I am currently working on migrating the blog from Typepad to Wordpress, so we may experience some significant disruptions over the next week or two. As such, please do bear with us.
I am currently working on migrating the blog from Typepad to Wordpress, so we may experience some significant disruptions over the next week or two. As such, please do bear with us.
It's the time of year that I affectionately call "conference season," i.e. the springtime one-two punch of the annual meetings of the International Studies Association and the Midwest Political Science Association. This week, thousands of political scientists will descend upon Chicago hoping to learn about new research, present some research of their own, and/or connect with old friends and new colleagues. Your trusty bloggers here at the Quantitative Peace will be among those making the trek, so, in case you are interested in seeing the kind of stuff we work on when we're not blogging, I've put together a schedule of our presentations with a brief description of each. Check it out after the jump.
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.
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.
As I'm sure most of you are aware, Nicholas Kristof believes that American academics (especially political scientists) don't do enough to engage with the public. Political scientists have responded:
Overall, I think it is good that we regularly have these moments to reflect on how we engage with the public. In recent years, we have made great strides in our ability to get the substance of our research out to a larger audience, and I see no evidence that we are slowing down. Still, it never hurts to take some time to think about how we might do more of this and do it better.
Of course, the conversation is ongoing, and many more are likely to contribute. Feel free to add links in the comments!
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.
***
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.
***
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.
In six days, 2014 commences and people across the globe will make resolutions to change their habits in areas concerning health, wealth, family, and work. I do not make such resolutions, but that minor detail will not stop me from providing some boilerplate resolutions for academics. Here are a few ideas to kick off the resolution-making New Year.*
Research/Writing
- I will collect one data point per day.
- I will create one data point per day (perhaps per month if your data involves war onsets).
- I will make sure my "thank you" section includes more genuine choices than strategic choices.
- I will actually write a paper before I write the abstract and submit it to a conference.
- I will derive all of my hypotheses from theory.
- I will write my theory sections before I write my results sections.
- I will not gamble on the probability that a conference will extend its deadline for submissions.
- I will book my hotel/flight more than two days in advance.
- I will write more words of non-fiction than fiction.
- I will read and comprehend the formal theory articles I cite instead of just reading the titles.
- I will include more genuine citations than self-citations.
Teaching
- I will read the papers before I grade them.
- I will know the topic before I lecture on it.
- I will wake up at least ten minutes prior to any lecture I must give.
- I will answer all student emails; even if it is the same question from the same student for the third time. My dog is no longer "eating my emails."
- I will wear at least two different ties during the semester.
- I will not include unsolvable riddles in my Power Point slides.
- During exams, I will not put Europe's "Final Countdown" on repeat over the speakers.
- I will make sure my students understand why proper international relations theory will allow them to achieve optimal victory conditions in Civilization V or Europa Universalis IV.
Service
- I will return reviews prior to an "outstanding review" email from an editor. Failing that, I will return it before the third such email.
- I will not use a Two-Face style coin to determine whether or not to desk-reject each submitted manuscript to my journal.
- I will not attempt to filibuster committee decisions.
- I will blog on substantive topics and not just on popular culture items like movies and holidays.
*To be clear, this does not suggest that I engage in any of the behaviors the above resolutions seek to correct. That is, this list is meant purely for humor.
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.
Continue reading "The Dark Knight Rises and the Economic Impact of Bane's Occupation of Gotham" »
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.
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.
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