The Quantitative Peace

Bipartisanship and the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy

Editor's note: A version of this piece is cross-posted at the LSE USAPP blog, and can be found here. This post is based on my recent article, The International and Domestic Sources of Bipartisanship in U.S. Foreign Policy, in Political Research Quarterly.

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The idea that foreign policy and national security issues are somehow exempt from the partisan rancor that often characterizes domestic politics is perhaps best encapsulated by the old adage, “politics stops at the water’s edge.” In American foreign policy, nowhere is this spirit better exemplified than by President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War. Since World War II, Stimson and other prominent bureaucratic appointees—such as Robert Lovett and John McCloy—have come to represent this ideal. This phenomenon of bipartisan cooperation that is held to have characterized the early Cold War period has been popularly referred to as the “Cold War Consensus”, or as “Establishment” bipartisanship.

However, following the Vietnam War pronouncements of the collapse of this bipartisan consensus became commonplace. Similar claims followed the end of the Cold War, and more recently, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Indeed, such assertions have become common in discussions of American foreign policy, with the broader substantive implication being that the conduct of American foreign policy has become increasingly erratic and subject to the kind of partisan political battles that have long afflicted domestic politics. 

Some of my recent work evaluates just how closely these stylized truths match up with reality. Earlier accounts of the breakdown of bipartisanship in foreign policymaking relied largely on anecdotal accounts or individual’s assertions with little in the way of systematic evidence (see here, here, and here). Some work by political scientists has done better in approaching the concepts of bipartisanship and consensus in a more systematic way (see here, here, here, and here). Still, there are some gaps that my work tries to address. First, earlier qualitative works often focused on elite bureaucratic policymakers (like Stimson), while quantitative studies have tended to focus on congressional voting patterns or public opinion. Second, foreign policy scholars often view bipartisan cooperation through the lens of foreign threats and crises, ignoring or downplaying more basic domestic political pressures that may drive bipartisanship. My work aims to apply a more systematic form of analysis to the subject of bipartisanship in presidential appointments, while also assessing the relative importance of domestic and international factors in affecting bipartisan cooperation.

Using data on over 1,000 individual appointees to the foreign policy bureaucracy—agencies like the State Department and the Department of Defense—I identified those individual appointees who were members of the opposition party (e.g., Republican serving in a Democratic administration). Figure 1 shows the number of bipartisan appointees in a given year between 1948 and 2011. While this is only a starting point, it does not lend much support to the conventional narrative regarding the apparent collapse of bipartisanship following either Vietnam or the end of the Cold War. In fact, the early Cold War period sees some of the lowest counts observed in the data.

Figure 1 — Annual count of bipartisan appointees, 1948–2011.

However, Figure 1 does not provide us with any insights into the effects of a wider range of variables that might be influencing bipartisanship. Accordingly, I modeled the probability of observing a bipartisan appointment in a given year as a function of these different forces. Briefly stated, I find no evidence to support the idea that bipartisanship has undergone a structural shift following either Vietnam or the end of the Cold War. In fact, as is displayed in Figure 2, each party’s probability of making a bipartisan appointment has converged when comparing the pre- and post-Vietnam periods. Though it may be contrary to our expectations, this finding makes sense when we consider the domestic political environment of the early Cold War period. The McCarthy hearings, as well as the long absence of Republicans from the White House, help to explain the scarcity of bipartisan appointments during some of the early Cold War years.

 

Figure 2 — Predicted probability of a bipartisan appointment by party and time period

 

 

Similarly, I find no evidence that US conflict involvement promotes bipartisanship. On the contrary, my findings indicate conflict involvement actually has a negative effect on bipartisanship. As Figure 3 shows, the predicted probability of observing a bipartisan appointment decreases as the duration of US war involvement increases. Furthermore, these results actually match the findings of previous studies. Using different metrics, an earlier study by Peter Trubowitz and Nicole Mellow also finds a negative correlation between international crises and bipartisanship in Congressional voting. This negative relationships is likely due to the increasingly contentious and politicized nature of particularly long military engagements.

 

Figure 3 — Predicted probability of a bipartisan appointment as a function of war duration.

 

Lastly, I find that domestic political conditions play an important part in promoting bipartisanship. I argue that bipartisan appointments can serve to compensate presidents for lower levels of partisan support in Congress and aid in the construction of moderate coalitions. However, this dynamic only works when the parties are close and there are moderate legislators in Congress with whom the president and his appointees can work. But as the parties in Congress have become more polarized, moderate legislators have become increasingly scarce. Figure 4 illustrates this dynamic. At low levels of polarization, a decrease in the number of seats that the president’s party controls in Congress leads to an increase in the probability of seeing a bipartisan appointment. As polarization increases the size of this effect becomes smaller, eventually becoming negative.

 

Figure 4 — Marginal effect of a decrease in presidential support in Congress on the probability of a bipartisan appointment

Note: Gray box denotes area of statistical insignificance.

 

Overall, these findings cast doubt on some of the conventional wisdoms surrounding American foreign policy, pointing instead to the importance of the domestic political environment in promoting bipartisanship. Accordingly, my research suggests that we should expect to see less bipartisan cooperation through presidential appointments moving forward. The fact that polarization unfolds over several years at a time also suggests that this trend is unlikely to reverse itself any time soon. President Obama’s retention of Robert Gates, and his appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, would seem to provide some evidence to the contrary. However, while these appointments are surely important, they are not necessarily indicative of broader trends.

 

Troop Deployment Research and Poland

Interstate conflict is a rare phenomenon. Since 1816, the Correlates of War project only counts 96 different wars occurring over an almost 200 year period.  Given Russia's incursion into the Crimean peninsula, it is of little surprise that IR scholar blogging activity has been rampant the past week; we may just have conflict 97 just around the corner.

It is of little surprise that Ukraine is on the forefront of our discussions across twitter, blogs, and other forms of social media.  It is an intellectually ripe ground for explanation, prediction, and is an important teaching tool for me.  In the classroom, the ongoing crisis is engaging for students.  Their preferred lenses to view the conflict appears to be a mix between neorealist power politics and bargaining models of conflicts; the students found constructivist and liberal explanations to be somewhat less satisfying. Though, there was a healthy discussion about whether or not Russia should count as a democracy. 

Beyond Ukraine, my preperation for conference season is holding my attention.  One manuscript I am presently working on, while keeping an eye on the Ukrainian-Russian crisis, is a collaborative piece with Michael Flynn and Julie VanDusky-Allen.  In a follow up to another work that we have, we are presenting an article at the Midwest Political Science Association that looks as the regional contexts US troop deployments provide for foreign policy decisions of states by employing Lake's 2011 work on contractual hierarchies. He argues that sovereignty is a fungible good that can be traded away in various domains for various side-payments. In the case of the United States, we often provide security services to states (in the form of troops, bases, weapons, etc.) in exchange for more control over their foreign policy decision-making.  Previous research, including our own, shows that for the average state, when troops are deployed to their country, they tend to spend less on their own defense.  In the classic guns-versus-butter framework of government spending, a state granted additional resources can supplement its own defense spending and shift its spending priorities to other social (butter) issues.

However, despite this on-average effect, we see two additional wrinkles to this process.  First, NATO states do not follow this trend. NATO countries tend to respond to new troop deployments with further spending, not reduced spending.  Second, states in the midst of a regional concentrations of US troops, across the board, will increase their spending.  Today, the Obama administration announced that it would be sending military assets as well as 300 troops to Poland. While this move is almost certainly more to assure Poland than it is to threaten Russia, the current crisis will undoubtedly see jumps in military spending by most countries in the region. 

 

Kane's 2006 work on troop deployments is the source for troop deployment data and Michael and I used the Department of Defense's published reports to fill in the years from 2003-2011 in our recent CMPS article. Through 2011, the US had a nominal number of US military personnel in Poland, but the first time the US officially "stationed forces" in Poland happened about 18 months ago in June 2012.  The small number of US military personnel in Poland from 1980-2011 is a relatively insignificant number as the US, currently, has some level of troops in almost every country. These military personnel represent and conduct several kinds of activity and do not represent a deployment that projects US power or capability to coerce.  The announcement by the US today is a significant increase in the size of US troops in Poland beyond previous deployments and represents an operational, fighting force.  It is likely that the number of troops in Poland will stay well above 300 no matter how the Crimean dispute resolves. Ultimately, the troops represent a security commitment to Poland's defense by the United States, and given the regional activity by Russia, the US would be hard pressed to drawn down our forces in Poland.  If anything, I expect the long term number to be higher, perhaps requiring the US to redeploy forces elsewhere in Europe. It will be hard for the US, or John Kerry for that matter, to forget Poland. 

 

 

 

The Military and Competitive Sports

I missed my last post, but thankfully I'm on top of this week's edition. 

Kyleanne Hunter and Oliver Kaplan have a piece at Political Violence @ a Glance discussing some of the military roots of the biathlon. I've never known much about the sport's history, but it certainly makes sense that its origins are so closely tied to the kinds of security needs that Hunter and Kaplan cite. This was particularly interesting to me as both my wife and I grew up close to Lake Placid, New York. Lake Placid hosted the winter Olympics twice—once in 1932 and again in 1980—and continues to be a destination for tourists and athletes alike. Additionally, the 10th Mountain Division is headquartered about three hours from there at Fort Drum, and they have an armory located in Saranac Lake, New York where I grew up. Two members of the US biathlon team are also from Saranac Lake: Annelies Cook and Tim Burke. 

I went to high school with both Annelies and Tim, and it's great to see them doing so well. Hunter and Kaplan's discussion of the biathlon's history also makes me appreciate the sport and where I grew up a little bit more, and it's neat to think about the sport in terms of how it intersects with my own personal historical/research interests. The idea that specific military assignments can evolve into cooperative/competitive sporting events is really interesting, and I'm sure there's been much more written about it than I'm aware of (which is little). Naturally this makes me wonder what other sports have evolved out of military activities. Archery comes to mind, but I suspect that has competitive origins that are less exclusively military. There are a number of other shooting-related events during the summer games (see here), but again, many of these events are not necessarily exclusively military in origin either. Some of the historical information the link provides, and the descriptions of some of the events, suggest more of a hunting-related background. And many of these events appear to have been phased out, or have only been held once or twice.

It also makes me wonder as to what kind of selection effects might be at work in terms of how these activities evolve into competitive sports. Presumably you need activities that are a mixture of some highly specialized skill, but also something that's not overly secretive. After all, you don't want other states knowing that you have individuals highly trained in a particular task if that will compromise their work in some way. You also need an activity where multiple countries have need of the same type of training or force. As Hunter and Kaplan discuss, multiple countries were deploying similar sorts of forces to patrol remote, mountainous border regions, thereby facilitating the development of some sort of competitive event based on these shared activities. So not every state needs to have a given force, but at least a few do in order for it to be competitive. 

So what are some contemporary examples of the sorts of military activities that could evolve into internationally competitive sports? And how has technological innovation changed the landscape, so to speak, in terms of the pool of potential activities that could evolve in this way? My mind immediately went to some underwater sports, thinking of some combination of navigating an underwater obstacle course, and then performing some task requiring a demonstration of dexterity. This list of underwater sports suggests there are some sports that at least partly resemble these activities. Underwater navigation and underwater target shooting, specifically. This article also indicates that no underwater sports have been a part of the Olympic games. This appears to be due to the International Olympic Committee selecting which games it will grant approval to. Still, these seem like activities that require a high degree of specialization, but are also pursued by enough countries to facilitate competition. 

Another future possibility would be sort sort of aerial drone competition. Competitors might be judged on their ability to take off, perform certain maneuvers, perhaps "paint" a moving target for a given period of time, and then land. Though there are more advanced military variants, less sophisticated and less expensive drone variants are already being experimented with for a variety of purposes (see Amazon's recent talk of drone-based delivery). Though this would certainly emphasize physical performance less than other athletic activities, I'm not sure it's all that different from other activities like shooting, much of which emphasizes hand-eye coordination. This is also technology that more countries are likely to pursue for security/military purposes as time goes on.

If anyone can think of other military activities that might translate into internationally competitive sports, please share in the comments. 

Incorporating Blog Consumption into the Classroom

There is currently a proposal before ISA to prevent blogging by the editorial members of ISA journals.  While there are a few posts discussing how this is professionally problematic and limits some real discussion that is happening via blog, there is one other arena such a mandate would also hurt: My classroom.  

During the 2013-2014 academic year, I have been part of a teaching program at Boise State (Boise State Teaching Scholars) that aims to help early-career professors develop a more robust classroom while incorporating what we know from the scholarship on teaching and learning.  Part of my work through this group has been to develop a new current events section in my course based on blogging. Some of you are familiar that I have already worked on making my IR syllabus more web-consumption friendly, and this is a more formal extension of that project. 

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One of the major things lacking in my introduction to International Relations course is a concurrent focus on ongoing international events.  While issues about Syria or North Korea would inevitably creep up into the classroom last semester, I have not previously devoted classroom time or grading space to incorporating student comprehension of active events, but instead, hope that they used the theoretical and empirical understanding of world politics to understand whatever events they happen across in their daily habits.

In some previous classes that I had taken as an undergrad or had been a teaching assistant for, there has, occasionally been a component that incorporated current events.  When I was a teaching assistant for Introduction to American Politics at Binghamton, the course required students to be subscribed to the New York TImes and had regular quizzes on the major current events that the front page covered.  This requirement is an expectation for students to be knowledgeable about the ongoing world.

While I have toyed with introducing newspapers into the classroom, I have been reluctant to force students to subscribe to a newspaper on top of the three books they already have to buy for IR. I do not think many of my students read newspapers currently and may be entirely foreign to the concept of a folded newspaper---I can only imagine them trying to put a newspaper back together, like a map in the glove box (another archaic task that most of my students will be unfamiliar with).  I considered having them keep up with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN online as well, but given the constant flux in front page news and the addition of pay-walls to some of the content, this would be too burdensome for my students to keep up with or have a reasonable expectation of what they should know.

Given these issues, I have turned to blogs for the current semester.  My students mostly get their news online, so having them add a few blogs to their daily reading should not be too problematic for them.  Additionally, blogs are timestamped and I can require them to pay attention to blogs on particular days to supplement their reading.  Finally, the blogs I am having them read discuss current events in the context of international relations research.  Occasionally, political scientists do write op-eds for local newspapers, but this is much more sparse than the current blogging environment. Ultimately, I hope this increases their comprehension of class material by having access to additional academic voices analyzing current events. 

The syllabus entry for my class is the following:

Over the last two days of class (we are on day three as of today), I have discussed this component, how to access to the blogs, and went over the kinds of posts they should be interested in and the ones that they can skip (though, if the topic is of interest to them, they should read it).  This experiment is new, so I have yet to evaluate my students' ability to keep up and I am months away from seeing if it has any effect on their tests relative to previous classes. 

Today (Wednesday), is the first quiz.  Given the topics covered on both sources over the last four business days, I am asking the following questions  (if any of my students are keeping up with my blog via RSS feed, then they will be well prepared for class today):

1) In what European country are there ongoing, massive political protests?
    A. Italy
    B. Greece
    C. Ukraine
    D. Belarus
    E. Latvia

2) What recent behavior provoked the protests?
    A. The President of the country has been diplomatically moving the country away from the European Union.
    B. The President of the country has been diplomatically moving the country away from Russia. 
    C. The protests are mostly anarchists from surrounding countries; there’s no real cause.
    D. The collapse of the Soviet Union.
    E. The United States threatened to send troops to the country.

3) Former President Mohamed Morsi was removed as President of Egypt by the military. What faction within Egyptian society does he have strong ties to?
    A. The military
    B. The Muslim Brotherhood
    C. Al-Qaeda
    D. The International Monetary Fund
    E. Israel

4) Research indicates (as discussed on The Monkey Cage) that there is a correlation between increased repression levels in Muslim countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen) and support for what?
    A. US intervention
    B. The government currently in power
    C. Islamism
    D. Israel
    E. Democracy

5) True/False: Tension between South Korea and Japan has been increasing and both countries are allies of the United States.

I expect questions Two and Four to be the most difficult of the questions.

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My classroom currently relies upon academic blogging to help my students engage the material they are learning with current events.  While I attempt to do some of that in my class, having online resources added to their daily consumption will help me help them struggle through some of the more difficult concepts while also putting a face to sometimes abstract theory.  The ISA's proposed rules would potentially limit the daily content of several political science blogs and may make it harder for me to point my students to active conversations within the discipline.  

Gifts for Political Scientists, 2013

It is a week before the American tradition of "Black Friday" starting on Thursday, and I have not done an updated list on "Gifts for Political Scientists" since 2010, so here is my proposed list for 2013.  Trying to find gifts for that special poltiical scientist in your life can be quite difficult.  Given the existing list from 2010 (that is, I am avoiding repeats) and inspiration from the source I originally stole the idea from, here is the supplement to the 2010 list. 

Board Games

The games on my 2010 list are still my go-to suggestions for people considering games for political scientists. However, for this year, I am adding a few to the list.

• Ticket to Ride (Amazon) - This game is relatively simplistic in its presentation and offers a variety of strategies based on hidden information that each player has.  There are two shared goals for all of the players, and at least two hidden goals for each player.  This game is fantastically appropriate for all age groups and allows some complexity even when there are a bunch of game theorists all playing the game.  I would strongly recommend this board game over something like Monopoly if you are looking for a game for the family.

• Mafia/Werewolf (Wikipedia) - This game is free and there are multiple versions of it available across the web. If you must buy the game, there are some options on Amazon.  I recommend this free game as it is similar to Bang! (see the 2010 list) in that it is a game of private information in which palyers are trying to determine other people's roles and take actions based on their evaluation of that information. In both versions of the game (Mafia or werewolf), the majority of the players are normal citizens who are trying to determine who the non-citizens are that are harming the town.  In Mafia, you are looking to determine who in your town is part of the mob. In Werewolf, you are rooting out werewolves that are destroying your community.  The citizens are attempting to identify and eliminate the mobsters/werewolves while the other party attempts to remain hidden and elminate citizens until they control a majority of the vote and win the game.  

This is a go-to game for large parties and is best played with seven or more people.

Card Games

• Dominion (Amazon) - Dominion is the top of my list for card games.  It is a "Deck-Building Game" that makes building a deck part of the game. For people who normally play collectible card games, deck-building is part of the pre-game strategy. Dominion makes this aspect front and center as many of your actions are built around creating your deck.  Dominion is flexible and boasts eight different expansions that allow you to engage in different settings, strategies, and fundamentally alter some of the rules of the game.

Video Games 

• Civilization V: Brave New World (Amazon/Metacritic Reviews) - Okay, this is slightly cheating on the no repeats rule, but it is cheating I can live with. The second expansion to the 2010 recommended item adds in a few important facets to growing a civilization and dealing with international relations. The biggest game-play addition for International Relations folk is the introduction of the World Congress. The ability to sanction belligerents, ban particular goods, encourage international festivals, and devote resources to science makes this expansion a necessary tool in international discourse.  Quite a long game, but solo play has improved dramatically. If you can find 2-5 people to sit and play competitively for hours at a time, then the experience of the game improves dramatically. To enjoy Brave New World, you do need the base game and I recommend also picking up the first expansion. 

• Bioshock: Infinite (Amazon/Metacritic Reviews) - In my 2010 list, I included Bioshock on the recommendation of Michael Flynn without my own exposure.  Now, I have played through Bioshock, Bioshock 2, and Bioshock Infinite.  The last in the series of games is a standalone game that you can play without having exposure to the previous games.  The setting is the city of Columbia in 1912; a city built in the sky.  Bioshock played upon Ayn Randian themes of an alternative societal structure during collapse.  Bioshock Infinite engages a mix of patriotism, jingoism, and racism.  Columbia is more patriotic and pro-America than America itself and ends up seceding from the Union. The game takes place after this secession.  There is much more to this game and the political themes are worth discussing for political scientists; however, I will not spoil much more of the story here. You can find a trailer for the game here on Youtube. 

• Tropico 4 (Amazon/Metacritic Reviews)- A simulation where you play the leader of a small Latin American Island and lead your country through economic, political, and social decisions. The setting of the game takes place during the Cold War, so you are balancing out trying to appease American and Soviet interests (the closer you move to either country, the more aid they give you) as well as dealing with other international factors.  You have elections every six years and you can make them free and fair, use election trickery, make false promises, or engage in outright assassination.  The choice is yours in creating your island government. This game is great if you are a builder, a planner, or into running your own country.

 

Books/Reading

• Game of Thrones (Amazon/Audible) - I am late on this particular bandwagon.  I have yet to see the show as I am making my way through the books first. Most of my book consumption happens through Audible as I can listen to the audiobooks during my daily commute via bike.  This fantasy series has a decent mix of intrigue and politicking that has made many of a political scientist happy thus far.  My favorite moment from the series thus far is when one of my students wrote a reaction paper that tied a concept discussed by Robert Bates into the book and used it to explain the set of relationships between the various actors.  

• The Foundation (Amazon/Audible) - this foundational science fiction book by Asimov creates the social science theory of "Psycho-History"; a study of groups of people and has the ability to predict their behavior.  Psycho-history cannot predict individuals, but can predict the movement of large bodies as if they were unitary actors.  The parallels between Asimov's fictional social science and what we do should be obvious. This seven part series is a must-read for any political scientists interested in science fiction.

Movies

• The Hunger Games (Amazon) - The young adult novel hit the big screen a few years ago and the second in the series is out this week.  The movie lends itself to some discussion of civil war, protest, and rebellion in the context of dictatorships.  

• Brazil (Amazon/Wikipedia Entry) - One classic in addition to the contemporary blockbuster: Terry Gilliam's dark comedy Brazil.  This movie also lends itself to themes about dictatorship, repression, and resistance with a heavy backdrop of bureaucratic nightmares.  

For the Office

• Tardis Door cover (ThinkGeek) - In case you want to make your office seem bigger on the inside.

• Independents' Flag (ThinkGeek) - For the Firefly lover who wants to express their preferred political affiliation. 

 

The list is a bit truncated this year as I plan to make this an annual post. As such, there are plenty of other items that can make political scientists happy.  Of course, if you are an editor, then the simple word "accept" is more than enough. 

Human Rights, Foreign Direct Investment, & INGOs

Over at IPE@UNC, Lindsay Tello discusses the article on foreign direct investment and human rights shaming that Colin Barry, Michael Flynn, and I have in this month’s International Studies Quarterly.  Here’s the abstract:

Non-state actors, such as international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multi- national corporations (MNCs), have attained an increasingly prominent role in modern world affairs. While previous research has focused on these actors’ respective interactions with states, little attention has been paid to their interactions with each other. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the decisions of private actors seeking to invest abroad are affected by the reputational costs of doing business in countries publicly targeted by human rights activists. We find that “naming and shaming” by human rights INGOs tends to reduce the amount of foreign direct investment received by developing  states, providing  evidence that INGO activities affect the behavior of MNCs. An additional implication of our findings is that shaming by INGOs can impose real costs on targeted states in the form of lost investment.

I really appreciate Lindsay’s plug of the paper, and I would like to take the opportunity to share a few thoughts about where we are going from here.

Our paper is an attempt to advance three different literatures: the nascent literature on interactions between non-state actors, the longstanding literature on the relationship between government respect for physical integrity rights and foreign direct investment, and the growing literature on the effects of human rights INGO activities.  Lindsay focuses particularly on the interaction between non-state actors, i.e. MNCs and INGOs, and like her, I believe that this is an important direction for future research.  One thing we see as among the next steps is to look at more disaggregated FDI data.  As Nate Jensen has discussed recently, collecting these data can be incredibly difficult; luckily for me, my co-author, Colin Barry, has already engaged in the hard work of collecting data on 10,738 foreign subsidiaries of 77 major companies from 1993-2010.  We hope to use these data to understand which types of companies are most susceptible to the influence to INGO shaming.

While the study of interactions between non-state actors is still in its early stages, there is a long-standing literature that examines the degree to which state human rights practices and foreign direct investment are interrelated.  While we believe this paper represents a substantial step forward in delineating the separate mechanisms that connect human rights practices to the receipt of foreign direct investment, there is still more to be done.  Our focus in this paper was on how the external perception of the governments a company does business with may affect that company’s investment decisions. However, Lindsay points to another crucial question: How do labor standards (and shaming of individual companies for their exploitation of those labor standards) affect investment decisions?  We are hoping to get at this question in a couple of different ways.  First, Colin and I are currently working with David Cingranelli on a dataset that contains information on seven different labor rights in law and practice for almost every country in the world from 1994 to the present.  We hope to utilize these data in future studies to determine how different types of labor standards affect investment decisions.  Second, we hope to eventually pair data on INGO shaming of individual corporations for their labor standards with disaggregated FDI data, allowing us to get a more direct understanding of the interaction between MNCs and INGOs.

Finally, while recent research has drawn attention to the ability of human rights INGOs to improve human rights practices, we understand far less about the costs that INGO “naming and shaming” can impose on states to encourage them to engage in these improvements.  As such, we see this paper as a step toward understanding those costs, but we still have many ideas about other ways in which INGO shaming is capable of imposing costs on target states.  According to Keck and Sikkink’s “boomerang model” and Murdie and Davis’ findings, INGO shaming is more effective when that shaming is echoed by third party states. As such, we are currently working on a project that looks at the influence of human rights INGOs on US foreign policy; our early results suggest that INGO shaming influences both foreign policy outcomes and statements made by individual policy-makers, such as members of Congress.

Of course, these are just some thoughts about where we would like to take our work.  Where would you like to see this go?  Give us some feedback in the comments.

Political Science and Scientists in the News

Just a quick link to this Atlantic article. It features several works by political scientists on why and when the public is likely to support military action. Complete with graphs and everything. 

 

*Picture taken from the aforementioned and linked Atlantic article. 

History vs. Political Science? Temporally Constrained Studies and Generalizability.

So this is my first post back from a prolonged break. As I mentioned in a previous—albeit brief—entry, I’ve had a busy but enjoyable summer. I got married, defended my dissertation at the beginning of July, and my wife and I have since relocated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama where I’ve accepted a position as a post-doc. We’re both pretty excited about the move and we’re really enjoying ourselves. Having grown up in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, summers that extend beyond a two month window have a certain appeal. And now that we’re getting settled in down here, I’m slowly getting back into a routine for work. I’ve been sitting on some papers for a while now that I’m finally turning my attention to, and it’s my experience with one of these papers that motivated me to write this particular post.

I’ve been thinking recently about how we view the place that history holds in our discipline. Now, I suspect there is an initial reaction that many people (particularly quantitative political scientists) are likely to have to the word “history,” and I’m guessing that is probably one of derision. It’s not that political scientists necessarily dislike history or historians, but this reaction is conceivable given that these disciplines are marked by some important epistemological differences, and many quantitative political scientists are often taught from the outset to avoid relying on single cases when drawing more generalizable lessons and conclusions (with good reason). When we think of historians, it is often in the context of someone who provides an excruciating level of detail about one particular event, and then tries to explain its origins and broader implications/lessons. My issue is not in fact with this particular point—as social scientists, we want to be able to assess just how generalizable the relationships that we’re looking at really are. We are typically interested in exploring systematic relationships, trends, and patterns that hold over broader periods of time and apply to a wide range of actors than are many historical studies. So to be clear from the outset, I am not advocating that quantitative political science should attempt to emulate the professional approach or methods that many historians employ.

My issue, really, stems more from the assertion by many quantitative political scientists that a study that is time bound in some way is “history”. This does not apply to all political scientists, but it’s been my experience that reviewers will often look at the temporal range of a study and dismiss its if it is explicitly bound to a particular period of time that does not overlap with the present (allowing a few years of slack on just what constitutes the “present”, that is). Indeed, some seem to be under the impression that it’s not even political science if the gap between the time period covered by a study and the present is sufficiently large. For example, let’s say I’m interested in understanding the domestic determinants of pre-hegemonic US foreign policy behavior. In this particular instance, there are theoretical reasons to suppose that the behavior of the US could be different in this time period as compared to later periods. Let’s further suppose that I have theoretical expectations regarding the relationship between X and Y, and I write a paper on this relationship for the period between 1900 and 1945. I would not at all be surprised to receive reviews rejecting the paper at least in part because the reviewer(s) questioned the study’s broader relevance, given that it’s bound to a 46-year time period.  

I think these sorts of reactions expose some problems and some important assumptions that we often make as political scientists. First, not every study necessarily needs to neatly map onto the present time period—or any other arbitrarily chosen time period. There is nothing inherently unscientific about the notion that certain relationships or phenomena can only be found in a particular temporal context. I’m fairly certain people have not abandoned the study of dinosaurs simply because we no longer see T-Rex roaming around the countryside. And our field is rife with examples of research, the temporal context of which is fundamentally limited in some way. Scholars of American politics provide perhaps the clearest example of an entire sub-field that cannot be held to apply to a period extending back beyond 1789. The sub-field of international relations is similarly dependent in many ways upon the existence of the modern nation-state, which we typically trace back to 1648, and some of the most widely used only go back to 1815. Do we consider our endeavors in these areas “history” because our studies are bound to these time periods?

Also on this point, there seems to be a double standard when we consider the broader implications of our research. Taking my example from earlier, reviewers will commonly ask how the study of US foreign policy between 1900 and 1945 is relevant for today, but rarely do we consider how a study of US foreign policy from 1945–2013 informs our understanding of the 1900–1945 period. It strikes me that this is (1) perpetually moving the goalpost, and (2) that it may be the wrong goalpost. This may seem like an odd point, but what it “relevant” by current standards is something that obviously changes on a day-to-day basis, and it’s a standard that says nothing about the quality of a paper as a piece of social science, or whether or not a paper helps us to understand a particular question about a given set of relationships. Really, this only represents our own innate temporal biases, but it says nothing about how scientific a piece of research is.  If the goal is truly generalizable theoretical and empirical knowledge, in a temporal sense, then this kind of consideration should apply just as much as thinking about how a study informs our understanding of the present. Conducting a study with the purpose of expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships between societal actors is not synonymous with expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships between societal actors for the purposes of informing our understanding of the present.

And it’s not as though we don’t attempt to deal with “unique” time periods and cases in our current research. However, it’s often the case that the manner in which we deal with these cases is fairly crude. For example, we might include a dummy variable in a model to control for a time period (or characteristics of a time period) that we believe to be unique in some way. Bipolarity during the Cold War, for example. Similarly, we might include a dummy variable in our model to control for states that we believe to be unique—depending on our topic, it might be a state like Israel, Egypt, the US, or maybe a group of states like the “Great Powers”. Sometimes we might also include an interaction term to account for how the effect of one variable might be conditional upon another. 

But these approaches are not always appropriate methods for dealing with the questions that we want to answer. Dummying out a particular time period is only going to tell us whether or not a given time period or group has a higher or lower intercept than the alternative time period or group. This approach is also often atheoretical. For example, we might have a belief that a time period is somehow different, but cannot fully articulate why or how. Similarly, interaction terms with a variable capturing a particular time period, for example, are implicitly suggesting that a given relationship is time-bound in some way. However, these approaches don’t allow us to examine whether or not the remaining variables in our models also have different effects in the context of a particular time period. For example, maybe we’re interested in whether or not both regime type and economic interests have a different effect on conflict propensity during the Cold War as compared to after. This, then, would suggest that maybe splitting our sample into two time periods is the more appropriate means of addressing our question. In fact, the notion that we would dummy out a particular time period because we suspect that it’s “different” in some way, but don’t exactly know how, is exactly the reason why we would want to conduct a study that is temporally bound in the first place.

This points to another issue. I think these biases are somewhat rooted in, and reinforced by, our relatively limited access to “good” data. Almost every journal article contains passages wherein the authors attempt to assert the broader relevance of their work. In the case of international relations, it is also quite common for these articles to then proceed to test their arguments using data that is only available for the post-World War II period. Sometimes, these tests will use data for a single country—often the US. Yet the arguments the authors make are often asserted as applicable to a broader set of countries than just the US, and rarely do such papers even address their own temporal limitations. We implicitly accept the generalizability of papers in which the tests of broader theoretical arguments rely on data from an incredibly narrow and often unrepresentative set of states, but push back when a study openly acknowledges its more narrow temporal confines. Why should we automatically assume that such studies inform our understanding of international relations and state behavior in the 1800s?

This is understandable. Particularly in the field of international relations, the availability of data is exponentially greater in the post-World War II period than before. Commonly used indicators like GDP and trade either don’t exist, are often missing, or are highly inaccurate for earlier time periods. Accordingly, many of our studies focus on this 50–60 year time period—not because it somehow matters more, or because we are interested only in this particular time period, but because this is the period for which we have access to relatively abundant data sources. But even in the post-World War II time period some of the data we use can still be of questionable reliability. Accordingly, when we see an article that focuses on a much earlier time period it sticks out like a sore thumb, and reviewers will often proceed to subject that paper to a different standard than other papers—a standard that really has nothing to do with the execution of the paper or the soundness of its argument.

This knee-jerk reaction against studies that are temporally bound in some way can also have deleterious consequences for our ability to understand the world. Finding that a particular relationship between two variables holds only for a given time period can reveal new and interesting questions. For example, we have evidence that Republicans and Democrats have switched their positions on military spending over the course of the Cold War. If we were looking for a relationship between Republicans and higher military spending over the entirety of this time period, we might erroneously conclude that there is no relationship. Alternatively, the finding that this relationship is temporally bound in some way raises new questions: Why did they switch? What caused the switch? Etc.

If our goal is to continuously develop and refine our understanding of how the world works then we must think carefully about the standards we set. If that standard is that we must only examine relationships that hold for centuries at a time, then we are imposing some very serious limitations on ourselves as researchers. These kinds of “big” systematic relationships are clearly important, but the march of scientific progress is not marked exclusively in these terms. 

Tom Coburn's Grudge, Part II

Via Jennifer Diascro's Twitter feed: The Economist has an article up addressing the specific targeting of Political Science Research by Senator Coburn. The article addresses a point that I've brought up a couple of times in the past (see here for example). Specifically, why only political science?

The Economist:

The real debate seems to be over what is of value. For many Republicans the answer is nothing having to do with political science. Yet it is hard to see how that discipline is any more frivolous than—or even all that different from—economics, sociology or anthropology.Mr Coburn's measure wouldn’t touch NSF funding for other social sciences. But this is the fourth time since 2006 a Republican has singled out political science for cuts.

If we look closer at those efforts, the picture becomes a bit clearer. Mr Coburn, for example, has particularly objected to studies on American attitudes to the filibuster, at a time when Republicans are using the filibuster routinely. Mr Flake had likewise complained about research on climate-change negotiations. When Mr Coburn first proposed cutting off funding in 2009, he complained that NSF money had gone to fund The Human Rights Data Project, which, he noted, had “concluded that the United States has been ‘increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists,’ leading to a worldwide increase in ‘human rights violations’ as others followed-suit.” Mr Coburn even groused that Paul Krugman had received NSF grants more than 15 years earlier. Presumably that was because Mr Krugman went on to become a liberal columnist and not because the research won him a Nobel prize.

In all of these cases, the research risked calling into question the wisdom of policies supported by the Republican Party. In none of the cases did Republicans argue that the studies were flawed. They appeared to simply object to financing research that might contradict their point of view.

I would add that my impression is that political science research is probably the one field that is most likely to draw upon and combine insights from all of these other fields. Perhaps I'm mischaracterizing the work of scholars from these other disciplines, but if this view is accurate then it further hurts the credibility of Coburn's claims to be going after wasteful spending. If the idea is to get as much bang for our buck as taxpayers, political science seems like exactly the right field to invest in. But does this matter? Probably not. Most people just don't know or care enough about this to really see the problem, and for these people Coburn's credibility is really a non-issue, so he can still claim to be simply fighting the good fight against bloated government budgets. 

Finally, I'd urge all of my Americanist and comparativist colleagues to start building up the national security implications of their work. After all, we must remain ever vigilant to safeguard our democratic institutions from infiltration by the communist scourge. Maybe ANES can just add a question asking "Are you a communist spy?" or "Are you a terrorist?" and Coburn will be satisfied. 

Links Galore

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought it was time to put up at least a little something:

Senate Republicans are, for the moment, blocking Chuck Hagel's nomination as Defense Secretary. Admittedly, my attention to current events has been spotty over the past couple of months, but it seems that every time I turn my attention back to this the basic rationale for opposing Hagel has changed. Initially it concerned his comments regarding Israel, then it morphed to include a means of obtaining more information about the attacks on Benghazi, and now it seems to have evolved further to include concerns over compensation Hagel received for giving some speeches since he left the Senate. Ultimately I guess I remain unsure as to how this works out for the better for Republicans—now, or in the long run. 

A meteor injured several hundred people in Russia. 

Spencer Ackerman has a piece up at Wired looking at the mistakes made by the Galactic Empire at the Battle of Hoth. There is also a broader set of responses to Ackerman's piece at Wired, and the folks at the Duck of Minerva have several followup posts debating the shortcomings of the Empire in a wider context. Itemize these posts, I will:

1. Here's Ackerman's post.
2. Wired's symposium.
3. Dan Nexon's piece for said Wired symposium.
4. Patrick Thaddeus Jackon's piece at the Duck.
5. Robert Kelly's piece at the Duck.
6. Steve Saideman piece at the Duck.
7. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's followup at the Duck.

As these discussions have mirrored some of the lunchtime discussions I've had over the past few years with fellow bloggers Chad Clay and Michael Allen, I've enjoyed reading them immensely. I will try to update this list if there are any new additions.