Orin Kerr brings my attention to a survey that shows that most Americans don’t know the names of any members of the Supreme Court. Of the 35% who could name one or more, Sandra Day O‘Connor and Clarence Thomas are the most well-known. Here’s the money quote from the press release:

“The results of the survey are disappointing, but not surprising,” said Professor Stephen Presser of Northwestern University School of Law. “I suspect that the American public generally believes that it doesn’t really matter much who serves on the Supreme Court, because they believe the Court is objectively applying the Constitution and laws when it makes a decision.

“The truth of the matter is,” said Presser, “it makes an enormous amount of difference who serves on the Court. Our political parties are very much divided over whether judges should passively follow the law or legislate from the bench, with President Bush committed to appointing judges who will promise not to legislate from the bench, and Senate Democrats committed to opposing his nominees. This is an issue that ought to be of great concern to the public, but really hasn’t attracted much attention.”

Let me get this straight. You’ve got the money to do a good probability sample of the U.S. population, and you ask them a trivia question. How about finding out empirically whether or not the “American public generally believes that it doesn’t really matter much who serves on the Supreme Court”—that seems like a pretty important public policy question, no? How about telling me if there are any systematic variations in who knows which members of the Court—do blacks disproportionately know Clarence Thomas is? Do women know the female members at a higher rate? Do they know anything about particular cases? Do they know some important precedents, even in impressionistic terms? (I suspect more people know they have the “right to remain silent” than the fact the warning was established in Miranda v. Arizona. But both show some familiarity with the work of the Court.)

Ah well, at least the law professor concedes the validity of the attitudinal model. It turns out that the entire judicial behavior field isn’t excreting into a headwind after all…

James Joyner at OTB indulges in a little POL 101 lecture on what James Madison was talking about in Federalist 10. I’ll have to remember to pilfer some of it when I next update my Federalist handout.

Dan Drezner links to a University of Chicago Magazine piece that does as good a job as any I’ve seen in trying to explain the fracture in The Discipline™ spearheaded by the Perestroika movement. One thing it points out rather well is that many of them don’t have any clue what the term “rational choice” means, since surely they’d call me at a “rat choicer” yet my entire dissertation is an assault on the idea of rationality under limited information. Not to mention that I enjoy formal models about as much as I like receiving a sharp kick to the groin.

However, I will agree with their point that the APSR was rapidly becoming a wasteland; Lee Sigelman has his work cut out for him to bring its standards back up to where the AJPS and JOP are at today.

The graph illustrates how Dutch voters interviewed in 1998 with varying levels of political sophistication used their attitudes toward the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) to evaluate the performance of Wim Kok’s 1994-98 coalition government, which included three other parties: PvdA (Labour), VVD (the Liberals, in the European sense of the word), and Democrats 66 (who maybe Pieter can explain, since I haven’t figured them out yet), but not the CDA.

The least sophisticated members of the electorate show a positive relationship, which indicates that they evaluated the performance of the coalition based in part on their attitudes toward a political party that hadn’t been in office in four years. In American terms, it would be essentially the same thing as a voter thinking George W. Bush was doing a good job because he likes Democrats (which, before you laugh, I’m sure I could find evidence of among a fair portion of the U.S. electorate). You can also see an exaggerated negative relationship among the most sophisticated voters, suggesting that there’s some sort of cognitive balancing going on (“I dislike the CDA so I must like the coalition’s performance”) independent of the feelings toward the other three parties, which are also controlled for in the model (and held constant in the graphs).

The point isn’t so much that they’re wrong, but rather that they’re relying on an outdated view of how Dutch politics works to make voting decisions. In terms of my dissertation topic, their heuristic (cognitive shortcut) for evaluating coalition performance is flawed—and this leads them to make incorrect decisions compared to their “fully-informed preferences” (how they’d behave if they knew everything that a highly sophisticated voter did about Dutch politics).

Honorable mention to Dad, who guessed it had something to do with magnets. I think he’s been watching too much Stargate SG-1…

89 final-format pages including front and back matter, not including the rather skeletal introductory chapter and a couple of weird graduate-school-required pages I haven’t decided how to generate in LaTeX yet. Unlikely to increase short-term since one chapter needs some substantial revisions and I’m still waiting on comments on another one.

Via Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy, I learn of the Social Science Research Network, which sounds really neat except for the fact that, erm, they don’t actually seem to have much to do with social science: the category that springs to mind when describing the eight groupings of disciplines is “business administration,” not social science.

Maybe this reflects my own personal biases, but at a minimum I’d expect a site for social science to include at least one of sociology, psychology or political science, which I suspect most laypeople (except maybe Jane) would identify as social sciences before such fields as marketing (which, I’ll grant, is closely related to psychology and not-so-tenuously related to political science, even though there’s little direct cross-over), legal studies (which stands more-or-less on its own), and maybe even economics (which cross-pollinates with Chicago/Rochester-school rat-choice political science and through econometrics into political science).

It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it… not that I’m entirely sure what I’ve done is very good, but I have a lit review chapter where before I had nothing, and I’ve spent most of the weekend struggling with the analysis chapter I’d done the least amount work on—which will have a lengthy lit review of its own that I think I’m close to being able to write.

It turns out nothing concentrates the mind like a quiet corner of the second floor stacks in the John D. Williams Library—just me, an ethernet cable, a waist-high stack of photocopied articles and books, and my laptop. I’m beginning to really believe I can get this thing done. Would that everything else in life were so simple…

In other news, I’ll be TAing a four-week course in July and August at ICPSR. So it would be nice to finish this stuff before I have to head to Michigan, because I know I’ll never accomplish any dissertation stuff there.

I’m supposed to have a chapter of my dissertation done in the next thirty hours. Don’t expect a lot of blogging between now and Tuesday night.

In the meantime, feel free to visit some of the newer entries on my blogroll. Or click on some of the pretty buttons.

The Imperialist Dog is the rare specimen that enjoyed his experience in research methods:

Of course, the vast majority of undergraduates hated the class and panned it (disclosure: I liked it and got an A-). They are apparently happy being spoonfed and unable to analyze data for themselves. Given the tendency to take the easiest possible path, the department will probably make the class an elective at some point, then abolish it entirely.

Everyone doesn’t need to know how to do multiple linear regression, but a knowledge of what terms mean (sampling, confidence interval, etc.) and how data may be manipulated would prevent some of the more egregious deceptions perpetrated by misusers of statistics.

One of the things I bumped into teaching the equivalent course here at the University of Mississippi is that a lot of the students didn’t seem to get the point of the statistical portion of the course (which may have been partially my fault, since it was my first time teaching the course). Understanding why we’d want to test hypotheses and talk about variances is perhaps more important than the actual algebra involved, but I’m not sure you can have a solid understanding of the former without comprehending at least some of the latter. (That’s not to say I know the formulas for most of these things off the top of my head; that’s why we have R and Stata, not to mention Greene and Kennedy.)

I firmly believe nobody should draw any conclusions from survey data unless they fully comprehend what the terms “margin of error” and “confidence interval” mean. Furthermore, anyone who ever uses the results of a “web poll” to decide or justify anything more important than the SportsCenter showcase highlight ought to be publicly executed.

Iain Murray had an interesting post yesterday discussing the results of a study that showed that relatively few members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who are elected via proportional representation, felt tied to their constituencies. While there are ways to circumvent this problem (lowering the district magnitude—the number of seats elected from a constituency—may help), there is a tradeoff: reducing the number of seats also reduces the proportionality of the system.

Overall, I think the most effective approach to PR is to combine it with single-member districts, using a relatively small number of proportionally-allocated seats to offset some of the bias in seat allocation caused by first-past-the-post elections, without undermining the link between representatives and their electors.

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry has an interesting followup worth reading.

The discipline’s favorite cynic has returned to H-POLMETH, this time with a brutal assault on the American Political Science Association’s new logo, which purportedly “is intended to represent APSA’s mission to bring together political scientists from all fields of inquiry, regions, and occupational endeavors within and outside academe in order to expand awareness and understanding of politics.” Exactly how three swooshes of orange is supposed to represent that escapes me entirely, but Mr. Pravda has seen through the layers of deception:

As I continue staring at the logo while uncorking my second bottle of wine, it all suddenly becomes clear. The point is obvious: there is no point. This design is intended to convey different ideas to different people. It is, in that sense, fundamentally democratic. Each of us can assign his or her own meaning to it. To the Quantoid, it can represent pure spatial logic. To the Perestroikan, it can signify the diversity of cultures and peoples. To the cynic, it can serve as a reminder of why it’s always a good idea to underreport your professional income when paying dues to the APSA.

Heh.

So says Jane Galt, anyway. Here’s what I posted in comments over there in response…

I’m afraid I’ll have to continue to disagree. Political science, like sociology and economics, is a science because it applies the scientific method (a.k.a. empiricism) to the study of politics.

The difference between political science and say physics isn’t so much the method as the measures; physicists have very good measures of the quantities they like to analyze (819,321 leptons here, 1.32121 angstroms there), while political scientists (and sociologists and psychologists and…) have to deal with things that are much harder to quantify. Economics does slightly better because (a) there’s a simplifying assumption that utility is money (which happens to work nicely for most people except monks and tree-huggers) and (b) money is very easy to quantify compared to “affect,” “ideology,” or “partisanship” (things that political scientists measure).

Now, there are people who study politics (and economic behavior and social groups) without the use of the scientific method. They aren’t scientists, and thankfully most of them have gotten it through their skulls that they aren’t and don’t pretend to be. (The question then is what do you do with the people who don’t study a social science using the scientific method, which becomes a thorny political issue.)

More broadly, I think you’re confusing generalizability with empiricism. Yes, sociologist X followed around a single drug dealer; yes Dick Fenno followed around Senator Y. But if enough sociologists follow around enough drug dealers we can test a theory about how drug dealers behave in general.

I’d find the whole discussion laughable if Jane (who usually I find rather thoughtful) weren’t so horribly misguided on what “science” is and isn’t.

Other reaction to Jane’s original post can be found at The Volokh Conspiracy, where Jacob Levy and Dan Drezner have comments. Also, I somehow forgot to link to Kieran Healy, who defends the honor of sociology.

I don’t have lots to post about today, but Jane Galt has a followup on yesterday’s piece that I’m in broad agreement with, as well as a more polite version of my Krugman snakeoil post.

Henry Farrell has more. Just to clarify: most of my work is in mass political behavior, including political psychology, and what you’d call “institutional behavior,” so I don’t do much with economic theory per se. It’s not so much that I have an aversion to the material as it is an issue of it not being particularly applicable, although my dissertation does revolve around a Downsian take on how voters use and process information (straddling the line between political psychology and rational choice theory).

Jane Galt has a lengthy post in which she makes the following statement:

The humanities simply doesn’t have this rigor. In some cases, such as literature, you really can’t, although you can certainly be more rigorous than many of the programs devoted to exposing the obvious truth that Shakespeare and company did not have the same racial and gender sensibilities as 21st century Americans, yawn. In other cases, such as sociology and political science, it’s possible that you could, but don’t yet. That’s why discussions in those courses tend to revolve around the speakers’ opinions on human nature, interesting and possibly right but very difficult to either prove or falsify.

James Joyner took Jane to task for lumping political science in with the humanities, and in comments there the validity of political science as a science is being piled on by James and Steven Taylor. My comments at Jane’s place were a bit less temperate, but some of the other commenters got under my skin too; here’s what I said:

1. Yes, there is a giant pissing match in our discipline between the empiricists and the non-empiricists. Coupled with that is an internal war among the empiricists between the quals and the quants and the game theorists. But then again political science has really only existed as a separate discipline from history, sociology, psychology, and economics for about 50 years (despite the 100-year pedigree of the APSA), and it’s still trying to figure out what to do with those disparate heritages.

2. Not everybody plays with 2×2 contingency tables and single-variable explanations of political phenomena. We have this neat concept called “multiple regression” that can deal with more than one independent variable these days; we use that sometimes.

3. Explanation is more important than prediction in the long run. I’d rather have a wrong prediction than a wrong explanation. If we just wanted predictions, we’d do what insurance companies do: stick a bazillion independent variables in the model and stepwise-regress it. It’ll predict great to your original dataset but (a) will blow up if you apply it to anything else and (b) won’t make any sense anyway (“hey, it turns out people with purple cars and limps have more accidents than others”; yeah, so?). By contrast, I can tell you why almost 400 members of Congress voted for articles of impeachment and procedural motions leading up to it, and I did it with 9 independent variables—and some of the explanations would be quite surprising even to those who followed the public debate and talking heads.

4. There is no number 4.

5. I can build you a very simple probit model today that will predict how most voters will behave in the next congressional election, based on nothing other than their demographics. Heck, I already have; read this paper. It ain’t Galileo dropping stuff off the Tower of Pisa (apocryphal), but it’s pretty good for a then-2nd year grad student playing with a Heckman selection model (ok, not so simple) and 50-year-old theories of voter behavior.

Now, granted, there are a lot of snake-oil salesmen running around pretending to have all the answers. Some of them (Larry Sabato *cough*) are in my discipline. Some of them (John Lott, Paul Krugman) are in more “respectable” ones. But just because some Ivy grad whose only exposure to The American Voter was that it happened to be on a bookshelf in someone’s office in his department can’t tell you who’ll win a local school board election doesn’t mean that nobody can.

For the record, no particular Ivy grad was being singled out above. I love all Ivy and non-Ivy grads.

I have a (loose) May 15 deadline for writing a chapter of my dissertation; hence, bloggage will probably be limited to procrastination or break periods (i.e. not much more limited than it already is… but still, I’m giving a heads-up).

I’ve already insulted Larry Sabato once in this blog, so why not do it again? Today he handicaps the Mississippi governor’s race for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger; let’s figure out what Larry thinks will happen:

... Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said he expects Bush to swing through all three Southern states as he builds a coalition for his re-election bid next year.

Sabato said he expects Bush to rally support for Barbour.

Ok, so Bush is going to help Barbour, right?

But if the president actively campaigns for Barbour, it could also help energize the opposition, [Sabato] said. ... “I can also see Bush campaigning for Barbour generating a large black turnout for Musgrove because of the black community’s dislike of Bush,” Sabato said.

Maybe not. But Sabato doesn’t think this will matter much:

Although the race for governor has barely made it out of the gate, Sabato gives Barbour the edge because of Mississippi voters’ natural inclination to vote Republican and the state budget troubles haunting Musgrove.

Good points all. But…

Still, he doesn’t discount Musgrove. “He’s the incumbent governor. He worked hard to get there, and he’ll work hard to keep it,” Sabato said.

Ok. So how is Barbour’s campaign going to affect down-ticket races (like mine)?

Both [University of South Mississippi political scientist Joseph] Parker and Sabato said Mississippi voters have idiosyncrasies that make it difficult to say with certainty that statewide Republican candidates could ride Bush’s coattails.

Bush carried the state in the 2000 presidential election, but most of the statewide elected officials in Mississippi are Democrats.

So maybe Mississippi voters have split-level partisanship… but maybe they don’t:

“That’s left over from the old days,” Sabato said. “Most Southern states had that kind of schizophrenic voter behavior. They would vote Republican for president because Democrats were liberal. Democratic nominees on the state level were more moderate. That (behavior) is changing over time.”

Front page in the Clarion-Ledger. Absolutely no story. Another article for Sabato’s clippings file… but completely unenlightening otherwise.

Tim Lambert has a Sunday update that links here. I agree with Tim that there were coding errors; however, as someone who’s worked with large CSTS data sets, it can be hard to get the coding right, particularly when you’re dealing with time-varying covariates (example: event X happened in 1991; do I change the dummy variable in 1991 or 1992?). One’s judgment of the maliciousness will probably depend on one’s overall assessment of Lott; I’m not going to go there.

The larger question: has Lott been discredited? I don’t know. Ayers and Donahue say yes, but the potential problems I identified with the econometrics apply both to them and Lott; without someone doing a proper analysis—dealing properly with missing data, justifying fixed effects (instead of using, for example, random effects or regional or state dummies), etc.—we just don’t know who is right. But again, someone who either (a) has tenure or (b) cares can do that—the topic’s too politicized for someone who doesn’t even have a Ph.D. yet, much less a job. I’ll just go with the default, Calvin Trillin response for now: it’s too soon to tell.

Tim Lambert has another post today arguing that there’s a systematic problem with Lott’s coding that favors his results; since I’ve not read Lott & Mustard (I have a copy of More Guns, Less Crime, but I never got past the first few pages and a skim of the tables due to other time constraints), I can’t speak to that, but it seems suspicious at first glance.

And, regretfully, picking and choosing one’s analyses is endemic to the social sciences; you present the models that work. Of course, if the model doesn’t work (at least in terms of the relationship you care about; who cares if the SOUTH dummy is significant or not), and you can’t fix it without doing fraudulent things with the data or the specification, then you’d better throw out your research or revise your hypotheses...

Apparently inspired by CalPundit’s idea to “out” anti-gay Republicans, Matthew Yglesias is speculating on the prospects of a right-to-privacy bill or amendment. Matthew speculates on why such an amendment has not been proposed in the past:

The existence (and scope) of a right to privacy in the constitution is a matter of some controversy, and proposing a constitutional privacy amendment might be seen as an admission on the part of privacy advocates that such a right does not exist in the un-amended constitution.

This argument goes back to the days of the Federalist Papers; one of the reasons why the Constitution didn’t originally include a Bill of Rights was the fear that enumerating rights would imply that those not enumerated did not exist (this is the reason the 9th Amendment was added to the Constitution, as part of the compromise Bill of Rights that the Federalists proposed to get the Constitution ratified—Radley Balko gives the expanded explanation here), based on the understanding that Congress’s enumerated powers were narrowly-drawn. Alexander Hamilton makes this argument in Federalist 84:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights.

James Madison, who did support a Bill of Rights in some form, makes a similar point in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, again couching it terms of limited federal powers and a fear that enumerating liberties might encourage them to be curtailed.

Having said all that, in the 215 years since the Constitution was ratified, the interpretation of Congress’s enumerated powers has greatly expanded. Unless you’re a liberal who subscribes to Lopez (a rare liberal indeed!), an enumerated powers argument in support of a right to privacy isn’t going to go anywhere—despite the fact that, at least when discussing the federal government (and state governments whose constitutions also enumerate the powers of their legislatures, a field I am admittedly inexpert on), it’s arguably the most powerful one. So necessarily the protection of unenumerated rights rests solely on the 9th Amendment, which leads to the need to enumerate them to protect them from infringement by judicial or legislative fiat unencumbered by any recognition of limited power.

My view: since both parties have basically abandoned the principle of limited government, as a practical matter a RTP amendment probably wouldn’t be a bad thing in this day and age, as the 9th is a very shaky foundation to found fundamental freedoms, including some conception of a right to personal privacy, on. However, I’m not quite ready to abandon that principle myself, so from a philosophical standpoint a privacy amendment would likely be another nail in the coffin of the 9th.

Edited add a link to Radley’s 9th Amendment discussion, which I read and linked a day or two ago (a similar discussion been a part of my 101 lecture on the Constitution for a few years); Jeremy Scharlack has a good roundup of links on the 9th too. More Santorum discussion in the Santorarium.

Glenn Reynolds today links to three articles in the Stanford Law Review that argue over John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime thesis. Normally in these disputes it’s hard to say much of anything without having the data at hand; thankfully, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III have posted their data (warning—ZIP file) at Ayres’ website, so hopefully someone—who has more time on their hands than me and isn’t supposed to be writing a dissertation on a completely different topic at the moment, mind you—can make heads or tails of what’s going on.

My preliminary assessment (as a political scientist who plays an econometrician on TV and spends most of his time running limited dependent variable models): without knowing any of the authors’ statistical training, I’d be very reluctant to draw any conclusions from their writing alone, but Ayres and Donahue appear to be onto something. However, analyzing statistical models with fixed effects can be nasty business, particularly since theoretically the asymptotics that regression analysis relies on aren’t fulfilled (the number of independent variables in a fixed effects model increases as a function of the number of observations, rather than being constant) and throwing lots of atheoretical dummy variables into a model runs the risk of soaking up variance that really ought to be attributed to a substantive effect—but that applies equally to both sides in this debate.

I’m not quite sure why Ayres and Donahue use areg instead of xtreg in Stata to estimate fixed effects, but it shouldn’t make a substantive difference (it just makes the specification a bit harder); more generally, I’d be more comfortable if everyone involved used some sort of vaguely modern time-series analysis (ARIMA, VAR, cointegration—even Box-Jenkins!), but maybe I’m just weird that way. I assume the dependent variables are logged since economists log everything for some odd reason (perhaps just to make the regressions harder to interpret). It’s not entirely clear how any of the authors treat missing data.

Anyway, someone else will have to take over from here… this is far too much thought for a debate I have absolutely nothing invested in.

Julian Sanchez writes on this issue as well; I agree that this problem with his research (if borne out by the evidence) bothers me much more than the basically silly “Mary Rosh” business or other complaints (some of which seem to be based more on his political views on issues other than gun control).

Also, to clarify for the hardcore econometricians in the audience, by “time-series” I meant cross-sectional time-series or panel analysis. (Political scientists don’t get particularly worked up about the CSTS versus panel distinction in general, mainly because we tend to deal with much more of the latter; this data is closer to CSTS but has properties of both—large number of units, but also a fairly large number of time-points.)

Via Jacob Levy, I learn that Henry Farrell has reorganized his directory of scholar-bloggers by discipline. That’s something of a Herculean task, one that can lead to fistfights if one isn’t careful. For example, you won’t catch me discussing whether you can be opposed to empiricism and still be a political scientist—so I’ll refrain from talking about the Perestroika movement, and just direct you to Mr. Pravda’s comments instead.

For the record, I am a political scientist who studies mass political behavior, legislative behavior, political institutions, and political methodology. In a pinch, you can call me an Americanist, but I also study comparative politics—one of the three analytical chapters of my dissertation (The Role of Political Sophistication in the Use of Heuristics by Voters) looks at the role of political sophistication in the voting behavior of the Dutch electorate. My fundamental bias is toward empiricism (qualitative or quantitative, although I do much more of the latter—having data is nice), perhaps due to my undergrad days studying hard science and mathematics.

What I’m not: a normative political theorist. I’m afraid any APSR article with the word “Locke” in the title will fly straight over my head. Nor am I any good at game theory.

What Bill Hobbs said. Not that I’d expect the Tennessean to know any better…

I guess this means I won’t be getting a job at Virginia. Ah well, I’ll live.

Matthew Yglesias (now back blogging after some nasty problems with Movable Type) has an interesting series of posts on voting systems.

Current federal law requires the use of single-member districts to elect the House of Representatives (per 2 USC 1 § 2c), but nothing in the constitution requires it—as the Supreme Court noted in Branch v. Smith (538 U. S. ?, 2003). Nor does federal law specify the mechanism for elections, although they must comply with the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as interpreted by Thornburg v. Gingles (478 U.S. 30, 1986), and related laws, which may rule out the use of majority-runoff elections in some circumstances.

Ceteris paribus, I’d favor some sort of mixed proportional representation/plurality system for House elections, like the “top-up” PR system used for elections to the Scottish and Welsh assemblies (also known as the Additional Member System); however, the best we can do in the House under current federal law is either approval voting or some other single-member district method (Condorcet or instant run-off being the most likely).

I had a moderately pleasant meeting with my dissertation chair this morning. The good news is that in terms of the data analysis, my dissertation is much closer to done than I normally think it is. The bad news is that I still need to wrap it up in flowery prose and write up a strong section on political sophistication, which I’ve basically been procrastinating on since last spring.

Still, it’s somewhat reassuring to know that at least I’m getting somewhere. It just doesn’t feel that way much of the time…

Daniel Drezner has a good post on the relationship between The Discipline™ and blogging. For my part, I can only say that if people I know in the discipline are aware of this blog, they haven’t mentioned it to me, much less had anything to say about it (with the sole exception of one recent Mississippi Ph.D.). Of course, my little corner of the blogosphere is a bit more obscure than Daniel’s, which may account for some of it; my status as a grad student (ABD, mind you), as opposed to a faculty member, may also be a contributing factor. But, the URL is in my .sig, so maybe I’ll get some more traffic from fellow political scientists over time.

I’d also say that, like Dan, I don’t see this blog as a forum for heavily-footnoted discussions of concepts in political science; for example, if I start blathering on about an aspect of the Michigan Model (the “funnel of causality,” anyone?), remember that I’ll likely be glossing over four decades of caveats, revisions, and extensions. But, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to make the occasional forays into the murky depths of political science bearable.

You can tell you're completely disorganized when you think a conference is three weeks later than it actually is. Grr. Something tells me this conference paper isn't going to be a work of art...