The Quantitative Peace

While the IR people are away, the Americanists will play.

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Joshua N. Zingher, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Binghamton University. The content of this post is based on Josh's paper, ‘An Analysis of the Changing Social Bases of America's Political Parties: 1952-2008’, appearing in Electoral Studies. This piece is cross-posted at the London School of Economics' USAPP Blog, which can be found here. 

 

Demographic changes mean that traditional Republican constituencies are shrinking as the Democrats’ grow.

It is difficult to discuss electoral politics in the United States without talking in terms of social groups.  Journalistic accounts of party competition often stress the important role that specific constituencies play (such as the “evangelical” or “Latino” vote) in determining the outcome of presidential elections.  A great deal of political science research has shown that these social cleavages structure party competition.  However, the political importance of these social cleavages can change, which can lead to a reshuffling of the social bases of the party coalitions.  In addition, demographic changes also have the potential to dramatically reshape the political landscape, as new groups enter the electorate and the ratio of existing groups’ changes.  I am interested in how changes in the cleavage structure and changes in the ratio of groups work in conjunction to transform electoral coalitions.  In new research, I investigated two related questions: what group memberships influence individual level voting behavior and how has the number of votes each political relevant group contributes to the party coalitions changed over time?

 

Identifying the Group Bases of Party Support 

So what groups are politically relevant?  To answer this question, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis utilizing nearly 60 years of American National Election Survey (ANES) spanning 1952 to 2008.  I utilized group memberships as independent variables and vote choice as the dependent variable.  The battery of group memberships included variables for class, race, ethnicity, region, education, birth cohort and age. I define politically relevant group memberships as those that exert a statistically significant influence on individual level vote choice.  I ran a separate regression for each decade, which allowed me to assess whether the effect of specific group memberships have changed over time.  The substantive results of these models are displayed in Figure 1 below.

 

Figure 1 – Predicted effect of group membership on vote choice in presidential elections

 

 

The results of the analysis displayed in Figure 1 demonstrate that the following group memberships lead individuals to be consistently and statistically significantly more likely to support one party over the other: 

 

Table 1: The Core Democratic and Republican Social Groups 

Democratic Groups	Republican Groups
African Americans	Whites
Latinos	Protestants
Catholics	Weekly Church Attendees
Union Members	Southern Whites
Non-Religious	Men
College Graduates
Women Jews

 

This analysis highlights the continuity and change that characterizes the parties’ social bases.  Some groups have been stable members of a party coalition for the last 60 years.  African Americans, Catholics, union members and Jews have all been consistent members of the Democratic coalition while whites and Protestants have reliably favored the Republicans. 

Yet, other groups’ political leanings have changed considerably.  Whites in the Southern United States were once reliably Democratic voters; today they are one of the most solidly Republican constituencies.  The divide between the religiously devout and the secular has also become more politically important in recent elections.  Non-religious voters have become increasingly likely to vote for Democratic candidates while weekly church attendees have become more likely to support Republicans.  Similarly, a partisan “gender gap” emerged in the 1980s.  Men have become significantly more likely to vote for Republican candidates while women have become more likely to support Democrats.  In sum, many traditionally politically important social cleavages have endured (e.g. black/white) while other cleavages have become politically important only in recent decades (secular/religious or female/male).

           

Group Contributions and the Importance of Demographic Changes

The preceding analysis established what group memberships significantly influence vote choice, however, simply understanding what group memberships shape individual level voting behavior paints an incomplete picture of electoral change.  Winning an election is not about having core groups of loyal supporters.  Rather, parties must be able to obtain a majority of votes in order to win elections.  Thus, any process that leads to a party gaining more or less from a specific social group is potentially politically consequential.  Figures 2 and 3 show my calculations for each group’s contribution to the Democrats’ and Republicans’ party coalitions, as measured as a proportion of the party’s total votes. There have been considerable changes in the size of group contributions to the party coalitions—many of which highlight the important role that demographic shifts play in reshaping the party coalitions. 

 

Figure 2 - Group contribution as a proportion of Democrats’ total votes: 1952-2008

 

 

Figure 3 - Group contribution as a Proportion of Republicans’ total votes: 1952-2008

 

The Democratic Party has been obtaining an increasing proportion of its support from groups that are growing as proportion of the electorate, such as Latinos, college graduates and the non-religious. In addition, increasing turnout among Latinos and African Americans has also led to the size of these groups’ contributions to the Democratic coalition.  The Republican Party is being forced to confront the opposite scenario—many Republican groups, whites, Protestants and weekly church attendees, are making up a continuously shrinking proportion of the electorate.  Thus far, the Republican Party has been able to offset demographic changes via high turnout among their core groups as well as through winning an increasingly large majority of the Southern white vote.

So what are the conclusions can be drawn from this analysis? Firstly, the group sources of party support are dynamic, the political relevance of certain social cleavages ebb and flow across decades, which is evidenced by the changing relationship between group membership and vote choice.  Secondly, demographic changes can be politically consequential.  The Republican Party is currently in the undesirable position of having to find new sources of electoral support in order to remain viable in future elections.  The Republican Party’s need to find new sources of electoral support has come about not as a result of the loss of electoral support among loyal groups—rather, the Republican Party must find new sources of electoral support simply because traditionally Republican constituencies are making up a shrinking proportion of the electorate.     

 

 

 

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.

 

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.  

Historical Cartography

Uri Friedman at the Atlantic has a nice piece entitled "12 Maps that Changed the World." It's based on a book by Jerry Brotton, professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University. It's worth checking out if you haven't seen it already. This article is interesting for a few reasons. First, it gives you some sense as to how views of the earth have changed over time. Second, Friedman's snippets for each map help to show how politics, culture, and religion all influenced the evolution of these views. And related to that previous idea, it points to that ever-present issue of measurement. Social scientists aren't the only ones who confront these kinds of issues, and information we now tend to assume away as being relatively objective and simple to define/convey (e.g. geography) can actually be more complicated that we might first think:

"All cultures have always believed that the map they valorize is real and true and objective and transparent," Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London, told me. "All maps are always subjective.... Even today’s online geospatial applications on all your mobile devices and tablets, be they produced by Google or Apple or whoever, are still to some extent subjective maps."

There are, in other words, no perfect maps—just maps that (more-or-less) perfectly capture our understanding of the world at discrete moments in time. 

At this point in time I suspect the subjectivity associated with cartography is probably less a matter of relative size and space, and more a matter of content (i.e. borders, landmarks, etc.). Friedman addresses this a bit when he talks about Google's map-making efforts in #12.

Map #4 also stood out to me:

What's most striking about this Korean map, designed by a team of royal astronomers led by Kwon Kun, is that north is at top. "It's strange because the first map that looks recognizable to us as a Western map is a map from Korea in 1402," Brotton notes. He chalks this up to power politics in the region at the time. "In South Asian and Chinese imperial ideology, you look up northwards in respect to the emperor, and the emperor looks south to his subjects," Brotton explains.

There's also a clip from the West Wing attached to Map #11, the Peter's Projection. Something for everyone.

The Dark Knight Rises and the Economic Impact of Bane's Occupation of Gotham

I started working on this post a long time ago and, for whatever reason, never got around to finishing it. So please keep in mind that this was largely written shortly after the film first came out. I should also disclose at the outset that this post will contain spoilers, so if there is some sort of unbelievably powerful force that has kept you from seeing this fantastic movie, please be warned. For those still interested, there's more after the jump.

Educational Attainment and Race in Alabama

A part of my responsibilities as a post-doc here at Alabama entails helping faculty with seeking out external funding for projects. One of these projects has involved developing a program to promote educational outreach throughout the state. In the course of this work I've been digging through some data on educational attainment rates in Alabama. In terms of learning about the political and economic characteristics of my new state, this has been an informative exercise. I also think it's helpful in illustrating the benefits of digging through your data, and helps to shed some light on the benefits of considering the distribution of your data more carefully, and so I thought I'd write a quick post on the subject. For the purposes of this post I'll be drawing on data collected from the American Community Survey's 2006–2010 five year population estimates. 

The mean percentage of Alabama's population holding a bachelor's degree or higher for this time period is 21.7%.  Compare this figure with that of my home state—New York's overall rate is 32.1%. This is a fairly large disparity, but further disparities emerge when we begin to disaggregate the data by race. The graph below shows the mean value of this same variable across the black and white populations of both states. 

From this we can see that the total values mask some important differences between groups within each state. In both cases the college attainment rate of the white population is slightly higher than the overall mean value. Alternatively, the attainment for the black population is significantly lower than the overall mean value in each state. Even New York, which on its face appears to have a significantly higher overall college attainment rate, is not much different from Alabama when we compare black college attainment rates with Alabama's values. 

Even when disaggregating the data in this way, we often still lean on the mean value pretty heavily. The distribution of the data around the mean can be incredibly informative as well, but we don't often pay as much attention to this as we should. Below I present a quick illustrative example of why this can matter.

Looking at Alabama's data again, I have drawn on county-level college attainment data for both groups.

Looking back at the first graph we can see that the statewide mean white college attainment rate was about 24%, and the statewide black attainment rate is roughly 14%. Looking at the county-level distributions can help us to get a better grasp on educational attainment rates throughout the state. In the case of white attainment, we can see that the distribution is slightly skewed towards the low end, but the lowest value in the distribution is around 8–9%. Alternatively, the distribution of black college attainment rates at the county level is more heavily skewed, and the lowest value in the distribution is considerably lower than for the white attainment rates, as shown in the preceding graphs where the X-axes are held constant to help make the figures more comparable. In fact, .30% is the lowest black attainment rate recorded in the data. 

Looking at the distribution of the data in addition to the mean values for these different groups can provide some additional insights into the substantive issues we're interested in. In this case, it's already apparent from considering the mean values that there are disparities in the college attainment rates of the black and white segments of the state's population. However, these values may actually underestimate the magnitude of those disparities. Though the distribution for white attainment rates is still skewed, it's floor is considerably higher than that of black attainment rates. In fact, by my count there were 14 counties in which the recorded black attainment rate was lower than the lowest recorded white attainment rate. The maximum for each group is roughly the same, however. Areas around Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Huntsville have fairly high college attainment rates. But these areas are highly unrepresentative when considering the state more broadly. In fact, although the mean statewide black attainment rate is 14%, the majority of counties fall well below this figure. And while most counties also fall below the mean on white attainment rates, there are, comparatively, more counties falling above the mean. All of this suggests that the mean statewide black college attainment figures are more heavily influenced by outliers in the data than are white attainment rates.  

Lastly, looking at these plots reveals another important feature of the distributions—the variance. The variance in white college attainment rates is 66.2. The variance in black college attainment rates is nearly half that, at only 37.5. This tells us that not only are black college attainment rates lower than white attainment rates, but they are more uniformly so. To put it differently, there is greater dispersion in white college attainment rates, while black college attainment rates are more tightly clustered around lower values. This is made apparent by looking at the two preceding graphs. Though both are skewed towards the lower end of the X-axis, white college attainment figures are less tightly clustered here, as I mentioned above.

This is an issue that I'll come back to in the future, but for now it seemed like this was a useful example for illustrating the importance of familiarizing yourself with the data that you're working with, and how relying less on simple mean values can reveal interesting features of the data you're working with. Bear Braumoeller has an interesting Political Analysis piece about examining the variance, which is worth checking out. More substantively, I also think that this exercise helps to more fully draw out the disparities that may exist between social groups. Relying on simple indicators of central tendency can be useful in some contexts when we want to quickly convey bits of information, but these figures can also be misleading. At the very least, they don't always tell us the full story.

 

How Do You Review?

I’ve been sending articles out for review for a few years now, and I’ve also had the opportunity to review several papers for journals. Having been through each side of the ordeal, I’ve begun to form some opinions on the peer review process as a whole. This is something other political scientists have written extensively about. For example, Michael Allen recently addressed the issue on this blog, and Nathan Jensen recently wrote an interesting piece about one of his paper’s journeys through the political science peer review process.  However, some of my recent experiences have prompted me to think about the process from the vantage point of the reviewer. Most of what I can recall reading on the subject tends to focus on the process as a whole, or discusses the process from the point of view of the submitter, rather than the reviewer. So I thought I’d reflect on my experiences and what practices I’ve tried to incorporate into my reviews.

1. Take reviews seriously: This might seem like an obvious point, and it's one Jensen makes in his post, but for anyone who has been through the process you know you can’t always take this for granted. We’ve all gotten terrible reviews in some way shape or form—some of them are condescending in their tone, some of them seem to address topics or ideas that are completely irrelevant to the paper in question (even after much reflection), some of them are incredibly short, and some of them are just wrong. And these points just concern content. Some reviewers just don’t respond to review requests from journals, and others don’t seem to get around to the review until several months after the paper was submitted.

For the most part, all of these things are well within the power of the reviewer to control. I say “for the most part” because sometimes comments or suggestions made in a review may be wrong, but I’d like to believe reviewers are not dishing out incorrect information on purpose. And maybe sometimes people just aren’t communicating their thoughts well, thereby leaving the reader with no idea as to how those thoughts apply to their paper. Also, sometimes life does get in the way, causing unexpected delays. But, quite often, you as a reviewer can control these sorts of factors.

The review process can and does put a burden on journal editors and reviewers—there’s no question about that. As Jensen notes in his post, senior scholars in particular can be swamped with review requests. But reviewing is probably one area in which scholars can have the greatest impact on the professional fortunes of other scholars. And I don’t mean to imply that reviewers should fail to reject a paper just to provide a boost to someone else’s career. Not every paper deserves to be accepted or given a revise and resubmit, but editors rely to varying degrees on the advice given to them by reviewers. We also know that there are plenty of hard working people out there who face rejection after rejection, many of which are for really silly reasons. If you’re going to reject a paper, the author deserves to know why. A flippant one-line response is not helpful to anyone.

I typically try to get my reviews back within a month or two, if possible. I'm still pretty early on in my career, at a point where not many people know much of my work, so it's probably pretty easy for me to meet this goal as compared to more senior scholars. On the one occasion that I've known in advance that I wasn't able to get reviews back in a timely manner, I’ve communicated this to the editor. It’s easy to blow this responsibility off—I mean, this isn’t your work, right? You are taking time away from your own busy schedule to review someone else’s work. Still, more likely than not you are asking others to do the same for you. 

2. Be clear and detailed: Along the lines of the previous point, a lack of detail in a review doesn’t help anyone. I once received reviews on a paper that ran the gamut from a single sentence saying to publish the article as is, to a rather lengthy, and in no uncertain terms, reject. As nice as it was to see that someone enjoyed your paper so much that they suggested accepting it, I’m not sure that such a brief reply helps. Truthfully, some of the more lengthy and critical reviews provided me with ideas for changes that I really do believe made the paper a better one.  

More often than not, papers are going to be rejected, and reviewers should know this. Even if you like a paper so much that you want to see it accepted as is, or with minor revisions, there will usually be at least one other reviewer on a given paper, and it is quite possible that this other reviewer will have a very different take. No paper is perfect, so it can be helpful to know why a reviewer believes that the strengths of a paper outweigh any weaknesses. Especially when other reviewers are less supportive. It’s also helpful to be able to compare reviews to see if there are any common themes/complaints that are popping up across readers. Given the high rate of rejection, I think it’s important to remember that it’s not really just about the one or two reviews that the author receives on a given round of submission. Setting aside for a moment the fact that one person can get the same paper to review over the course of that paper’s journey through the review process, if reviewers are clearly raising the same concerns through multiple rounds of reviews that might be a pretty good signal that something needs to be changed. Sometimes these sorts of things are easy to spot from one set of reviews, and at other times they’re not, but the authors can’t tell if the reviewer doesn’t provide the detail. Given the high probability of rejection, if you, as a reviewer, think that a paper's strengths outweigh its weaknesses, a failure to highlight those very features could result in them being erased in future rounds of reviews.

I’ve gotten to the point where I offer a brief statement at the beginning of the review in which I explicitly state whether or not I’m recommending acceptance, rejection, etc. I also try to offer a brief summation of what factors I’m considering in making this recommendation. I also try as hard as possible to not waver in my judgment—if you have “mixed feelings” or you “could be convinced” that a paper could be worthy of publication, don’t try to pass the buck to the editor and the other reviewers. Just recommend an R&R and move on. Nothing says you have to accept the second or third round of revisions, but given how competitive the review process is, this kind of waffling is effectively the same thing as rejecting the paper outright, and it's probably not all that helpful to the author.

Beyond the introduction, I also try to clearly identify each individual point that I want to address. And yes, this often involves an enumerated list and/or bullet points. To some extent I think this is just a matter of style. However, it can be difficult in a meandering review to discern the exact points that the reviewer wants you to address, and as much as it is the author’s responsibility to take their revisions seriously, it is also the reviewer’s responsibility to make clear those points that need addressing. Furthermore, we hold ourselves to a pretty high standard when it comes to organizing our thoughts and arguments in the context of an academic paper, so why shouldn’t it bethe same in reviews? It is, after all, all part of the same, broader, knowledge-generating process.

3. Offer constructive criticism: Again, this seems like an obvious one, but you can’t take it for granted. We spend an awful lot of time in college and graduate school learning/practicing how to pick apart other people’s arguments. So while pointing out the flaws in someone’s article is certainly an important part of the review process, I also think it’s equally important to be able to point out its strengths.

For the most part, my experience on this point leads me to believe that most reviewers are pretty good about this. However, I have received reviews that are highly critical, with little in the way of constructive commentary. "Complainy" might be the most appropriate made-up adjective to describe these reviews. If you as a reviewer think that there are some deficiencies with an argument or method, you need to spell that out for the author. If such deficiencies were clear to all, then they probably wouldn’t be in the paper to begin with. Further, I think the degree to which any flaw is damning to the overall article is contingent upon the availability of feasible alternatives. If you don’t like a measure that the author uses, don’t just complain and then move on. At the very least, ask the author to clarify whether or not superior measures are actually available. If you are aware of one that you believe is superior, then please share it and explain why you believe it to be better suited to the analysis at hand. Again, this is a collaborative venture, and part of the review process is being able to access the knowledge of other scholars.

I would also say that personally, as a junior scholar, I really do appreciate a good review when I get one. Some people have clearly taken the time to think about my work, and I appreciate it. As I said before, I’ve been fortunate enough to get some great feedback that I have subsequently incorporated into my work, and I do think the work is better for it. Criticism accompanied by constructive feedback and advice generally seems to be more helpful than merely pointing out the faults of a particular project.

4. Be transparent when it comes to your own limitations: As I stated above, sometimes reviewer comments are just wrong. Sometimes this is an honest mistake, and the reviewer is trying to offer sincere advice or criticism, but just gets it wrong. But, as an author this can be incredibly annoying—particularly if some factually incorrect statement could have been a major contributing factor to your paper’s rejection. If I’m reviewing a paper and I’m unclear about a measure, statistic, or method, I typically try to be entirely transparent when it comes to my own ignorance on the matter. Now I'm pretty confident in the substantive and methodological training that I received in graduate school, but this doesn’t mean I’ve mastered every analytical approach or estimation technique. Nor does it mean that I can’t learn even more about those topics and methods that I have been exposed to. Indeed, I’ve learned a lot over the past seven years, but as this SMBC comic so nicely conveys, sometimes expanding your knowledge base can raise new questions. So, when you think you don’t know, or you know you don’t know, just say, “I don’t know.” Feel free to even pose a question on the issue to the author in your review. After all, there is a certain irony in the idea that certain people, having devoted themselves to an industry that (ostensibly) is based on the discovery and accumulation of knowledge, would be so reluctant to utter those three words.

I'm sure senior scholars may have a different take on some of these issues. As I said, I'm still very early on in my career, so I'm not facing the same kinds of pressures from as many sources as they are. I don't have to deal with dissertation committees or a never ending stream of review requests. Still, I don't mind reviews all that much. They can provide me with some insights into what people in my general area of expertise are working on, and they often lead me to read works that I've not previously noticed or thought much about. But perhaps my views will change given time. 

 

 

 

 

 

Follow-up

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post. Chad sent me a link to this paper that was recently posted on AJPS' early view. I've not read the entire article yet, but it seems apropos given the subject matter of yesterday's piece. 

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. 

Updating the Introduction to International Relations Syllabus to 2.0

Note: We are returning to a weekly blogging schedule. As such, if you still have us on your RSS reader, new content will be regular!

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I am about to begin my fifth semester teaching introduction to international relations and it will be my third such offering at Boise State.  We are elevating the course to serve more advanced political science students and we now offer it at the 300 level instead of the 200.  Given this elevation in designation, prerequisites, and a new year of teaching the course, I am working to revamp my syllabus as well as make it more friendly to the modern college student.

Specifically, the recommended reading sections of my previous syllabi have somewhat languished with a few article or book recommendations.   The biggest effort in my revamp is not to just merely recommend a few books that my students are unlikely to read but, instead, to provide material that is easily within their reach and may prove more engaging than what they already have to read for class.  As my consumption of material has become more digital, I am trying to now pass on that material to my students. More specifically, in addition to the occasional book recommendation, connecting students to podcast episodes, online lectures/course, blog episodes tv episodes, youtube videos, webcomics,  and songs* may give them other avenues to explore international relations.

One of the more difficult topics for students has been our discussions on game theory.  The syllabus now offers a few additional avenues the students may wish to explore if they are either struggling with the topic or they are enjoying the topic so much they want additional material:

 

For the above portion of the syllabus, I have embedded links into each suggestion so students can easily click the link in the .pdf to be taken to an online source, the library's copy of the item, or a place they can purchase the item if they are compelled to pick up their own copy.  Additionally, if the students would rather access the material through Blackboard, all the persistent links are there as well:

 

One of my goals in crafting the syllabus in this manner is to provide other digital areas the students can check out besides what they may simply find on Wikipedia.  I do not actively discourage my students from using Wikipedia (it is not allowed as a source on written assignments) as I think it is a good resource to begin researching a topic or to find additional information on a topic.  However, as an encyclopedia, it engages students in a similar way that a textbook does and still may not offer material in a format that a student may find palatable.  We all have different tastes and preferences, so offering additional avenues to engage those tastes may offer additional insight into the classroom.  

 

Challenges:

The investment in finding content appropriate for the syllabus and providing it for students comes with a few challenges as well:

1) Students will ignore it: For the vast majority of recommended books in my and other syllabi, I expect this to be the norm as the task of actually sitting down and reading a book that may or may not be interesting to you is daunting.  Why read a lengthy book if I can go to Google or Wikipedia and find a condensed summary of the argument?  I hope to help this process along to some degree by providing easy links to materials that may further pique a student's interest.  Of course, I will not ever get 100% of my students to look at recommended material (that number is nearly impossible to achieve with required material alone), but providing additional, easy avenues to help some portion of students understanding seems valuable.

2) Incomplete Coverage: What I offer on the syllabus will inevitably be incomplete on a few different metrics. First, it will not have every topic covered equally across all types of material.  Second, it will also lack appeal to every type of student.  Both of these are issues I find easy to stomach. In some respects, this will be an evolving process as I come across new material, I will add them to the syllabus while removing items that are not withstanding the test of student interest. 

3) Too much information: The opposite problem of number 2 is over-saturation. With each topic, there is an ever-expanding catalogue of digital items I can add to the syllabus.  However, each additional link or line on the syllabus has the possibility of obscuring the topic we discuss or seem too overwhelming for a student to really explore. Over-saturation of information runs the risk of an Huxleyian effect of rendering useful information inert.   For example, my week on game theory is already quite large and I would rather not add additional items to list. Being selective is the answer to this. 

A few other approaches:

I do link to specific blog posts in the syllabus and will be adding additional posts when they crop up. I have toyed with the idea of requiring a subscription to a national newspaper and have quizzes occasionally on major IR news items, but that seemed a bit too artificial. Instead, I am actively encouraging my students to either add blogs to their normal reading habits or, if they use reddit, then to subscribe to the subreddits that deal with what we study. Specifically, the four subreddits include: /r/IRstudies, /r/PoliticalScience, /r/Comparative, and /r/ForeignPolicyAnalysis.  I do not offer a grade incentive for this, so students will employ this sporadically. However, if they already use an RSS service or Reddit, the simple addition of blogs/subreddits is trivial and could help them in the class.

Also, for the first time this semester, I am attempting to use Blackboard's wiki as an effort for collective note taking. I had collective note-taking last semester organized through Google Drive. This project had some success with a handful of students participating, but the addition of a third party software made verification/grade incentives more difficult than I initially imagined.  As such, the wiki can serve a similar purpose and I offer a weak incentive of adjusting grades favorably for students that are on the precipice of a higher grade. 

 

Final Thoughts:

1) This link provides the current version of my syllabus.  There are a few items that are still in flux and I need to back-fill several some of the later topics with obvious choices that I am currently neglecting. Specifically, the sections on Human Rights and the Environment are undeveloped; I likely need to ask my co-bloggers for suggestions since they know those areas better than I do.

If you have any obvious suggestions please post them here or message me on one of the various social networks I visit.  If you have any suggestions, please do post them here or forward them to me.  

2)This will be an ongoing project and will hopefully have all of my syllabi, eventually, in a similar state. I think this type of cross-referential material will be useful for all types of subjects/disciplines, the challenge is to continual building the catalogue to match. Doing this all in one sitting is much more challenging than doing it as you go along. As I am teaching Comparative Foreign Policy for the first time, I will be slowly updating the syllabus as I go along with new content. For example, /r/ForeignPolicyAnalysis is doing a series of posts on the major theories of foreign policy that my students may find useful. 

 

 

*I have just started this part of the project and I am not sure if music is a solid addition or not.  Going through my personal collection is somewhat limited and there are a few other sources for how music relates to international relations/political science that I still need to draw from/peruse.