Family squabbles

The political science blogosphere (hey, there is one!) has been atwitter about Jacqueline Stevens NYT Op-Ed on political science. I agree with most of what has been said, and have even said some of it myself in the past.

But I'd like to make a slightly different observation. It's worth noting that Stevens' piece is really about a divide within political science. Political scientists spend a good bit of time arguing about what kind of evidence we should accept. This divide is more significant than it is in many other disciplines (e.g. economics, physics), but it's not completely unique and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

We are a diverse discipline. I like to say that the difference between say economists and sociologists is that both study pretty much any human behavior, but each discipline has its own set of theoretical approaches, questions and methods. Sometimes they talk past each other. Political scientists, on the other hand, study a narrower band of human behavior -- the political -- but we approach it from every direction. We draw from economics, sociology, history, biology, anthropology, literary criticism, philosophy, etc. And that is a good thing, even if only because it means we have to think carefully about the standards we are using.

There is nothing wrong with "airing this dirty laundry" for the rest of the world to see. It shouldn't be a secret that we have interdisciplinary disagreements, and talking about it might be the only way to get past naive mischaracterizations of social science as not a science. But it should be recognized for what it is. It's a debate within the discipline. Stevens' claim is ultimately that those who are interested in prediction (who are very few), or in quantitative analysis (a much larger group), are too powerful in the discipline, and that those who do work like hers are not as powerful as they should be. Others disagree about both where the power lies, and who should and should not be powerful.

What does this have to do with the NSF? Well, if quantitative analysis is favored by the NSF, then the debate about what makes for good social science has had a different outcome there than Stevens would like. Some of us actually like the kind of work that is being funded, but it's legitimate to challenge it. This ought to be different than deciding whether we fund anything, though. That we sometimes disagree on what makes for good work does not mean that there is no good work, or that a roll of the dice is the way to determine which work gets done.

Are we prognosticators?

I don't wish to provide a detailed rebuttal to Jacqueline Stevens' article in today's New York Times, as Henry Farrell has already done this extremely capably. But I do wish to focus on one of Stevens' central points: that political scientists are primarily prognosticators. As she writes,

[I]n terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money.

In other words, we are at our most scientific when we act as soothsayers. As Henry noted, prediction is simply not what we do. Thumb through any of our scholarly journals, and you will find almost no forecasts of future political events. We are in the explaining business, not the predicting business. The one notable exception is the round of scholarship that generally comes right before a U.S. presidential election, where a small number of us use a few different models to anticipate the outcome.

And the point of these forecasting articles is not to offer predictions so much as to test theories of how elections work. The claim being made is not "I can predict elections!" but "I can predict elections with just two variables!" There is an enormous difference between those two statements. The first claims the magical powers of a seer. The second makes an argument that elections turn on just a few key factors, and that other things that political observers tend to dwell on prior to elections (charisma, narrative, spending, etc.) may be just noise. Further, by providing those variables or explaining how they can be obtained, it invites other researchers to check their work and offer their own conclusions. The first statement is a boast, the second is scholarship. To the extent we do engage in forecasting, we are almost entirely engaged in the second form.

Obviously, I disagree with what Stevens wrote, and I find the piece disheartening on several levels. Of course, political scientists are not required to march in lockstep with their colleagues. We're free to disagree with each other -- and often do -- about the best ways to conduct our profession. My concern here, though, is that this piece will be used as a justification to cut support for political science, even though it is based on what I perceive to be a serious misinterpretation of just what our discipline does.

Foie gras: the unaligned issue?

One of the consequences of strong partisanship is that most, if not all, issues eventually become partisan ones. As recently as the early 1980s, abortion and handguns, to give two prominent examples, were not strongly partisan issues; Republican legislators and voters were no more likely to support access to them than Democrats were. But over time, they became absorbed into the party dimension, and today you can know a politician's stance on these and other issues just by knowing their party affiliation.

So it's always interesting to catch an issue that hasn't yet become a partisan one. Note the state of California's impending ban on foie gras (fattened goose liver), which goes into effect on July 1st. (I blogged about this at Enik Rising the other day.) Now, notably, the ban, which was authored by a Democrat and originally passed the state Assembly and Senate on strong party-lines votes (with Democrats supporting the ban and Republicans opposing), was signed into law by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Currently defending the ban is Schwarzenegger's fellow Austro-Californian Wolfgang Puck. I don't know Puck's party affiliation, but he recently took part in a huge Hollywood fundraiser for Obama, so that should tell you something. State Democratic Party chair John Burton, who originally authored the ban as a state senator, continues to defend it.

So you could say this is largely Democrats in favor of banning animal cruelty, and Republicans in favor of protecting businesses, with Schwarzenegger leaning left, as he sometimes does. But note the flavor of this delightful piece in the Atlantic: chefs that serve foie gras are the little guy, and they don't have the kind of money to defend themselves they way, say, the beef industry does. And I have no doubt that many of these chefs who are organizing in defense of foie gras lean Democratic. Anthony Bordain, for example, seems to lean strongly left, and Thomas Keller has donated exclusively to Democrats in recent years.

It may be that in the years since the ban worked its way through the legislature, the issue has transformed somewhat, particularly as liberal-leaning chefs have embraced artisanal organ meats. I don't know that this will ever rise to the level of a fully partisan issue, especially since the level of interest and appeal to the masses is extremely limited here. But if you're eating at a California restaurant in the days leading up to July 1st and a protest starts outside, look to see who's participating and if you can tell whether it looks more like a Tea Party or an Occupation. I'm curious.

Should we punish non-voters or peer-pressure them?

Presidential election years have a way of focusing attention on voter turnout.  Each season there seems to be renewed focus on voting participation rates in America and recognition that they tend to be quite a bit lower than in other democracies (e.g., America ~50-60%; Australia ~80%, Malta 94%, Iraq 58%).

What if everyone voted?  Would election outcomes be different?  Research is somewhat divided on this.  Some say no, some say yes. Peter Orszag argues that regardless of the effect on outcomes, voting should be mandatory and punishable.

Peter Orszag rightly points out the “paradox of compulsory voting” is that it could only be enacted if it could be shown to have a null effect; in other words, both parties would have to support it and if one party was seen to have an advantage, then the reform would fail to be enacted.  Orszag suggests that compulsory voting is a sensible reform that would “make democracy work better, in the sense of being more reflective of the population at large.”

Orszag’s argument correctly assumes that elections, or the outcomes they produce, are a public good—no individual has any incentive to contribute to them (via voting) because an individual’s action can make no difference; yet, collectively we are all better off if everyone participates.  Almost by definition, democracy can only work if its citizens participate in selecting representatives.  If no one participated, democracy would cease to exist.

One of the classic tenants of political science is that public goods result in collective action problems, and that we can traditionally use institutions to solve these dilemmas. For example, we can prevent car crashes at intersections using traffic lights; we can create safe drinking water by regulating polluters; we can create safe places for children to play and learn by using tax dollars to build parks and schools; we can create safe communities and perhaps prevent military actions against us by having police and national defense systems.  When individuals defect from participating in these public goods (by, for example, refusing to pay taxes), we punish them (by, for example, charging fines or sending them to jail). Our laws and system of sanctions act as institutions that solve the collective action problems created by the desire for public goods—this is what we teach in political science 101.

Orszag’s argument is in direct line with this type of approach to governing. Create an institution (mandatory voting) to solve the collective action problem (non-voting) that results from the desire for the public good (elections). But Orszag himself notes that it might be “unpopular” and difficult to enact. In light of this problem this blog is a good place to point to recent research on the causes and consequences of citizens’ participation in politics (especially voting behavior), which suggests that other tactics might be more effective, easier to enact, or perhaps more welcome by a citizenry increasingly suspect of government.

For example, Meredith Rolfe shows that voting is a social exercise. People tend to vote when they are active in large social circles where others vote. Likewise, in a large-scale experiment using Facebook, James Fowler and collaborators found that when an individual believes his/her friends have voted, the individual is more likely to vote. Also, Betsy Sinclair shows that many types of political behavior, including voting tendencies, are influenced by one’s peer network and their perceptions of their friends’ inclinations toward voting. Simple positive social messaging, such as “people like you have voted today, will you?” have a meaningful positive impact on voter turnout.

This is consistent with the mission of new organizations like Votizen, which aims to reduce the role of money in campaigning by activating individual’s social networks to help encourage their friends to vote.

So, mandatory voting laws would likely increase participation in elections in America, but it is unclear whether such reforms are feasible, and whether the benefits of increased participation would outweigh the costs of enforcing the law.  Rather, social media, social networks, and peer influence may be inexpensive and perhaps more effective ways of increasing political participation. Political parties and candidates have already been figuring this out. The use of social media in modern political campaigns has quickly become a standard tactic, rather than a novelty. Perhaps the government in general, or those who champion higher turnout rates, should take this research to heart and deploy a more systematic system of encouraging voter participation through social networks and their media.

The Smoke-Filled Room

We are pleased to welcome a new political science group blog to the blogosophere. A group of intrepid graduate students have begun a blog called The Smoke-Filled Room (nice name, btw). Their inaugural post is here, and they've kicked off the week with some interesting pieces on Egypt. I don't know how much overlap there will be with the work we do here at Mischiefs, but given their blog's name, I'm hopeful.

Welcome!

The United States of Nebraska

Via Alex Pareene, an interesting tidbit from Matt Bai's recent interview with Bob Kerrey:

One of his central proposals calls for a constitutional amendment that would ban party caucuses in Congress and establish nonpartisan elections for the House and Senate, much like the unusual system that has governed Nebraska’s Legislature since 1934. The amendment, as Kerrey envisions it, would also eliminate the unlimited campaign donations made permissible by the Supreme Court. Practically speaking, what all of this would mean, he says, is that there would be no “party line” to follow but rather coalitions based on ideology or shared interests.

Now, as Pareene notes, "We already have coalitions based on ideology or shared interests and they’re called 'political parties.'" This is true, but that doesn't mean that these coalitions would look quite the same under a nonpartisan system. Let's just assume for a moment there's be enough support within the Congress and the state legislatures to pass such an amendment. (And yes, we'd have to assume that legislators elected through a partisan system would be willing to vote away the parties that got them into office and help keep them there.) What would American politics look like if it adopted the Nebraska model?

Notably, while Nebraska's state legislature is officially nonpartisan, it is not without partisanship. No, most voters probably do not know the party affiliation of their legislators, but the more politically active Nebraskans do, and the legislators, lobbyists, and journalists who hover in and around the statehouse certainly do, as do those who donate to the candidates for state legislature. As Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty have noted, the Nebraska statehouse has been polarizing rapidly in recent decades, and it is currently more ideologically polarized than 17 other state legislative chambers (which, of course, have parties).

All this is to say that there would certainly still be a "party line" in the Congress, even under Nebraska rules. Would such rules reduce the incidence of party line voting? Almost certainly. But keep in mind why this would happen: because it would be much harder for people outside of Congress to follow what's going on and to assign rewards and punishments. Most voters, even the politically interested ones, generally don't follow what individual members of Congress are doing. Votes on committee reports and legislative amendments and procedural rules are often strategic and inherently confusing for outside observers. What voters can observe, however, is the behavior of a party when it's in power. If they don't like the way things are going, they can vote in another party and get a very different result. The knowledge that voters will reward them if things go well and punish them if things go poorly creates an important (if limited) constraint on legislative parties. It helps make them responsible.

This responsibility is greatly attenuated under Nebraska's electoral rules. To be sure, it probably creates a nicer work environment for state legislators; it's easier for them to get along without the partisanship. But creating a nicer work environment for 535 people in Washington would carry with it a great price in terms of responsibility and accountability.

(h/t Jonathan Ladd)

Networking

Light posting here this week, as the Mischiefs are all gathering at the Political Networks conference in Boulder. But you can follow all the action at the Political Networks Twitter feed, or on the hashtag #polnet2012.