even more explicitly in the political psychology tradition, also had zero citations of Political Psychology.* Since most people who join groups like the ISPP do it to receive the journal, if the society can’t publish a single journal article that would be even tangentially relevant to our dissertation topics (which, basically, is the criterion for a citation), it speaks volumes about the relevance of the ISPP to research in the subfield.

* There is a possible source of bias here: the University of Mississippi library doesn’t subscribe to Political Psychology—which may also speak volumes about the relevance of the journal to the subfield…

Mark your calendars… December 2nd is the day, at a secure, undisclosed combined conference room/classroom somewhere in Deupree Hall on the University of Mississippi campus. Of course, that’s not exactly the end of the tunnel, but pretty darn close.

I wonder if my committee will accept this Jay Manifold post in lieu of the conclusions chapter of my dissertation. After all, it basically says what I want to say, although far more succinctly and without the obligatory citations to seventeen billion political scientists. Quoth Jay:

The Scrappleface material aside, I rise to the defense of my fellow citizens on this one. Like many other polls, it can be made to look very bad. The lessons we should be drawing, however, are not the usual people-are-stupid, everybody-should-have-to-know-this-stuff sort of thing, but are more related to simple common sense:

1. Suppose the poll had instead taken the form of a true/false test with a list of, say, 40 possible names of Cabinet departments. How different would the results have been? I’m sure that only a small percentage would have gotten them all correct; but I surmise that most respondents would have gotten most of them right, a far different result than the one presented.
2. Also, I like to apply the body-count test. Are we stepping over bodies in the streets every morning as a result of [insert failing of American public here]? No? Then maybe, just maybe, it’s not a big deal.
3. According to the poll, if you can name more than 11 Cabinet departments, you are in a minority of 1%; if you can name them all, you’re probably a solid 3σ away from the statistical mean. In other words, you are a weirdo.
4. In fact, if you’re complaining about public ignorance about almost any political data, while demonstrating your familiarity with such data, you’re not only a weirdo, you’re a control freak whose idea of a healthier polity is one with a whole bunch of weird little copies of you in it.

Needless to say, the above describes almost all current-events bloggers.

Or, as I put it in the current iteration of my draft conclusions chapter:

It is also possible that what matters isn’t what voters know about politics, but rather what they understand about politics. Knowledge may simply be a byproduct of understanding among those citizens most exposed to political information; in other words, knowledge is only important to the extent that higher levels of knowledge about politics—as measured by, for example, answers to the notorious “trivia questions” about politics that are regularly used as evidence that the public has insufficient levels of civic education—generally reflect greater understanding of politics. If that is the case, civic education efforts may improve voters’ reasoning processes even if they don’t lead to greater retention of the minutiae of politics by citizens over the long term.

I resisted the urge, however, to accuse Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter of wanting to build clone armies of themselves.

Howie Dean’s latest gaffe has sparked a substantial discussion in the blogosphere about the so-called “Southern Strategy”; Steven Taylor has something close to the post I’d write if I had more time.

From the scholarly perspective, I think most political scientists have attributed the maybe-realignment of the 1960s to racial issues (see, for example, the book-length treatments by Carmines and Stimson and Huckfeldt and Sprague), but Abramowitz (1992 AJPS, I think; might have been JOP) makes a strong case that those issues weren’t driving Republican success in the 1980s—although he leaves the question of the 1960s aside, and I don’t think people in political science were particularly enamoured with his use of exploratory factor analysis to demonstrate his point. However, I think there’s a paper to be written either trying to apply Abramowitz’s methodology to the 1960s-era data or looking at it over the history of the ANES using the Cumulative file; unfortunately, from a publication standpoint, I think realignment is no longer the sexy topic it was in the late 80s and early 90s.

I wrapped up* the final substantive chapter of my dissertation Saturday evening, then spent a few hours down at the Square downing a few $1 PBRs. Once I’ve given a copy to my committee chair sometime today, I’ll probably post a link to a PDF of it here in the blog.

For the morbidly curious, it currently weighs in at 123 printed pages, not including about 10 pages of front matter—the title page, acknowledgements, dedication, abstract, table of contents, and lists of figures and tables—and the yet-to-be-written conclusions chapter. It is typeset entirely using the gatech-thesis class in pdflatex in 12-point Palatino, with the included Trellis graphs generated by R’s pdf graphics driver.

For those who are interested in such things, here’s a new graph from my dissertation. More on this topic soon…

Greg Wythe (GregsOpinion.com) notes a Washington Post account looking at the Texas and Colorado redistricting plans; notably, it quotes a lot of political scientists, instead of the legal scholars that generally appear in these accounts.

Notable quote from the article:

Whatever the answers, Thomas E. Mann, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that the Texas and Colorado experiments in multiple redistricting could have profound political consequences.

“If this is sustained, what we will have is a form of arms race where there is no restraint on keeping the game going on throughout a decade,” Mann said. “You ask, who wins in this process? This is a process designed not for citizens or voters but for politicians. It will lead politicians to say there are no limits. I think it threatens the legitimacy of democracy.”

I think this is the natural consequence of the Supreme Court’s muddled post-Baker jurisprudence: insistence on exact population equality between districts, despite the huge known sampling error of the Census making that equality essentially meaningless; a ridiculous level of deference to partisan gerrymanders coupled with the unclear dictates of the Voting Rights Act and vague, O‘Connoresque prohibitions against racial gerrymanders—which, due to bloc voting by African-Americans, are virtually indistinguishable from partisan gerrymanders; widespread abandonment of any conception of geographic compactness or geographic logic as desirable features for districts; naked partisanship by the federal judiciary; and a general failure to incorporate anything that political scientists who do applied and theoretical research in the field contribute. No wonder it’s a giant playground for political opportunists from both parties.

I still think the only viable way to eliminate this mischief is to incorporate an element of proportional representation into the system—even two or three seats in a state the size of Texas, elected by “top up” proportional representation, would be enough to both undermine the possible benefits of partisan gerrymanders and ensure that incumbent-protection gerrymanders don’t lead to a sclerotic delegation.

Matt Stinson tears into CalPundit for his risible suggestion that he, Paul Krugman, and Atrios are “moderates” (see also John Cole). Allow me to add my two cents.

Newsflash to Kevin (and anyone else in punditry under the misguided impression they are moderate): nobody with a well-developed political ideology is a moderate. By definition, if you are liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, Enviro-wacko, batshit neocon, or whatever the hell Pat Buchanan and Bob Novak are (paleo-pseudo-con?), you cannot be moderate. George Bush isn’t moderate. Nor is Colin Powell, Janet Reno, Howard Dean, Glenn Reynolds, Megan McArdle, or Kevin Drum. Nor am I.

Most Americans—and most people the world over, in fact—don’t have consistent, ideological belief systems. The absence of those belief systems makes them moderate, because they just react to whatever’s going on in the political ether; if you’re lucky, you might be able to pin their beliefs to some overarching fundamental value (“hard work“, “equality“, “liberty“).

There are only two types of true moderate: people who don’t care about politics, and centrist politicians (and this latter class of people generally care less about politics than they care about keeping their jobs—I defy you to explain the behavior of Arlen Specter or Olympia Snowe otherwise). Bloggers and New York Times columnists aren’t. Anyone who cares enough about politics enough to post several essays a day explicating his or her worldview is not a moderate, and neither is anyone who’s taking time away from his academic career to publish two incoherent essays a week in America’s flagship newspaper.

Said people may be swell, wonderful, good fun at parties, open-minded, and paragons of virtue and erudition. It is not a sin to have an ideology; in fact, it is a good thing. So please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you don’t have one.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution blogs on an Alan Krueger New York Times piece that reports on the latest research by Larry Bartels* on the effects of what he describes as “uninformed preferences” on voters’ decisions. Alex has some interesting thoughts on the substantive meaning of Bartels’ research, as does Robert Garcia Tagorda.

For what it’s worth, Bartels’ most famous piece on the topic (“Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections,” American Journal of Political Science, February 1996) concluded that low levels of information in the electorate had actually benefitted Democrats in presidential elections over the history of the ANES up to that point (I recall that this advantage gained the party an average of around 2% of the vote); that conclusion, however, may be time-bound.

Russell Fox, a political scientist at near-neighbor Arkansas State University (whose football team is about to be Ole Miss’ sacrificial lamb for Homecoming), has a lengthy post that makes a reasonably strong case why recalls are a bad thing. As I posted before, I think the tenets of representative democracy are compatible with the recall power, but I can see where an unchecked recall power might harm our system of government, and in some ways I can agree with Russell that the California procedure was a “mess.” (Arguably, the state’s bizarre super-open primary system added to the mess by creating a situation where neither party nominated a decent candidate in 2002.)

I guess the big, open question is how to avoid the “mess” while still retaining a credible threat to lame-duck politicians and permitting a fair selection of candidates on the replacement ballot.

Steve Verdon thinks there are some flaws in Russell’s argument.

I posted my sketch of a theory of perceived media bias a few months ago; now Gallup has done me a favor and produced a poll that suggests I may be onto something. Take a look-see at the results:

Now, unfortunately, there’s nothing to show the causal mechanism here (i.e. why conservatives and liberals perceive the media’s biases differently). But it’s an interesting look at the question, nonetheless.

Link via Andrew Sullivan (although I think I saw it cited earlier somewhere else).

Stephen Green links to this Roger L. Simon post that alleges:

What we are witnessing is the beginning—the early movement—in the death of the two-party system as we know it. This is a revolt of the pragmatic center. And that is a good thing for the American people because those parties and the media that feed on them have indeed become a form of nomenklatura. They depend on each other. They are the mutual gate keepers of an old and sclerotic bureaucracy from which their jobs flow in a system of patronage as elaborate as the Czar’s. No wonder watching CNN tonight I felt as if I were watching a wake. They are threatened by what is going on—as they should be.

I don’t know that I believe that. Any good political scientist will tell you that we’re probably overdue for a realignment—but realignments rotate the societal cleavage lines, finding a new way to split the center; they generally don’t produce “the pragmatic center” versus “everyone else.”

Realignments are fundamentally about changes in the issues that separate voters between the parties. Now, maybe the “war/no-war” issue is a possible realignment pivot; I honestly don’t know. It certainly sees political figures of all stripes squabbling within their own parties more than usual. But that’s not anything to do with the “pragmatic center.”

Yet, arguably, the pragmatic center won in California. That was largely due to the ballot format, and in particular due to the fact that party activists were not the gatekeepers for candidates to receive a major-party label on the replacement ballot. Look at the figures: six of the top seven candidates in the replacement ballot had a party affiliation, and five of the seven were affiliated with a major party; the top five major party candidates received 94.3% of the vote, the Green party candidate received 2.8%, while the highest independent tally (0.6%) was for Huffington, who essentially ran as a Democrat. If primary voters, comprised mostly of Republican and Democratic activists, had been able to be gatekeepers for the ballot—as they are in virtually every other partisan election in the United States—chances are the “pragmatic center” option wouldn’t have even made it on the ballot, even though it’s fairly clear Schwarzenegger was the Pareto winner* of the election.

Unless the pragmatic center can break down these barriers to entry for their preferred candidates, or establish a viable third party label (something Schwarzenegger probably isn’t interested in heading, particularly after the Ventura debacle), chances are that the major parties—and particularly the party activists who control them—will continue to win almost all elections.

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk has some interesting thoughts on this topic as well, including a cautionary tale about single-party democracy in his adopted homeland. And, I particularly like Matthew’s reaction to something Michael J. Totten said:

This isn't really recall-related, but Michael Totten follows up on Simon's post with a "can't we all just be nonpartisan?" plea, and cites increasing complexity as a reason to move toward a more nuanced politics. That's fine for folks like Michael, but there's a downside to increased complexity—most consumers of political information have little time to think about complexity, and instead receive their information in little bite-sized pieces. It's this famine of depth which encourages hyperpartisanship, as gut reactions predominate over reason. If anything, the trend isn't toward the death of the two-party system as we know it, but toward the creation of an increasingly polarized and anti-intellectual pair of party masses, along with a highly informed politically moderate elite (i.e. folks like Michael and Roger), who occupy the position of “kingmaker” in future elections.

That sounds about—and, dare I say, scarily—right.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds’ semi-blog at MSNBC thinks the recall is an effective way to upset special interest politics-as-usual; I think that, again, goes to the format of the ballot, which allowed a moderate figure to run with a party label without significant initial support from that party’s activists. The other major candidates, however, were in hock to established state interests: Bustamante with the Old Left and racial unity groups, McClintock with the Christian right, and Camejo and Huffington with the Sierra Clubbers. In any event, generally speaking I don’t have a problem with organized interests influencing politics, even if the playing field could be made more level. (And I’d slightly quibble with Mancur Olson’s interpretation of Japan’s interest group structure; by the accounts I’ve read, the post-war kieretsu were not too different from the business cross-holdings prior to the war. Olson’s probably correct when it comes to the bigger picture, however.)

Tyler Cowen has the scoop on the Economics Nobel prizes, which are being given to the inventors of two time-series econometrics techniques: ARCH and cointegration. As Tyler points out, Granger is more famous (perhaps even infamous) for his contribution of the concept of “Granger causality”; the typical joke is that, by the Granger defintion, summer “Granger-causes” fall (or autumn, if you don’t live in North America).

Anyway, very cool stuff; I’m not a time-series guy myself, mainly because there isn’t all that much great cross-sectional time-series data on mass political behavior at the individual level, but ARCH and cointegration are a big deal for political scientists looking at things like presidential approval and aggregate voting behavior over time, and the Nobel is well-deserved by both.

Henry Farrell, Daniel Drezner, David Adesnik, The Invisible Adjunct, Erin O‘Connor and Jacob Levy (whew—did I get everyone?) are among those discussing David Brooks’ latest NYT op-ed on the alleged liberal bias of the academy, particularly in its hiring practices. (I previously blogged about this topic back when Horowitz was making his splash but can’t be bothered to search for the post. Oh, well.)

I think Jacob Levy is onto something when he writes:

What we do is also: research. It’s always been pretty clear to me that there are people who have the reputation of subordinating their research to an ideological mission, and doing bad research as a result.

I think the danger for a lot of scholars—on the left and the right—is that they will fall into this trap. However, it’s a much more deadly one for rightist scholars than leftist ones; I can recall a particular gathering at which one particular political science faculty member was fawning over Michael Bellesiles’ then-new (and then-undiscredited) Arming America; one suspects my colleagues were not quite so entralled by John Lott’s (also-then-undiscredited) More Guns, Less Crime. In the medium-to-long term, Bellesiles is likely to resurface relatively unscathed somewhere in second-tier academia, while Lott will be most fortunate if he ever sees a room with students in it again in his life. Of course, neither of these men are political scientists (just as well, I suppose, since that means we don’t have to disavow them).

I’ve been relatively fortunate in my career to fall in with faculty who, if they don’t share my political beliefs, can at least accept that they are legitimate and sincerely-held. I think it’s also the case that in more empirically-oriented parts of the social sciences, ideological differences don’t matter as much as what the data can tell us, provided we are honest researchers. After all, Johannes Kepler started out believing—as his mentor, Tycho Brahe did—that the Earth was the center of the universe, but ended up producing the laws of planetary motion for our sun-centered system that astronomers still use today.

The epitome of good science is a willingness to revise—and if necessary, reject—your preconceived notions if the evidence cannot support them. In the end, that is the only ideology that should matter.

David Adesnik has a response to the critiques of his earlier posts at OxBlog and the Volokh Conspiracy. He first notes that he’s just as annoyed by new data sets as by old ones:

Actually, I’m far more frustrated by the new data sets than the rehashing of the old ones. Just three days ago I was at a presentation in which a colleague described the data set she assembled on over 120 civil wars that have taken place since 1945. Since Latin America is the region I know best, I pulled the Latin American cases out of the data to set look at them.

What I found was that a very large proportion of the cases were “coded” in a misleading or flat-out wrong manner. Why? Because no one can study 120 civil wars. But pressure to come up with data sets leads scholars to do this anyway and do it poorly. Of course, since their work is evaluated mostly by other scholars who lack the historical knowledge to criticize their work, they get away with it. And so the academic merry-go-round spins merrily along.

That’s a fair and reasonable critique—of that particular dataset. There’s always a tradeoff between parsimony on the one hand and depth on the other. You can collect data on 120 civil wars, and try to explain with parsimony why—in general—civil wars occur, or you can soak and poke in one civil war and try to figure out all the myriad causes for that particular one. Each has its pitfalls; figuring out why Cambodia had a civil war in 1970 (my years are probably off, me not being an IR scholar) through a “soak and poke” really doesn’t help explain why Pakistan had one in 1973. On the other hand, oversimplifying the causes can be problematic too.

But that strikes me as more of a coding problem in a particular dataset than a problem endemic to social science research; ultimately, you have to simplify the real world to make scientific explanations of it. And this isn’t a problem unique to “soft” sciences like political science: physicists don’t really think light is composed of photons that are both a particle and a wave (for example), but the only way for humans to currently understand light is to model it that way, and chemists don’t think that nuclei are indivisible (but, for their purposes 99.9% of the time, they might as well be).

David does take me to task for my admittedly flip remark that Hamas was comparable to the Sierra Club:

With apologies to Chris, his comment summarizes everything that is wrong with political science. Who but a political scientist could think that ideology is not a good explanation for the differences between the Sierra Club and Hamas?

Both groups have fairly revolutionary ideologies, yet they pursue their ends through different means. The Sierra Club operates in an environment where at least some of its goals can be accomplished from within the existing political system, while Hamas’ goal is the obliteration of the existing political system in Israel and the Palestinian territories. One need not resort to ideology to see that the Sierra Club doesn’t need to engage in violence to pursue its goals while it’s pretty clear that for Hamas to produce revolutionary change in the former Palestinian mandate, it does.

That the goal has something to do with Hamas’ ideology is rather beside the point; they can’t accomplish it without obliterating the Israeli state through violent action. The Sierra Club, on the other hand, has a sympathetic political party, a regulatory agency whose civil service employees (if not its politically-appointed overseers) share its goals, and other sources of active support that mean that they can achieve their goal of reducing pollution and other environmental impacts without resorting to violence. Ideology may define the goal, but the goal itself will be pursued through means that are shaped by the political environment.

Of course, in some cases, ideology may affect the means chosen. But a theory of how Osama Bin Laden operates isn’t very generalizable; it only explains how Bin Laden behaves, without explaining how ETA, the Tamil Tigers, or the Real IRA operate. That’s the tradeoff—you can spend a lot of time trying to explain how one actor will behave, and nail that, or you can spend a lot of time explaining how multiple actors will behave, and maybe get close. Maybe Bin Laden deserves case study attention. But most political actors don’t; they’re frankly not that interesting.

For example, in-depth case study of how my neighbor across the street makes his voting decisions tells me next to nothing about how my next-door neighbors vote, much less how people vote in general. My resources are probably better spent trying to explain how most people vote from large-scale survey data, and getting close, rather than studying one person so I can predict precisely how he’ll vote in 2032.

Around Harvard, all one hears is that incorporating statistics into one’s work significantly increases one’s marketability (and I don’t just mean at the p<.05 level—we’re talking p<.01 on a one-tailed test.)

I will grant that the use of statistics—or more accurately, the demonstrated ability to use statistics—helps the marketability of political scientists. For one thing, this is because of hiring practices in political science—your primary or major field defines the sort of job you will get. Unless you are looking for a job at a small liberal arts college, no school that is hiring in IR will care if your second (minor) field is comparative, theory, or American, since you’ll never teach or do research in those fields. The exception is in political methodology: you can get a job in methods with a substantive major and a minor in methods. The downside (if you don’t like methods) is that you will be expected to teach methods. The upside is that you aren’t tied to a particular substantive field.

More to the point, in some fields it is difficult to do meaningful research without statistics. In mass political behavior and political psychology—my areas of substantive research—at least a modicum of statistical knowledge is de rigeur. Which brings me to Dan’s point:

I’d argue that the greater danger is the proliferation of sophisticated regression analysis software like STATA to people who don’t have the faintest friggin’ clue whether their econometric model corresponds to their theoretical model.

For every political scientist that knows what the hell they’re doing with statistics, there are at least two who think typing logit depvar ind1 ind2 ind3 at a Stata prompt is the be-all and end-all of statistical analysis. Frankly, a lot of the stats you see in top-flight journals are flaming crap—among the sins: misspecified models, attempts to make inferences that aren’t supported by the actual econometric model, acceptance of key hypotheses based on marginally significant p values, use of absurdly small samples, failure to engage in any post-estimation diagnostics. And, of course, “people who don’t have the faintest friggin’ clue whether their econometric model corresponds to their theoretical model.” Several thousand political scientists receive Ph.D.’s a year in the United States, and I doubt 20% of them have more than two graduate courses in quantitative research methods—yet an appreciable percentage of the 80% will pass themselves off as being quantitatively competent, which unless they went to a Top 20 institution, they’re almost certainly not.

David then trots out the flawed “APSR is full of quant shit” study, which conflates empirical quantitative research with positive political theory (game theory and other “rat choice” pursuits), which, as I’ve pointed out here before, are completely different beasts. Of course, the study relies on statistics (apparently, they’re only valid when making inferences about our own discipline), but let’s put that aside for the moment. The result of all this posturing is our new journal, Perspectives on Politics. Just in case our discipline wasn’t generating enough landfill material…

He then turns back to the civil war dataset his colleague is assembling:

Take, for example, the flaws in the civil war data set mentioned above. I’m hardly a Latin America specialist, but even some knowledge of the region’s history made it apparent that the data set was flawed. If political scientists had greater expertise in a given region, they would appreciate just how often in-depth study is necessary to get even the basic facts right. Thus, when putting together a global data set, no political scientist would even consider coding the data before consulting colleagues who are experts in the relevant regional subfields.

Undoubtably, this particular political scientist should have consulted with colleagues. What David seems to fail to understand is that she did: that is why your colleague presented this research to you and your fellow graduate students, to get feedback! Everything political scientists do, outside of job talks and their actual publications, is an effort to get feedback on what they’re doing, so as to improve it. This isn’t undergraduate political science, where you are expected to sit still and soak in the brilliance of your betters while trying not to drool or snore. You’re now a grad student, expected to contribute to the body of knowledge that we’ve been assembling—that’s the entire point of the exercise, even if it gets lost in the shuffle of “publish or perish” and the conference circuit.

And one way to do that is to say, “Yo, I think you have some coding errors here!” If this political scientist is worth her salt, instead of treating you like a snot nosed twit, she’ll say, “Gee, thanks for pointing out that the Colombian civil war had N participants instead of M” or “Cuba’s civil war was a Soviet-supported insurgency, not a indigenous movement? Thanks!” (Again, these are hypotheticals; I’m not an expert on Latin American history.)

As for the lag time in Pape’s piece, well that’s the peril of how the publication process works. If it’s anything like any other academic paper, it’s been through various iterations over several years; you don’t simply wake up one morning, write a journal article, and send it off to Bill Jacoby or Jennifer Hochschild. At least, not if you don’t want them to say nasty things about you to your colleagues. Anyway, you can fault the publication process to a point, but I think it’s a safe bet that Pape’s thesis predates 9/11, and that people were aware of it before his APSR piece hit the presses.

Daniel Drezner notes that David Adesnik is digging himself into a hole of rather epic proportions. Quoth Adesnik:

The great flaw of modern political science is its desire to imitate microeconomists (and share in their prestige) by developing theorems that explain and predict the behavior of rational actors. Of course, that is exactly the wrong way to go about things. It is only when political scientists recognize that ideas and values are what drive politicians and voters that they will begin to produce something worthy of the name “science”.

Huh? To begin with, in general political scientists—with very few exceptions—don’t believe all actors are purely rational; in Herbert Simon’s terms, actors are boundedly rational. It isn’t just political scientists who believe this—contemporary psychologists and economists also use Simon’s conception of bounded rationality and satisficing (the idea that people don’t choose among all available options, but rather choose the first one that they encounter that is minimally satisfactory) to explain decison-making, as well as more modern ideas.

For another thing, political scientists recognize that “ideas” and “values” have utility to rational actors. Quantifying these things is hard, and perhaps sometimes it is simpler to retreat to the realm of relative capabilities and force projection ability (to name two favorite variables of my friends that study international relations using data from the Correlates of War project), but to blanket the entire discipline with a critique that perhaps only applies to the most hardcore CoW junkie (and doesn’t even discuss the contributions of the political behavior field to the understanding of how citizens in democratic societies make voting and other political decisions or elite decision-making processes—not all political science goes on in the halls of ISA) seems awfully, and dangerously, simplistic.

Josh Chafetz, one of David’s partners in crime at OxBlog, has some good points (partially in David’s defense and partially critical) and usefully distinguishes between rational choice theorists and empiricists. But, honestly I’m not sure there are that many “universalist” rat choicers out there; I know a few, and they mostly lurk on the edge between political science and economics. Perhaps that perception reflects my training in the behaviorist (Michigan) tradition, though. But in general the ones I’ve met aren’t hostile to empirical testing of their ideas; it’s just not what they personally find interesting.

As for Josh’s snarky aside, “when The Clash of Civilizations is widely mistaken for a good work of political culture analysis, the field is in trouble,” all I can say is: Heh.

A measure of the APSA’s efforts to make its conference the global center of attention is the fact you can’t even get back from their conference before they start bombarding you with material for the next year’s conference—even though it’s eleven months away. At least it’s in Chicago next year, one of my favorite cities in North America.

Anyway, Dan Drezner is working on a paper on the political impact of blogging with Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber, as part of a roundtable on blogging he is planning to organize at the conference, and is blegging for help with a definition of a “blog” and some good sources.

Considering that I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to propose for the Midwest—the deadline for which is two weeks away, and which will also be held in Chicago (apparently the only city in America that can put up with two gatherings of several thousand political scientists in a year)—I should applaud Dan and Henry’s initiative.

In somewhat related (i.e. completely unrelated) news, I plan to finish my dissertation revisions today. Granted, I’ve been saying that every day since I got back from Philadelphia, but maybe blogging about it will light a fire under my proverbial ass.

David Adesnik apparently has been drinking the Perestroikans’ Kool Aid:

The secret to success in America’s political science departments is to invent statistics. If you can talk about regressions and r-squared and chi-squared and probit and logit, then you can persuade your colleagues that your work is as rigorous as that of a chemist, a physicist, or (at worst) an economist.

Funny, I just came back from spending a month with people who told me that the absolute worst way to get a job in political science is to “invent statistics.” If David means “understand and be able to utilize” by “invent,” that is. If he means something else, I can’t figure it out.

Still, it is absolutely impossible to explain the tactics of Al Qaeda or Hamas without reference to their perverse ideologies.

It is? Actually, it’s pretty easy to explain their tactics—historically, they’ve been quite effective. What’s (slightly) more difficult to explain is why Al Qaeda and Hamas engage in terrorism while the Sierra Club and Libertarian Party don’t.

The real problem is that [Robert] Pape, like so many political scientists, abandons all nuance in deriving policy programs from his work.

Fair enough. But what exactly does that have to do with the fact that Pape uses quantitative methods in his research? Adesnik claims:

As I see it, the cause of this unsubtle approach is political scientists’ obsession with statistics, a pursuit that dulls their sensitivity to the compexity of real-world political events. If numbers are your thing, you’re going to have a hard time explaining why Israelis and Palestinians have spent five decades fighting over narrow tracts of land.

So then, what is to be done? As you might of heard, many political science programs require training in statistics but not foreign languages. That trend has to be sharply reversed.

Great. Now we can have more social scientists who are completely incompetent at quantitative methods, but at least can express that incompetence in multiple languages. Where do I sign on to this initiative?

Look, I’m more than willing to concede that quantitative research doesn’t—and can’t—answer every interesting question in political science. But the rigorous study of politics can, and IMHO should, be scientific: founded on the scientific method, no matter whether the actual methods used are qualitative or quantitative.

And—irony of ironies—the APSR piece that Adesnik vents his wrath at is completely qualitative (at least in terms of its method of inference). Not a p-value, χ², or logit model in sight.

Anyway, you can read the piece yourself courtesy of Dan Drezner, at least until the APSR’s copyright goons come after him.

Steven Taylor of PoliBlog notes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Iraq’s al-Qaeda ties and the capture of Abu Abbas on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, my friend Scott Huffmon forwards a collection of quotes from administration officials that juxtapose 9/11 with Iraq (Scott therefore wins the longstanding Signifying Nothing “no-prize” for forwarding evidence of the adminstration linking Saddam and 9/11). Perhaps more interesting is the associated article discussing how the public’s belief in a 9/11-Saddam connection came about. Key graf:

A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein’s involvement—even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged.

Or, as I am fond of saying, when it comes to politics, it’s all heuristics.

The California Recall has prompted a few questions about various polling techniques. As someone who’s put in his fair share of hours doing telephone survey research, and has heard a version of the “pitch” from Harris Interactive from one of their in-house statisticians*, I thought I’d try to clear up some confusion.

The “traditional” way of doing political polling these days is a system called “random digit dialing.” Basically, to get the number of respondents they need, professional pollsters call several thousand households from a list of residential numbers prepared by companies like Survey Sampling Inc.; if you’re feeling cheap, there are other alternatives that can be used (with a much higher non-response rate). (Before RDD, we did stuff like what Zogby did in Iraq recently; that sort of quasi-random “man on the street” interviewing is common in non-industrialized countries, and essentially the same as contemporary exit polling in the United States.)

RDD worked pretty well for polling until computers arrived on the scene in the mid-80s along with the hardcore telemarketing industry. In the past two decades, response rates have dropped off sharply, requiring more calls to get a valid sample for statistical inference. Coupled with answering machines and caller ID, the effectiveness of RDD for getting a truly random sample has been undermined.

The Internet allows a few new options. Internet survey delivery allows respondents to complete surveys at their own convenience, and also permits the delivery of non-verbal stimuli (like photographs, long blocks of text to be read, and drawings), which is useful for experimental designs. The drawback is that just sticking a survey on the Internet will result in a non-random sample, the most notorious instance of which is the abomination known as the “web poll.” Since respondents to web polls self-select, we have no idea how representative they are of the public at large.

Two groups in the U.S. have tried to tackle the non-random response issue from different directions. Knowledge Networks (KN) solves the representativeness problem by only offering the surveys to a randomly-selected sample of households. Rather than recruiting a new batch of respondents for each survey (like in a traditional phone survey), KN has a rolling panel of several thousand households that participate in studies. They are provided with free WebTV service for the duration of their panel membership, and in exchange must participate in a certain number of surveys. The surveys are delivered via WebTV to the household. (This approach is basically the same as that employed by the Neilsens for television ratings.) As in a traditional phone survey, some weighting is done to adjust the sample to account for stratification and clustering effects. KN’s co-founders are Stanford University professors Norman Nie and Douglas Rivers; Stanford apparently has an arrangement for reduced-cost surveys with KN due to this relationship (at least judging from the number of Stanford professors and graduate students I see at conferences using KN-based experimental and survey data).

The other approach, employed by Harris Interactive, is to do post-hoc adjustments through a technique called “propensity weighting.” Harris has a truly Internet-based panel with a larger membership than KN’s panel (some of the difference in membership size is due to Harris also doing survey work outside the United States; however, they also use bigger samples for each survey for other reasons which I’ll get to shortly). Surveys are administered via the user’s web browser in response to invitations, and participants receive points for participating in surveys and also get entries in regular drawings for cash prizes. Instead of ensuring that participants are representative of the population at large, Harris uses propensity weighting to reweigh respondents based on their demographic and behavioral characteristics and the frequency of those characteristics in the population at large (weighting schemes for other survey techniques are generally based on the design of the sampling procedure). It is important to emphasize that Harris’ technique is not based on random samples. However, propensity weighting is designed to make the sample behave “as if” it was selected randomly.

Which technique is better? All of them have flaws, particularly if trying to reach certain subpopulations like the homeless and indigent (Harris’s technique might find the occasional homeless guy who checks his email at the library; KN and RDD would never catch him). For voting research, however, all of the techniques would probably fare better. Generally speaking participation is correlated with the variables that would be associated with having a telephone, a stable household, and Internet access. To the extent that some population groups are less likely to be online, propensity weighting should adjust for that (in the case of Harris).

Earlier this year, Political Analysis had an article that compared all three techniques, which found that generally RDD, KN, and Harris provided estimates of population parameters within the reported margin of error, with a few notable exceptions. For inferential statistics (trying to figure out the relationships among variables), which is generally what political scientists are interested in, the sampling issues are relatively unimportant, but for the descriptive statistics (trying to figure out what the population-at-large is like) pollsters and the media care about, there may be more important issues that weren’t addressed in the PA piece.

But generally both KN and Harris appear to have credible techniques that have been backed up with actual election results, so their conclusions are as likely to be correct as those of traditional surveys like the Field Poll and L.A. Times.

Daniel Drezner has the scoop on a poll of Californians conducted by Knowledge Networks on behalf of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from August 28 through September 8 that finds Arnold Schwarzenegger in a commanding lead and the recall with 62% support, contrary to many polls that show Bustamante in the lead and the recall question in a dead heat. One possible explanation for the difference:

The Stanford/Knowledge Networks survey is the first to ask voters to choose from the same list of 135 candidates that they will see on election day. Previous polls have restricted voters’ choices to the top candidates and have allowed respondents to select “undecided” or similar options.

If this methodological difference alone* makes that large a shift in the results—and there is fairly good reason to believe that it does—then there’s good reason to believe that the existing polling is flawed, since this methodology more accurately reflects the balloting environment.

Meanwhile, SacBee columnist Daniel Weintraub thinks a Schwarzennegger-McClintock detente may be in the offing.

Robert of Boomshock has some thoughts on the meaning of the poll as well. As for Knowledge Networks’ methodology, I recommend this page which explains how their panel works; it's pretty dissimilar from Harris Interactive’s approach. KN in general has some pretty smart people on board (as, for that matter, does HI) who’ve put a lot of thought in how to make Internet-based surveys representative.

Tim Lambert does a pretty good job demolishing John Lott’s latest evasions; I think the key quote (buried in Lambert’s effort to prove that Lott played games with a table) is here:

Plassmann was kind enough to reply. He conceded that no significant results remain after correcting the coding errors and did not know why Lott had removed the clustering correction [from his Stata .do file]. I also posted my question on the firearmsregprof list (also CC’d to Lott because I am very courteous). No-one there knew of a reason either.

However—accepting that Ayers and Donahue do it right—there’s still the issue of null results. More guns may not mean less crime, but the results clearly show that more guns don’t mean more crime either, and the signs indicate that concluding “more” has less support than concluding “less,” although you’d have to be an idiot to come to either conclusion based on the Ayers and Donahue corrections to Lott’s results (that’s why we call them “not statistically significant”). Then again, “More Guns, No Effect On Crime—Either Way” isn’t a very sexy book title.

More fundamentally, the “null results” return the issue of gun rights back to the realm of philosophy, the area where all rights ought to be debated in the first place. My view is that public policy is, and should be, the subject of empirical debate, while (in general) fundamental rights and liberties should not. An example: even if we proved empirically that 99.9% of coerced confessions were made by people who actually committed crimes, that would not be a valid justification for law enforcement to violate the 4th and 8th amendments to the Constitution.

CalPundit has more. I’ve also clarified that the Ayers and Donahue corrections to Lott’s results are not their results (which I haven’t looked at in any great detail, although I did download their data and stare blankly at the Stata files for a few minutes a few months back when it came out; I do remember them logging everything, which at least proves they learned their stats from economists).

Link via InstaPundit.

I’m back in Memphis after returning from APSA in Philly yesterday afternoon, and will be heading back to Oxford sometime today. A few odds and ends:

• Dan Drezner (the only fellow blogger I knowingly ran into at the conference) has some choice quotes from attendees (none of which I can take credit for) and a modest proposal for a new organized section; Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber compares the APSA experience with science fiction conferences; and Laura McK notes that political scientists don’t talk much about politics:

  One truly amazing aspect of the political science conference is the lack of interest in real politics. You would expect political scientists would live and breathe current events. They should sit around arguing whether or not it's time to get out of Iraq, the merits of the Dean campaign, and the state of the deficit, but no, they don't. For academics, politics has to be discussed years after the events and with clinical coldness. They only touch politics with sterile rubber gloves.

  For what it’s worth, I did have a (not-very-sober) discussion about the prospects of the Dean campaign with my roommate and two Oklahoma grad students, reiterating my belief that due to the electoral rules in place and the lack of a consensus candidate backed by the party establishment it’s Dean’s campaign to lose.

• Five hours is far too long to sit in a single bar. But it was worth it to see Ole Miss beat Vanderbilt, in their typical, lacksadaisical fashion.
• Somehow I ended up with a pair of my hotel roommate’s pants. I’d keep them except they don’t fit (as a pair, we sort of resemble Laurel and Hardy).
• Most of the Ole Miss political science department would have been wiped out had our Northwest flight (nonstop from Philly to Memphis) crashed on Sunday.
• Now that I’ve told half the discipline that my dissertation will be done by the end of the month, I guess that means it’s time for me to start cracking!

The flight to Philly wasn’t entirely horrible, although at times I felt like I was on the screaming baby express. That and I had a nice aisle seat at the rear of the plane where I got to hear the engine up close and personal. I did meet someone else coming to APSA across the aisle from me (who flew from L.A.; I’m not sure how Memphis ended up on her itinerary), but I didn’t catch her name because of the aforementioned engine. Then when we arrived there was a nice scene where an irate man with an English accent decided to wig out because the shuttle van couldn’t carry all 324 pieces of luggage he and his wife/mistress/daughter had with him. Good times. Have I mentioned how much I despise flying?

After I checked in, being the good political scientist that I am, I wandered over to the convention center to pick up all my APSA goodies—and so I’d know where the hell I was going tomorrow. However, even though registration was open today, the free shuttle doesn’t start until tomorrow—and (for a change, not by choice) I’m at the hotel that’s furthest from the convention center.

So I had a nice pleasant 7pm stroll through downtown Philadelphia. Anyone who alleges that downtowns are the hub of life in America should try wandering the streets of a city after working hours. From what I can tell, Oxford’s a more happenin’ town than downtown Philly after 6 p.m. (This pattern is repeated in virtually every major downtown I’ve ever visited. New York may be an extreme outlier in this regard.)

To make an incredibly boring story short, I got my APSA stuff, including my name tag and lovely canvas bag and my irreplacable but inaccurate program (apparently APSA thinks that controling the distribution of programs will reduce free-riding; I think lowering the registration fee and junking the progressive taxation tiered membership dues structure would be more effective). So now I have to wander back to my hotel with a giant canvas bag that virtually announces to the world, “Hi, I’m a tourist! Please mug me!”*

In other news, my friend Sara (who got a hotel within non-mugging distance of the convention center) and I have been running up our cell phone bills with conversations that half the time include her ancient Sprint PCS phone going dead for no apparent reason. And I found out that if I’d signed up for the hotel’s frequent guest program before I left Oxford I could have saved myself the $10 I’m paying for this Internet connection tonight.