Our book orders were due ridiculously early, so I didn’t slip in everything I probably should have added from my “to be read” list, but at least I got in The American Voter Revisited, The End of Inequality, and Partisan Hearts and Minds between my graduate political behavior course and the senior-level course I’m using to shoehorn political behavior, parties, and interest groups into our (radically in need of some overhaul) undergraduate major.

Now I have to make up some fake syllabi for two courses I’m unlikely to ever teach—but since I put in the proposals for our new graduate methods sequence, writing the syllabi for the curriculum committee is my job even though I’ve deferred to a PA person and a sociologist to teach the sequence regularly (which lets me focus on undergrad methods, which the PA person doesn’t want to teach and which I’d rather teach than the graduate sequence).

Via Ars Technica, yet another social networking site, this time for academics with extensive support for classifying yourself down to the most microscopic of subfields. So far it seems a little less sterile than LinkedIn, which is probably a good thing.

My profile is here, if you haven’t been blasted by an invite from me already.

Hilzoy wonders why more people think Barack Obama will raise their taxes than think John McCain will, despite fancy graphs indicating that neither will raise most peoples’ taxes. Three broad hypotheses spring to mind:

1. Voters do not believe Democrats (and Obama in particular) are credible on promising tax cuts or holding the line on taxes. Obama’s vote for a budget resolution that contemplated raising taxes (even if, in of itself, it did not raise them) does not help his credibility on this score. The inscrutability of how Washington works to the average voter strikes again—a similar procedural-versus-substantive vote issue, after all, was the basis for John Kerry’s “for it before he was against it” problem.
2. Voters do not believe that the promises on the campaign trail regarding taxes reflect the situation that both candidates will face after the election. Presidents do not decide fiscal policy in a vacuum; instead, both will face a left-of-center Congress committed to both the appearance of fiscal responsibility and more progressive tax rates. For example, a “solidarity” tax increase on a greater portion of the “middle class” than anticipated by Obama (however “middle class” is defined) to fund programs like universal health care is not unlikely.
3. It’s all heuristics. Voters have no actual knowledge of either candidates’ tax plans (rationally or irrationally—I’d argue rationally, due in part to point 2) and are relying on a schematic conception of politics in which Democrats are seen as more likely to raise taxes than Republicans.

Notice in the full report of the poll results the graph labeled “Economic Groups Perceived to Benefit Most in an Obama or McCain Presidency,” in which the heuristic perceptions of the public comport to a greater degree to the promised tax plans, in large part because both candidates are promising plans that—in their effects on various subsets of the population—are more consistent with what we’d expect Republican and Democratic fiscal policies to emphasize.

Incidentally, none of these explanations require voters to even be aware of the campaign spin regarding Obama’s tax positions; one suspects most voters aren’t.

I’ve always thought cooperative federalism was something of a misnomer, that whole “national drinking age” thing being just the tip of the coercive dimension of that state “cooperation”; now, via Jacob Levy, comes word of an SSRN article on uncooperative federalism.

I’m now up to five different terms for “independent variable” (X’s) in my methods lecture for today (thanks in part to a Polmeth post that just reminded me of one I’d forgotten to put on the list), and I’m probably missing some. You’d think we could narrow that down a little. The others: covariate, predictor, explanatory variable, and regressor.

Funnily enough, I only came up with “dependent variable” and “regressand” for Y, but I’m surely missing some there too.

IHE reports on an APSA panel debate over whether the American politics field has outlived its usefulness. I generally (but mildly) agree with the proposition, but then again I’m one of the relatively few “Americanists” who would self-identify as a behaviorist/applied methodologist with a dash of neo-institutionalism, primarily interested in the politics of North America and Western Europe.

A (regrettably final) update for those of you interested in the Arthur Miller saga: a correspondent emails that Miller’s body has been discovered and that campus authorities have ended their investigation into his alleged indiscretions. My sympathies go out to Miller’s family and his current and former students.

Jacob Levy reports on efforts by some conservative APSA members to organize a boycott of the 2009 APSA Annual Meeting, to be held in Toronto, Canada, not-very-proud home of Human Rights Commission Kangaroo Courts ‘R’ Us.

I, as always, support all boycotts of APSA in body, although not in spirit—in spirit, I agree with Jacob that this boycott is at least as dumb as “NO-LA 2012.”

Iowa political science professor Arthur Miller,* recently accused of attempting to trade students sexual favors for grades, has apparently gone missing with his family fearing the he has taken his own life (I got the link via the rumor mills). While I had a little fun with the case here earlier this week, and think Miller’s conduct was reprehensible assuming the allegations are true, nonetheless it’s hard not to feel at least some sympathy for him and particularly his family, even if the horrible situation Miller was in professionally was entirely self-inflicted.

* Whom I do not know personally, although I did cite a short essay he wrote on schema theory in my dissertation.

The policy syllabus is done and the website is more-or-less up-to-date; I’ll probably update the CV and teaching philosophy/research interests statements over the weekend, but that doesn’t need to be done for a couple of weeks yet.

In the meantime, I get to wear fancy regalia tomorrow, although I’m really not sure it’ll be that much fun given tomorrow’s weather forecast.

Two syllabi down, one (the graduate public policy seminar) to go. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want the students to do in the policy class, although I think I have it narrowed down to three relatively brief papers plus a take-home final.

My OTB colleague James Joyner links a post by Dean Dad on graduate school placement statistics, noting that the key question is “how would you define ‘success’ for a doctoral program?”

I think this is, at some level, a relative question; the “expected placement” for various programs differs wildly and the bandwidth of that expectation also varies, often between specialties. In American politics, at least, supply and demand are pretty well balanced; my “travails” on the market probably have had more to do with my personality as an interviewee and my pickiness when it comes to job opportunities than a placement issue. On the other hand, if I defined success not as “a tenure-track job” but “a tenure-track job in a doctoral program”—which is how many of the faculty and graduate students I’ve interacted with over the years at ICPSR and EITM have defined it—my career is destined to be a failure, since I have no real interest in such a job except as a means to obtaining another job (I suppose now is as good a time as any to offer my apologies to those PhD-granting departments I applied to under semi-false pretenses).

Those who are skeptical that any single, useful, standardized measure of placement can be adopted are probably right, although there are some surveys available that get at the basics, and I think this answer gets to the crux of the situation for the potential student:

Programs with a good placement record will keep track of placements and brag about them.

If you can't get a straight answer from a department/program, THE REAL ANSWER SUCKS.

Time to clear out the Google Reader “to be blogged about” queue, while I wait around for the Safelite guy:

• The old debate over academic titles resurfaces with questions over whether Barack Obama’s teaching at the University of Chicago Law School merited his claim of being a professor; Orin Kerr says yes and I am inclined to agree, particularly given that at most institutions instructors with a terminal degree in the field (which in most fields of law, horror of horrors, includes the professional JD degree) would receive the title “adjunct professor” even when teaching a single course.
• Amber Taylor describes why she doesn’t sound like a Houstonian. My accent, on the other hand, is not really the result of any deliberate plan; it just seems to have worked out that way.
• Political scientists only pay attention to the importance of SES in their research, not in graduate admissions.

That wasn’t all of the queue, but it took care of most of the highlights.

I think I have to agree with the critics that fixing the anomalous situation of England in Britain’s almost-but-not-quite-federalist arrangements, thanks to the reintroduction of home rule in Northern Ireland and Scotland and the establishment of a Welsh legislature over the last decade, by only allowing English (or, in some cases, English and Welsh) MPs to vote on some things only affecting England (or England and Wales) is probably not really going to work very well in practice, since the whole notion of cabinet government in the UK relies on there effectively being one government supported by a majority of Parliament that can muster majority votes on all issues that come before it. When the “England” majority and the “UK” majority differ, as could easily be the case due to the regional variations in party support in Britain, it seems likely the whole business will become a mess.

Not that many of the alternatives are much better. Labour’s plan for regional devolution was pretty dumb, since few of the “regions” have any historical standing and governing different parts of England under different laws runs counter to the rationale for devolution elsewhere in the UK. A separate, single English parliament seems like overkill, given that most Britons live in England, but in the end it may be the only workable arrangement in a parliamentary framework.

Megan McArdle follows up on my previous post, which I think she took as being more critical of her position than I intended; I was attempting to use her post as a jumping off point for some broader thoughts on pluralism vs. centralism*, rather than a debate over the anarcho-libertarian “all government inherently sucks” position. Indeed, the continental model sucks on other dimensions, such as respect for private property rights and minority interests†, which might be more important to citizens in the Anglo-American tradition than efficiency or speed. Megan adds that we might potentially also blame government accounting methods, which sometimes fails to internalize costs properly.

* I don’t think the usual political science antonym for “pluralism,” “corporatism,” really works here; this is more a contrast between the pluralist, politically-egalitarian Anglo-American model and the elite, expert-dependent (Napoleonic/Confucian) continental model of bureaucratic decision making.
† In the Madisonian, not racial, sense.

Megan McArdle is answering questions by request from her readers; returning to a theme near and dear to Prof. Karlson’s heart, she again addresses why passenger rail sucks in the U.S.:

I am about to blame—you will perhaps be unsurprised—the government. Why isn’t there a high speed train from New York to Chicago? Well, first of all, this would greatly anger legislators from New York and Michigan, who like the fact that the Chicago train must pass through Buffalo and Detroit, even if this assures that almost no one with a job will actually use it.

There’s also the problem of the Federal construction process. The high speed train between DC and Charlotte was first conceived in the early 1990s. The EIS for this project will be completed probably sometime in 2010. Then we have to get final legislative authority. Then we have to put out the project for bids. By the time the thing is actually built, we’ll probably all have evolved an extra leg and be able to run faster than the high speed train.

Neither of these things are true of government in general. As a couple of her commenters point out, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Germany (where things are more of a work-in-progress) have managed to create impressive high-speed rail systems, as has (of course) France.

It’s in the Anglo-American countries where high-speed rail has hit a roadblock. The United States in particular has the ideal conditions for low support for efficient HSR: legislators with a great deal of autonomy from their parties and an interest in developing a personal vote through constituency service and pork-barrel spending, a geographically dispersed population, and few potential logrolls that can produce a majority vote in either house for practical HSR schemes. Even voter-initiated schemes in states fall prey to these issues; witness the California High-Speed Rail proposal, which has to promise future HSR access to as many communities as possible to maximize the chances of a funding referendum passing in November.

And, as I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. and Britain have much more stringent environmental review procedures than France and Germany—to say nothing of 1960s Japan, when official LDP policy was to maximize the amount of pork spending diverted to infrastructure companies, environment be damned—which (at best) lead to delays as the potential impacts, real and imagined, of projects are cataloged by the government and consultants and (at worst) allow every interest group and NIMBY under the sun multiple chances to stall the process along the way.

In an entirely different venue, compare the war on plastic bags in China (via Matthew Stinson’s shared items feed) and Laredo. Both situations involve “government,” but government is acting in very different ways. I personally wouldn’t trade our pluralist system for a more centralized one, but there are times the transaction costs associated with the former make one long for the latter.

Michelle’s post‡ today on laptops in the classroom (in a similar vein to this article I read last month on the suggestion of Glenn Reynolds) reminded me that I had a few items from the past few weeks still in my Google Reader queue of “things to blog about” related to Margaret Soltan’s continuing crusade against the use of PowerPoint* and its ilk, and specifically Timothy Burke’s partial rebuttal:

What’s the difference between bad usage of PowerPoint in lectures and bad lectures that involve hand-outs, overhead transparencies and writing on the chalkboard? Are we just complaining about old wine in new bottles here? Is the real culprit professorial droning at classrooms of 200+ students followed by recite-repeat-and-forget examinations? I think it’s at least plausible that the technology is just giving us a new reason to pay attention to a pedagogy whose effectiveness has been suspect for two generations.

I dare say I’m among the last doctoral students who was “trained”—and I use that word loosely—to teach prior to the widespread use of PowerPoint. Four years of full-time in-classroom experience, mostly with small lectures and seminars, has brought me basically to agreement with Burke on this point—complaints about PowerPoint essentially boil down to complaints about either instructional laziness or the whole nature of lecturing, or as a Burke commenter puts it, ”[e]xactly how does one teach even 80† students at once without succumbing to passive data transfer?” The non-use of PowerPoint or some other form of instructional technology seems to me to be a luxury confined to those who only teach small seminars and graduate students, and while my personal career aspirations lean in that direction the reality is that I’m several years away (in terms of research productivity) from being there—if I ever get there.

Burke in his comments hits the nail on the head, I think, when it comes to any sort of visual presentation in class:

It seems to me that the absolutely key thing is to avoid speaking the slides literally. They’re best as definitions, key concepts, images: the kind of thing you’d stop your flow of lecturing to write on the chalkboard. They’re not the lecture itself.

I think there are three useful aspects to a lecture: what you put on the board (or slides), what you say, and the general outline. If you’re preparing a handout or something to stick on Blackboard for students, the outline or outline-plus-slides is what they need, along with space to fill in the gaps. An alternative approach is to make the slides/board material the outline; several of the more effective teachers I had (my high school history teacher and a political science professor at Rose-Hulman) took that approach. But you can’t shovel your script into PowerPoint and expect that to work well, any more than you’d expect that writing it up on the board, or for that matter reading a paper verbatim at a conference would be a good presentation, to work.

All this discussion leaves aside the question of teaching anything that involves symbols (chemistry, mathematics, statistics) which I think requires a different approach than bullet-points. In class, mathematics and statistics (and, by extension, social science research methods courses) lend themselves to a combination of “passive” PowerPoint-style presentation and more spontaneous problem-solving and brainstorming; for example, one of my early activities is to have the class try to operationalize (define in terms of a measurable quantity or quality) a concept like “globalization,” which you can’t really do with a static slideshow even though you can define terms like “operationalization” that way. Similarly, while you can step through the process of solving a problem in a slideshow I think it’s more effective to demonstrate how to step through the process on the board.

Unfortunately, many classrooms aren’t set up to allow you to present and use a board simultaneously; some of TAMIU‘s lecture halls have a nice design where the projection screen is above the board, so you can write on the board without having to do anything special with the slideshow, but rooms most places are designed for “either-or” which can be a real pain—fiddle with the control system to blank the screen, raise the screen, write on the board, then lower the screen, switch the screen back on. After a few iterations of that in a single class, you’ll never do it again.

I freely admit I haven’t figured everything out yet; my current methods slides are pretty good lecture notes but pretty rotten for projection. One of my projects for this summer (postponed from last summer after I learned I wouldn’t be teaching any methods courses this year) is to work on my research methods lectures to incorporate advice from Andrew Gelman’s book so I can lay the groundwork for my plot to take over the world effort to produce a workable, but rigorous, methods curriculum at both the undergraduate and master’s levels for political science, sociology, and (at the grad level) public administration.

More on this theme from Laura at 11D, who takes note of some of the more positive technological developments associated with academe. And, another of Burke’s commenters links this hilarious example of what not to do with your slides.

* I use “PowerPoint” as shorthand for the use of a computer-projector based slideshow-style sequential presentation of items associated with a lecture, a technique obviously made famous by the Microsoft software package but also available with many other software packages such as Apple’s Keynote, OpenOffice.org Impress, and several PDF viewers including Adobe Reader, xpdf, and GNOME‘s Evince.
† I’d put the cutoff significantly lower, at around 30–40 students. Beyond that point, one might as well just blow the cap off the class.
‡ By the way, it’s nice to see Michelle’s blog back from haïtus! (Where else would I keep up with current Mexican politics?)

Read about the new south. I don’t think this one is as good as the busing article, but I can’t think of much I could do to improve it either. Next up: George Wallace (not the comedian).

Read everything you’d ever want to know about busing. Comments welcome.

I was slightly bemused to read in one of my American government essays that one of the distinctions between federal systems and the unitary system used in the United Kingdom is that the U.K. parliament can alter or abolish the Irish legislature at will. (In fairness, I think they tried that, but it never really stuck.)

In the future, I may have to reiterate the Northern part of Northern Ireland when I talk about the concepts of sovereignty and federalism.

As reported in today’s edition of InsideHigherEd, a New Jersey teen has discovered something heretofore only known to every potential adopter of Wilson and Dilulio’s American Government text: namely, that the authors are conservative and take that viewpoint in their textbook. The Center for Inquiry has cataloged a few problems with the textbook, most of which can be chalked up to sloppy phrasing or editing (a problem endemic to American government texts, to say nothing of textbooks in general).

For example, much of the CoI complaint is about the authors’ mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s rulings on prayer in public schools, but the mish-mash of rulings from the court aren’t exactly clear—hence why the report spends pages going into the nuances of those rulings—and they border on being contradictory (essentially requiring judges to mind-read whether a state or locality mandating “moments of silence” had religious intent or not when adopting the law). Furthermore, I suspect most students’ eyes would glaze over at a full treatment of this minor subject in what is supposed to be an introductory text; hashing out the nuances of the Supreme Court’s establishment clause doctrine would take 2–3 lectures in a constitutional law course, and you’re not going to do justice to it in at most five minutes of intro lecture.

That said, Wilson and Dilulio appear to have overstated the degree of controversy within the scientific community over global warming and climate change—but that doesn’t change the fact that there is little political consensus within the United States about the appropriateness of particular public policies to combat climate change, or even a political consensus that the scientific consensus is correct.

There is also a broader concern, in that the College Board is apparently reviewing the “appropriateness” of the use of the text in AP government courses. Frankly (speaking only in my individual capacity and not as an employee of ETS, the corporation that grades the exam on behalf of the College Board), the only criterion the College Board should be using is whether or not the textbook covers the topics that are examined on the AP exam in sufficient depth and accuracy. If the Wilson and Dilulio text contains a greater-than-average degree of factual inaccuracy (which, in my view, seems unlikely given the number of egregious errors or omissions I regularly discover in textbooks when asked to review them), then it should be avoided, but whether or not the authors take positions on anthropogenic global warming that conform with the political beliefs of the College Board is immaterial. In that regard—and probably only in that regard—I am in agreement with Richard Vedder.

All that said, I don’t use Wilson and Dilulio’s book, as I would not use any book that has a strong ideological bent in my introduction to American government course (similarly, I wouldn’t use Miroff, Seidelman, and Swanstrom’s book, a textbook from the same publisher written by three left-leaning political scientists, either—another disclaimer: Todd Swanstrom and I worked together at SLU). And I’d have a problem with it being assigned as the primary textbook in a mandatory course in a public school where students had no choice as to which instructor’s course to take—but AP Government is an elective intended to replicate a college-level course where students are not expected to be mindless consumers of the course materials but instead to engage critically with them even if they disagree with the ideas of the authors, so that complaint doesn’t fly here, and takes it over the line from a “force-feeding of ideology” issue into an “academic freedom” issue.

So, in sum: the teen is right to complain about the factual problems with the text, and those should be corrected (shame on the reviewers and editors for allowing those to get through). But otherwise Wilson and Dilulio have every right to write a textbook that reflects their views about American politics, just as seemingly hundreds of other professors have exercised their similar right to do so, and the instructor has every right to choose that book if he believes it provides the best preparation for students to succeed on the examination (which, in an AP course, is really at the heart of the instructor’s primary responsibility—you can complain about “teaching to the test” all you want, but in this case the test is the whole point of the course).

Update: Also covered at Hit and Run, Watts Up With That?, and No Left Turns.

I didn’t think these guys were serious at first… but this journal showed up in my mail today with my regime stability and presidential government article in it. Those who don’t read Russian or Ukrainian will probably find the English-language version a bit more digestible. (I think the translator added some stuff to the article, but damned if I know what it means.)

At least three regular Signifying Nothing readers will find their names on the first page, below, although two will have to transliterate for themselves.

It is done. Or at least as done as it’s going to get before the conference. Now I can work on overheads or something on Tuesday before the big trip.

A sneak preview of part of my Midwest paper, for all zero of you waiting for it at the edge of your seat:

Suffice it to say I’ve spent more of this morning trying to figure out how to get R’s maptools package to merge the raw data with the cartography than I did on the actual data analysis, which was actually quite easy, even though the MCMC took forever.

Via my Facebook friends feed, I discovered this New York Times book review by Janet Maslin of William Poundstone’s Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair. Money grafs from Maslin’s review:

Mr. Poundstone’s book asks one overriding question: “Is it possible to devise a fair way of voting, one immune to vote splitting?” The answer requires some historical context: a brief history of elections gone terribly awry.

Mr. Poundstone’s chronicle of spoilers concentrates on presidential elections that delivered the opposite outcome from the one most voters seemed to prefer. This goes from explaining how abolitionist vote-splitting in 1844 put the slave-owner James Polk in the White House to showing how a consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, helped to elect “the favored candidate of corporate America,” George W. Bush, in 2000.

Since at least 5 out of 45 presidential elections have gone to the second-most-popular candidate because of spoilers, Mr. Poundstone calculates a failure rate of more than 11 percent for our voting system. “Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner,” he writes about this traditional method, “it would be recognized for what it is — a defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed.”

Any book that earns a favorable blurb from Ken Arrow is probably worth a read.