Brad DeLong Versus Political Science: Grasping Narrative with Both Hands

DeLong, in Democracy:

If there was a single moment when Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, it was in May when he stood in front of the $50,000-a-plate audience at Sun Capital honcho Marc Leder’s home in Boca Raton and spoke his soon-to-be-infamous words:

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what…. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government…who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it…. These are people who pay no income tax…. My job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives…"

John Sides, at Salon.com:

To commentators used to thinking of campaigns like a boxing match, [the 47 percent video] seemed like the knockout blow.

In reality, the impact of the video was much more muted. This is the argument UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck and I make in our forthcoming book on the election, “The Gamble.” ... 

It is always tempting for those following a presidential election closely — pundits, reporters and political scientists alike — to assume that every new twist is the proverbial game-changer. But in retrospect, the 47 percent video did not live up to the hype.

Models predicting Romney's loss well before the video emerged -- those based on economic fundamentals -- performed very well. The 47% video had almost nothing to do with the electoral outcome.

The rest of DeLong's essay -- essentially a defense of the welfare state against the entreaties of Nicholas Eberstadt -- is fine enough if a bit boilerplate. But if he's going to deliver lectures on how folks should understand the basic tenants of macroeconomics if they are to comment on them, then he should understand the basic tenants of political science if he is to comment on it.

NSF Recipient Has "No Idea" if He Should Be an NSF Recipient

I'm not sure why I'm jumping in on this again. Oh well.

I suggested in a previous post that if social scientists want to continue to get federal funding we should be prepared to explain why we should continue to get federal funding. I further explained that a simple recitation of "interesting" or "important" findings was not sufficient. Neither was it enough to say that research is worth of subsidy because it is a public good (which it actually isn't). We needed to explain why our work was more in the public interest than some other spending program. After all, if poor folks now have to take drug tests before they can get food aid, the least we should be expected to do is explain why our work deserves federal money instead of, I don't know, condition-less food aid. Or biomedical research, or deficit reduction, or tax cuts, or early childhood education, or universal post-secondary education or or or.

Either we need to explain why our work is in the public interest or we need to admit we're rent-seekers and start trying to be better at it. Presumably we should know how to do that.

So we were given a chance! Krugman went after Cantor, Cantor fired back by naming a particular NSF-funded political science research program, and the recipient political scientist -- Walter Stone of UC-Davis -- took to the Monkey Cage to state his case. Here's his (Stone's! Not Cantor's!) answer to the question:

Are these and other results we are reporting worth the $267,000 support NSF granted the project? I have no idea. Could the money have created more value for the nation if it had been devoted to medical or biological research? Possibly.

Nice. Credit to Walter Stone for honesty and humility, but I doubt Cantor feels chastised.

The actual findings of the study are interesting to me. They also support things we generally already knew: proximity models of elections work pretty well in most cases. They worked pretty well in 2010, just as they had previously worked pretty well. 2010 is actually an interesting case for this, since many had assumed that the rise of the Tea Party are thrown a wrench in proximity models. This wasn't so. The findings reinforce my priors, so I like that too.

But in the end it doesn't matter what the findings were. The question is whether it was worth $267,000. I don't know any more than Stone, but it'd be easier for me to argue that it isn't than that it is. The problem with social science is not that we haven't done enough voter surveys or tested the median voter theorem enough, at least in my view. Even if it was... is there any public interest in it? Other than the "knowledge for its sake" sense I can't see it. There's an academic interest in it, but that is not the same as a public interest. Just because findings are interesting or important doesn't mean that they are worth public subsidy. Lots of things are interesting or important that do not.

John Sides previously objected to my suggestion that social scientists were acting like rent-seekers when they defend their, erm, rents. I didn't mean it pejoratively, but the first commenter at the Monkey Cage (an anonymous grad student, apparently) made my point:

I thought we political scientists were supposed to know something about the practice of politics. Quotes likes this are why we are at serious risk of losing our funding. No professional lobbyist would EVER make these kinds of concessions. If I were in the APSA executive office, I would be furious after having read this response.

Indeed. But if we acted like lobbyists it'd be even harder to argue that our work was in the public interest, wouldn't it?

Stone ends his response to Cantor with this:

I am confident, however, that some small investment in understanding citizen behavior in the world’s oldest democracy is worthwhile. If we find that voters act reasonably in selecting candidates for seats in the “people’s House”—that they are not dominated by money and other distorting influences—perhaps we will learn to trust that deliberations in Congress, including over how best to spend federal research dollars, will ultimately reflect the public interest.

Maybe. But the APSA will disagree if the House votes to cease funding political science through the NSF.

Does Social Science Deserve Public Funding?

John Sides notes that the Congressional Republicans have resumed their attack on federal funding of social science. Here's Eric Cantor, as quoted by Sides:

There is an appropriate and necessary role for the federal government to ensure funding for basic medical research. Doing all we can to facilitate medical breakthroughs for people … should be a priority. We can and must do better. 

This includes cutting unnecessary red tape in order to speed up the availability of life saving drugs and treatments and reprioritizing existing federal research spending. Funds currently spent by the government on social science – including on politics of all things – would be better spent helping find cures to diseases.

Cantor's argument is not that social science has no merit; it is that other policy goals should have priority. This is possibly wrong, but it is not unreasonable on its face. When development organizations start programs in less developed countries they do not fund social science. They fund health care, infrastructure, and basic education. This suggests that publicly-funded social science is, to some extent at least, a luxury good. The US government obviously does not face the same budget constraint as say Liberia, but at some margin there is a tradeoff between funding program A and funding program B. If 'A' is medical research and 'B' is social science research, it might make sense to prioritize the medical research.

Many people believe that the US is not spending nearly enough on infrastructure, health care for all, education, alternative energy programs, public transportation systems, and biomedical research. Or foreign aid, for that matter. Indeed, social scientists frequently make these claims. Cantor has laid down a challenge: can the social sciences demonstrate that their work is a better investment than research into new medical procedures, alternative energy sources, infrastructure upgrades, etc.? Can the social sciences demonstrate that money spent on their programs is worth more to society than whatever the next-best option is? More technically, Cantor is asking us to think about the relative opportunity costs given actual budget constraints.

This is an opportunity for the social sciences to demonstrate their value by making a clear, coherent argument. Simply pointing to research on topics of possible public interest (as Sides does) is not enough... it must be accompanied by an argument that that research is more deserving of public funding than something else. So far I have not seen such an argument made. I have seen social scientists act like any other interest group: they want public spending on programs that benefit them because those programs benefit them. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a bit distasteful to equate common rent-seeking behavior with a broad public interest. If the social sciences deserve public funding they ought to be able to make the case on its merits. In a way, Cantor is challenging us to think like civically-minded social scientists.

Sides concludes his post:

The broader point is that Cantor’s goal, curing disease and saving lives, can be better accomplished by including social and political science alongside the “hard” sciences and medicine.

Maybe that's true (I'm not being sarcastic here), but it is indisputable that we cannot cure diseases without medicine. However, we can administer medicine without studies showing how we have previously administered medicine, however useful those might be. (If that wasn't the case we social scientists would have no cases to study!) If the efficiency gains and complementarity effects from combining research in the social and physical sciences are sufficiently high that they out-weigh the costs, then we ought to be able to demonstrate that fact using the tools of social science. In other words, it is incumbent upon social scientists -- not congressional representatives -- to demonstrate their value to society. The question is whether we can do it.

UPDATE: John Sides has responded with a good post. I don't disagree with much of; maybe not any of it. But also see my comment.

Why Political Scientists Should Take Political Science Seriously

Warning: This post is intentionally inflammatory, over the top, and abrasive. Also, some claims are over-stated. Nevertheless...

So I was just going on a rant to my wife the other day about how we IR folks frequently waste our time because we don't know what other (non-IR) political scientists are doing. For example, the big trend in studies of trade politics now is to find new and novel ways to figure out what peoples' trade preferences are. So scholars are spending tons of time (and sometimes money) running surveys and experiments to figure out whether attitudes towards trade reflect sociotropic interests or self-interests.

All fine and good, but ultimately it just doesn't matter. Why? Because no election in American history  has ever been a referendum on trade policy.* Hardly any elections are decided on foreign policy more generally. Study after study shows that voters don't care about foreign policy, don't know about it, and don't change their vote because of it unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. That is, if IPE knew any damn thing about what political scientists who study American politics know we'd leave trade preference formation to the psychologists (and preference aggregation to the Americanists). And if security scholars actually took domestic politics seriously they likely wouldn't've wasted thousands of pages on audience costs, or the "transparency" of democracies vs. non-democracies as causing them to be more peaceful overall (which they aren't).

Instead, we've got reams of literature showing contradictory results regarding the link between trade preferences and policy, and the existence/non-existence of audience costs and democratic propensity for conflict, and then we try to figure out how to rectify these divergent results. Well the answer is to ignore them completely -- at least in the case of the U.S. -- because the supposed mechanism doesn't exist. We would know this if we paid attention to political scientists working in other sub-fields.

This is prompted by this post from Nexon:

Among other things, Saunders argues that theories of “democratic international relations” — particularly those surrounding audience costs — need to incorporate a central insight from the last fifty years of American politics research: that most voters are “low information”* when it comes to most things political–and especially foreign policy.** Thus, elites who provide “cues” to the voting public in general, partisans, ethnic groups, etc. are often key intermediaries in the relationship between foreign-policy and electoral pressures. ...

Saunders spent a lot of time walking us through arguments about low-information voters, partisan cueing, and various aspects of contemporary theories of political behavior. During the Q&A period, I asked her, basically, “why are you spending all this time telling us things we already know when you could be using that to further elaborate the implications for international-relations theory?” She responded that, in essence, when she presents the paper, “about half the time” she gets “that reaction”; “the other half of the time people are surprised.”

My reaction to this was, more or less, how could anyone working in political science in 2013 not know this stuff? I don’t mean know it well – I certainly don’t know a lot of the relevant literature or the intricacies of key debates — but rather: know the basic contours at all. And after the last few Presidential campaigns? I suspect most readers of this post will have the same reaction.

My reaction is that social scientists don't take social science all that seriously, and they take the work of other social scientists even less seriously. When was the last time an IR scholar cited The Macro Polity to note that foreign policymakers are generally not constrained by domestic mass politics?

I can't believe I'm even typing this, but despite its many (theoretical, empirical, rhetorical, etc.) flaws a book like The Israel Lobby is at least on the correct track. Foreign policy can be influenced by strong domestic interest groups and is influenced by strong domestic interest groups, so when IR folks study domestic politics we should probably focus on which groups are doing the influencing, rather than inferring causal relationships from mythical qualities of regime type.

I'm sure there are times and places in which foreign policy is exceptionally salient for mass publics. I know, for example, that common people pay lots of attention to exchange rates in Japan. I'm sure that the typical Greek pays more attention to central bank activities than the modal American. But to acknowledge this is to reinforce my point: if we in IR are going to theorize about domestic politics, we cannot simply assume that all polities are the same in all times and places. And we especially cannot do that when comparativists (yes, Americanists are comparativists) are telling repeatedly that that is not the case.

*This is not to say that campaigns will never use trade policy to target particular groups like, say, sugar growers in Florida or steel manufacturers in Ohio. They will. Occasionally winning the support of these groups might even be critical for winning elections. Interest group politics is real, and IR folks should be concerned with the phenomenon. But knowing what the median voter thinks on "trade" as a general intellectual concept just isn't very helpful.

No Social Science Among Social Scientists

Matt Yglesias, one of the most econ literate journalists going, is at the annual flagship conference for economists and notes something odd:

I'm in San Diego for the American Economics Association's annual meeting, and so naturally I wanted to grab a cup of coffee in the hotel lobby before the 8AM sessions started. Imagine my surprise to find that as of 7:45 AM the lines were punishingly long and there was no way I'd be able to get to the session on high-skill immigration if I waited around.  

Sad. And a result of a shocking lack of economics. Clearly the price charged should have been much, much higher. You only have the logistical capacity to serve so many people between 7:30 and 8:00 AM, so you ought to serve the people with the most willingness to pay. Let folks who don't care about being on time to an 8AM session just wait around and buy their coffee later after prices fall. Let those who place a strong premium on both coffee and punctuality pay through the nose. It seems so simple and yet even at a conference of economics nobody wants to apply economic ideas.

I find the same thing is true in political science. For example, when Jeff Flake launched a campaign to cut federal funding of political science research what did political scientists do? Did we utilize our theories of politics to form an effective lobbying organization? Did we use our professional organization to overcome the collective action problem and secure our rents? No. APSA released an outraged statement on its website and encouraged members to... write their Congressperson. How imaginative, how theory-driven, how efficacious. The Monkey Cage reviewed a bunch of studies which had received NSF funding. That's about the sum total of the response from political scientists, excepting snarky posts on Facebook and Twitter.

Similarly, it is a cliche that political science faculty departments are often governed, shall we say, sub-optimally. While I'm not yet a faculty member, and thus don't yet have much experience in this area, I hear stories all the time (not just from my department) about how weird and screwed up things frequently get in faculty meetings. Why not use our theories to improve this in Pareto-improving ways? We supposedly know how to do that. While we're at it, why don't political scientists control governance at the university level? Don't we know how insurgencies succeed?

And why do most of us vote, contribute to campaigns, and even volunteer to work for particular candidates? Leaving aside whether voting is "rational" for instrumental reasons, most of our theories suggest that actual policy differences between candidates will be minimal and that most of politics occurs in a bureaucratic setting anyway. Why not direct our efforts towards influencing that process instead? For that matter, why are the successful politicians a bunch of lawyers rather than political scientists?

I could go on but you get the point: all too often social scientists tend to not take their theories seriously enough to actually make use of them in the real world. That says something. Not sure what, but something.

In Which Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson Explain Why I Am Getting My PhD In Political Science

In our last post we noted how Lord Lawson of Blaby used our arguments in Why Nations Fail to bolster his claim that Britain should not be committing itself to spend 0.7% of GDP on development aid. In his speech he noted: 

A useful analysis, which I commend to the House, is to be found in a penetrating new study, Why Nations Fail, by a couple of economists, Acemoglu and Robinson…

A couple of economists? Actually, James Robinson likes to refer to himself as a “recovering economist”… 

Why? Because to paraphrase Bill Clinton’s famous adage: “It’s the politics, stupid” — at least when it comes to understanding economic development.

I wouldn't limit it to just economic development. I would argue that the same applies to almost every sub-branch of social life. This is why decided to pursue post-graduate study in political science rather than economics, which was my undergraduate major. Fine, whatever, that's what I did and why I did it. No one cares. But Acemoglu is one of the most prominent young(ish) economists in the game, winner of the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal. And he's saying that the academic discipline of economics isn't up to snuff.

That ain't nothing.

The quote above and more can be found here.

QOTD: Political Science vs. Mythmaking, the Case of de Gaulle

One of the few persistent myths about de Gaulle that Hazareesingh leaves unexplored is how he managed to acquire his reputation as a grand strategist among today’s historians and policy-makers. “I believe that sooner or later the United States will have to develop some operational concept of the national interest. And when that happens, we will have to be, whether we like it or not, students of de Gaulle,” remarked Henry Kissinger in a breathless 1990 tribute. But any close inspection of de Gaulle’s policies reveals an implacably pragmatic politician who was as much constrained by domestic pressures as any leader of the period. De Gaulle never hesitated to delay his grand plans for Europe in order to satisfy more local concerns, as when he held the EEC hostage to the whims of French farmers. (De Gaulle threatened to leave the Common Market unless it included the massive subsidies he thought were necessary for the modernization of French agriculture.) That the political scientist Andrew Moravcsik was roundly dismissed by scholars across the spectrum for showing this more mundane side of de Gaulle is indicative of the reverence he still commands.

Source. This was a debate that I didn't know had existed. I'm on Moravcsik's side, of course, and am pleased to (therefore) find myself on the opposite side of Kissinger once again. Here is much much more, although note that the state of art in this debate seems to be captured by this earlier piece and this more recent one.

Does Political Science Deserve Public Funds?

If you pay any attention at all to the political science blogosphere you know that the House of Representatives recently decided to prohibit the National Science Foundation from directing $14mn roughly -- 0.2% of its budget -- to political science research. This has caused much consternation among (some) political scientists, as well as indignant blog posts from political scientists and e-mails from APSA asking us to fill in form letters and send them to our Congresspeople.

What it has not done, generally, is come up with any sort of explanation for this event that is informed by political science, nor any sort of strategy for mobilization that would ensure outcomes that benefit the discipline.

This I find ironic. Faced with an banal existential threat to its existence, political science has responded by a) acting as if social science methods do not exist, and b) acting as if it knows nothing at all about political mobilization, organization, competition, institutions, or much of anything else relevant to altering outcomes in the political sphere. The response from academics has been to whine, get defensive, and generally miss the point (which is almost surely not about whether political science is cool or interesting or even important).

In fact it's worse than simple ineptitude: rather than unifying around some strategy that will secure existing funding, the discipline has turned on itself*.

In a sense I think this goes back to broader schisms in the discipline**. Particularly in IR the past decade-plus has seen a lot of internecine battles over what is best practice for academics. Everything from "what we should study" to "how we should study it" has been debated, quite vituperatively, in journals, blogs, conference panels, graduate student seminars, letters to editors, and bitch-sessions at the tavern. The period from Perestroika to TRIPs has moved us a bit from knee-jerk anti-positivism towards "let a thousand flowers bloom", but there is another problem: the NSF.

Actual funding from the NSF is pretty paltry; getting those funds neither makes nor break political science as a discipline, and almost any NSF-funded project could be funded in other ways***. But getting an NSF grant is prestigious: it improves your application and tenure packets; it can lead to a reduction in teaching load thus increasing research output; it can help you get a full professorship or endowed chair; it boosts your status. Right now the NSF does not fund all types of political science research equally. It privileges certain types of projects, and in particular those smell that smell especially "science-y": studies that build and/or analyze large data sets. As it happens most of my research uses this kind of data set, and I certainly wish there were more of them in the world, but not everybody in political science does. In fact, most of us don't.

According to the most recent TRIPs, a majority of IR scholars consider themselves to be something other than positivists (Q. 26) and only 15% of us employ quantitative methodologies as our primary research method (Q. 28), although another 22% sometimes use them as secondary methods (Q. 29). Obviously international relations is not all of political science, and I'm sure that a greater proportion of Americanists use stats. But (I would expect) fewer comparativists do, and almost no political theorists do. To the extent that NSF funding is biased in favor of quant studies, it is biased against the majority of the discipline. Given that hiring and promotion decisions (and general prestige) are influenced by ability to attract grants from places like the NSF, this is no small thing.

This is probably why Jacqueline Stevens wants to see funding either abolished or distributed via a lottery system which would not privilege some types of work over others ex ante. To me that makes little sense, but I can see why some would prefer either outcome to the status quo ante.

Regardless of where you come down on this -- and I don't really care that much either way -- it's hard not to notice that political science has not covered itself in glory. It seemingly has no theory of politics that can help folks understand why this is happening or how to change it. Its best response to this challenge is classic rent-seeking -- we deserve this money because we do cool stuff -- but without any ability to effectively seek rents. That, in and of itself, might be reason enough to discontinue funding.

*Links to much other discussion can be found at that one. I'm too lazy right now to hyperlink them all myself.

**I'm not the first to point this out. Henry Farrell did as well, in one of the dozens of posts political scientists have dedicated to this bill.

***Phil Arena has one such proposal here, although I'm not too sure how serious he is about it. I find the fact that political scientists are not willing to fund their own research through their professional associations to be another indication that it probably doesn't deserve all that much funding. Some of his commenters suggest that public funding of political science is necessary because it generates public goods which will not be realized without government intervention. To that I say a) show me the evidence****, and b) public goods can be supplied without government intervention, particularly if there are motivated groups who can easily identify the location of those goods and organize to capture them. APSA is already organized, and presumably in a better position to find these public goods than Congress or even the NSF.

****Or even the logic. Most political science research, including NSF-funded research, is published by journals with subscription feeds that are prohibitively for individuals or even most libraries. Therefore the work is most definitely not "non-excludable"... it is excluded! So it is not a public good. But even if it were it would only be a public good in the most facile sense of "the creation and dissemination of knowledge is good" which merely begs the question: maybe, but wouldn't that money be better used in ways that spread knowledge in different ways? E.g., funding public libraries, giving laptops to low-income people, etc.

Good Sense and Critical Intelligence

Following up on my post below, here's how our elected leaders view social science:

“We’re spending $70 per person to fill out [The American Community Survey]. That’s just not cost effective,” [Rep. Daniel Webster] continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

I hope you can spot the egregious error at the end.

We've been doing the American Community Survey since 1850, and it is used to learn about the demography and needs of the citizenry as a way to guide spending programs in a more sensible way:

It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.

The House of Representatives has already voted to abolish it.

Via all the poli sci grad students in my Facebook feed.

Politics is Everywhere, Even in the Brackets

Brad Smith, a UNC undergrad who is currently making his mind up about IR grad schools, writes:

Stated explicitly, the question I hope to answer here is: "Does Obama systematically favor teams from "swing states" when filling out his NCAA bracket?" My theory is that Obama does, indeed favor teams from swing states because, by doing so, he only stands to gain. As long as his predictions are not absolutely outrageous, Obama can favor a battleground state's team over the team of a state that he either expects to win outright or expects to have no chance in in order to curry favor with that state's voters. This might seem like a silly political move at first, but if you think this wouldn't make a difference in the way people might vote, you've never met someone from rural North Carolina. On a more serious note, it makes an intuitive sort of sense that during an election year a presidential candidate should waste no opportunity to squeeze out a little more favor from voters in strategically valuable states. I think that's exactly what Obama's doing here, which leads me to my hypothesis:

Hypothesis: Obama will predict more wins for teams from swing states than the "average" individual who fills out an NCAA bracket.

He has a little toy stats model and (surprise!) finds some basic support for the hypothesis.

My bracket got screwed by Mizzou and -- to a lesser extent -- Duke, but I'm totally fine with the latter.

Paradigms in Political Science

It may not be easy to see (click here for a bigger image, and here for some discussion at TMC), but the above graph shows the probability that a political scientist will think that the eurozone will split up versus stay together. The group in the top left are IPE scholars, the middle are International Org scholars, and the bottom are comparativists who study Europe. I'm not a big fan of this graphing style, as it seems to obscure nearly as much information as it illuminates, but it's fairly easy to see that IPE folks are the most convinced that at least one country will leave the euro. More than half of us. Meanwhile, only about 37% of IO folks and 30% of Europeanists think a country will exit the common currency.

I find this interesting for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I think provides a pretty stark reminder that political scientists think very differently about politics. This could break down along paradigmatic lines -- the authors of the report note that constructivists tend to be comparativists, while realists tend to be in IR. I still think that a materialist conception of politics carries me farthest down the road I wish to be on, so I think it is fairly likely that a country will drop the euro if things continue to deteriorate.

I've had many conversations with Europeanists on this point. All of them are enamored of the EU. For them the collapse of the EU is unthinkable. I can't understand why. It's not as if fixed exchange rate regimes -- and political unions -- haven't collapsed before, particularly when subjected to this level of stress. That said, they certainly know more about Europe and the European identity than I do, and they take it very seriously.

I don't really have an answer here. I hope that conditions in the EU improve enough that we don't have to test these paradigms this time. A confederal Europe is good for the world, on net, particularly if they can figure out how to manage the broader economy in ways that don't lead to periodic crises. But I have my doubts about that.

Is This Really True? QOTD

From an article on the multidisciplinary influence of Kahneman and Tversky:

Political scientists use prospect theory to model foreign-policy decision making. Some international-relations scholars argue that cognitive biases favor hawkish policies, making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end. (Kahneman shares that view.)

That's the only part of the article discussion IR (no hypen needed) or other political science. I'll admit that I don't follow the FP decision-making lit very closely, but this doesn't ring true to me. Yes, the classic Kahneman/Tversky prospect theory article was on my Intro to IR Theory first-year syllabus, but it was tucked into the "Other Approaches" week at the end of the semester. I have to say that I've come across few major IR articles that have explicitly adopted a behavioralist frame.

Perhaps others can fill in the gaps in my education. I welcome comment.

Understanding

Angus Deaton has some new research that may help explain why political scientists are all neurotic:

According to Deaton’s analysis, the very act of thinking about politics makes Americans feel less happy and satisfied with their lives — an effect that’s almost as big as being unemployed.  

“People appear to dislike politics and politicians so much that prompting them to think about them has a very large downward effect on their assessment of their own lives,” he writes. “The effect of asking the political questions on well-being is only a little less than the effect of someone becoming unemployed, so that to get the same effect on average well-being, three-quarters of the population would have to lose their jobs.”

Welp, that explains a lot. Here's the paper (pdf).

Political Science Invented the Interwebs

It's a series of tubes, right? Anyway, Errol Morris writes about how his brother helped set up the first e-mail system in the MIT political science department:

In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, "Where's electronic mail? That would be so cool." And they said, "Oh, there's no time to write that. It's not important." And we said, "Well, can we write it?" And we did. And then it became part of the system.

From political science to you, world. Kind of. Okay not really.

(How crazy is it that e-mail was originally deemed "not important".)

Via.

Is American Political Science Ignored?

In American academic circles, there is often much weeping and gnashing of teeth about how government and academic political science are separated. Few policymakers read academic research, complain academics. Few academics do anything substantively important or intellectually accessible, complain policymakers. So I found it interesting to read this, from a profile of Joe Nye in the UK Independent:

The advantages of the revolving door between academia and government, as it works in the United States, however, are indisputable. It gives academics an opportunity to test their ideas in practice and it gives politicians the benefit of specialist advice. Mid-career, Joseph Nye spent two years as a security official specialising in nuclear non-proliferation in the administration of Jimmy Carter. Fifteen years later, he joined the Clinton administration as assistant secretary for defence, and then became chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a body that coordinates intelligence estimates for the President. Had John Kerry won the 2004 election, Nye was seen as the natural choice to be National Security Adviser. When the Republicans were in power, Nye returned to Harvard.

Such a career would be unusual, not to say impossible, in Britain. Despite hints by Tony Blair, among others, that he would favour academics, business people and others moving in and out of government, the structures are not there and no-one – not the professional politicians, not the civil servants – has a real interest in fostering change. When it does happen, it is the exception and the beneficiaries – Admiral Lord West, for example – have tended to be more accident-prone than other ministers. Sharing a platform with Nye during his sojourn in London, Mark Malloch-Brown – former Deputy General Secretary of the UN and Foreign Office minister under Labour – lamented Britain's single track with more than a touch of envy. At very least, serving in government can be said to lend a practical aspect to the various branches of political science at America's leading universities.

Nye's direct experience of academia and politics – two worlds which in Britain tend to be seen as alien to each other, if not inimical – is the rule rather than the exception for senior US scholars and it ensures that their ideas are given a hearing on both sides of the fence. It allows the two worlds to feed off each other to mutual benefit and those who excel in both become a particular kind of superstar, guaranteed a global audience and needing to feel beholden to no-one.

Clearly Nye is an exceptional case, but the article makes a more general argument. I don't know much about the reporter, Mary Dejevsky, so I'm not sure what cred she's got. I just found it interesting that for all the hand-wringing American academics do over the fact that policymakers don't pay enough attention to us, one view from across the Pond is very different.

George Rabinowitz

I just wanted to pass along a few links memorializing George. Here is the original Daily Tarheel report of his death, and here is their obituary. An undergraduate student pays tribute here. John Sides and Eric Voeten paid their respects at The Monkey Cage here and here. Here are the Twitter results for "Rabinowitz". Lots of former students and colleagues have posted tributes there, as well as in comment threads and Facebook posts across the web. My previous post on George's passing is the most-visited in this blog's history, just one small testament to the impact he had on his students, the university, and the broader discipline.

RIP, George Rabinowitz

The UNC political science department lost a valued faculty member, colleague, and friend this weekend. George Rabinowitz, Burton Craige Distinguished Professor, died suddenly of a heart attack on Friday in Norway, where he was spending a semester. (Prof. Rabinowitz was elected member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters in 2003, and frequently spent time teaching and researching in that country.)

I TA'd for Prof. Rabinowitz last semester, and can testify to his dedication to rigor in his teaching. He had a similar discipline in his research. He is probably best known for developing the directional model of issue voting, which complicated traditional proximity voting models, but contributed many other notable works as well. He served on the editorial board of AJPS and JoP. Here is his CV. Here is his seminal APSR paper on directional theory, with Stuart Macdonald. Here is a Google search on directional theory, which gets 163,000 hits.

He is survived by his wife Stuart Macdonald, also a UNC political science professor, and several children.

Shout It From The Rooftops

Phil Arena says that we need to take political economy seriously (bold added):

What does concern me, though, is the cult of democracy worship that pervades IR (and much of political science, though IR scholars seem to be the worst about this). And this has come to rest heavily, in recent years, on the claim that democratic leaders have an incentive to provide public goods while leaders of other regimes do not. Unfortunately, the evidence that this is the case comes almost entirely from statistical analysis of data that is non-randomly missing and pertains to goods that are not public goods (see this paper for more details). The difference is important if you want to make claims about democracy working for everyone, not just the winners of the political process. There's good evidence that it does not (see here, or of course, virtually all of the public choice literature, which I truly wish more IR people would read -- a great primer for which can be found here).

Amen. Even true public goods have to be paid for by somebody; politics is about who pays for them, and who enjoys them. But the bigger point is that what many think of as public goods (e.g. roads, schools, health care) are definitionally not. It seems like many people confuse public goods with egalitarianism, but they are not at all the same. Many in IPE make the same mistake.

My impression that comparative politics may have some of the same democracy-worship proclivities as IR, for the same (misguided) reasons. Selectorate theory is, after all, a comparative theory before it's an IR theory. This type of question doesn't seem to be high on the American politics research agenda either.

All politics is about distribution. Whatever it's other faults, at least Acemoglu and Robinson get that part right.

Who Says We've Got Economics Envy?

Cowen Tabarrok says it should be the other way around:

(Economics, and perhaps social science in general, seems behind its time compared say with political science.)

That is mostly (I think) in reference to the incorporation of psychology and experimental methods into political science. The post is about what ideas are behind their time.

(Updated to note correct MR writer. Thanks Anon.)

Pwnage

Listening to Marketplace tonight. Kai Ryssdal introduces a freakonomics piece: "How Powerful is the President". Ah, I say to myself, surely this will feature a political scientist. Um, no. Two economists and one law school prof. But it gets worse. One of the economists is J.C. Bradbury, the so-called "baseball economist." So apparently, an economist who specializes in the analysis of baseball statistics knows more about whether the president is powerful than any political scientist alive. This should hurt.