Your humble blogger has been knee-deep in chairing, discussing, and attending International Studies Association panels all of which seem to have the word "diffusion" in the title and SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!!!

Now, naturally, with the global financial crisis and its aftermath there's been a lot of talk about debts and deficits. And with the defense sequester and what-not, there's been a lot of talk about rising levels of partisanship.  And I've come to the reluctant conclusion that a lot of this talk need to stop, like, right now. 

Here's the dirty truth about most international studies scholars: They know a fair amount about the high politics of international affairs and almost next to nothing about the rest of life. Of course, the rest of life does impinge on world politics, so there's some natural overlap. The problem starts when, in talking about non-IR stuff, we start to think that we have just as much expertise in these areas. Which we don't. At all. 

Last night I tweeted a query about what areas IR scholars should be quiet about and got way too many answers to fit in a blog post. So, here are five things about which I'd really like 99 percent of international relations scholars to shut the hell up:

1) Macroeconomic policy. Should the United States cut its deficit further? Are budget cuts, tax cuts, or tax increases necessary? How can the eurozone escape its current macroeconomic malaise? Most of us have no friggin' clue what the correct answers are for the United States, and that goes double for the euro zone. So unless you're actually publishing scholarly work on global macroeconomic policy, shut up.

2) The role of money in American politics. Foreign policy scholars are far too often shocked -- shocked!! -- when they see interest group politics at work. The Citizens United decision has only amplified this lament. The reaction to this is to either bemoan the general health of the American polity or to start developing simple theories that argue that money or lobbies explain everything about politics. Now I might not be the biggest fan of the American politics subfield, but I'm pretty sure they know more about this topic than we do. So shut up and read what they have to say.

3) Partisanship in the United States. Did you know that it's getting worse? And that it's paralyzing the U.S. government? And that it's getting worse? One of the natural biases of foreign policy scholars is to think in terms of a national interest, and then act appalled when there are different partisan conceptions of that term. Basically, what applies to #2 applies to this point as well.   

4) The Internet. As near as I can determine, when asked about this technology affects international politics, most scholars answer with some variation of "networks networks networks cyber cyber cyber." Some scholars do very good work on this subject. The rest of us should shut up for a spell and read them. 

5) Diffusion. Never again. Ever.   

What else, my dear readers, would you like to see less gabbing about from international affairs scholars? 

Yesterday an amendment to the continuing resolution funding the U.S. government, sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was passed by a voice vote in the Senate. Its purpose? 

To prohibit the use of funds to carry out the functions of the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation, except for research projects that the Director of the National Science Foundation certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.

Now, from a pure material interest perspective, this should make me happy. I've never received a dime in NSF funding, and I'm sitting on a pretty good grant for the next 5-10 years, so from a strictly relative gains perspective, I acquire more influece in the discipline. Furthermore, the national security exemption means that whatever scraps the NSF throws to political science will go to my preferred subfields like international relations and comparative politics. 

The thing is, though, that I love political science. I want to see more quality research being done, and the NSF cutoff pushes things in the opposite direction. So I'm not happy. 

If I'm displeased, however, then I think it's safe to say that the American Political Science Association is galactically pissed off at this outcome: 

Adoption of this amendment is a gross intrusion into the widely-respected, independent scholarly agenda setting process at NSF that has supported our world-class national science enterprise for over sixty years.

The amendment creates an exceptionally dangerous slippery slope. While political science research is most immediately affected, at risk is any and all research in any and all disciplines funded by the NSF. The amendment makes all scientific research vulnerable to the whims of political pressure. 

Adoption of this amendment demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the breadth and importance of political science research for the national interest and its integral place on the nation's interdisciplinary scientific research agenda. 

Singling out any one field of science is short-sighted and misguided, and poses a serious threat to the independence and integrity of the National Science Foundation.

And shackling political science within the national science agenda is a remarkable embarrassment for the world's exemplary democracy.

I've blogged at length in the past on the substantive reasons why a cutoff of NSF funds for political science is really, really, stupid. Another post on that question won't change things. And I vented my frustration at the willful ignorance of Senator Coburn yesterday, so there's no reason to go there now. Yesterday, however, there was rollicking debate on Twitter about the need for political scientists to, well, be better at politics. Folks such as Phil Arena, Jay Ulfelder, William Winecoff, and Jacob Levy observed that APSA's tactical response to Coburn's folly -- encouraging APSA members to email Congress and so forth -- was pretty lame. Only if we used the Dark Arts of political science knowledge could we somehow stymie the Senator from Oklahoma. 

Here's the thing, though -- while I'm no expert in American politics, I think I know enough of the Dark Arts to know that we could have the best arguments in the world and still recognize that political science is good and truly f**ked. 

From a straight interest group perspective political scientists don't matter. At all. The NSF funding for political science is a $13 million appropriation spread out geographically. There is no concentrated interest in a particular congressional district or state to motivate a member of Congress to fight for this issue with as much ardor as Tom Coburn or Jeff Flake. 

Now, one could argue that if you believe in epistemic communities -- i.e., the power of collective expertise -- to influence uninformed members of Congress, then maybe political scientists could function as Weberian activists and educate members about the inherent value of political science. The thing is, as I've argued previously, politicians and pundits do not think of politics as a scientific enterprise. Maybe a few pundits developed a new appreciaion for statistics following the 2012 election, but that's not quite the same thing. So an epistemic community of political scientists won't cut it. Hell, all social scientists would be unlikely to persuade the Senate -- remember, this is a body that was copacetic with a Senator blocking a Nobel Prize winning economist from sitting on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Maybe we could logroll with all  the natural and physical sciences too, but if the past decade of climate change policy has proven anything, it's that this won't work terribly well. 

Another gambit would be to move public opinion on this issue to the point where Congress had no choice but to accede to the masses ... except the masses likely support the cuts. A mass public that believes the foreign aid budget is a thousand times larger than it actually is likely believes that cutting NSF funding of political science goes a long way toward tackling the deficit. Furthermore, as Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's research shows, it's next to impossible to correct that misperception. 

There are three other ways for political scientists to alter the status quo -- but each of them has issues: 

1) A political scientist needs to come up with a killer scientific breakthrough that really advances knowledge in the field in an unambiguous manner. We're talking something Nobel-worthy. Oh, wait, Elinor Ostrom already did that, and it didn't matter. Never mind...

2) A political scientist needs to develop a predictive model that's so powerful that it yields substantial profit -- to the point where the political scientists can afford to set up an endowment that substitutes for NSF funding. The thing is, there already are political scientists who have thrived in the private sector -- but I'm not seeing enough cabbage being earned to create endowments. 

3) Finally, maybe a trained political scientist could just run for the Senate, get elected, and apply the necessary counterweight to Coburn et al ... except that one of Coburn's co-sponsors is Arizona freshman Senator Jeff Flake, who has -- wait for it -- an M.A. in political science. 

Am I missing anything, or is political science good and truly f**ked? 

UPDATE: OK, there's one other possibility that could theoretically shift the status quo. Suppose a rival great power -- say, a country that rhymes with "Dinah" -- were to suddenly throw around huge research $$$ to develop a comparative advantage in poli sci. Say that the money was so good that it started to attract the cream of the political science crop. That might spur Congress to freak out about the existence of a political science gap. 

So, any political scientists sitting on fat research offers from China -- now is the time to accept them. 

Justin Logan has blogged a response to my post from yesterday.  He's also done the courtesy of uploading the paper from which both his recent post and his 2009 post emanate. 

Now Logan makes some compelling points to rebut me, such as:

It’s worth noting that a disproportionate number of academics writing about grand strategy are realists, so that’s coloring the ideological content of what the academics are producing. Drezner has complained about realist victimhood before, but grand strategy is an elite sport, and even headmits that “America’s foreign policy elites are more hostile to realpolitik – though even here, things can be exaggerated.” Drezner then points to Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft as bearers of the realist flag, but even if you would lump Kissinger and Scowcroft in with Posen and Walt (I wouldn’t), both men are in their late 80s. There is no realist faction in the FPC, if by “realist” we mean “person whose views on strategy comport with leading academic realists.”

Think about members of the FPC who work on strategy and scholars in the academy who do so. Is a potential strategy debate between, say, a Democrat like Anne-Marie Slaughter and a Republican like Robert Kagan very interesting? I don’t think so. It’s fought between the seven and nine-yard lines at the primacy end of the field. Then consider a debate between, say,Barry Posen or John Mearsheimer, on the one hand, and Kagan or Slaughter on the other. Pass the popcorn.

Now, ordinarily, this would get my intellectual juices flowing and I'd start trying arguing that Logan is conflating IR theorists with realists a bit or whatnot.

The thing is, this was my actual view (as opposed to my worldview) for much of today:

You know, with this kind of view, it doesn't take much to realize that the problems of a few international relations wonks doesn't amount to a hill of sand in this world. 

So I'm conceding this round to Logan.  Excellent points, and nicely done!!  I'll read the paper when I'm back in a cold climate. 

[So, basically, any author of an MS you refereed this week should be feeling pretty good right about now!!--ed.  Pretty much, yeah.]

Dan Nexon has sparked some online debate among political scientists about whether our hiring process makes any kind of rational sense.  Dan expresses particular disdain towards the centerpiece of any campus interview, the job talk --  a format in which a job candidate speaks for 30-45 minutes and then fields questions from faculty and grad students in the audience for 30-60 minutes. 

Dan thinks the whole exercise is stupid:

In fact, the job talk is most useful for… assessing the ability of a candidate to give a job talk. The reason we place so much weight on it is that most academics (and I include myself in this category) are too damn lazy pressed for time to skim carefully read candidates’ portfolios. And why should we? It isn’t like there’s a good chance that the person we hire will become lifetime colleagues… Doh!

I’ve heard rumors of other, more rationale systems. Some say that the University of Chicago conducts an intensive proseminar in which the candidate provides introductory remarks and then everyone discusses an article-length piece of research. This strikes me as a plausible alternative to the modal job talk.  But I ask our readers: are there others? And does anyone want to defend the status quo?

OK, first off, for the record, in my experience that's not how the University of Chicago did job talks.  Their process involved some criticism of rational choice theory,  a lot more hot wax and-- but I can't say anything more because of that darn oath of secrecy.

Seriously, though, Dan's post triggered a whole passel of responses.  Tom Pepinsky defended the institution, as did Jeremy Wallace.  Nate Jensen wants to know what's the replacement system.  Nexon responded by sticking to his guns, and Tom Oatley went so far as to declare that technological change had rendered the original motivation for the job talk obsolete. 

I think I have to side with the defenders of the job talk -- or, rather the job talk and Q&A, because the latter part is way more important in my own evaluation of a candidate. 

Dan's claim that it serves no purpose other than giving a job talk seems short-sighted to me.  In part, a job talk is an act of editing.  No one -- well, no one but political theorists -- simply reads their paper verbatim.  They have to organize and select what they believe are the most compelling and crucial parts of their argument.  They also have to pitch it to a level that's wider than their subfield.  An Americanist will know little about Adorno or Agamben; a comparativist is likely to be unfamiliar with work on state legislatures, and a political theorist would have no reason to know much about the Basel Core Principles.  This holds with even more force at an interdisciplinary public policy school like Fletcher or SAIS.  A job talk lets me see whether this candidate will be able to talk to anyone outside of the five other people on the planet who know this specific topic cold. 

If I've read the paper, I'm always curious to see how a candidate crafts his or her presentation.  And if the presenter can't hold my attention, that's a bad sign, because if they can't make their own work compelling, good luck keeping the attention of less interested students with work that's not their own. 

Truthfully, however, the most important part of a job talk to me is not the talk, it's the question and answer session aferwards.  How well can a candidate respond to tough questions?  Stupid questions?  What are the reservoirs of expertise that lie below the surface?  In my professional experience, I can only think of a handful of candidates that blew their chances with the actual job talk.  I can think of a LOT of them, however, that deep-sixed their chances because they couldn't handle good questions.  I'd also add that while I often have questions after reading the paper, I wind up with different questions when I hear the talk -- in no small part because the presentation reveals what the candidate thinks is mportant. 

Good political scientists have to give a LOT of talks in their career -- large lectures to undergraduates, draft paper presentations to graduate students, invited talks at other universities, APSA panels, smaller field conferences, symposium conferences, workshop talks, think tank presentations, and even the occasional public lecture.  In my experience, the job talk is the format that best covers all of these other types of presentations. 

Am I missing anything, fellow political scientists? 

Dani Rodrik tweets that Albert O. Hirschman has passed away.  Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has a lovely obituary up explaining Hirschman's life and work. 

You humble blogger has, on occasion, waxed poetic about Hirschman's accomplishments as a scholar and a writer. His primary area of expertise was in development economics, particularly in Latin America. He was a true giant in the larger study of political economy -- which is why my best-global-political-economy-of-the-year awards are named The Albies. The Social Science Research Council also named a prestigious award after Hirschman:

The Prize recognizes Albert Hirschman's pioneering role in contemporary social science and public policy as well as his life-long commitment to international economic development. Exploring theory and practice, the history of ideas - economic, social or political - and innovative approaches to fostering growth, Hirschman has seen scholarship both as a tool for social change and as an inherent value in a world in need of better understanding. He has written in ways that help social science effectively inform public affairs. His work stands as an exemplar of the necessary knowledge that the Social Science Research Council seeks to develop and the interdisciplinary and international approach in which it works.

What did Hirschman write to earn such honorifics? Well, Exit, Voice and Loyalty is one of those books that you have to read if you're earning a Ph.D. in any social science; as I've said before, that book was crucial to some of my thinking behind All Politics is Global. Beyond that book, however, Hirschman wrote must-read books on international economic power (National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade), economic ideas (The Passions and the Interests), political rhetoric (The Rhetoric of Reaction), and the evolution of the social sciences themselves ("Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding").

Hirschman's ideas ere important, but I'd argue that his writing style was equaly important -- clear, lucid, vivid, never a word wasted. As a grad student, I dozed off a lot reading a necessary but abstruse journal article. One did not fall asleep reading Hirschman -- hell, he was better than any energy drink in boosting one's intellectual energies.

He will be missed -- but not forgotten.

So, my post about good and bad reasons to get a Ph.D. in political science has made a few waves.  I'd like to clarify, endorse and respond to some of the feedback I've received. 

Just to recap, here was the primary point of my post:

Even standard political science departments are littered with students who have sterling resumes, glittering letters of recommendation from well-connected fixtures of the foreign policy community, and that disturbing tendency to look past the task at hand to plot out steps three, four and five of their Ascent to Greatness.

Here's the thing about these students: 95 percent of them will not earn a Ph.D. -- and most of the rest who do get it will only have done so by finding the most pliant dissertation committee alive. Ambition and intelligence can get someone through college and a professional degree. It can even get someone through Ph.D.-level coursework. What it can't do is produce an above-the-bar dissertation.

In my day, I've known too many students who were talented in many ways, and yet got stymied at the dissertation phase. For people who have succeeded at pretty much everything in life to that point, a Ph.D. seems like just another barrier to transcend. It's not. Unless you are able to simultaneously love and critically dissect your subject matter, unless you thrive in an environment where people are looking forward to picking apart your most cherished ideas, you won't finish.

Now, some of the comments and tweets about this post suggested that I was pooh-poohing the idea of getting a Ph.D. if you don't want to become a professor.  To be clear:  that is not what I was trying to say.  Indeed, if anything, given the state of the academic job market I heartily endorse "non-traditional" career paths for Ph.D.s.  Furthermore, as Joshua Foust notes in his response, "If you want to succeed in Washington, a PhD is the quickest path to it. Anything less is just an uphill battle."  There is no shame in going from a doctoral program to a job in DC, and I was certainly not implying that there should be. 

Foust offers a strong counter-explanation for why aspiring policy wonks should go for a Ph.D.:

[A] PhD offers a better way for many [than getting a professional M.A.]. PhDs are usually funded, which means they cost nothing to the student (stipends may not be much, but that’s a separate matter — the financial loads are drastically different). They also take a lot longer, say 5 years minimum but more likely 7 if you’re young and right out of undergrad.

Even so, that PhD is more or less free. Entering the DC workforce with a PhD, instead of a Masters, is an instant leg-up. For organizations like think tanks, it instantly signals research skills; for NGOs it signifies a strong work ethic. And for many government jobs, contractor jobs, or jobs at IGOs like the World Bank or IMF, it is a basic minimum requirement for most non-admin jobs. In almost any field, having a PhD is a shortcut to the initial round of CV scrutiny — an easy and quick way to sort candidates.

Now, let's assume Foust is correct about the money (doctoral students about to comment that a doctorate is not "more or less free" -- I know!!  I'm not asserting this, Foust is!!  Go bug him!!!).  It seems like the Ph.D. is the smart play then, right? 

Wrong.  Foust is assuming that the choice is a binary one -- between climbing the policy ladder without a a doctorate or with a doctorate.   The point of my initial post is that there's a third possibility, and it's the one that will fell people getting a Ph.D. for professional reasons only -- that one will start a Ph.D. program but never finish. 

First of all, that is, by far, the worst outcome.  Matt Groening can express this far better than I: 

In all seriousness, life is not quite this bad for those who fail to finish.  It's not great, however.  For those who recognize early on that the Ph.D. is not for them, it's OK.  Exiting a doctoral program after, say, three years with a terminal masters is about as graceful an exit as one can execute. 

The more years one stays in, however, the greater the pain of exiting.  There's a lot of psychological scarring, and the networks built up in a doctoral program are likely inferior to those that would be built up via a lower-level policy job.  And I'd wager that it's precisely the ambitious, career-minded DC types who are less likely to cut and run -- because their entire life experience to date suggests that quitting is the wrong course of action. 

Furthermore, not finishing a Ph.D. is not exactly uncommon.  Click on this slide show about Ph.D. attrition rates from the Council of Graduate Schools, and note the following three facts:

1)  Only 46% of all entrants finish their Ph.D. after seven years in a program.   

2)  For social science Ph.D.s, that figure is even lower -- 41%

3)  If you extend it out to ten years, the lowest completion rate among the social sciences is political science -- only 44% complete a doctorate after a decade.  In other words, entering a Ph.D. program and then not finishing is the modal outcome. 

Foust is likely correct that getting a Ph.D. gives one a leg up in the DC policy wonk rat race.  But I know I'm correct when I say that starting but not finishing a Ph.D. is the worst possible career trajectory.  It is this outcome that I'm harping on when I'm warning ambitious go-getter policy wonks to think long and hard about why they want to get a doctorate.  It can't just be to win "The Game." 

Now, to be fair, Tara Maller makes a valid point when she notes that "personal challenges" can fell a Ph.D. candidate.  However, I would argue that the biggest impediment to finishing is not having a clear idea of what's involved in getting a doctorate in the first place.   In an email from Afghanistan, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Dempsey -- a Columbia Ph.D. and published scholar -- made this point: 

Part of the dynamic I think is 'degree-inflation' where everyone has a master's, so it seems logical that to distinguish yourself from the pack that a PhD is the next logical step.  While finishing my dissertation I had quite a few officers who had just finished MA or MPA programs asking how they could proceed to a PhD, with no idea that they were two entirely separate animals.

I've also had to break it to people that publishing an academic book is not the road the glory it might seem from afar, and that the most you can expect out of it beyond the intrinsic reward of contributing to an ongoing discussion is a box of very heavy 'business cards'....

Knowing what you are getting into and the need to fully embrace the topic are key to success.  Sometimes that will align with a non-academic career-- probably more often not....  The difference between an MA and a PhD isn't incremental but fundamental, and that is a hard gap to bridge when coming from an institution that is decidedly pragmatic and application-oriented as a matter of survival.

Dempsey's point is the one I was trying to ham-handedly make in my last post.  It is natural for people in DC to believe that the Ph.D. is the next logical step after a professional or masters degree.  It.  Is.  Not. 

When asked about whether getting a Ph.D. is a good idea, I usually tell men that writing a dissertation is the closest experience they will have to being pregnant -- except that instead of nine months they'll be carrying that sucker for 2-5 years.  I then tell women that, of course, writing a dissertation is not remotely close to being pregnant -- but take the most volatile relationship from your past and then multiply that volatility by a factor of fifty.  That's what it's like.  And I haven't even gotten to the incredible socialization pressures within graduate school to feel like you should pursue an academic career instean of a non-academic one. 

Despite these barriers, is it possible to simply "grind out" the Ph.D. without loving the subject matter and the process?  Yeah, in theory.  I've met one or two extraordinary people in my day who were able to pull that off.  But -- and I cannot stress this enough -- I've met far more people who thought they could grind it out and then met their ruin on the shoals of some doctoral program.  These are the people who stay in a doctoral program long after everyone else knows that the jig is up.  That is the fate I am warning policy wonks  away from. 

There is no shame in thinking that a Ph.D. gives one a leg up in the Beltway job market.  But that cannot and should not be the primary reason to get a doctorate.  What separates a Ph.D. from other degrees is the scholarly act of writing a dissertation.  If there is no genuine fascination with the subject matter, if there is no love of the topic, then there is a 99.5% probability of failure.  That has to be the primary driver.  If it's fame and fortune, then the professional degree route -- a J.D., an M.B.A. or a M.A.L.D. -- is the better route for you. 

Steve Saideman sums up why I'm making this argument so vehemently: 

An MA is a professional degree for the policy-maker but most PhDs are not that.  They require patience, analytical rigor, the ability to think theoretically, to be open to criticism, and so on.  So, [Dan] has seen those who are in it just for the stamp flounder and fail. 

That's correct.  Maybe I'm exaggerating the costs of failure here -- but I don't think so. 

So, to conclude.  There is no shame in getting a Ph.D. with the intention of pursuing a non-academic career.  Foust is correct that there are certain material rewards that come with earning a Ph.D.  But unlike other degrees, those rewards cannot be the principal reason you choose to pursue a doctorate.  That is the recipe for misery and heartbreak. 

MacArthur Foundation president Robert Gallucci has an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on a topic that feels juuuuuust a bit familiar.  Here's how he opens it:

Something is seriously wrong in the relationship between universities and the policy community in the field of international relations. The worlds of policy making and academic research should be in constant, productive conversation, and scholars and researchers should be an invaluable resource for policy makers, but they are not.

One hears perennial laments from those in academe that their valuable work is being ignored by policy makers. And, on the other hand, policy makers complain they can get nothing useful from the academy. They may all be right.

Now your humble blogger has explored this topic again and again and again and again and again.  I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that while a gap still exists between these two worlds, the bigger gap is between the perception of people like Gallucci and actual reality.  Also, to be blunt about it, I also suspect that no one will actually say this to Gallucci's face, because, well, he's got the money.  Why argue against a gravy train? 

Consider the following: 

1)  There is pretty clear evidence that academics are becoming more copacetic with the media through which policy advice can be communicated.  It's also worth noting that two of Time's top 25 blogs this year are run by political scientists *COUGH* self-promotion *COUGH*. 

2)  We are beginning to see routinized channels through which academics are learning how to affect the policy world. 

3)  On the policy side of the equation, Joshua Foust notes that the Ph.D. is both highly valued and increasingly de rigeur inside the Beltway.  Whether that's a good thing or not is a topic for a later post, but Foust's observation cuts against Gallucci's assertions.

So I think Gallucci's claim is exaggerated.  But what's interesting is why he believes that the theory/policy gap has gotten worse: 

There has been a theoretical turn across the social sciences and humanities that has cut off academic discourse from the way ordinary people and working professionals speak and think. The validity and elegance of the models have become the focus, rather than whether those models can be used to understand real-world situations. Conferences and symposia are devoted to differences in theoretical constructs; topics are chosen for research based not on their importance but on their accessibility to a particular methodology. Articles and books are published to be read, if at all, only by colleagues who have the same high regard for methodology and theory and the same disregard for practice.

Look, I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of abstruse research in the academy filled with lots of seemingly impenetrable jargon.  That said, I would humbly suggest that the pattern of recent published work does not match Gallucci's observation.  I would also note that it is way too simplistic to divide political science research into "policy relevant" and "not policy relevant."  

There is still a gap between scholars and policymakers.  But Gallucci's essay suggests a bad situaion that's getting worse, whereas I see a mediocre situation that's trending in a positive situaton.  

Still, let me also confess that I might be a victim of sample bias here.  Over time I've found greater and not fewer pathways that connect scholarly international relations research and real-world policymaking.  That might be because I've got a bit more girth gravitas than I did a decade ago. 

So I'll ask this question to the crowd:  do Gallucci's assertions ring true?  What do you think? 

Your humble blogger has been pretty quiet about this week's Israeli/Hamas conflict.  That's for a bunch of reasons:

1)  I've had a few day job papers to bang out;

2)  Foreign Policy has not suffered a deficit of content on this topic;

3)  My bar to blogging about Israel and Palestine is whether I can offer anything more insightful than The Onion.  It's a disturbingly high bar.

That said, I do think there are a few interesting political science questions that are worth asking after the past week.  After all, we've just had an election in this country where it turns out that political science explained an awful goddamned lot.  I wonder if some of that knowledge is being imbibed -- in uneven amounts -- in the Middle East.

In particular, I have three questions: 

1)  Has Bibi Netanyahu been reading Romer and Rosenthal?  One of the landmark articles in political science is Thomas Romer and Howard Rosenthal's paper on the effect of the status quo on political positioning.  One of the key takeaways is that in a two candidate race, if Candidate A takes an extreme position on the central policy issue, it allows Candidate B to adopt a policy position that is further away from the median voter and still win. 

After reading Ethan Bronner's story in the New York Times on how the Gaza conflict is radicalizing the West Bank away from Fatah and towards Hamas (see also Haaretz), I wonder if Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has figured out the following political jujitsu:

STEP 1:  Take actions that radicalize the Palestinian population -- particularly in the West Bank;

STEP 2:  Have Fatah look less and less like a credible negotiating partner, have the world acknowledge that Hamas now represents the median Palestinian preference on peace talks;

STEP 3:  Have Likus win Israeli election without changing its policy position, which suddenly doesn't look so bad to Israeli voters. 

Actually, I'd posit that there's an element of this in the Israeli's right's strategy of the past decade, but it seems to be particularly blatant this time around. 

2)  Has Hamas been reading Stephen Walt?  And if so, which Stephen Walt?  No, I don't mean that Stephen Walt.  I mean the author of The Origins of Alliances and Revolution and War.  I bring this up cause those books would offer contrasting takes on what Hamas would expect the rest of the Middle East to do.  It seems pretty clear from the press reportage that Hamas believed that This Time Was Different:  the Arab Spring had eliminated authoritarian despots who had used the Palestinian issue as a useful vent for domestic unrest.  Newly democratic regimes would -- according to Walt's Revolution and War -- be more likely to identify with Hamas' cause, thereby taking more aggressive action to undermine and isolate Israel.  And, indeed, at the rhetorical and symbolic level, this has happened.  Libya is sending a "solidarity delegation" to Gaza, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has labeled Israel a "terrorist state," and Egypt's Morsi governmment has been pretty plain in blaming Israel for the latest hostilities.   

The thing is, my bet would be on Walt's Origins of Alliances playing the larger role here.  What's interesting about Arab government's reactions to this Operation Pillar of Defense is that they seem.... an awful lot like how Mubarak et al would have reacted.  It would seem that once Islamic movements are charged with running a government, they suddenly start to care about things other than the occupied territories (this appears to be Dennis Ross' take as well, by the way).  For example, I'd argue that these negotiations matter far more to the Morsi government than brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. 

3)  Does the Israeli right really want to make U.S. Middle East policy a partisan football?  CNN polled Americans on the conflict in Gaza, and just like every other poll on this question, Americans backed Israel pretty strongly.  57% of American sympathize with the Israelis; only 13% side with the Palestinians.  But as The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper notes, there's a catch: 

CNN's poll director, Keating Holland, finds that there is a great discrepancy in which Americans think the action is justified, however. Of particular note is that only about 40 percent of Democrats believe the self-defense measures are "justified."

"Although most Americans think the Israeli actions are justified, there are key segments of the public who don't necessarily feel that way," Holland tells CNN. "Only four in ten Democrats think the Israeli actions in Gaza are justified, compared to 74% of Republicans and 59% of independents. Support for Israel's military action is 13 points higher among men than among women, and 15 points higher among older Americans than among younger Americans."

Now, you can speculate all you want about the source of this partisan divergence --  *COUGH* Netanyahu gambled on Obama being a one-termer and lost *COUGH* -- but friends of Israel should be disturbed by this growing split.  If Israel becomes a partisan issue, it's not really going to help Republicans all that much, because all it will do is mobilize the evangelical vote -- which they've already pocketed.  And eventually, Israel will have to face a Democratic president with a base that no longer cares about Israel's security.  That's not going to be a good day for Israel. 

[Yeah, we still liked the Onion story better--ed.  Yeah, me too.]

As I've written before, I'm a big fan of Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites, and the argument contained therein that public distrust of elites and expertise more generally is at an all-time high.  

Two data points from my morning reads can highlight -- but not prove -- this trend.  Exhibit A is a fascinaing column by Gillian Terzis in The New Inquiry on the persistence of superstar economists since the 2008 financial crisis.  What caught my attention:

E]conomists have not only retained their prominence in the years since the global financial crisis; they have expanded it. Media-savvy economists have only grown in number, disseminating nuggets of user-friendly economic theory and technocratic liberalism in newspaper columns, blogs, and econo-centric podcasts. Krugman, along with Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, and Jeffrey Sachs have become household names as swaggering political pundits....

With economists becoming mainstream personalities, their econospeak is worming its way deeper into everyday language. Our money is as easily invested as our time: remember to “calculate” your “opportunity cost.” Emotions are “inefficient”: try not to have any. Choosing a restaurant necessarily invokes a “cost-benefit analysis.” Steering the course of one’s life is necessarily about making the right decisions at the right time. And the time for this linguistic evolution is right. In an age of laissez-faire capitalism and precarious labor, what are individuals and corporations doing, if not constantly “re-establishing themselves” as “market players?”....

Underlying all these examples is the idea that a perfunctory understanding of economics, it seems, is society’s best attempt at a code of justice amid endemic institutional dysfunction in political and legislative frameworks. As such, the quotidian economist presents himself (most often, it is a “he”) to audiences as above and beyond the realm of trifling matters like ideology or politics. The everyday economist goes out of his way to portray economics as a social science untouched by politics and ignorant of historical context. But such an approach is at a deliberate remove from the complexity and the uncertainties of modern life. It suggests that because humans are rational thinkers, then our actions can always be predicted, or at least reduced into theoretical epigrams.  And so mainstream economics affirms itself as the discipline with an answer to everything, even when financial crises repeatedly underscore the gap between theory and praxis....

Metaphors may make for a great pull-quote, but too often they perpetuate causal simplification. Everyone is assumed to act in a certain fashion under a specified set of conditions, holding all other variables constant. Oversimplifying economic phenomena ignores possible failures and contingencies: how does one account for empathy, altruism, irrationality? Surely, politics must play a part; surely there are objects — sentimental talismans, or the right to decent shelter — to which no market value can be ascribed. It’s beyond the remit of economics to care....

In the online marketplace of ideas, the influence of a few celebrity economists creates an illusion of scarcity of new, heterodox voices. Yet now more than ever, to prevent costly and irreparable policy errors, economics needs its crowded-out Cassandras.

This is such an extreme mixture of fascinating analysis and total bulls**t that your humble blogger really needs to step back and gaze in awe at it.  A big problem with Terzis's analysis is that the very "celebrity ecconomists" she cites -- Roubini, Taleb, Stiglitz -- were precisely the economists who were the Cassandras prior to 2008.  One would assume that a public intellectual ecosystem that rewards critics who provided trenchant criticism is a good thing.  Lamenting their rise seems... odd. 

Except that it isn't for Terzis, because she objects to the very idea of a social science that tries to drain the complexity out of modern life in order to model it.  Which is a fancy way of saying she objects to social science in principle -- because without simplifying reality a lot, it's simply impossible to model or explain it.  In essence, Terzis' argument is that modern society is sooooo complex that radical uncertainty can't be eliminated -- so don't bother. 

Terzis is coming at this from a Karl Polanyi-esque place on the left.  Meanwhile, on the right, John Podhoretz looks at yesterday's polling in the 2012 presidential race, throws up his hands, and basically says, "Bah!! Numbers!!"

Mark it down on your calendars: Yesterday — Monday, Oct. 8, 2012 — may go down in the annals of history as the day political polling died.

It was the most ridiculous polling day among many preposterous polling days in the course of this long campaign...

The disparity in these numbers and their trends are so broad that even the cautionary method of adding them all together and averaging them out — best done by the Real Clear Politics “poll of polls” — makes little sense....

Pollsters themselves, when challenged on their stats, say they’re just presenting a snapshot of public opinion. Fine, but these snapshots are wildly distorted.

The key hidden fact is that fewer than one in 10 respond to those who try to poll them.

People who screen their calls, hang up on people they don’t know or end the survey because they don’t have time to take it make up more than 90 percent of those phoned by pollsters.

Then there are issues with cellphone users and those who communicate pretty much solely by texts and e-mail, and the like.

All we can be sure of, in the words of the peerless Internet humorist Iowahawk, “political poll results accurately reflect the opinions of the weirdo 9 percent who agree to participate in political polls.”

What yesterday proved is that all bets are off. We’re judging the state of this contest with junk data, and we need to stop. Until pollsters can figure out how to avoid all these crazy mood swings and white noise, they should be put on political and pundit probation.

Yeah!!  Until pollsters learn to avoid... um... statistical variance... um... they shouldn't do statistics.  And get off my lawn!!

Podhoretz raises some useful points here -- omitting cell phones does introduce a possible bias into polls, and the possible sample bias of low response rates.  Podhoretz's core complaint, however, is both deeper and pretty friggin' absurd -- there's too much variance!! Stop the madness!!

The whole basis of statistics is that one is attempting to determine what a population thinks by looking at a small sample of that population.  Such an exercise inherently introduces variance in interpreting the results.  One day of particularly wide variance does not spell doom for the polling enterprise.  Indeed, as a poll-watcher, what's been striking this election season is not the variance in the poll numbers but the relative lack of it compared to past elections.  Both candidates' post-convention "bounces" were modest compared to past elections, and the numbers were pretty constant for a pretty long period of time during the summer. 

Look, I get that social scientists are easy to mock and ridicule, and Lord knows, we make mistakes.  Acknowledging fundamental levels of uncertainty and unknowability is a healthy thing to do.  Going from that acknowledgement to rejecting the enterprise of social science entirely -- as both Terzi and Podhoretz do in their essays -- is really, really stupid. 

Now get off my lawn.

When we last left off, your humble blogger was speculating on the ways in which foreign policy had cost Mitt Romney during the campaign.  In this post I want to expand on that theme -- with an assist from the just-released-this-very-minute-from-embargo 2012 Chicago Council Survey of American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy. 

To set the table: 

1)  Despite the expectations of some Republicans, the traditional economic variables that affect a presidential campaign aren't tilting the needle towards Mitt Romney.  As the New York Times' Jeff Sommer reports:

For a year in which a truly dismal economy sealed the electoral fate of an incumbent president, [Ray Fair] says, look at 1980, when President Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. In the nine months leading up to that election, per capita gross domestic product actually declined at an average annual rate of 3.7 percent, while inflation increased at an annual rate of 7.9 percent.

Professor Fair estimates that the comparable numbers for President Obama are G.D.P. growth of 1.62 percent and inflation of 1.51 percent. The low inflation rate is a plus for the president, while the mediocre G.D.P. growth rate is a problem — though not a fatal one.

“You can quite properly call this economy ‘weak,’ ” he said, “but it’s nothing like what Carter faced.” Mr. Reagan’s overwhelming victory “fit the economic picture perfectly,” he said. “This is a different situation.”

He added: “If the economy were significantly weaker or significantly stronger — if we were in a recession or if economic growth were really dramatically better — we’d have a much clearer picture of who would win the election. But the economy remains in a range of mediocre growth. It puts us in the margin-of-error range.”....

Professor Fair will compute a fresh prediction based on data available in late October, but at this stage the political probabilities aren’t likely to shift very much, he says. “It looks as though this will be a horse race, a very close one,” he says.

If it's a horse race, then one of the horses has pulled into an ever-so-slight lead. Both FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver and Politico's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen note that the conventions have given a small but crucial advantage to the incumbent.  VandeHei and Allen talked to both campaigns, and here is the best hope for the Romney camp:   

[W]hen you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged. 

Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates. “Romney is not going to win undecided voters 4-to-1,” a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “If you are losing in Ohio by 4 or 5 points and trailing in Colorado by 2 points, if you are trailing in Nevada by 2 or 3 points, you are not going to win in those states." 

So, for Romney to win, he's going to have to run the table with the tiny sliver of undecided independents. 

And here is where foreign policy becomes a real problem for Mitt Romney -- because if the Chicago Council results are accurate, independents basically want the exact opposite of what Mitt Romney is selling them. 

Let's stipulate that a President Romney might not actually do what he's promising during the campaign -- certainly the smart money doesn't believe him.  Still, based on his rhetoric to date, let's also stipulate that Romney really wants America to lead the world.  He wants to boost defense spending rather than cut it.  He certainly wants to give the appearance that he would pursue a more hawkish policy towards Iran, Syria, Russia, North Korea, China and illegal immigrants than Barack Obama.    

That's great -- except it turns out most of America -- and independents in particular -- want pretty much the opposite of that.  Indeed, as Marshall Bouton says in the Foreword to the report: 

Over time, Independents have become more inclined than either Republicans or Democrats to limit U.S. engagement in world affairs. Because Independents are an increasing share of the electorate, this development in American public opinion warrants attention. 

If you read the whole report, what's striking is how much the majority view on foreign policy jibes with what the Obama administration has been doing in the world: military retrenchment from the Greater Middle East, a reliance on diplomacy and sanctions to deal with rogue states, a refocusing on East Asia, and prudent cuts in defense spending. 

As for Romney, here are some excerpts from the report that suggest where the entire country -- and independents in particular -- are drifting away from his foreign policy rhetoric: 

This survey demonstrates a  strong desire to move on from a decade of war, to scale back spending, and avoid major new military entanglements. The lesson many Americans took away from the Iraq war—that nations should be more cautious about using military force to deal with rogue nations—appears to be taking hold more broadly (p. 13)....

Along with the lessons learned from a decade of war and a reduced sense of threat, Americans are also keenly aware of constraints on U.S. economic resources. When asked whether the defense budget should be cut along with other programs in the effort to address the federal budget deficit, 68 percent of Americans say the defense budget should be cut. This is up 10 points from 58 percent in 2010 (p. 15)....

The most preferred approach to ending [the Iranian nuclear] threat, endorsed by 80 percent, is the one that the UN Security Council is pursuing: imposing tighter economic sanctions on Iran. Essentially the same number (79%) approve of continuing diplomatic efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium. Consistent with this strong support for diplomatic approaches, in a separate question, 67 percent of Americans say the United States should be willing to meet and talk with Iranian leaders (p. 29)....

Republicans see greater threats in nearly all areas tested in the 2012 survey. They are more likely than Democrats and Independents to view U.S. debt to China, immigration, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Iran’s nuclear program as critical threats (p. 42).

It would appear that Americans -- particularly independents -- have become even more realpolitik than they were when I wrote this five years ago.  Or, to put it more pungently, poll results like these are the kind of thing that will make John Bolton really angry and Jennifer Rubin really scared and William Kristol and the rest of the Weekly Standard gang all hot and bothered -- and not in the good way. 

Now, I strongly suspect that this won't matter to most undecideds.  Foreign policy really isn't a high priority for most voters.  That said, there are three ways in which this could matter. 

First, undecideds likely hold that position because they haven't paid a lot of attention to the campaign yet.  As they start to, it's going to be easier for them to process the rhetorical differences on Iran than on health care.  So if Romney is going to attract the bulk of these undecideds, he's going to do it despite his foreign policy pronouncements -- not because of them.   In an election where a 2% advantage seems insurmountable in a lot of states, even tiny disadvantages matter. 

Second, the Obama campaign seems to be quite eager to micro-target key audiences on foreign policy/national security, as VandeHei and Allen note in their story:

Obama’s plan is to slice and dice his way through myriad campaigns, all distinct, all designed to turn on — or off — very specific subsets of voters in specific states or even counties. Republicans concede Obama is better organized in the areas getting hit with the micro-campaigns....

The Obama plan also focuses on students with an education message; veterans in states that include Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada; housing in Nevada and Florida, where the market tanked; and military families in Virginia, Florida and Colorado (emphasis added). 

I am willing to bet that these groups are not going to be keen to hear anything about a more bellicose foreign policy, and Romney's waning competency on the issue won't help. 

Third -- and finally -- look at it this way:  if the economy doesn't produce the national poll movements that the Romney campaign wants, they'll have to shift to secondary issues.  For the last forty years, the GOP has been able to go to foreign policy and national security.  If Romney does that this time, however, he'll alienate the very independents he needs to win. 

Could Romney/Ryan simply retool their foreign policy message for the general election to allay the concerns of independents and undecideds?  No, I don't think they can.  For one thing, it's simply too late to rebrand.  For another, when cornered on these questions they seem to like doubling down on past statements. Finally, I get the sense that one reason Romney sounds so hawkish is because the campaign thinks it's a cheap way to appeal to the GOP base.  Deviating from that script to woo the undecideds will only fuel suspicion of Romney's conservative bona fides. 

So maybe, just maybe, foreign policy will matter a little bit during this election.  And not in a way that helps Mitt Romney. 

Am I missing anything? 

Your humble blogger has not been shy in decrying those in Congress, the mainstream media, and the academy who believe that the answer to all of America's problems starts with defunding National Science Foundation research grants for political scientists.  As I've blogged about repeatedly, political science research provides significant bang for the buck, and even the jargon serves a purpose. 

However, a good social scientist must also acknowledge contradictory data points against his or her hypotheses.  And so I must concede that this week the American Political Science Association has highlighted a decision-making process that suggests political scientists shouldn't be trusted with either money or power.   

Readers might be aware that Tropical Storm Isaac appears to be bypassing the Republican National Convention in Tampa and is instead headed.... right for New Orleans.  It's scheduled to his the NOLA area on Wednesday.  This is a wee problem for political scientists because, well, the American Political Science Association annual meeting is scheduled to be held in - wait for it -- New Orleans from Thursday to Sunday.  APSA has already cancelled all Wednesday pre-meeting activities, and based on the storm path, I'd place a 50/50 bet on the whole convention being scrubbed (the other possibility is APSA Hunger Games, which would end badly for all the post-materialists). 

This gives rise to a very simple question of mine:  why, in the name of all that is holy, did any political scientist think it was a good idea to have the annual meeting in a hurricane zone... DURING HURRICANE SEASON??!! 

Now, you might think that this decision was made post-Katrina to express solidarity with the city of New Orleans -- it wasn't.  According to this timeline, the decision was made in 2003.  Still, it's not like hurricanes devastating New Orleans is a recent phenomenon -- there's a long and storied history of tropical storms hitting New Orleans right around Labor Day weekend.  Indeed, there's even a history of hurricanes affecting past APSA conferences in New Orleans -- second-hand sources have informed me that a hurricane nearly hit the 1985 APSA meetings held in the Big Easy.  Since that's the weekend APSA takes place, maybe places like New Orleans and Miami are bad hosting locales, right?  Right? 

[So you're saying you don't like these cities?--ed.  No, I love both cities.  Hell, I'm half convinced New Orleans exists merely to give writers an excuse to use the phrase "seedy charm."  I'm saying if the conference is going to be held in late August/early September, avoiding hurricane zones seems like a prudent course of action.] 

Now, since Katrina devastated New Orleans, there has been a huge controversy about whther it's a bright idea to hold the meeting there.  However, if you look at that timeline, you'll see that the controversy has to do with Louisiana's "Defense of Marriage" constitutional amendment and the effect it would have on same-sex couples.  This is a fair issue to raise, but I'm thinking that the whole "possibility of being in a hurricane zone" thing should have come up as well. 

Looking over APSA's written guidelines for convention siting, I see that APSA has included criteria about regional diversity, local treatment of same-sex unions and partnerships, labor union strength, carbon neutrality, and ethnic and racial diversity.  Might I humbly suggest that if political scientists want to be taken seriously by Congress and the general public, if would be a good idea to add "no city located in a hurricane zone during hurricane season" to the list of criteria? 

Late at night, when your humble blogger is troubled in his sleep because of some crap argument he was making in his day job, some version of this Annie Hall scene plays out in his head:

This is, far and away, my worst nightmare. 

I bring this up because yesterday in the National Review, Mitt Romney doubled down on his "culture comments" he made in Israel:

During my recent trip to Israel, I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy.

But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

"Double down" is appropriate here, because he went from a speech in which he said there were "other factors" that mattered as well to zeroing in on culture. Again, to be fair, a close read of what Romney describes as "culture" in his essay clearly includes political and economic institutions. To get academic-y about it, Romney is being "conceptually fuzzy" with his terms.

So sure, Romney has been pilloried by political reporters and left-wing columnists and foreign policy writers and former U.S. diplomats and snooty British publications for a bad trip... but they've mostly been focusing on the "gaffes."

This morning, however, Romney is having his Marshall McLuhan moment. In the New York Times, Jared Diamond grades Romney's citation of his book Guns, Germs and Steel:

Mitt Romney's latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.

It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it.

Then there's Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson here in FP, attacking Romney on the conceptual fuzziness thing:

Unfortunately, Romney's views are seriously out of sync with those of the great mass of social scientists. For one, as his more extended argument in the National Review illustrates, he confuses "culture" with institutions. By culture, social scientists mean people's values and beliefs. Romney refers to Americans' "work ethic," which is cultural, but he also claims that political and economic freedoms are the real keys to economic success. But political and economic freedom are not guaranteed by (or even related to) culture but by institutions, such as the U.S. Constitution or its system of property rights. Romney did cite Harvard University historian David Landes, who did indeed argue that values and beliefs are crucial for economic development, as providing the intellectual origins of his views -- but his focus on institutions is much more in line with our book Why Nations Fail than with Landes. Indeed, the facts on the ground in the Middle East illustrate the power not of culture, but of institutions.

Fareed Zakaria weighs in the Washington Post [Wait, he counts?--ed.  He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard under Samuel Huntington.  So yeah, on this, he definitely counts]: 

Had Romney spent more time reading Milton Friedman, he would have realized that historically the key driver for economic growth has been the adoption of capitalism and its related institutions and policies across diverse cultures.

The link between economic policies and performance can be seen even in the country on which Romney was lavishing praise. Israel had many admirable traits in its early decades, but no one would have called it an economic miracle. Its economy was highly statist. Things changed in the 1990s with market-oriented reforms — initiated by Benyamin Netanyahu — and sound monetary policies. As a result, Israel’s economy grew much faster than it had in the 1980s. The miracle Romney was praising had to do with new policies rather than deep culture.

Ironically, the argument that culture is central to a country’s success has been used most frequently by Asian strongmen to argue that their countries need not adopt Western-style democracy. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew has made this case passionately for decades. It is an odd claim, because Singapore’s own success would seem to contradict it. It is not so different from neighboring Malaysia. The crucial difference is that Singapore had extremely good leadership that pursued good economic policies with relentless discipline.

Finally, there's the Center for Global Development's Charles Kenny, who is far and away the most supportive of Romney's argument:

Mitt Romney created a stir this week when he pointed to the immense difference in wealth between Israel and the Palestinian territories and explained it with his interpretation of Harvard economic historian David Landes’s work that “culture makes all the difference.”

By now there is wide agreement that Romney used a pretty terrible example to illustrate Landes’s point. And yet the proposition that “culture” is a factor in long-term economic performance is increasingly accepted among development economists. What Romney seems to have missed is that culture is a declining barrier to development worldwide.

Still, three out of four social scientists have flunked Romney's comparative political economy comp. Will this make a whit of difference in the campaign? That depends entirely on whether you believe that voters still respond to cues from elites... so for me the answer is "probably not." This entire episode is nevertheless an instructive parable for graduate students studying for comps everywhere:

1) Define your terms clearly;

2) Make sure you've done your reading and not staffed it out relied on book reviews or summaries of the Big Arguments -- cause those summaries can be way off base;

3) Don't double down when you make a bad argument.

So in yesterday's New York Times, Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens wrote something really stupid about whether the NSF should fund political science. 

I don't use the term "stupid" lightly.  Based on her blog, she has a philosophy of science that's about, oh, sixty years out of date.  She was (as she now acknowledges) sloppy with some of her facts.  One paragraph proudly trumps a John Lewis Gaddis essay that actually critiques the very kind of work Stevens claims to like.  And, after spending much of the essay indicting political scientists for getting in bed with an imperial state ("research money that comes with ideological strings attached"), she closes with:  

Government can — and should — assist political scientists, especially those who use history and theory to explain shifting political contexts, challenge our intuitions and help us see beyond daily newspaper headlines. Research aimed at political prediction is doomed to fail. At least if the idea is to predict more accurately than a dart-throwing chimp.

To shield research from disciplinary biases of the moment, the government should finance scholars through a lottery: anyone with a political science Ph.D. and a defensible budget could apply for grants at different financing levels.

So, in other words, state funding is pernicious and corrupting -- unless you and yours get the money. 

So yeah, there's a lot of stupidity contained in this essay.  But that's OK!!  I have been to many a seminar (and maybe, just maybe, presented at some) in which the paper du jour was horrible, but the discussion that the paper triggered was quite interesting.  And I think that happened in this case.  For robust deconstructions of Stevens' arguments, see Henry Farrell, Steve Saideman, Jim Johnson, and Jay Ulfelder.  

Two other responses are worthy of note, however.  At his blog, Phil Arena makes an interesting semi-serious suggestion:  

Here's a thought experiment -- if [the American Political Science Association] were to increase membership dues by $500 a year or so, and if most current members remained members, we'd have a pool of money a bit smaller than the current NSF budget for political science, but still one that could fund a good number of projects with the greatest potential for generating positive externalities.  The big data sets that lots of people use, like the NES, could continue.  And let's face it, many of the individual projects that are funded by the NSF do not generate significant positive externalities -- and even if they did, a great many of them would be carried out even if without external funding.  So the net loss wouldn't be that big.

Now, there are some obvious problems and not-so-obvious problems with this proposal.  Obvbiously, APSA membership wouldn't stay the same size.  Not-so-obviously,  the demographics of APSA membership would likely skewresearch dollars in ways that people like Stevens would find even more abhorrent. 

Still, I think a more modest version of this idea makes a great deal of sense.  It's entirely reasonable to, say, ask that tenured professors at R1 research universities to chip in $500 to a research fund.  It's also reasonable to ask other APSA members to chip in... something.   I'd want to see the International Studies Association do the same.  The result would not be a perfect substitute for NSF funding, but it would certainly be a good way of building up an appropriate research infrastructure free of Congressional interference.  

Second, Penn political science professor Michael Horowitz posts about  an ongoing research project with Official Blog Intellectual Crush Philip Tetlock.  This section contains some beguiling findings... and an invitation:

One of the main things we are interested in determining is the situations in which experts provide knowledge-added value when it comes to making predictions about the world. Evidence from the first year of the project (year 2 started on Monday, June 18) suggests that, contrary to Stevens’ argument, experts might actually have something useful to say after all. For example, we have some initial evidence on a small number of questions from year 1 suggesting that experts are better at updating faster than educated members of the general public – they are better at determining the full implications of changes in events on the ground and updating their beliefs in response to those events.

Over the course of the year, we will be exploring several topics of interest to the readers – and hopefully authors – of this blog. First, do experts potentially have advantages when it comes to making predictions that are based on process? In other words, does knowing when the next NATO Summit is occurring help you make a more accurate prediction about whether Macedonia will gain entry by 1 April 2013 (one of our open questions at the moment)? Alternatively, could it be that the advantage of experts is that they have a better understanding of world events when a question is asked, but then that advantage fades over time as the educated reader of the New York Times updates in response to world events?

Second, when you inform experts of the predictions derived from prediction markets, the wisdom of groups, or teams of forecasters working together, are they able to use this information to yield more accurate predictions than the markets, the crowd, or teams, or do they make it worse? In theory, we would expect experts to be able to assimilate that information and use it to more accurately determine what will happen in the world. Or, maybe we would expect an expert to be able to recognize when the non-experts are wrong and outperform them. In reality, will this just demonstrate the experts are stubborn – but not in a good way?

Finally, are there types of questions where experts are more or less able to make accurate predictions? Might experts outperform other methods when it comes to election forecasting in Venezuela or the fate of the Eurozone, but prove less capable when it comes to issues involving the use of military force? We hope to explore these and other issues over the course of the year and think this will raise many questions relevant for this blog. We will report back on how it is going. In the meantime, we need experts who are willing to participate. The workload will be light – promise. If you are interested in participating, expert or not, please contact me at horom (at) sas (dot) upenn (dot) edu and let’s see what you can do.

So, to sum up:  a stupid op-ed.  But lots of interesting things to read as a result of it.   Well done, other political scientists!!  

There are a lot of concerns rumbling around the wonkosphere that the United States is headed for a "fiscal cliff" at the end of this year.  Unless Congress acts, all $300 billion of the Bush tax cuts will expire, the $200 billion Obama payroll tax cut will expire, and $100 billion in spending will be automatically cut as per the debt deal from the summer of 2010.  Now, unless you reject Macroeconomics 101, you know that $600 billion in fiscal retrenchment in this economy practically guarantees a double-dip recession. 

Of course, Congress could change this if it acted in bipartisan fashion.  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!  I kid, of course.  Except I don't -- any politial action to avert the fiscal cliff really would require some kind of bipartisan compromise. 

Earlier this week Josh Marshall posted an intriguing hypothesis about how the Democrats are thinking about this situation: 

For years and years now, the Democrats have been a much more fiscally responsible party than the Republicans. (Here, fiscally responsible means that they try to pay for the federal programs they support, not fiscally responsible in the way Republicans define it, where social spending programs are “fiscally irresponsible” even if they’re paid for.)

Republicans, by contrast, have intentionally drawn up big deficits with massive tax cuts, so that popular programs they don’t really like will eventually have to be cut. This is more or less the central organizing principle of the conservative movement, and the main way the conservative movement exerts control over the GOP. It’s no coincidence that when Republicans came back to power in 2011, they made deficits a huge legislative priority, and insisted on reducing them by cutting social programs alone.

The Democrats’ counter-strategy is a bit more subtle, but has essentially been to find ways to make it very uncomfortable for Republicans to maintain such a rigid anti-tax orthodoxy — to ultimately force Republicans to break their anti-tax pledges and badly splinter their party. That’s what the Buffett Rule is about; that why Dems insist they won’t dismantle the so-called “sequester” — big cuts to defense and even to Medicare — unless Republicans agree to tackle deficits in a balanced way, i.e. by supporting significant new tax revenues.

The results have been mixed. They’ve won a small number of GOP votes here and there, and vulnerable members are nowadays more likely to trash or dismiss Grover Norquist in the press than they were last year. But at a very high level within the Democratic Party, there’s a recognition that breaking the GOP on taxes is an absolutely crucial strategic imperative for defending safety net programs over the long term. Getting the revenue in a passive way is a second best option.

Now, if Marshall is correct, what's interesting is that the Democrats have a powerful ally in this push to get the GOP to shift away from their anti-tax orthodoxy -- Wall Street: 

Now that the US is facing the possibility of another budgetary showdown with potentially even higher stakes – the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of this year – Wall Street lobbyists are preparing an aggressive campaign to stop the political brinksmanship.

"The experience of last year taught everybody to be ... focused on it earlier and not assume that this is business as usual,” said one bank lobbyist based in Washington. “People who had relied on government to respond eventually were surprised when it didn’t.”...

Different business sectors are preparing for the looming fiscal cliff with varying degrees of urgency. Among the most aggressive in pushing for a deal are defence contractors who would bear the brunt of the planned cuts to the Pentagon budget. Medical providers would also be hit hard by the automatic cuts. Companies that pay large dividends – such as utilities – would be slammed if the tax rate on dividends rise as scheduled from 15 per cent to more than 40 per cent.

But financial services companies also have a huge amount at stake. The question is how to influence the political process that remains gridlocked ahead of the November election....

Then there are tactical considerations. Though one bank lobbyist partly blamed a faction of congressional Republicans for last August’s debt ceiling showdown, saying they were “willing to go off the cliff with all flags flying”, it is unclear whether it is in Wall Street’s interest to take on some of their traditional allies on Capitol Hill by pushing them to accept higher revenues or tax increases in any deficit reduction deal, as Democrats are demanding.

The fiscal cliff is still a long way off in political time, but is the strategy having any effect?  Sort of.  We're starting to see gravitas Republicans -- real ones, too, not just MSNBC media darlings -- calling for compromise.  Calls that are annoying Grover Norquist. 

And look -- here's a real live GOP Senator speaking tax heresy!

[Senator Lindsay] Graham says the debt crisis is so severe that the tax pledge — which says no tax loopholes can be eliminated unless every dollar raised by closing  loopholes goes to tax cuts -- has got to go

"When you eliminate a deduction, it's okay with me to use some of that money to get us out of debt. That's where I disagree with the pledge," said Graham....

Graham said eliminating some deductions should free up money to lower tax rates — but also to pay down U.S. debt.

"I just think that makes a lot of sense. And if I'm willing to do that as a Republican, I've crossed a rubicon," said Graham.

This puts Graham at odds with his party's leadership.

And look!  Real, actual negotiations in the Senate are taking place!  So, does this mean the Democrat/Wall Street strategy is paying dividends?  Will Tom Friedman and David Brooks soon be able to wax poetic about "statesmanlike" politicians cutting a Grand Bargain? 

No, not really.   

Jeb Bush is not an elected official any more.  Lindsey Graham is, but he likes to talk iconoclasm every once in a while, so I'm not sure how much weight it carries  (if it was Jim DeMint uttering these words, I'd be more convinced).  And let's look a little closer at the New York Times story on the Senate negotiations, shall we?

Republican leaders remain largely on the sideline. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican, applauded what he called “grass roots” negotiations, but conceded that neither he nor other party leaders had been directly involved, aside from efforts to stave off automatic defense cuts. Still, even he is making conciliatory comments on raising taxes, the issue that has kept Republican leaders from the table.

And this is on the Senate side -- what really matters is whether the House GOP caucus will agree to any of this. 

In some ways, the next six months will be an excellent test of the roles that money and ideology play in current American party politics.  If money is the honey, then a deal will be cut, and well before December.  As the myriad articles suggest, what freaked out business wasn't just the rank partisanship during the last debt deebacle, it was how close things got to a breakdown.  They don't want to see that happen again. 

If ideology is what counts, however, then the House GOP won't budge, if at all, until the last minute.  They don't want to see taxes go up, but I'm not sure that they would be willing to make a compromise that would permanently eliminate tax deductions in order to preserve the status quo in income tax rates. 

What do you think?