Monday, 21 April 2003

Scholar-blogger taxonomy

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.