Political scientists, bloggers, and journalists

I'm just back from a truly delightful meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. Other than a creepy me-stalking meme and some underwhelming smelt at Miller's Pub, it was a big success both professionally and socially (as though I could still distinguish between the two).

I was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion called "Toward a Greater Dialogue: Political Scientists Meet Journalists," chaired by Lynn Vavreck. John Sides and I represented the world of political scientist-bloggers, while the journalists were Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and James Warren of the Chicago News Group. (Gilbert maintains the Wisconsin Voter Blog. And be sure to check out Warren's recaps of MPSA for The Atlantic, here and here.) The roundtable made for a really nice discussion (and should be available in podcast format soon), but I wanted to revise and extend my remarks a bit here.

Journalists-meet-political-scientists panels are becoming a regular feature at academic conferences, and I think this is a positive development. If I may draw an historically inspired (if probably inappropriate) analogy, journalism a few years ago was like Kate Winslet in Titanic -- lovely, enjoying first class, but lost in its own world and its own problems. It was largely oblivious to political science (Leonardo DiCaprio in this scenario) -- smart, wanting to impress journalism, but carrying a bit of a chip on its shoulder. In recent years, though, we've begun seeing each other, dancing to Irish music, enjoying the occasional hook-up in the jalopy, enriching both our lives.

Obviously I don't want to push this metaphor too far, since it results in political science frozen to death at the bottom of the North Atlantic. But I think one of the things that has brought us closer together in recent years (other than Billy Zane or sea ice) is blogging. Nyhan, Drezner, Bernstein, Putnam, Greene, Dionne, Glassman, the crews at the Monkey Cage and LGM, and many others have been working at making political science research more accessible to journalism and to political observers at large. (I've been trying to do my part, as well.) It was extremely heartening to read, for example, Mark Blumenthal's coverage of the early presidential primaries and caucuses, or this article from the Idaho Spokane Spokesman Review quoting four political scientists on the topic of Tea Party influence in state legislatures. I took these as evidence of the political science perspective working its way into mainstream political coverage, and while these things could have happened without blogs, I'm pretty sure blogs made them more likely.

While I believe this growing relationship between journalists and political scientists has helped to improve the quality of political coverage, it's clear we're not reaching everyone. I was curious if it was possible to measure political science's penetration of journalism. Below is one attempt: I used a Google News search to count the number of times the term "political scientist" appears in the text of New York Times and Washington Post articles annually. This is far from a perfect measure. Nonetheless, two trends emerge: we are quoted more in election years, and we are quoted with decreasing frequency.

Now, as Sides pointed out, if our perspective is being adopted by journalists, maybe they don't have to quote us at all. But it's also possible we're just reaching a small group of journalists, although perhaps they will influence their colleagues. I certainly don't expect us to reach everybody. I imagine the Chris Matthewses and Maureen Dowds of journalism will continue to claim that politics is driven by "narrative" and personality and manliness and tone and clothing and that elections are won by the taller candidate with the best smile whom you most want to have a beer with. But I still imagine we can reach more people. The question is how.

I was heartened during the roundtable to hear the journalists (including one in the audience) say that they actually want our input in their stories -- they seem to think we have something useful to say. One reason they don't always include us is because there are only so many hours in the day, and we have a penchant for droning on and on with caveats and jargon. I think many of us are guilty on this count, and it would frankly be good for us to learn how to describe our research, and that of our peers, with the journalistic audience in mind. Many of our schools offer media training, teaching us how to talk to reporters. We should do this training. Not to dumb down our work, but to learn how to describe it in a way that seems interesting to a broader audience than three reviewers for the American Political Science Review.

I'd also like to encourage more blogging by political scientists. The ability to boil down ongoing research into a few punchy paragraphs is a great skill to have, and not just for talking to reporters. Lynn Vavreck also suggested some sort of poli sci boot camp for journalists, where we spend a day talking to reporters and describing how we approach research questions. And as the reporters made clear, just getting into each others' Rolodexes is a great start. They'll call us if they know who we are, and we should feel free to call them if we have an idea for a story.

I left the roundtable feeling quite encouraged for the future of both political science and political journalism. I'm hoping this conversation is just getting started.

Politicians care about spelling and grammar

Last year, Dan Butler and David Broockman published an article showing that African American constituents who wrote to state legislators were less likely to receive a response than white constituents were. Jayme Neiman, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, has applied this same framework to a new idea -- the quality of written correspondence. She details the results in her MPSA paper "Does Quality Matter? State Legislative Response to Constituent Communication."

Basically, she sent out e-mails to a random selection of state legislators across the country. Half received a well-written request for information on registering to vote, and the other half received a poorly-worded, poorly-spelled piece of drivel on the same topic. Neiman reports than 62 percent of the well-written e-mails received a response, while only 45% of the poorly-written ones did. Legislators were also more likely to respond themselves (rather than refer the letter to a staffer for response) to the well-written ones.

From my own experiences answering mail for politicians, poorly-written letters are less of a concern than crazy ones -- aliens, fluoride conspiracies, etc. But I admit that's a lot harder to operationalize in a study.

APSA 2011

Relatively light blogging for now, as I'm at APSA in Seattle. I'll be posting occasionally to Twitter, and I hope to attend the Monkey Cage reception on Friday night for a chance to meet some real live bloggers and pay for my own drinks.

Meanwhile, yes, I'm tooting my own horn a bit, but this looks to be an interesting panel on party networks. Hope people can make it on Saturday at 8AM!

Networking

I'm on my way to the Political Networks conference in Ann Arbor. I was signed up to take a day-long course on exponential-family random graph models (I'll explain another time) with Garry Robbins, who was flying in from Australia to teach it. However, he can now not fly to the States due to volcanic activity in Chile, which has sent soot into the air all over the southern hemisphere. Luckily, Carter Butts, who has written a good deal of software on the course topic, has agreed to fill in. 

This is actually the second conference I've attended in the last year that has had to make substantial changes to the schedule because of volcanoes. It's an interesting lesson in the interconnectedness of our world, and also more evidence that the Earth really does want us to leave.

MPSA highlights

I posted earlier about the King, Orlando, and Sparks paper, but I wanted to recommend a few other interesting papers that caught my eye at last week's meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.

• Jenna Bednar and Liz Gerber show that roughly a third of congressional campaign donations are made by people who live in the candidate's metropolitan area but not in that candidate's district. Food for thought about the whole idea of geographic representation.
• John Sides and Henry Farrell (of Monkey Cage fame) had a nice paper demonstrating a "Kos Bump": when a candidate is mentioned on the DailyKos blog, that candidate sees a short term boost in fundraising. Mentions by Markos himself are particularly valuable. They haven't put the paper up on the web yet, but it's worth waiting for.
• According to Sarah Poggione and Janna Deitz, female House members pay a greater electoral price than do male House members for being too liberal for their district. Interestingly, though, women who are too conservative for their district do not suffer for it at all at the polls, although men who are too conservative do. No wonder when Steve Greene and I were looking for examples of candidates who suffered for being too ideologically extreme, we came up with Jeannette Rankin, Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky, and Hillary Clinton.
• If you have 30 minutes to kill, just ask Justin Buchler and me to talk about the Tea Party. We have no shortage of opinions.
• The service at Russian Tea Time was somewhat wanting this year, and they continue to water down the vodka flights. But the food is still good and I always have a great time there. Speaking of food, there should be a law preventing MPSA from convening until Miller's Pub has smelt on the menu. I need smelt.

The costliest vote revisited

Steve Greene and I have been working on our analysis of the effect of roll call votes on the electoral fortunes of Democratic House incumbents in 2010. (See this previous blog post for details.) We've put this research together into a paper that we're presenting this weekend at MPSA.

For the paper, we look at the impact of four roll call votes: health reform, the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and the TARP bailout from 2008. We find that a vote for health reform was very costly for Democrats, reducing reelection margins by six to eight percentage points. This cost at least thirteen House Democrats their jobs. We find a smaller, but still statistically significant, effect for supporting TARP. The stimulus has a mixed effect, harming Democrats in more conservative districts but possibly helping them in more liberal ones. We found no overall effect for cap-and-trade.

Here's my favorite graph from our paper, showing the estimated impact of the health reform vote on Democrats' likelihood of reelection. The patterns are generated by a logit equation and show how Democrats from a broad range of districts fared in 2010 based on this one roll call vote. For example, in a district where Obama got 40% of the vote in 2008, a Democratic representative would have a 54 51 percent chance of retaining her seat if she opposed health reform, but only a 19 an 18 percent chance if she supported it.

Steve and I are going to meet with Eric McGhee, John Sides, and Brendan Nyhan about their research on this topic to figure out where we agree and disagree. We'd talked about meeting for beers, but it's a morning meeting, so we'd best stick with wine.

Late update: A few folks noted a slight coding error in the original paper. We've updated the paper accordingly, and the results are substantively identical. I've corrected the above post as needed.

Is there a risk to academic bloggers?

I attended a wonderful APSA panel (not an oxymoron!) called "What Political Scientists Can Offer Journalists."  (Nice writeups here from John Sides and Robert Farley.)  This spilled over into a fun discussion afterwards at a pub.  Generally, the panelists encouraged political scientists to be more forthcoming about our findings, explaining to journalists what we know and why it matters.  Blogging is generally seen as a good tool for this endeavor.  However, one thing that the political blogger/journalists seemed to have a hard time appreciating was the concept that academics might face some risk when blogging.  Yglesias sums this up nicely:

As I heard it explained to me, it’s not merely that taking time to help inform a non-specialist audience about political science findings isn’t specifically rewarded, it’s positively punished. And not simply in the sense that doing less research and more publicizing is punished; I was told that holding research output constant, getting more publicity for your output would be harmful to a junior scholar’s career because it would feed an assumption of non-seriousness....  That’s pretty nuts.

I agree.  From my perspective, academics who blog -- who take the time to explain academic research in a way that non-academics can understand and care about -- are providing a real service, both to academia and to the intellectual world at large.  But, as Nanny McPhee says, "It's rather sad, really, but there it is."  Or, as Hyman Roth says, "This is the business we've chosen."

Still, it's difficult to say whether an academic would be punished today for blogging.  We act under the belief that such activities killed Dan Drezner's tenure bid in 2005, but of course we can't get definitive proof of that, and we don't know whether norms have changed in the past few years such that this behavior is no longer stigmatized.  No senior faculty member ever goes on record saying that blogging in itself is a strike against a promotion or hiring candidate.  I don't think it hurt my tenure bid, but I don't think it helped, either.  I suppose the only way we can know is by testing it further.  As more academic bloggers come up for tenure, perhaps we'll get some real data, hopefully all on the side of refuting the hypothesis.

The costs of the filibuster

Sorr that I haven't had much chance to blog any of my experiences at APSA last week.  I encourage you to read Jon Bernstein's account of the filibuster panel, which can be seen on C-SPAN.  I attended some of this panel, which I found fascinating.  I particularly recommend Steve Smith's material around 13:15 in which he notes how the filibuster distorts the legislative process and output.  He holds the filibuster responsible for reducing the economic stimulus package by 20%, for the removal of the public option in health reform, for the delay of unemployment benefits extensions, for the diminution of a small business program, and other things, even while the overall passage rate of bills remains high.

I am still processing the decision to include non-academics on some of these academic panels.  I thought Ezra Klein's contributions to both the filibuster and the media panels were interesting and quite entertaining.  Brian Darling's input on the filibuster panel seemed ridiculous at times, especially when he demanded that all senators read all legislation and that cloture requirements be ratcheted back up to 67 votes.  On the other hand, I rarely experience strong emotions during academic panels, so it was kind of nice to do that once in a while here.

APSA needs more contests

Anyone who has attended recent APSA conferences knows that the “audience” for many panels, even on the official program, is now no more than the panelists themselves.

The above quote is from Lawrence Mead's "Scholasticism in Political Science" (gated), out in the recent Perspectives.  Mead's overall point is about the declining relevance of political science due to hyper-specialization.  I'll have more to say about that soon enough.  But he's right -- even while conference attendance is up, attendance at individual panels is quite low.  So what to do?

I propose a panel in the style of "Iron Chef" or "Chopped" in which four scholars have to produce a piece of scholarship in a set time period (say, 20 minutes), to be judged by a small panel.  The model I have in mind works best for quant types but could probably be adapted to qualitative work quite easily.  Basically, at the beginning of the time period, the scholars are given a small dataset consisting of four variables.  Ideally, these variables have little or no obvious relationship to each other.  (e.g.: Annual GDP in the U.S., Florida's alligator population, undergraduate acceptance rates at Ohio State, and incidences of flooding in the Lower Mississippi River.)  Then the scholars must each produce a graph or table that manages to incorporate all of the variables in some compelling way.  Their laptops could all be connected to an LCD projector, which would alternate between each of them showing the audience how the projects are developing.

At the end of the appointed time period, the judges would render a decision.  I'm not sure whether it would be best to eliminate one scholar at that point and then do two more rounds, or whether two or three repeated rounds of the four scholars would work best.  Either way, a winner would emerge.

Trivial?  Sure.  Insulting to the pursuit of science?  Possibly.  But I tell you that the section that tries this will experience a substantial boost in its panel attendance and will be rewarded with more panels the following year.  And God help us, it might be fun.

Linking political science and politics

I'm at the State Politics and Policy conference right now.  In addition to the usual panels on, well, state politics and policy, there have been a few special panels on the relevance of our research to the rest of the political world.  These have been fascinating glimpses into both the mindsets of political actors and the perceptions they have of academics.

The first event was a panel discussion with former governors Madeleine Kunin (D-VT), Jim Edgar (R-IL), Parris Glendening (D-MD), and Bob Taft (R-OH).  When asked how political science could be more relevant to state policymakers, they advised us to look into a number of different topics that they thought might be of concern.  Taft thought we should investigate the effects of redistricting.  A few were interested in legislative partisanship.  Kunin mentioned campaign finance reform.  What really struck me was that they were pleading for research that already exists, largely done by scholars who were there in the room.  This research just isn't making its way into the hands of state policymakers.

One way that we could possibly get more of our research placed in front of state leaders, the governors suggested, was to build ties with their staffs.  We could contact them through our university lobbyists, we could invited staffers to speak in our classes, etc.  Some of us are doing this, of course, but in general this strikes me as solid advice.  Then the staffers would be more likely to seek out our research, involve us in the legislative process, or invite us to testify.

Of course, another way to communicate with policymakers is via the media.  We had a fascinating panel discussion with four seasoned reporters who used to cover statehouses.  When asked how we could be more relevant to them, they basically suggested we become more like journalists -- write in more accessible language, focus on solutions, etc.  They advised us to blog!

I had a fun back-and-forth with David Yepsen (formerly of the Des Moines Register) in which I suggested that we had different perspectives.  For example, I research partisanship, and when I talk to reporters about it, they ask me what we're going to do about this problem.  I have two reactions to this: 1) I don't really see partisanship as a problem; and 2) Even if I did, I got into this line of work to study the phenomenon, not to get rid of it.  I didn't get a lot of good/bad training in grad school. I'm far more interested in understanding how the political world works than in changing it.  Yepsen seemed surprised -- You have no feelings about this one way or another?  You're just a planted pot?  -- and he urged me to explain to reporters how I felt.  But this is where I'm uncomfortable.  My expertise is in understanding.  I don't know that I'm any more qualified to say what's good or bad than anyone else.  At any rate, the discussion just reminded me of the real disconnect between academics and journalists, although I'm sure we can be doing more to communicate with each other.

MPSA roundup

Well, I'm back from the Midwest Political Science Association.  While I blogged nothing, I Tweeted quite a bit, enjoying the challenge of summarizing conference papers in 140 characters or less.  Just thought I'd mention a few papers I saw -- hopefully they'll be up on the conference website shortly.

• Eitan Hersh analyzed the differences between caucus attendees and primary voters and found basically none.  There are no differences in terms of ideological extremism or any other political variable he examined, and his N (using CCES data) was quite high, meaning that if a difference was there, he should have detected it.  This seems pretty surprising, given that caucus turnout is usually around a tenth that of primary turnout and given the higher participation barriers for caucuses.  Hersh suggests that the sorts of people who go to caucuses simply have a higher threshold for meetings, but aren't extreme in other dimensions.
• Robert Boatright is following up on his research on the primarying of incumbents with an interesting paper on the effects of getting primaried.  The paper is a fascinating read if for no other reason than its portrayal of the complexity of studying the effects of primaries.  Do primaries weaken incumbents in the general election, or do weak incumbents just invite primary challenges?  Does a primary challenge cause an incumbent to change her roll call votes, or does shifting roll call behavior lead to primary challenges?  There are huge causality and endogeneity issues here.  Boatright makes a valiant attempt to wade through some of this, dividing up hundreds of congressional primary challenges by type: being challenged from the extremes, being challenged from the center, being challenged due to scandal or old age, etc.  He does find some modest effects, and generally in the expected directions.  He also finds that Democratic incumbents seem to suffer the effects of primary challenges more than Republican incumbents do.  However, basically none of these results is statistically significant.  I sympathize with this work -- Boatright is doing us a real service here, but it looks frustrating.
• Jordan Ragusa shows us a few interesting things about the career paths of senators.  First, the percentage of senators with prior experience in the House has been increasing steadily over the past half century.  Second, senators with former House experience tend to be more partisan than "indigenous" senators.  Ragusa argues that the career socialization in the more partisan House tends to train politicians as partisan, and they take that training with them into the Senate.

Beyond that, I had a bunch of productive meetings and saw many old friends.  I finally met Brendan Nyhan -- we enjoyed a limo ride and some deep dish pizza along with a large group of devastatingly cool political scientists.

Sweet home Chicago

I'm on my way to the annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.  Looking forward to four nights of revelry in the Palmer House Hilton and a few nights of fried smelt at Miller's Pub.  I hope to blog some of the more interesting things I see and hear.  I'll probably be doing some live-tweeting, as well, so be sure to follow me if political science conferences interest you.  (The official hashtag is #mpsa.  It's official in the sense that a few other people and I have started using it.)