The recent events in Montana have sparked a broad debate about the ethics of field experiments (I’ve written once and twice about it, and other recent posts include this letter from Dan Carpenter, this Upshot post by Derek Willis, and this Monkey Cage post by Dan Drezner). I wanted to continue a point that I … Read more
Nothing gets political scientists as excited as elections. In this previous post, I discussed the Montana field experiment controversy. In that post, I pointed out that the ethics of field experiments in elections—e.g., in which some people are given additional information and others are not—are complicated. In the majority of the post, I was attempting to … Read more
Three political scientists have recently attracted a great deal of attention because they sent mailers to 100,000 Montana voters. The basics of the story are available elsewhere (see the link above), so I’ll move along to my points. The researchers’ study is being criticized on at least three grounds, and I’ll respond to two of these, setting the third … Read more
Steven Pinker recently offered a lengthy explanation of “Why Academics Stink At Writing.” First, it is important to note that the title of Pinker’s post is misleading. Indeed, as he points out early on, he is actually arguing about why academic writing is “turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?” This is different … Read more
Yesterday, while actively following the events in Ferguson, I was asked the following by @GenXMedia: White Suburban America seems riddled with apathy, excuses and disconnect about #Ferguson. Any ideas why? Upon further prompting, it became clear that @GenXMedia wanted a response to each of the three things that White Suburban America is riddled with: apathy, excuses, and disconnect. It is important … Read more
Like many people, especially here in St. Louis, the ongoing events in Ferguson have consumed my attention and, frankly, really shaken me. After much thought, I have possibly come up with a manageable take on one angle of “the math of” the situation. It is important to distinguish protest from rebellion. Protest is distinguished from rebellion on the basis … Read more
We now live in a world of seemingly never-ending “data” and, relatedly, one of ever-cheaper computational resources. This has led to lots of really cool topics being (re)discovered. Text analysis, genetics, fMRI brain scans, (social and anti-social) networks, campaign finance data… these are all areas of analysis that, practically speaking were “doubly impossible” ten years ago: neither … Read more
The “academic job market season” in political science starts in the fall and continues through the early spring.[0] If you aren’t familiar with how the academic job market works, it’s basically still old school: schools post ads looking to hire for a more or less specialized position, applicants (“candidates”) send in “packets” containing a curriculum … Read more
In this post on Mischiefs of Faction, Seth Masket discusses the recent debate about whether (super-)rich are overly influential in American politics. I’ve already said a bit about the recent Gilens and Page piece that provides evidence that rich interests might have more pull than those of the average American. In a nutshell, I don’t believe that … Read more
This post by Ezra Klein discusses this study, entitled “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” by Dan M. Kahan, Erica Cantrell Dawson, Ellen Peters, and Paul Slovic. The gist of the post and the study is that people are less mathematically sophisticated when considering statistical evidence regarding a political issue. The study presented people with “data” from a (fake) experiment about the effect of a hand cream … Read more