The Monkey Cage

My dissertation begins, “Three Iowans walk into a diner …”

Job offers are pouring in.

Hunter S. Thompson used to say that “politics is the art of controlling your environment.” There might be something too that definition, as well as Bai’s, for the reasons that Aristotle identifies in book one of the N. Ethics (sorry, I’m a theorist, this is an occupational disease). That is, if we believe Aristotle, politics is the regulating discipline by which we achieve all the other ways we can control our environment. Or handle our insecurities, ambitions, etc. etc. etc.

GAH! “to” not “too.”

i keep trying to read Aristotle, but the books burn my hands.

i think they must be made of fire.

jk. theorist humor.

he also says politics is the highest of all sciences and the key to happiness, does he not? so, you know, listen up, bai.

(I don’t know which of the two threads is the main discussion on this topic, so I’m copying this comment from Henry’s post here)

I second the previous comments and John’s follow up post, but I think it is also worth highlighting Bai’s anti-mathematical bias as well. Rather than attempt to understand the mathematical representation of the argument Hindman puts forth, Bai dismisses outright the notion that ideas associated with greek letters are worth his time.

Political journalists will never understand political science OR “real-life” politics because they essentially have zero understanding of institutions (let alone most of the statistical analysis that underlines much of our work). That’s the whole problem in a nut-shell. In fact, most journalists dismissively sneer at the institutional constraints that define and bind most political motivations and interactions. And I am writing this as a political scientist who works as an American behavioralist!

It’s funny— there was a lot of amazement in the sabermetric community about how readily someone like Nate Silver was accepted into political journalism while he still battles daily with the guardians of sports journalism to justify his existence. I guess Bai didn’t get the memo about how open minded to new forms of analysis political journalists are supposed to be.

Rubbish. Empirical political scientists know that the right way to see present-day America is by a trip to Linens and Things!

I suppose we’re still in need of our Moneyball or perhaps our Freakonomics.

Eric L.: The correct name is Linens ‘n Things. This shows just how little you understand America.

Mr. Bai has his byline, which I suppose makes him a journalist of some sort. Now one does not need to have a journalism degree to be a journalist, including a political journalist. But I assume a political scientist would have to have a degree in political science. Consider the NYTimes journalist who asked Obama if he was a socialist. That was a dumb question, not well thought out by that journalist. Perhaps if Obama had grilled that journalist, he might have exposed the journalist as a hack seeking his “GOTCHA” moment in journalism. For example, Obama could have explored the background of the journalist in asking that stupid question.

I think one of the more telling things in Bai’s complaint is this line:
“whatever else [politics] may be, a science isn’t one of them. “

Do political scientists think that politics IS a science? Or do with think politics is something to which the scientific method might be applied? It’s a little like saying, ‘whatever else hail may be, a science isn’t one of them.’ Meteorology, chemistry and physics are sciences, but hail isn’t. And of course, most people can figure out how to get out of the hail even if they don’t know why it’s hail instead of rain or snow.

If you don’t understand what is supposed to be scientific about political science, it’s hard to appreciate it. It’s just a bunch of math that’s over your head. You understand that elections are being won (or that your head is getting wet), and that’s enough.

Perhaps the key difference here is that a political scientist, presumably, understands that he/she hasn’t “seen America” by visiting Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

Leaving journalists alone for a minute, haven’t we all also encountered the biologist, chemist, etc. (in my case even several academic psychologists) that claims political science isn’t science?

Having said that, I do think Deirdre (nee Donald) McCloskey’s critiques of economics may also apply to other social sciences that rely to much on analysis from the armchair. (Although some of her criticims are a bit over the top, perhaps for flair.)

-Doug

The irony of this entire discussion is that every once in a while some mathematician, astronomer or whatever devises some model to predict some political phenomena, and gets a front-page write-up in the New York Times or Washington Post. However, every time this happens the “insight” made by the hard scientist involves something which the political science literature has known for several decades. The irony is that every time, the same journalists who castigate political scientists fawn over the mathematicians for the “great strides” they made in our understanding of politics.

All of this just goes to show that none of the people involved (journalists or academics in other fields) knows a whit about what we do. Ultimately, I think points to a failing on our part to communicate with non-political scientists. Thinking big picture, if we want to solve the problems identified in this thread (and many other places), we’ve got to work on this type of communication.

Eric L. is absolutely right that empircal political scientists know the right way to see America is by visiting Linens ‘n Things. My last trip taught me that America is going out of business. Actually, maybe that’s less of joke than I intend.

Seriously, a big part of our “problem” communicating with journalists is that we behaviorists tell lousy stories, at least from a journalistic standpoint. Our basis conclusion about elections is that larger forces like economic performance and war/peace determine the outcome. That makes it really hard for Newsweek or Chuck Tood to write books title “How He Did It.”

Our reaction to day-to-day campaign events is that they have temporary effects at best, and probably will not have any affect on any voter on election day. Or if this event does have an effect, it’s really hard to tell at the time. Again, not a story that Mark Halperin or Politico.com wants to tell its insider audience.

Jeff is right that communication if a big part of our problem. We do a poor job of explaining what we know and how it can contribute to the broader political discussion. But a bigger communication problem that we have is that what we sell does not fit well with what journalists want to buy.

I think Brian is right about the lousy stories that political science would make journalists write.

I actually had an interview with a reporter once in which I tried to convince him that the minutiae about campaign styles that he was asking me about was going to be less important than things like the state of the economy. He said something to the effect of “yeah, we political journalists sort of know about that, but then we couldn’t justify following the campaign around and writing stories about it.”

Whether he said that for my benefit or he actually believed it, there is truth to it.

A couple things…

First, Matt Yglesias has a worthwhile post on this topic today:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/03/political_science_and_political_journalism.php

Second, I think Nate Silver is a very interesting case. My impression is that he broke through to the blog world and from there to a few pundits, including a fair amount of TV time; I don’t think that the Matt Bais of the world — print journalists — used his stuff. I could be wrong about that, though. I do have a sense that bloggers are far more likely to use what political scientists know than are print or TV reporters.

I do agree with Brian that what we have to sell is often just not as useful to reporters. Good reporters use political scientists anyway, because they care about getting things right, but I don’t know that it helps make their stories more interesting.

Cheap shot time: I never got around to reading Bai’s book on the Dems, but I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t think that what Stan Greenberg and other pollsters do is nonsense.

Oh, and Bai should know that “emprical” includes things that are “tactile and visual.”

In addition to picking (perhaps fairly) on Bai and the reflection that the field may need to communicate better, there is the sad fact that there are also some tenured faculty out there at some schools doing lousy research. I’ve only attended two APSA conferences, but I was taken aback by the quality of some of the papers and the way some people expressed themselves or debated their peers. My point is, it would be easy to point to journalists who suck and it is easy to point to poli sci profs who haven’t a very “real” clue about politics or elections, etc., or who communicate what they know very poorly or perhaps in a less than useful fashion (i.e., prideful rants). I think if the conversation were to rise above strawman rhetoric, the debate would need to take another direction, but I’m not sure what.
-Doug

What I don’t get is why a solid, well-respected writer like Bai…whose articles I use in my classes from time to time, needs to go on some rant about an entire discipline? He sounds like he’s on the Jim Rome show. All he need to do is end his passage by saying “rack ‘em…I’m the pimp in the box!” Actually he’s making and interesting critique about our overemphasis on positivist/deductive approaches at the expense of inductive/interpretivist approaches (which can be just as rigorous and systematic), but instead of going there, he decides to “zing” an entire discipline instead of being reflective about its strengths and weaknesses. When New York Times feature writers are going for the verbal “smackdown” then I fear for our public discourse.

Great Blog!

Re J. Marichal’s reference, above, to positivist vs. interpretivist approaches: those concerned with these issues may be interested in the latest post at my blog (“More on reification, and some other matters”) which discusses an ‘08 article “Concept Formation in Political Science.”

Great Blog!