Are (some) academic stresses self-imposed?

Dan Drezner makes some nice points in response to the Forbes article that lists academia as one of the least stressful occupations. While he rightly notes that adjuncts face a great deal of career stress, he concedes that those of us in tenure or tenure-track positions enjoy a degree of autonomy and flexibility that those in careers at similar pay levels do not have.

He also makes a point about us self-selecting into this line of work, and I think this is an important one in the discussion of stress. Academics generally do their jobs because it's a career they actively sought out and they study a subject that deeply interests them. (No one ever wrote a folk song about being forced to become an academic because it was the only job in town.) Thus, we end up committing to a lot of things we don't actually have to do -- such as conference papers, journal reviews, academic blogs, etc. -- because we find them intrinsically interesting or we believe we have a decent contribution to make. Now, it's good for the discipline and for our own career reputations and professional advancement that we do these things, but they're not always mandatory, particularly for tenured faculty. So the professional commitments I took on during that blessed year between gaining tenure and becoming department chair certainly added to my stress levels, but a) I could have declined many/most of them and kept my job, b) the commitments brought some satisfaction that partially offset the stresses, and c) the stresses weren't remotely like those faced by firefighters, police officers, soldiers, miners, commercial fishermen, etc. That is, no MPSA paper is going to kill me, although some have tried.

Similarly, with teaching, many of us endeavor to improve our teaching or offer new courses because we believe it's important to do so. Taking on such a commitment invariably generates new stresses -- teaching a new course sometimes leads to initially lower course evaluations, generating a new course is harder than repeating an old one -- and we could usually just not do these things and still keep our jobs. Nonetheless, we take on the task of improving our course offerings, and the concomitant stress, because to quote Hyman Roth, "this is the work we have chosen," and we think this is the best way to do it.

Research: It's so important that someone else should pay for it

If you're interested in the ongoing saga over NSF funding for political science, please do not miss Charles Lane's op/ed in yesterday's Washington Post. Lane starts by taking on Christopher Zorn's post at the Monkey Cage, in which Zorn raised concerns about the politicization of NSF funding decisions. Then Lane goes on to make some odd economic claims, such as:

The relevant question... is whether society could have reaped equal or greater benefits through other uses of the money — and how unreasonable it would be to ask the political scientists to rely on non-federal support. [...] 

If this research is as valuable as its proponents say, someone other than the U.S. Treasury will pay for it.

That last sentence is pretty astounding. Swap out the words "this research" for "the study of cancer" or "national defense" just to get a sense of it. Just because something is important does not automatically mean it is popular or well-funded. Strangely, Lane seems to concede as much just two paragraphs later:

The private sector chronically underinvests in basic scientific research; the costs and risks are relatively high, and the benefits relatively hard to commercialize. Government support compensates for this “market failure,” enabling society to reap “positive externalities” — economic, environmental or military.

Um, yeah! That's just what I was saying! But Lane thinks this logic only applies to the "hard" sciences, not the social sciences:

Though quantitative methods may rule economics, political science and psychology, these disciplines can never achieve the objectivity of the natural sciences. Those who study social behavior — or fund studies of it — are inevitably influenced by value judgments, left, right and center. And unlike hypotheses in the hard sciences, hypotheses about society usually can’t be proven or disproven by experimentation. Society is not a laboratory.

Wow. Okay, last point first: Of course we can use experiments to test claims about society! Political psychologists, among others, do this all the time. Political scientists also use natural experiments all the time. Here's one: Nebraska and Kansas have very similar populations but different institutional rules for their state legislatures, and this has important effects on legislative partisanship. Yes, society can be a laboratory.

Now, as for Lane's other points in there, let's just pretend for a moment that those who study the hard sciences are not influenced by value judgments, such as desires to cure cancer, to make fusion energy cheaply available, to prove or disprove human-made climate change, etc. Are social scientists influenced by value judgments? Well, I suppose we'd need to define the word "influenced." Their political beliefs probably cause them to find certain questions interesting and to spend time researching them as opposed to other questions. So I suppose that's a form of influence. But that's probably not what Lane is saying. Rather, he seems to be suggesting that our political judgments cloud our results.

So here's a challenge for Lane: Please browse through the most recent edition of the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, or any of the other major political science journals and show me where scholarship has been compromised by the scholar's ideological judgments. If you don't have access to these articles, just let me know and I'll send them to you. Hell, you can find most of my publications here: show me where my findings have been influenced by my value judgments.

The question of whether society should be subsidizing research about politics is an interesting one, and while I certainly have my opinions, I welcome debate on the topic. But the idea that social scientists can't do research without being clouded by political judgments and that this makes our research inferior to that of the other sciences is, frankly, offensive.

(Cross-posted from Mischiefs of Faction)

NSF: An invitation for Jeff Flake

I'm one of the host co-chairs of the fifth annual Political Networks conference, being held next month in Boulder. Since this conference and the APSA section organizing it have received substantial support from NSF's Political Science program over the past five years, I thought it would make sense to invite Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to the conference. Rep. Flake, of course, recently authored an amendment to a House spending bill that would defund the Political Science program, and this bill recently passed the House. 

I know this is already beyond the House, but Flake currently seems to be the main purveyor of the argument that political science is unworthy of federal support. And in fairness, as Ezra Klein points out, political science is deserving of some criticism for using public money for our research and then hiding the results of that research behind paywalls and obscure jargon. So we invited Flake to the conference, in all sincerity and in the interests of transparency, so he could see what NSF funding has helped to produce. The text of our letter appears after the jump.

NSF

Over at the Monkey Cage, John Sides comments on the House of Representatives' recent vote to defund the Political Science program at the National Science Foundation, explaining the usefulness of his own recent NSF-funded research. While I am certainly not thrilled about this vote, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for scientists receiving government funds to occasionally explain to the public just what they're doing and why it might be valuable.

I should mention that I (along with Michael Heaney, Joanne Miller, and Dara Strolovitch) received a relatively small NSF grant (about $30,000) a few years ago to conduct a survey of activists and delegates at the 2008 Republican and Democratic national conventions. The bulk of that money went toward hiring a few dozen undergraduate and graduate students in Denver and Minneapolis to conduct the survey and training them in how to do survey research. I still hear back from some of those students, who tell me how valuable the training was and how memorable the whole experience was.

The research itself, meanwhile, has yielded one published paper, one that's under review, and another that's still being written. We've found, among other things, some cultural distinctions between the two parties in how they work with interest groups, some interesting evidence about how the Democratic party managed its divisions after the Clinton/Obama primary battle, and some notable differences in the evaluation of female candidates across both major parties. The research covers two main areas -- differences between the major parties and the use of convention caucuses -- which haven't received a lot of attention in previous research. While focused on parties, the research isn't advancing any agenda for one party or another; it's simply trying to better understand how they function and how people and groups interact with them. I don't know that this work is "transformative" (which apparently is a new standard for meriting government support), but it is interesting and useful, and it tells us some things we didn't know before. And the evidence was gathered by struggling students who ended up with some useful training and some extra spending money in their wallets.

I might also mention a small NSF grant ($12,000) I received in grad school, which allowed me and Jeff Lewis to compile a complete roll call vote record for the California Assembly going back to 1849. (You can download the resulting ideal points here at the bottom of the page.) This research was essential to my book and an AJPS article, and it has been used by several other scholars in related research.

Now, these aren't large grants by any means. But for a scholar located at a liberal arts school in a small department with no graduate students and paltry research funds, they make an enormous difference. It's the difference between conducting research and, well, not. Assuming the federal government has an interest in promoting research (I believe the Constitution mentions something about promoting the "progress of science and useful arts"), this strikes me as a very good investment.

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.

Breaking: Student unimpressed with professor

I'm not quite sure how to react to this op/ed by a University of Kansas student complaining about tenure and the quality of undergraduate education. It's not like there are no legitimate concerns here. But my first reaction is to say that I don't feel like getting criticized by a student who, by her own admission, skips classes to watch "Seinfeld" and uses her friends and RateMyProfessors.com as her primary data sources.

On further reflection, though... No, you know what, I'm going to stick with my first reaction.

Ignite

I'm just learning about a new style of presenting research being promoted by an organization called Ignite. You present in five minutes using precisely 20 slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds. Below is a presentation by James Fowler describing his "Connected" research. I'm honestly not sure if this is a better way to present information that the more typical lecture-discussant format (Am I intrigued by James, his research, or the gimmick?), but it certainly is novel. I might try to do one of these some time.

How to teach political science

Ezra Klein was kind enough to call me and chat about his recent blog post on the 2012 election. During our conversation, we discussed his visit to APSA this year and his experiences with political science education (he attended two University of California campuses as an undergrad). As he described it, undergraduate political science education comes across like a high school civics class on steroids, and probably only over-the-counter-strength steroids at that. He moved to DC after college because he wanted to really understand "politics," but after a few years there, he discovered that political scientists were the only ones who were actually studying politics systematically, and that we actually had some pretty good answers.

This actually mirrors my own experiences. I was certainly happy enough with my undergraduate education, but I was very rarely inspired by my poli sci classes. I went to graduate school in poli sci largely in spite of, rather than because of, my undergraduate experiences.

I'd like to think things have changed since I was an undergrad in the late Pleistocene, but I'm not sure they have that much. I think we can do a lot more to engage our students. Not just by using more active learning approaches (although that can surely help), but also by conveying the idea of discovery. Learning a series of facts is not nearly as compelling as learning how we learned those facts. Any student can write down "The President's party tends to lose House seats in midterm elections" and probably regurgitate that on a test. Show them a scatterplot, though, and the visual approach grabs them on a different level. Have them make the scatterplot from raw data, and you've got a budding scientist on your hands.

I'm starting my intro class off this year by having the students read Hans Noel's fabulous essay "Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don't," which conveys, more than just about any other undergraduate-appropriate article I've read, the idea that some things are knowable. We haven't figured out everything by a long shot, but we've figured out some things, and the areas we're still working on are really pretty fascinating mysteries. I'd love it if one of my undergraduates some day figures one of them out.

Social networking media, cultural imperialism, and gender

Sociology grad student Sarah has an interesting post up at Facile Gestures that makes some important points about social networking media. One key point is about the coverage of the role that Facebook, Twitter, and other U.S.-generated media played in the Arab Spring and other social movements:

[T]there is a imperialist undertone to the notion that the uprisings could not have occurred without these social media platforms. By placing US-centric, English language platforms at the center of reportage on Middle Eastern unrest, we colonize the revolutions and claim them as victories of our own. Look at these tools of freedom we have created, we say, pointing towards our own techno-social accomplishments and feeling heroic that we provided such a space. This not only elides the fact that a significant proportion of political organizing outside the Western world happens outside of the services that we are most familiar with, but also diminishes our understanding of the relationship between online communication, political action, and information sharing outside the confines of those platforms we’ve deemed to be "important."

Exactly. While this is often done without malice, just offering us a way to understand foreign social movements in familiar terms, the result is to give us credit for something in which we played a very, very small role. (Given the larger role our country has played in supporting the targets of these revolutions, one can certainly understand our interest in feeling like we're on the side of the good guys.)

Sarah makes another interesting point with regards to gender:

We know that the feminist blogosphere runs a secondary parallel to the mainstream progressive blogosphere. Twitter — when not being used for celebrity gossip (an eminently female pursuit) — is the outlet for male dominated news outlets, mainstream or otherwise, to make their voices relevant. Facebook, though more personal and thus less likely to carry with it the gendering that comes with journalistic engagement, appears in the news as a gathering place for social movements gendered masculine by their leaders and tactics.

She contrasts these sites with LiveJournal, which is dominated by women. While LiveJournal is generally not listed among the sites facilitating political activity, it plays an important role in doing precisely that outside the United States.

I was thinking a lot about this topic during an impromptu "summit" of political scientist bloggers and their journalist counterparts at APSA last summer. It was hard not to notice that our group was overwhelmingly white, male, and young (defined as "≤ my current age"), and at least 50% Jewish. To be sure, this was hardly an unbiased sample of such bloggers, and we're drawn from a somewhat skewed population to begin with.

Nonetheless, women make up a substantial percentage of younger political scientists. Either a lot of these women are doing some political blogging in one form or another and we male bloggers just aren't aware of it, or they're declining to blog. I'm not sure if there's something particularly gendered about blogging in general. (I think a lot of us were computer nerds in high school, and that tends to draw a largely male population, as well, but that doesn't really answer the question.) I'm open to ideas on this.

(h/t John McMahon)

Are political scientists under-engaged?

Via Henry Farrell and Archon Fung, here's a notable quote from the late great Lee Sigelman:

If "speaking truth to power" and contributing directly to public dialogue about the merits and demerits of various courses of action were still numbered among the functions of the [political science] profession, one would not have known it from leafing through its leading journal.

I touched on this a bit in my article in the Forum last year. We actually have some evidence of of under-engagement by political scientists, provided by a 1969 survey of academics performed by Everett Ladd, Seymour Lipset, and Martin Trow. Here are responses among academics to the question of whether they have ever been active in a student group or club:

This, to me, suggests that the people who become political scientists are disproportionately inclined to join groups and get involved in politics. This shouldn't be terribly surprising -- political scientists took to their line of work because they actually care about politics. That they would have been involved politically in the past doesn't seem like a real stretch.

But note the next chart, for which academics were asked whether they are currently involved in consulting local businesses or governments, nonprofits, or national businesses or governments:

Suddenly political scientists don't look so special. Indeed, they seem to be underperforming relative to other social scientists, despite a disproportionate penchant for political participation. 

It's regrettable that political scientists are not sharing (or do not feel welcome sharing) their knowledge with the political world. It's also regrettable that we are ceding this role to other fields.

A library without books

The University of Denver's Penrose library is undergoing a dramatic change starting this summer. The library promises all sorts of wonderful new features -- lots of public space, more study areas for students, lecture and discussion rooms, a café with a patio, among other things. But how will they achieve this without expanding the building? By removing the books.

The library is betting on a vision of the future. It figures that print is dead or dying, that the vast majority of books just sit in the stacks for decades untouched, and that students and faculty are increasingly relying upon electronic texts. So they're switching to an almost completely digitized library. I'm honestly not sure of all the details here. If I want to get an obscure but brilliant text on California legislative parties in the mid-20th century, will I obtain a hardcopy from an off-site facility, or will they have scanned the text to make it available to me as an e-book?

Frankly, I can cope either way. I have fond memories of wandering library stacks and browsing books that just happened to be located near the book I was seeking. In the summer of 1990, I had a stack pass to the Library of Congress, which was a rare honor. I had a research job there reading letters from African-American soldiers to President Roosevelt written during World War II -- physically touching the yellowed letters was an important part of my development as a scholar. But I don't really research that way any more, and I find myself increasingly doing my reading on an iPad. The rise of on-line data collection has been a real boon to me, as well, as I'm old enough to remember actually walking to the FEC to photocopy campaign finance data, which was a true pain.

I recognize, however, that not everyone researches like I do. I've spoken with some folks in the humanities who aren't thrilled with the transformation of the library. Examining old maps or paintings or hand-written texts is not quite the same in electronic format, particularly when your work involves literally staring at something for hours looking for patterns or connections to other works.

I also find myself wondering whether students will actually utilize all this new public space. If we don't need physical books, do we need meeting rooms and quiet study spaces? Or are chat rooms enough? I don't really like being an e-hermit, but these students are at least 20 years younger than I am. How will they study in the years to come?

The university is gambling quite a bit -- $32 million, plus the school's reputation -- on one particular vision of the future. Maybe it's the right one. Or maybe we'll finally develop a national brand identity, only as the school with the bookless library.

But I was thirsty

Fellow political scientist Steve Greene gets an interesting evaluation from one of his students:

[I]nstructor has a reasonably informed grasp on the subject matter, albeit he often drinks the poli-sci koolaid and thinks polls and historical trends can explain almost all election outcomes and voting behavior.

Guilty.

On Bernstein's "Joyous Cynicism"

Andrew Sprung has a thoughtful and fascinating critique of Jonathan Bernstein's blog, a blog which, loyal readers will note, I cite frequently. Sprung seems to be using Bernstein as an example of a certain perspective that seems common to Americanist political scientists -- what Sprung calls "joyous cynicism." I can certainly understand what Sprung is arguing, and I have been accused of holding this worldview myself, so I'd like to take a moment to defend it, or at least explain it.

While bloggers like Bernstein and John Sides and I might have a great deal in common with bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and Sprung, we have vastly different motivations and training.  Political scientist bloggers, in my experience, are far more interested in explanation of political phenomena and far less interested in advocacy. (I had a minor argument on this subject last spring with a journalist who didn't understand my reticence to express my feelings about political parties.) For example, when Bernstein sought to explain Republican obstructionism on the New Start Treaty during the recent lame duck session, Sprung interpreted that as contrarianism, and questioned why we should accept crass political calculation by our elected officials:

Where Bernstein (judging from his blog's Comments section) does disturb many readers -- me included -- is in his suggestion that it is politicians' right, indeed their duty, to be guided entirely by such calculations. He argues, in effect, that the law of political survival is a necessary, natural, sufficient and therefore desirable prime mover of politicians' words and actions.

I don't want to speak for Jon here (I'm sure he'll have a good post along these lines up shortly), but my response to this is as follows: I don't celebrate this system. But to complain that politicians will be guided by political calculation is like complaining that businesspeople will be guided by profit maximization or that athletes are too obsessed with winning. It's not a character flaw; it's their line of work. Indeed, hoping for politicians who are untethered from political calculations is not only naïve, but sometimes quite dangerous.

I think you can learn much about Bernstein's viewpoint from his post on one of my favorite films, "Gangs of New York."  Note this bit on the film's portrayal of competing interests:

[I]ts idea of politics entirely lacks Mr. Smithism. Politics, in this movie, is serious business indeed -- and there's no way that Leo's Amersterdam is going to save the day by giving a dramatic speech. Nor is it the case that Bill is corrupt while Amsterdam is pure; Leo's character, I think, is one we can eventually feel okay about rooting for, but only eventually, when his blood feud broadens into something a little less personal and vindictive. At least, perhaps that's the case. And even then, he's certainly no Mr. Smith; he's no Progressive out for some abstract common good, but a partisan fighting for his group with whatever means he can find. Accepting democracy as a politics in which interests are legitimate is rare in the movies, and I think that's what Scorsese gives us here.

As individuals, we certainly have our preferences as to which policies should be enacted and which candidates and parties should be elected. But as political scientists, we are not interested in advancing one policy or party or candidate over another, and we do not believe that we can get to a better society by removing politics from the world. We accept that politics will exist wherever two or more people are trying to make a collective decision, and we view it as our job to explain how this works.

The Partisanship of Academics

Just how liberal are academics?  We actually don't have great recent data on that.  However, Everett Ladd, Seymour Lipset, and Martin Trow conducted a great survey of thousands of academics back in 1969 and broke the responses down by discipline.  The survey didn't include party identification, but they did ask people how they voted in the 1968 presidential election.  Here are the results:

So, all you haters who say that academics are a bunch of liberals? Well, um, you're right.  Or at least you were forty years ago.  In only two subfields -- agriculture and business/commerce -- did a plurality of academics prefer Nixon to Humphrey.  Political scientists look pretty darned liberal in this survey, although not so much as sociologists.

Political scientists engage in the struggle against the filibuster

My good friend and longtime conference roommate Greg Koger is one of the signers (along with Steve Smith, Barbara Sinclair, Sarah Binder, Eric Schickler, and others) of a letter trying to clear up some historic inaccuracies about the Senate's use of the filibuster.  Sens. Tom Udall (D-NM) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) are reportedly circulating this letter to encourage the Democratic majority to simply do away with the filibuster, saying that Republicans' promiscuous use of the filibuster demands a corrective.  You can read the letter below.

My understanding is that Democrats could readily do away with the filibuster either by simply ruling that a simple majority can change the Senate's rules or by using some kind of stealth point of order.  Either would work and are permissible under the Constitution.  The question is whether 51 senators are actually willing to do it.


filibusterletter -

Failing to overcome writer's block

Via Erik Voeten and Brad DeLong.

Evolution of a Headline

• Jonathan Bernstein's blog: "Next! (Why Romney and Palin May Be Overrated)"
• The New Republic blog: "Next! (Why Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney Are Overrated)"
• The New Republic website: "Bernstein: History Proves That Palin and Romney Won’t Get the GOP Nomination"

Funny how academics don't engage the world of journalism more.

Political science bloggers

While you're over at The Forum reading Hans Noel's piece, you might want to check out the article there by me and the one by John Sides and Henry Farrell.  I spend some time in my piece looking at evidence of political scientists' relative withdrawal from the political world, a trend of which I'm not a huge fan.  Both articles look at the utility of blogs (among other things) in reconnecting political science and practical politics.

Two must-reads

I wanted to call your attention to two recent pieces by friends of mine.  These articles are concise, accessible, and interesting, and I'll surely be assigning them to my students in the future.

The first is Hans Noel's recent Forum article "Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don't."  He touches on a number of the key findings that political scholars have more or less settled on that are nonetheless at odds with the conventional wisdom, from the importance of the economy in elections to the fiction of electoral mandates to the necessity of interest groups and parties to a functioning democracy.  He also does a very nice job explaining a pretty complex topic -- the difficulty of translating voters' preferences into a coherent policy agenda.  He concludes with a short section on things that the public just kind of knows but that political scientists haven't been able to prove one way or the other.

The second is a recent blog post by Jonathan Bernstein, entitled "Sterner Stuff." Here, Jon makes the case for political ambition as a good thing.  A sample:

The system needs -- is dependent on -- people who crave election and re-election so badly that they're willing to do whatever it takes. Madison recognized the downside of that in Federalist 51, but he also realized that all that energy could be an enormous positive as well, because it could be harnessed. Ambitious politicians are going to work hard to figure out what voters really want, and deliver it to them. They're going to want a healthy economy...because that will get them re-elected. They're going to take the nation to war reluctantly and only when positive outcomes seem very likely at low costs (or if avoiding war will be highly costly)...because it will get them re-elected.

He also suggests that one of the things that made George W. Bush a relatively unimpressive president was his lack of ambition.  (While I agree with this characterization of Bush's personality, I think it was augmented somewhat by the fact that Bush's vice president had no aspirations for the presidency, creating even less incentive to do the stuff that voters care about.)

There. You have your orders.

Now who's being naive, Kay?

In response to Ezra Klein's Sunday column, John Sides and I had some nice things to say about the idea of political science freeing up politicians to work on public policy rather than be obsessed with ephemera that don't affect elections.  Jonathan Bernstein objects, however:

I can’t imagine much would be lost if Senators felt free to choose their primary residence without worrying about whether they’d be accused of “going Washington,” or if Barack Obama could pick his vacation spot without worrying about its effect on public opinion polls. The problem is that I’m not sure you can separate this particular baby from this particular bathwater. A Member of the House who realizes that she can skip a few fundraisers because incumbent spending in elections is subject to severe diminishing returns might also realize that she can skip a bunch of committee meetings, because no one in the district really cares (especially since the local paper long since has closed its Washington bureau). A Senator who realizes that it doesn’t matter much whether or not he gets time on the evening news back home might also realize that he can in most cases ignore the preferences of his district on issues of public policy. A president who understands that his ability to move public opinion is extremely limited might just not bother holding press conferences or otherwise giving any access to the press.

Jon's whole post is quite good.  And there are certainly some reasons that we really wouldn't want politicians to take political science to heart.  (For example, what if the minority party read some poli sci and realized that the ticket to them becoming the majority is a faltering economy, so they used all their powers, notably the filibuster, to thwart the majority's efforts to stimulate the economy.  Whew, good thing that doesn't happen in real life!)

But I take issue with Jon's contention that we can't separate the good kind of ephemera from the bad.  To go off one of his examples, I really doubt that most members of Congress attend committee meetings because they're concerned that voters are watching the hearings on C-SPAN and taking roll.  They attend because they know it's part of the job, because they're socialized into it, because they'll catch grief from their colleagues if they don't attend, because their party might get rolled on an important vote if they don't show up, and because their colleagues might not be there for them the next time around if they aren't there for their colleagues.  I also doubt that exposing politicians to political science would cause them to shirk their districts.  After all, there are a number of solid studies (like this one) showing that members of Congress who don't vote their districts have a harder time getting reelected, even if no one individual roll call vote particularly matters.  Members would still know this, and if they didn't, they'd eventually be replaced by people who did.

I recognize we're in the realm of political science fantasy here, but I believe that elected officials would still have plenty of motivation to actually represent their constituents and do their jobs even if they didn't go on audience-less Sunday talk shows or poll-test their vacation destinations.  I'm not sure how we get to that point, but I think Ezra's column is a start.