The Monkey Cage

The excuse for Labor Day I had heard was that APSA is so big, we need a date when nobody else is doing a convention, otherwise we can’t find enough hotel/conference rooms.

My guess is that is a dated excuse.

I think we need to reduce the fees dramatically. The Association has millions in the endowment and I don’t think we need to continue to put money into it like that. Annual fees should be $50 or so.

I would have it on the west coast more than once a decade.

It might be nice for the American Political Science Association to hold its meetings in America.

“It might be nice for the American Political Science Association to hold its meetings in America.”
Sure, because Toronto is in Asia, right?

What I gleaned about the annual meeting from sitting in on the APSA Council meetings for six years (and these all-day meetings were the worst part of being the APSR editor):

—Virtually likes the Labor Day schedule.

—Attendance suffers greatly when the meeting is on the West Coast.

—Finding an alternative set of dates that would work much better seems to be a far more elusive objective than I had imagined. You run into massive conflicts with teaching schedules (it’s hard for some to bear in mind that at many schools, vanishing for two or three days during the semester is frowned upon), religious holidays, secular holidays, etc., and lots of competition for hotel rooms from other, typically non-academic, organizations that are holding their annual meetings.

What you’re left with is an inconvenient schedule that’s hard to improve on, for a meeting that’s held in the eastern half of the country.

I must learn to proof-read more carefully. In the previous message, I meant to say “Virtually no one likes the Labor Day schedule.”

I find it funny that west coast attendance is greatly lower. I’m not surprised, but it’s funny.

On the east coast: a west coaster has to lose an entire day getting there. East coasters have a marginally longer trip to the airport, generally, but west coaster make that up in spades in the air, in plane transfers, and in the time difference.

On the west coast: most west coasters still need to do significant travel, but they don’t lose the hours. East coasters GAIN the hours on the way here, and lose them going home, but they all have Monday off anyway.

Really, the impositions of east coast on the west coasters seems much higher than the other way around. The reason for the lower attendance is simply the density of academia, but we really might be amazed that us west coasters show up at all.

There are other points to be made in favor of the west coast, most notably USUALLY the weather is MUCH more pleasant to wear a suit in. (LA, this week, is NOT demonstrating that, but SF, Seattle, and Portland are usually very pleasant on September 1)

However, all these reasons won’t convince anyone in the face of the empirical truth that meetings out here don’t get attended. I’m just griping.

APSA should introduce liveblogging for at least the plenaries.

I do not attend APSA except when it is in Boston (where I live) because it is on Labor Day weekend and I think this is unfair to my family. It would be easy enough to move it one week earlier without causing havoc to schedules.

I am anxious to see what attendance looks like. I understand that the Association has had a huge influx of members from Europe, and so it may not be down. But, anecdotally, but lots of the people I usually meet up with did not attend.

I’d love to see some of those numbers showing west coast conferences to have lower attendance. Given how few west coast APSAs we’ve had in the past few decades, I’d be surprised if these findings were particularly robust.

Finding an alternative set of dates that would work much better seems to be a far more elusive objective than I had imagined.

But yet MPSA does perfectly well choosing a date within the rough guideline of “Late March through April” year in and year out, and they have ~5000 attendees nowadays.

Why does it always start at 8am regardless of time zone?

If it’s on the east coast, 8am is 5am for west coasters. If it’s on the west coast, 8am is 11am for the east coasters.

Why not start at 10am (EST), 7am (PST) regardless of where it’s held? If it’s in San Francisco, start at 7; if it’s in Dallas, start at 9; etc.

Having worked as a grad student for the Midwest, I can say that the Midwest changes dates because it locks those dates in with one hotel FAR in advance. They typically have a 5 year contract with the Palmer House. While this is off topic here, I’d love to see the Midwest mix it up a bit. The Palmer House is getting a bit old and I’m sure there are lots of great Midwestern cities that would love to host a large conference. As for APSA, I couldn’t agree more with the move it from Labor Day crowd.

Does anyone have any actual data comparing attendance at the Toronto meeting to the Boston meeting in 2008?