Q. Are we not researchers? A. We are professors

I've been thinking about 80s music a lot lately.

 What follows is a digressive and only partly thought-through exploration of a tough topic. I'm posting it as an excuse to work through some of my own thinking about the responsibility of academia to the public, the scholar to the student, and the discipline to all other parties. I hereby reserve the right to admit that I'm completely wrong about everything.

Why should the public pay taxes to support our research?

This used to be an academic question, but officeholders like Tom Coburn and Jeffrey Flake have put the question squarely before political scientists. Other disciplines have faced this moment before, as physics did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and still more will face it in the future. My reasoning is plenty motivated, so I think that the case for funding basic academic research is pretty good. Like a lot of social scientists, I'm frustrated by the often self-inflicted lack of solidarity among academics ("Which social science should die?") and the professoriate's inability to sustain a campaign to make our arguments. Even the political science blogosphere's concerted arguments in favor of NSF arguments probably did less to move the needle than one foolish New York Times op-ed.

The outlook for funding for the social sciences and academia more generally is a lot dimmer for my generation than it was for the two or three generations of academics before us. At worst, they had to look forward to long periods of stagnation (unless you were a Sovietologist); at best, you could go from nothing--literal non-existence--to a seat at the grown-up table in the time it takes some disciplines' doctoral students to finish a dissertation. As the funding pool dries up, there's bound to be a lot more friction and fighting among academics than there was when the only question was how to divide up the increasing pie.

The situation won't get better on its own. I'm unconvinced by the idea that state governments' spending will naturally pick back up as the economy does, since it relies both on the idea that the economy will pick up--green shoots!--and also that politicians will refrain from directing that savings from their structural adjustments toward other priorities. And even if it does, higher education is under increasing pressure to justify its business model in every dimension:

• Why should college be a physical location, and not an MMORPG-cum-TEDtalk?
• Why should professors be hired and promoted based on their research skills--most without ever having had any practical or theoretical training in pedagogy--when the public's understanding of funding universities rests on their teaching productivity?
• Why should there be an expectation that tuition should rise faster than inflation?
• Why should an English degree take as long to complete and cost the student as much as a physics or an engineering degree?

All of these are different ways of asking the "why-pay-for-my-research" question. But historically we've only had to answer one or two of them at a time. And now we have to respond to all of them in a way that recognizes that answers to questions that were serviceable ten years ago--in 2002!--may now be unpersuasive or unrealistic.

At root, we largely rely on one of two arguments to answer all of these questions. The first is that the knowledge produce is a public good, and that institutions are organized to support our knowledge production for the maximal good of society (or, at least, that reform would cost more than it would gain--that we are in a stable local maximum). The second is that our research leads to better learning outcomes for our students. Winning the future, then, requires academics to have maximum time for research, even if there are short-term tradeoffs for the students.

I think the first answer is better, since it does at least appeal to the innate beauty of knowledge, but it tends to obscure the third reason that we voice silently--that learning, like art, is a luxury good. We can't say that aloud, since it carries with it the implication that  opposition to learning is opposition to civilization itself, and that the superior culture is the more refined culture. That is a line of argument that has never played well with the citizenry, and these days would not play well with the mythical one percent.

The second answer--better research, better students, better jobs--is, to put it bluntly, not overly persuasive. It is, in fact, close to being faith-based. We expect better evidence and stronger argumentation from our students when they turn in term papers than when we produce public justifications of our budgets. Why should we ask students who want to be lawyers to sit through four years of an undergrad degree and then three years of law school when the British and others manage to produce serviceable advocates after three years of law-focused undergraduate studies? And much of the other justifications for our teaching--our students learn critical thinking! statistics! data visualization! discipline!--only beg the question of why students should learn those skills by majoring in our subject instead of majoring in something more practical in which those skills are foregrounded.

There are answers, of course. One part is that it's that the ivory-tower academics are not the ones who are out of touch with the real world. Rather, frequently it's our critics who deride us for not taking "real-world" problems seriously enough who have no idea what the real world is actually like. This sounds counterintuitive, but sober reflection or residence in Washington (or Jefferson City, or Albany, or wherever legislators gather) will quickly remind you that politicians and activists who make these claims frequently have no idea about what either academics or businesspeople or bureaucrats actually do. The "soft skills" matter, and those are hard to impart at a distance or by paying professors less than a living wage. As Tim Burke, the charge of know-nothingism applies with especial force to fact-free discussions about information technology and teaching.

A second part would be to forcefully stress how social science matters by discussing our research. This is easy in the abstract but harder concretely. Yes, individual scholars and individual projects make tangible contributions, but how many of us are willing to say there are scholarly consensuses about issues in social science as there are in comparably observational sciences like geology? Where we are most consensual, we are least interesting; where we are most interesting, we are least consensual--and often (as with the democracy-promotion agenda of the Bush administration, or the debate over whether there is a resource curse) most dangerous. So we're left with the unsatisfying choices of either "teaching the debate" or picking sides among competing findings where there is real and lasting disagreement. (One way of squaring the circle is to find and promote popularizers of our research--popularizers in the real Carl Sagan or even Stephen Jay Gould tradition--and let them handle the rhetorical aspects.)

But the third part is to recognize that we should probably systematically invest in and require better teaching and measurements of teaching effectiveness. We measure research productivity decently well--by no means as well as we should, or as we as we ought to given the importance of the measurement and the time we've spent on it--but we rely on ... student surveys to monitor teaching effectiveness. We lack a well-defined progression of introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses comparable to what other disciplines have. (What should students learn in Introduction to Comparative Government? We don't have an answer to this question that we could explain to a congressman in the same way that economists could say what Intro Micro is about.)

Achieving comparability, however, would require some conscious moves toward standardization. Such measures would reduce the autonomy of the individual instructor. And it would also prompt us to begin to assess what the discipline is and what it should become. In one sense, that means picking winners and losers, at least at the level of undergraduate instruction. And that likely would require the formalization of much political-science instruction (graduating students who don't know the median-voter theorem or the differences in free-trade voting preferences of workers and capitalists should be acutely embarrassing). It might even mean dropping one subfield--or, better, prompting that subfield to more clearly engage with the questions and methods the rest of the field has adopted (something that would benefit both sides of the debate). The relationship between international studies and political science would be redefined, perhaps drastically.

At the end of such a process, though, the relationship between our instruction and our research would be much clearer. The risk of intellectual monoculture would be blunted by the fact that different institutions would naturally choose to focus on different parts of the field. And our students would likely have a clearer idea both of what to expect in graduate school (an IR Ph.D. is not Foreign Affairs with more footnotes) and also of what the key insights of political science really are.

An Awe

Among the traits characteristic of the historical line of research begun during the 1930s by the Annales school, reference to statistical objectifications has been significant. From this point of view quantitative history has inherited, via Simiand, Halbwachs, and Labrousse, elements of the Durkheimian school and, even closer to the source, of the mode of thinking centered on averages engendered by Quetelet, who opposed macrosocial regularities to the random, unpredictable, and always different accidents of particular events. It sought, by this technique, to overcome individual or factual contingencies in order to construct more general things, characterizing social groups or the long run, depending on the case. This attempt to give form to the chaos of countless singular observations involves having recourse to previous sources or to specific encodings, of which historians ask two questions: Are they available? Are they reliable? In this perspective, the question of the reality and consistency of objects is assimilated to the question of the reliability of their measurements. The cognitive tools of generalization are presumed to have been acquired and firmly constituted. All that matters is the controlled collection and the technical treatment--eventually automated--of the data.

--The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, Alain Desrosieres, trans. Camille Naish, Harvard UP, 1998, p. 323.

Everyone hates adultery

John Sides and Matt Yglesias delve into the General Social Survey to see why people's attitudes toward adultery have changed.

Hester Prynne by Flickr user Billhd

The GSS is great; it may be my favorite dataset of all time. And I remember the first time I sat down and started playing with it I immediately gravitated to the variables about social behavior--extramarital sex, premarital sex, pornography, gay sex, and so on. Political scientists hardly ever get to play with these sorts of variables, and guys who do International Relations absolutely never have time to wonder what causes adultery. And Sides, like Douthat and Yglesias, is right to be shocked at the levels of support for extramarital sex--it is striking the first time you plop these into Stata to see that your parents' or grandparents' generation enjoyed a bit on the side.

Sides observes that more-educated Americans have gotten less accepting of adultery, and speculates that the availability of divorce has something to do with it. Yglesias notes that an alternative theory is that female empowerment has made women less reliant on breadwinners, and so the "marriage market" may have allowed them to find more suitable mates and enforce better behavior by holding out an exit option.

I think these are both plausible theories worth investigating. But I want to add some data and some thoughts to this debate. What follows uses only descriptive statistics (for now), so no interpretation is needed, just some careful thought. But I want to drive down one main point: Adultery used to be at least somewhat popular, but everyone hates adultery more than they used to, and this shift has affected practically all subgroups over the past forty years.

First, let's take a look at some additional data. The two charts below show shifts in opposition to adultery by sex and by race over the period 1972 to 2010.

First, a couple of notes. I follow Sides in defining opposition to adultery (and, yes,  I am using the shorter and judgmental term) by using the GSS question XMARSEX. (By the way, this is how we refer to GSS variables at my department--"XMARSEX," "PORNLAW", "HOMOSEX", etc. Way cooler than standard variable names like "V16".) In this case, I am conservative: Opposition to adultery includes only those who say adultery is always wrong.

Second, we should be aware that the GSS responses constrain our ability to answer these questions. What we want to know is under which circumstances people believe adultery is acceptable, but we merely know if they think it is "almost always" or "sometimes" wrong, or "not wrong at all." It is possible that the categories we're measuring have changed--that the person who thought in 1975 that extramarital sex was almost always wrong would believe that given today's divorce laws that it is now simply wrong to engage in affairs. There are strategies to cope with challenges such as these, but I'm not going to get into them now.

Third, we should always be aware that America has changed a lot in the past 40 years. In 1972, only 11 percent of respondents had a college degree; in 2010, 29 percent of respondents did. Similarly, in 1972, about 84 percent of respondents were white; in 2010, only about 76 percent of respondents were. (That's one reason why I just use "White" and "Black" as categories in the race chart--there aren't enough observations to support finer-grained categories across such a long time period.)

Getting back to the charts with these caveats in mind, though, we can see that the same picture that John held out is broadly true: even groups (like men) that used to be favorable to adultery are no longer supporters. The same pattern can be seen by looking at religious affiliation, which I present in two ways. The first looks at Protestant versus Catholic attitudes and the second at all respondents who view themselves as religious versus those who have no religious preference (e.g., atheists and agnostics). (Again, data limitations prevent me from displaying anything more fine-grained.)

Here we begin to see an interesting pattern. The shift in societal mores has affected even atheists and agnostics, contrary to what we might expect if we get all of our news from Glenn Beck. Secondly, although nonreligious respondents are more tolerant of deviations from marital fidelity, the gap is narrowing quickly; nonreligious respondents are now almost as willing to condemn adultery as Catholic respondents were in 1972.

Just for fun, I also looked at a partisan breakdown.

Although there is a widening split between the parties on this issue (and others), nevertheless Democrats and Republicans alike have grown less tolerant of adultery, at least at a mass level.

Given the relationship of adultery to marriage (long recognized by playwrights among others), we might want to investigate whether those who are married have different ideas than the population as a whole. A plot of opposition to adultery by marital status reveals a surprising pattern. In this case, we see that although married respondents have always been intolerant of adultery, divorced/separated respondents and never-married respondents have quickly caught up.

Note that fewer than half of single respondents in 1972 thought extramarital sex was "always wrong," which explains Mad Men. Very interestingly, in the early 1970s divorced respondents were fairly accepting of extramarital sex, but over the past few years their attitudes have converged on those of married respondents a generation ago. (One wonders if there isn't a natural ceiling to how strongly divorced respondents will condemn adultery, since some of them, at least, are presumably divorced because of an affair.)

Finally, I looked at whether levels of workforce participation by women have tracked with changes in perceptions on adultery. The first chart takes women who are working either full or part-time and compares their attitudes with women who are not (e.g., laid off, never working, retired, and so forth).

Here, we can see that there is support for a modified version of the Yglesias hypothesis. If the effect of women getting jobs is to make them more likely to demand marriage equality and fidelity, than that effect is recent. In the 1970s and 1980s, women who worked approved of adultery at nearly the same rate as men.

 However, there does seem to be some support for the idea that male attitudes have changed. The chart immediately above compares the attitudes of men whose wives work full- or part-time with those of men who are unmarried or whose wives do not work. Whereas there was practically no difference between those two groups throughout the 1970s or even the George H.W. Bush administration, a wide gap opened up during the Clinton-Bush administrations. (It remains to be seen whether the steep decline in 2010 is a blip.) This is consistent with Yglesias' (girlfriend's) hypothesis: male attitudes have shifted faster and more consistently than women's.

Finally, I want to point out that the GSS is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This is what federal support of social science underwrites. It's critical to have these data in uninterrupted time-series, and it's essential that guys like Tom Coburn not be allowed to take away funding for such projects.

Fun with Local Politics

I yield the floor to my distinguished colleague, the Hon. J.L.:

The question, from a backbencher: "Following local politics --- worthwhile or not?"

The answer: Worthwhile.

Strange as it may sound, I've become a lot less interested in politics as I've become a political scientist. Since moving to Washington for grad school, I stopped following politics back home, and never took an interest in local politics in D.C. I also haven't voted, being unregistered in D.C. and probably not a qualified elector back in Florida.

So it's been fun to pay attention to local politics again. I've spent the past week in Jacksonville, FL visiting friends and family. In the city's municipal elections on Tuesday, Jacksonville residents elected their first black mayor in a stunning upset. At the same time, District 1 voters reelected a controversial young city commissioner with a promising career in Republican politics ahead of him who, depending on your perspective, is either a theocratic zealot or a faithful Christian serving courageously in public office.

In the mayoral race, local businessman Alvin Brown defeated Mike Hogan, Duval County's Clerk of the Courts, for the seat being vacated by term-limited Mayor John Peyton. This race was never supposed to be close. High profile Republican figures were being assured of Hogan's victory. Hogan, a Republican, took a beating in the media and in the polls for dodging a debate. Apparently everyone in Hogan's camp thought it was a sure thing. Instead, this one-third black Southern city with a particularly nasty history of race relations celebrated the election of its first ever black mayor.

In political science, we are fond of aggregate--level voting models suggesting that partisanship and economic conditions are all that matter, and that campaigns and candidates make no difference. But in local elections -- even a runoff like this one with 37% turnout -- little things can make a big difference.

Skipping a debate is a risky decision. While you don't want to legitimize a trivial candidate by debating him, you risk seeming presumptuous if you decline to debate a serious candidate. The story in Jacksonville seems to be that Hogan made some mistakes and Brown, a Democrat, capitalized on all of them, all the while courting and winning support from key Republicans. In the end, Hogan's arrogant, tea party-themed campaign may have lulled his rapidly dwindling base of angry white suburbanites into thinking their votes were not needed, all the while alienating the more moderate factions of his coalition. But let this be a lesson: as lame as debates may be, don't skip them. The campaign turned on local issues, of course, but Republican candidates would be wise to learn from Hogan, who hitched his wagon to the tea party movement, all the while risking enduring some serious retaliation from voters disgusted with the GOP legislature and the wildly unpopular conservative policies of Hogan's co-partisan, Gov. Rick Scott.

In the other race I mentioned above, Councilman Clay Yarborough cruised to reelection, buying enough time to wait for a seat in the Florida Legislature to open up. Presumably, he won't campaign for higher office on his best-known position -- opposition to gays and Muslims holding public office -- but he seems to be enough of a true believer that I wouldn't put it past him.

Yarborough became embroiled in a controversy last year over his questioning of the (Republican) mayor's nominees to the city's Human Rights Commission. Parvez Ahmed, a professor at the University of North Florida, reluctantly responded to Yarborough's questions about gay marriage and the role of religion in public life and ultimately received Yarborough's approval in committee. Another nominee, a law professor, declined to answer Yarbrough's questions and was summarily blocked.

The next week, a journalist posed a similar line of questions to Yarborough. Asked if homosexuals should be allowed to hold public office in Florida, Yarbrough said he "would prefer they did not." As for Muslims, he admitted he "doesn't know." While this response is alarming from a legal/constitutional perspective, the lack of certainty is refreshing to hear from someone who otherwise seems so absolutely convinced of the rightness of his positions. In the end, Yarborough voted against Ahmed when his nomination came before the full city council. In fairness, it was another council member who turned the final vote on Professor Ahmed's nomination into an embarrassing spectacle.

Yarborough ultimately voted against putting Ahmed on the Commission, implying that Ahmed was connected to terrorist groups. (Professor Ahmed's nomination was eventually approved 13-6). It's kind of a shame that Yarborough is best known for his bizarre, discriminatory views on this one issue, an obscure, low-level nomination. In 2007, a local alternative newsweekly ran a fairly favorable profile, portraying Yarborough as an independent-minded and hardworking young politician. Fundamentalist quirks aside, Yarborough is in every way an unusually responsive and engaged public servant. He has shaken up the old-boy network and worked tirelessly for his constituents. After learning more about him, I'm torn between wondering if he should be stopped or encouraged.

In national politics, it's often hard to see how one official, one candidate, one campaign, one volunteer, or one voter can make a difference. But locally, things really are different. Every day, city councils, county commissions, and school boards spend our money and make importnat decisions that impact our lives. I commend those who are serving the public interest in these mostly unglamorous offices. This week in Jacksonville -- 700 miles outside the Beltway -- I've been reminded anew of both the promise and perils of politics.

Will Ph.D.s save humanity?

The question, from a backbencher: "If humanity survives the Mayan apocalypse in 2012, it will nevertheless have to deal with economic instability, nuclear proliferation, environmental degradation, and myriad other problems. I would like to read into the record two paragraphs from a letter to the editor of Nature (not available ungated) by a U.C.-Santa Barbara professor:

I disagree that we have a glut of scientists with PhDs (www.nature.com/phdfuture). The corporate view of PhD numbers in terms of what the market will bear ignores the major problems that only science can solve in the coming century.
The list is long: natural disasters, such as earthquakes and incoming celestial objects; environmental degradation; sustainable energy; famine and violence; untreatable medical conditions; and threats such as antibiotic resistance. If science abdicates, there is nothing else.

Will holders of the Ph.D. degree save humanity?"

The answer: No.

I would like, first, to quote further from Professor Kosik's letter:

The size of the military is dictated by our defence needs, not the market. In science, by analogy, our global defence needs are soaring.
Spending a few years in the service of science and the greater good, being rewarded with an advanced degree and, for example, going on to teach in high schools is an honourable fix.

I am always glad to read statements such as these, because it gives me an opportunity to quote Richard Feynman: "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." And, in this case, to remind professors that statements like these, uttered by tenured professors to graduate students, will someday be enshrined next to Marie Antoinette's milkmaid costume.

Kosik has succumbed to the technocratic fallacy (henceforward the TF). The TF is a variant of functionalism and holds that all social problems are analogous to engineering problems. The deficit, for instance, is not the consequence of differing views over the proper scope of federal spending and of federal taxation, considered separately (as they indeed are in our system); rather, it is the result of those damn fools in Washington being unable to work harder and come up with a solution. Similarly, wars, terrorism, crime, and the paradoxical consequences of welfare provision (e.g., the sort of thing covered in the Moynihan Report and other first-generation neocon commentary on the Great Society) are technical problems to which technical remedies exist and may be applied frictionlessly.

It should be immediately obvious that this is an attractive viewpoint to a great many people. And that is a group that includes not merely scientists and engineers, whose vanity it naturally flatters because of its naive faith in "reason" to overcome problems. It also includes a great many politicians and senior civil servants, both in competitive political systems such as the United States and less-competitive ones such as the People's Republic of China. Politicians are attracted to these policies because it offers them a nicely nonpolitical justification for their continuance in office, while similarly allowing them to disparage all those who disagree with them as (to use the Stalinist term) "wreckers."

Yet Kosik's letter, which is as pure an expression of the TF as we are apt to find, shows the real problems with the TF, both as an approach to politics and as a guide to real-world practice. As an approach to politics, the TF fails because it misunderstands the nature of political disagreements. Even political fights over purely technical issues (such as, say, CAFE standards) are always driven by interest or identity, neither of which are amenable to technical fixes and which are often compounded by institutional "pathologies" (which are often just institutional design tradeoffs). As a guide to real-world practice, the TF consequently is always running into the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, which requires the TF's adherents to eventually propose dismissing "political" solutions (which are the product of "irrational" conflict) in favor of ever-deeper technocratic fixes.

That Kosik presumes that "only science can solve" environmental degradation, famine and violence, and Deep Impact-style asteroid threats is to claim, simultaneously, that politics cannot solve these problems. Yet political science has much to say about all of these problems, and even leaving beside classic formulations such as the collective-action problem (and later critics), we should be able to recognize that these are basically political problems, not scientific ones. Famine is not caused by a lack of food; violence is not caused by a lack of periodic tables; and environmental degradation will eventually require a political, not a scientific, solution. Indeed, any scientific "solution" to environmental degradation will almost inevitably cause bigger headaches, since it strains belief that there is a sort of carbon-dioxide penicillin that would heal everything without any side effects.

In the end, the TF can lead to bizarre conclusions, like hedge fund managers' beliefs that the system of private property rights currently in vogue would survive the sort of economic catastrophe that would lead to $25-a-loaf bread. We've learned over the past few years that hedge fund folks are apt to really, really believe in their models' assumptions, but this seems to bespeak a sort of obsessive faith in the God of Equations and a willful ignorance of the God of Experience. Of course, that is why we call it the technocratic fallacy.

Is compromise good?

The question, from a backbencher: "Is compromise desirable for its own sake?"

The answer: Of course not. A compromise is only preferable given the range of other plausible outcomes.

You may object that this question is a little bit one-sided, and indeed it does come from the Government's bench (so to speak). But on the other hand I have never understood why liberals love compromise so much. This has never been a problem with conservatives, who long ago embraced A Choice, Not An Echo as a pithy summary of why their party would never succumb to what was equally pithily referred to as "me-tooism."

(There is a strange affinity among both the American right and the global left for catchy slogans that convey entire programs in a few syllables. Granted, the American right has nothing as good as "peace, land, bread." But given time ... )

That the Republican Party has increasingly become firmer in its consistent advocacy of a set of policy positions is something of a triumph for what is known as "Responsible Party Government," an argument that political scientists first put forward decades ago. It was, essentially, a repudiation of the simple-minded high-school civics class bromides that politics is about "solving problems" or "coming together" or being bipartisan for the sake of bipartisanship. Given that very serious people used to mouth such bromides (remember the "vital center"?), the assertion that parties ought to stand for different things, and that voters should hold incumbent parties responsible for their conduct in office and then replace them with people who held different views, was viewed as something radical.

And it remains so today, at least for adherents of the Democratic Party. Managerial liberalism is out of fashion everywhere but in the White House, whose incumbent is resolutely committed to negotiating with everyone--with Republicans, with foreign governments, and with himself. In many cases, this is not a bad thing. In many other cases, his unforced willingness to give up policy positions as a show of "good faith" is merely weakness. (And I say "unforced" because the typical reaction is to say that structural factors somehow required the president to make every choice that he has made. That, however, seems doubtful, given his pre-election rhetoric and given his enthusiasm for obvious dry holes like the Baucus deliberations.)

On the other hand, the consistency of the Republican Party has made manifest two problems with the RPG doctrine. The first is that responsible party government requires responsible and unified government, to keep accountability clear. Yet the Republicans' dogged success at advancing their positions in the House--not even the full Congress!--means that the beautiful theory has been assaulted by a gang of vicious facts. One would have to be a real enthusiast for sausage-making to know what the Republicans are responsible for--which is to say, a graduate student in political science. Obviously, this is less a failing of the Republicans and more of American constitutional theory, which was designed less to instantiate the will of the voters (as RPG assumes) and more to consistently thwart it.

The second problem is that, as Duverger's Law assures us, America will always only have two parties. Let's think of a world in which there are two parties, A and Z, and that voters mostly prefer A's policies to Z's. Yet if A's incumbents somehow screw up badly in the implementation of their policy positions--under, say, president Ajimmy Acarter, or even Agerald Aford--then RPG says that voters should vote in the Z party next time (under president Zwarren Zharding, or perhaps equally president Zwoodrow Zwilson). This obviously is not optimal, since now voters are choosing a party that may be skilled at implementing policies that are the precise opposite of what voters would prefer. Yet that is what the RPG model dictates; there is no way to vote for, say, party A1 over A2, because you can only choose between A and B.

In such a world, of course, compromise with party Z may become desirable for party A, so that they can implement their policies more skillfully. Yet party Z will have no incentives to cooperate, and every incentive to screw up compromises--to be the Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown at every incentive. If party A's partisans understood that, the dynamic would shift. But hope seems to triumph over experience every time.

What is the best IPE sitcom IPE scholars have never heard of?

The question, from a backbencher: "Everyone knows that Yes, Minister is a work of genius. But are there other BBC sitcoms that political scientists should know and quote?"

The answer: Yes: Hyperdrive.

How to describe it? The closest I can come is that the show is a parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation crossed with the Crimson Permanent Assurance section of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Perhaps even better would be to say that it is Doctor Who meets Firefly.

The essentials are that the crew of the HMS Camden Lock, a starship that bears a passing resemblance to the BT Tower, are on a mission to "to protect British interests in a changing galaxy." Rarely, this involves military action. Almost always, it includes trying to attract foreign direct investment to Britain or opening interstellar markets to British trade (a task made harder by the fact that Britain is not very good at exporting).

The delight for IR scholars, of course, is that we know that this is more or less how international relations works these days. Even though security folks still think IPE is sooooo boring, it's not exactly as if security work over the past twenty years was as exciting as it was in the preceding three thousand years. Yes, I know that many good scholars are keenly interested in learning more about low-intensity conflicts. But there is an obvious qualitative difference between studying how best to manage COIN and trying to manage a thermonuclear war.

The day-to-day nature of power in the international realm instead seems to be a little more mundane. What are your exchange rates? How credible is your government's commitment to paying off loans? (Not that it matters anyhow; Greece has been moving toward a sovereign debt crisis, enduring a sovereign debt crisis, or recovering from a sovereign debt crisis since 1827.) What are your labor regulations? And so forth. In such a world, the idea that Britain has to maintain aircraft carriers and other accoutrements of power projection is, frankly, ridiculous.

For some reason, it is only slightly less ridiculous when the French do that. But that may just be better advertising.

So Hyperdrive captures the precise absurdity of swagger in a world of intergalactic trade. Pragmatically, force is never the solution, even when the Camden Lock employs it. But as a matter of policy, national pride requires that the United Kingdom maintain a vast and expensive spacefaring Royal Navy. ("Britain is still a great power, isn't it?" one character asks the captain.)

And this is exactly the kind of dynamic that IPE scholars occasionally miss when they move from their quotidian models to asking broader questions. The same assumptions don't hold for models that seek to explain 50,000-feet phenomena as those that work for explaining more micro-level processes. At some point, other factors do start to confound simple models.

This isn't to say that such processes can't be explained. I rather think they can. But theory should include a sense that, just as gravity and the strong nuclear force (say) have different effects at different scales, so too do different kinds of political effects operate differently at different scales of analysis.

I'd also like to point out something that needs to be discussed more often. For all our discussions of the Liz Lemon problem*, I'm not sure that we've really thought about what it would be like if people who were ... not ugly, but just physically unattractive were cast in sitcoms. The BBC has always been much better about casting people who look like, well, people. It's realistic that The Office's Dawn is pretty enough to be crush-worthy but also not snagged by a real alpha male; similarly, Life on Mars' Liz White falls into the category of real-person cute, not celebrity cute. (Alison Brie on Community allegedly falls into the same range as Liz White did.) Hyperdrive takes that attitude to extremes.


* I've seen only eight minutes of Glee, ever, but as someone who shops in grocery stores I have of course seen many photos of Lea Michele. If the show presumes that she is unattractive, the show is an ass.

What does natural selection mean for slavery?

The question, from the Honorable Mr. Coates:

It occurred to me last night that Darwin's Origin of Species was written just two years before the Civil War. In think this might mean something--not in the broad causal sense, but in the correlative sense. I don't have much background in intellectual history. But this is a question I hope to explore. What does natural selection mean for a bonded society?

The answer: It is a justification for slavery.

All good liberals hope that all good things go together. The local apogee of this thinking came in the 1990s, in which we hoped that increasing trade relations with China would give us cheaper tube socks and comfortable jobs in knowledge industries while letting the Chinese transform themselves from wretched peasants living in a tyrannical society into cheerful proletarians living in a happy democracy.

Well, we did get cheaper tube socks.

In the same way, liberals (and I'm using the term here in the broadest sense, to include everyone from John Stuart Mill to out-and-out social democrats) like to believe that more knowledge is better--that truth will somehow set us free. The history of social science should make us doubt that lesson. The recommended reading is Wikipedia's "Scientific Racism" article, which details how social science in a great many instances was used to justify existing power relations.

Before you say that social science has gotten "better" in that regard, think of exactly the kinds of things that critical theorists would mention, such as how psychometric theory is used by large organizations to make large organizations run better (e.g., ASVAB, the SAT) and the political consequences of that and how most research money comes from either the government generally or the military specifically. Yes, social science is "better," but I think that we should reflect on the fact that a good deal of what makes it better is likely to have come not from social science but from societal progress in general.

Returning to the main point: The argument is not that this was bad social science. In a lot of instances, it was the cutting-edge stuff that helped reify racial categorizations. (Think of IQ tests.) And it's hard for nonspecialists to determine the difference, anyway; if it were easy, then many fewer people would get tenure.

Natural selection obviously played a large role in all of this. The eugenics movement, the notion of the Victorian hierarchy of the races, and the general preoccupation with improving the "stock" of the "races" had real roots in (bad) readings of Darwin. This is different from the "Social Dariwnism" aspect of bad readings of Origins of the Species, by the way; this is simply reading in "natural facts" as social science. For the modern version, see the debate over The Bell Curve.

So when I say that natural selection is a justification for slavery, I mean really to say that we should not presume that there is an immediate and objectively understandable implication of the theory for social justice. Just the opposite. Such findings have no immediate implications for how we organize society. Regardless, we will read into them what we want to read, and the more powerful among us will see in these findings justifications for what they want to justify.

[Updated]: TNC has updated his original question, so I will update my answer. In a way, this is just a return to themes I have explored elsewhere, at greater length.

Ideas and innovations don't directly map onto the ways in which we view the social world. Ideas make politics, but not as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

This is why I oppose technological determinism. Politics and power always matter. We used to think that the Internet would help liberate the oppressed--remember the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" and all the other techno-utopias of the 1990s?--but it turns out that the effect of the Internet is at best greatly curtailed by the type of government that you had when the Internet arrived. Chinese democracy is no nearer, and very possibly less near, now than in 1991. The causal weight of the reorganization of social networks is conditioned by the ability of the sovereign to coerce those networks into a form amenable to Leviathan.

In the same way, how are we to understand "the telegraph" shorn of its rootedness in actually existing societies? It clearly helped facilitate commerce and "progress" in a great many ways. On the other hand, it also helped facilitate imperial control of distant lands in greater detail. And, in the same way, we tend to think that radio was as much a boon to dictatorial governments as it was to democracy--which is to say, it was just a tool. (It is easy to imagine democracy without the radio, since it existed. But it is actually hard to imagine what a pre-20th century fascist state would have looked like. There's a reason we think it's significant that futurism fed fascism.)

Looking for moral progress is tough. It does exist! But it's telling that we can find just as much of it in Lincoln, who was after all a corporate lawyer, as in Gandhi, who thought that trains, telegraphs, and lawyers had ruined civilization.

Should political scientists learn political theory?

The question, from a backbencher: "Should political scientists learn political theory?"

The answer: I retract my previous equivocations on the subject and affirm that they should, unreservedly.

Like Evelyn Waugh's Mr. Salter, though, I will caveat my policy by saying that political scientists need to know political theory up to a point.

There is no contradiction between these two statements, even though superficially they are plainly opposed. Rather, what I mean to suggest is that the role of political theory in the training of empirical political scientists needs to become something more like the role of methodologists in the training of the same. Just as we expect researchers to know enough about methods to be competent in their field, so too should we demand that they have reflected sufficiently about the normative implications of their work and of the real-world debates into which their work may enter.

This is an unabashedly utilitarian view of theory. Many theorists might object that this, then, devalues their work. After all, shouldn't it stand on its own? Isn't political theory a field in its own right, with its own claims, and with its own research? The answer to all of these questions is very much yes, but that is beside the point. I am not adjudicating what the role of political theory in the discipline should be, nor attempting to regulate its external affairs. After all, the same questions could be posed of methods research, and I would respond in the same way in that case. The distinction I am drawing is not one that demeans theory (or methods) but which merely underscores what is obviously true: that political science research is conducted by people who have scarce time and limited interest in debating the good, the just, and the true. If they had greater interest in discussing those topics, then they would be political theorists themselves.

Yet my analogy is exact. In the same way as we believe that methods training is an essential part of bringing up scholars to adhere to community standards and to producing reliable research, we should similarly believe that engagement with theory has the virtue of warning off scholars from making claims about their work, or assumptions within their models, that are either laughably wrong or dangerously naive. This is, consequently, a strong affirmation of the value of theory training, albeit one that is studiously agnostic about which of the different camps of theory should be employed. I leave that to the theorists, such as Mr. Williams.

With one exception. Such courses cannot linger too long on the ancients. I once described my university's required theory course as covering the sweep of theory from Plato to Aristotle. That was an exaggeration, as others promptly reminded me: The course also covered Augustine. Actually, teach Plato and Aristotle, and teach Augustine and Machiavalli too; teach Hobbes and Locke, but teach them better than they are normally treated; but mostly, treat people whose principal concerns were those relevant to the work of contemporary political science. Thinkers who deal with the nature of the state in its modern form (and the polis is not, in the end, a modern state), who deal with the questions of justice both within and among political communities, who deal with the questions of nationalism, and who deal with the nature of questions of personhood (of identity, of gender, and of race) are vastly more relevant to empirical social scientists than exegeses. That's a lot to cover in a semester, but better to serve up tapas that might be nibbled than an entree that will be left uneaten.

Why does automation threaten the viability of qualitative research?

The question, from a backbencher: "How are quallys different from quantoids?"

The answer: Few topics are so perennially interesting for the individual political scientist and the discipline as the Question of Method. This is normally, quickly, and violently reduced to the Quant v. Qual debate, which is a battle of those who can't count against those who can't read. Even divisions that really affect other dimensions of methodological debate, such as those that separate formal theorists and interpretivists from case-study researchers and econometricians, are lumped into this artificial dichotomy. Formal guys know math, so they must be econometricians, or at least close enough; interpretivists use language, ergo they are case-study guys, or at least close enough. And so elective affinities are reified into camps, among which ambitious scholars must choose. (How else to understand EITM, which is the worst bastardization of all: the melding of deterministic theory with stochastic modeling?)

(Incidentally, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that mutli-method work is a via media. In everyday practice, quantoids proceed according to a one-drop rule: if a paper contains even the slightest taint of process-tracing or case studies, then it is irremediably quallish. In this, then, those of us who identify principally as multi-method guys stand in relation to the qual-quant divide rather as Third Way folks stand in relation to left-liberals and to all those right of center. That is, the qualitative folks reject us as insufficiently pure, while the quant camp thinks that we are all squishes.)

There is one point, however, in which it is incontestable that the quantoids have the upper hand on everyone else. And that is in the ease of transmission of the techne of data management, of data collection, and the analysis of data. I do not mean the high-concept stuff. All of that is usually about as difficult and as rarefied as the qualitative or formal high-concept readings, and about as equally useful to the completion of an actual research project--which is to say, not very, except insofar as it is beaten into everyday practice. (That R^2 continues to be reported as an independently meaningful statistic even 25 years after King (1986) is shocking, but the Kuhnian generational replacement has not yet so far really begun to weed out such ideological deviationists.)

No, when I talk about techne, I mean something closer to the quotidian translation of the replication movement, which when put into practice is rather like the business consultant notion of "best practices." There is a real craft to learning how to manage data, and how to write code, and how to present results, and so forth, and all of this is completely independent of the project on which a researcher is engaged. Indeed, it is perfectly plausible that I could take most of the thousands of lines of data-cleaning and analysis code that I've written in the past month for the GSS and the Jennings-Niemi Youth-Parent Socialization Survey, tweak four or five percent of the code to reflect a different DV, and essentially have a new project, ready to go. (Not that it would be a good project, mind you, but going from GRASS to HOMOSEX would not be a big jump.)

There is nothing quite like that for qualitative guys. Game theory folks come close, since you can tweak models indefinitely, but of course they then have to find data against which to test their theories (or not, as the case may be). Neither intepretivists nor case-study folks, however, can automate the production of knowledge to the same extent that quant guys can. And neither of those approaches appear to be as easily taught as quant approaches. The sage of Cambridge (that is to say, Gary Rex) is uncharacteristically almost snide in a passage from an unpublished paper:

A summary of these features of quantitative methods is available by looking at how this information is taught. Across fields and universities, training usually includes sequences of courses, logically taken in order, covering mathematics, mathematical statistics, statistical modeling, data analysis and graphics, measurement, and numerous methods tuned for diverse data problems and aimed at many different inferential targets. The specific sequence of courses differ across universities and fields depending on the mathematical background expected of incoming students, the types of substantive applications, and the depth of what will be taught, but the underlying mathematical, statistical, and inferential framework is remarkably systematic and uniformly accepted. In contrast, research in qualitative methods seems closer to a grab bag of ideas than a coherent disciplinary area. As a measure of this claim, in no political science department of which we are aware are qualitative methods courses taught in a sequence, with one building on, and required by, the next. In our own department, more than a third of the senior faculty have at one time or another taught a class on some aspect of qualitative methods, none with a qualitative course as a required prerequisite.

And yet there is something real here. If every quant scholar has gone from the probability theory --> OLS --> MLE --> {multilevel, hazard, Bayesian, ... } sequence, what is the corresponding path for a "qually"? What could such a path even look like?

Brad DeLong put the problem plainly in his obituary of J.K. Galbraith:

Just what a "Galbraithian" economist would do, however, is not clear. For Galbraith, there is no single market failure, no single serpent in the Eden of perfect competition. He starts from the ground and works up: What are the major forces and institutions in a given economy, and how do they interact? A graduate student cannot be taught to follow in Galbraith's footsteps. The only advice: Be supremely witty. Write very well. Read very widely. And master a terrifying amount of institutional detail.

This is not strictly a qual problem. Something similar happened with Feynman, who left no major students either (although note that this failure is regarded as exceptional). And there are a great many top-rank qualitative professors who have grown their own "trees" of students. But the distinction is that the qualitative apprenticeship model cannot scale, whereas you can easily imagine a very successful large-lecture approach to mastering the fundamental architecture of quant approaches or even a distance-learning class.

This is among the reasons I think that the Qual v Quant battle is being fought on terms that are often poorly chosen, both from the point of view of the qualitative researcher and also from the discipline. Quant researchers will simply be more productive than quant guys, and that differential will continue to widen. (This is a matter of differential rates of growth; qual guys are surely more productive now than they were, and their productivity growth will accelerate as they adopt more computer-driven workflows, as well. But there is no comparison between the way in which computing power increases have affected quallys and the way they have made it possible for even a Dummkopf like me to fit a practically infinite number of logit models in a day.) This makes revisions easier, by the way: a quant guy with domesticated datasets can redo a project in a day (unless his datasets are huge) but the qual guy will have to spend that much time pulling books off the shelves.

The qual-quant battles are fought over the desirability of the balance between the two fields. And yet the more important point has to do with the viability, or perhaps the "sustainability," of qualitative work in a world in which we might reasonably expect quant guys to generate three to five times as many papers in a given year as a qual guy. Over time, we should expect this to lead to first a gradual erosion of quallies' population, followed by a sudden collapse.

I want to make plain that I think this would be a bad thing for political science. The point of the DeLong obituary is that a discipline without Galbraiths is a poorer one, and I think the Galbraiths who have some methods training would be much better than those who simply mastered lots and lots of facts. But a naive interpretation of productivity ratios by university administrators and funding agencies will inevitably lead to qualitative work's extinction within political science.