political science

Over at Duck of Minerva, Charli Carpenter has some interesting blog posts on recent trends in civilian casualties of interstate wars.  These casualties are traditionally divided into two categories.  The more prominent category is the intentional targeting of civilians by militaries -- what we now call "war crimes."  The other category is the unintentional killing of civilians in the course of routine military operations -- what is often referred to as "collateral damage." 

Carpenter is asking the question, "what percentage of total civilian deaths are 'collateral damage' and is this percentage trending up or down over time?"  Her first, very preliminary cut at an answer -- remember, this is a blog post, not the American Political Science Review -- is rather surprising:

This analysis suggests that collateral damage rather than war crimes now constitute the majority of civilian deaths in international wars worldwide, and that the total number of collateral damage deaths is 20 times higher than at the turn of the last century.

The ratio of collateral damage victims to war crimes victims has dramatically increased since the end of the Cold War. According to Downes' dataset, between 1823 and 1900, unintentional deaths constituted 17% of all deaths in war. Since 1990, that number has risen to 59%....

In other words, the majority of civilian deaths since 1990s have not been war crimes but have been perfectly legal "accidental" killings. Of course this could partly be a result of a decrease in direct targeting of civilians over time, which would be a good thing.

But collateral damage is not only increasing as a percentage of all civilian deaths. The number of collateral damage victims is also increasing over time in absolute terms. Between 1823 and 1900, 84 civilians per year on average were the victims of collateral damage. Since 1990, the number is 1688 per year - a twenty-fold increase (emphases in original). 

This finding, if it holds up, is surprising for two reasons.  First, the number of interstate wars has been trending downward for the last thirty years -- so an increase in the absolute numbers of civilian collateral damage would not be expected.  Second, this bump in collateral damage also took place during a revolution in precision-guided munitions -- which, in theory, was supposed to reduce the likelihood of collateral damage. 

One could argue that the good news portion of this is that the intentional killing of civilians is trending downward.  And I'd like the security studies readers to go over Carpenter's approach to see if it holds up. 

Developing....

Last night, the Indianapolis Colts stormed back from 17 points down against the New England Patriots to win a gripping game by the score of 35-34.  After the game, the most talked-about play was the Patriots' decision to go for it on a fourth down play with two yards to go at their own 28 yard line with a little more than two minutes remaining and the Colts down by 6 points. 

Rather than punt the ball, Patriots coach Bill Belichick defied coventional wisdom and decided to go for it.  Had they converted the down, the game would have effectively been over.  Instead, they fell a yard short.  The Colts therefore gained possession about 35-40 yards closer to the Patriots' end zone than if the Pats had punted. 

The Boston press and national press have raked Belichick over the coals for this play call.  You know, stuff like, "Everyone knows by now he should have played the percentages and punted the ball from his own 28-yard line with just two minutes left in regulation against the Colts." Are they right to do so?  Over at his Freakonomics blog, Steve Levitt defends Belichick:

Here is why I respect Belichick so much. The data suggest that he actually probably did the right thing if his objective was to win the game. Economist David Romer studied years worth of data and found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, teams seem to punt way too much. Going for a first down on fourth and short yardage in your end zone is likely to increase the chance your team wins (albeit slightly). But Belichick had to know that if it failed, he would be subjected to endless criticism.

If his team had gotten the first down and the Patriots won, he would have gotten far less credit than he got blame for failing.... What Belichick proved by going for it last night is that 1) he understands the data, and 2) he cares more about winning than anything else.

Is Leavitt correct?  Thanks to Football Outsiders, you can fill out your own percentages and see which decision maximizes your expected utility.  Or you can read the Boston Globe's Adam Kilgore and appreciate the historical percentages:

According to [AdvancedNFLStats.com Brian] Burke’s tabulation, going for the first down gave the Patriots a 79 percent chance of winning. Punting gave them a 70-percent chance to win. Even after Burke made tweaks, the win probability never dipped in favor of the punt. If anything, factoring in how explosive the Colts’ offense is, the team-specific adjustments only made going for it more favorable.

“A lot of criticism is probably way over the top,’’ Burke said. “At the very least, it’s defensible. It’s not crazy. It’s not reckless.’’

Of course, the problem with football -- and politics -- is that decision-makers are usually judged by the quality of the outcomes rather than the quality of the processes.  So, the result in both worlds is often excessive risk-aversion. 

And so this blog post might end with absolution for Bill Belichick and a plea for a stronger appreciation for expected-utility analysis.  Except life is not that simple.

On that play, it appears that Belichick made the right call.  Except that Belichick also did the following things before making that call:

• Called his last two time-outs during the series, thereby removing his ability to challenge a ruling on the field during the crucial play;
• Decided, on third down and two, to call a pass play rather than a running play, which would have run more time off the clock and made the fourth down percentages a little easier.
• Traded Richard Seymour to the Raiders in the pre-season, stripping his defensive line of any depth.  Not surprisingly, his starters were pretty gassed by the end of the Colts game. 

Sooooo... it's possible to defend Belichick's call on fourth down as the rational, utility-maximizing decision, but conclude that he committed a series of small blunders that got the Patriots to the point where they had to convert a high-risk, high-reward play.  In other words, sometimes the criticized decision might be the right one to make, but the decisions that structured the controversial choice might not have been. 

Question to readers:  Looking at the Obama administration's foreign policy, which move echoes Belichick's play-calling? 

Your humble blogger will be MIA for the next few days, as he is attending the annual meeting of the Japanese Association of International Relations in Kobe, Japan for the next few days. 

Let me assure my readers that my decision to flee leave the country has nothing whatsoever to do with recent events.  It's just a very, very, very, very happy coincidence. 

While I'm gone, let me recomend reading Evan Feigenbaum's new Council on Foreign Relations report, "The United States in the New Asia."  I'll certainly be reading it on the flight.  The latest issue of The National Interest is also worth a gander. 

And now a request from my readers -- what's worth reading that I haven't commented on?  In other words, what should I be reading? 

A theme common to all social scientists in the United States is the complaints lodged at "human subjects committees" or "institutional review boards" (IRBs).  These are committees set up to ensure that faculty research projects do not lead to the mistreatment of the human subjects that are the focus of said research.  This is all to the good for those researchers who are giving human subjects experimental drugs and treatments, mostly to the good for researchers who are running psychological experiments on test subjects, and one whopper of an inconvenience for the rest of us who have to get IRB approval for completely unintrusive investigations. 

In the New York Times, however, Ellen Barry writes about some new requirements for professors at St. Petersburg State University who wish to present overseas.   Their new requirements will make me a little less likely to bitch about IRB procedures: 

Word spread this month among the faculty members of St. Petersburg State University: According to a document signed on Oct. 1, they have to submit their work to administrators for permission before publishing it abroad or presenting it at overseas conferences.

The order, which was circulated internally and made its way onto a popular Internet forum, says professors must provide their academic department with copies of texts to be made public outside Russia, so that they can be reviewed for violation of intellectual property laws or potential danger to national security....

Though scientists have long been subject to export control rules, the St. Petersburg order applies to the humanities as well. It asks for copies of grant applications to foreign organizations, contracts with foreign entities, curriculums to be used for teaching foreign students and a list of foreign students, along with their plans of study.

Deans will clear the work for publication or submit it to an internal export control commission for review, said Igor A. Gorlinsky, the university’s vice rector for scholarly and scientific work. The order was issued to clarify a rule that has been on the university’s books for a decade, but that existed “only on paper,” he said. Dr. Gorlinsky added that the plan might be adjusted or streamlined in response to faculty feedback....

He said he doubted that work in the humanities would be affected unless it violated the university’s intellectual property rights.

“What state secrets could there be in the sphere of political science?” he said (emphasis added).

Ouch. 

Steve Walt weighs in with his take on the relative virtues of NSF funding of political science.  I agree with a fair amount of what he wrote (in particular the lNSF's listing of sponsored research outputs), but this part brought me up short: 

I can't say that I think Coburn is right, but I'm finding it hard to get too exercised about it. I say this in part because I think a lot of NSF-funded research has contributed to the "cult of irrelevance" that infects a lot of political science, and because the definition of "science" that has guided the grant-making process is excessively narrow.  But I also worry that trying to use federal dollars to encourage more policy-relevant research would end up politicizing academic life in some unfortunate ways.

Walt is conflating two different things here -- "policy-relevant research" and "publicly beneficial research."  Believe it or not, those two terms are not equivalent. 

The implicit assumption in Walt's post -- and a lot of discussions on this topic -- is that if political science research cannot produce policy-relevant advice, then it's not worthy of public funding.  But this gets the argument exactly backwards.  One would assume that, the greater the demand is for policy-relevant research, the more outsourcing and consultancies that would be pursued.  And, indeed, I think that's what you're seeing with the rise of political risk consultancies and the Defense Department's Minerva project. 

The key question to ask is whether that kind of policy-relevant research can be produced out of whole cloth or whether it rests on more basic research into political science and international relations -- the kind of basic research for which the free market would underprovide.  Much of Walt's own research, for example, rests on Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics.  This is a book that proffers very little in the way of useful policy advice.  It is, nevertheless, a foundational text; an awful lot of realists build their policy prescriptions off of that book (and, if memory serves, Waltz received NSF funding to write that book).  Speaking for myself, a lot of what I wrote in All Politics Is Global is cribbed from rests on Albert Hirschman's more abstract work Exit, Voice and Loyalty. 

There is a continuum of research that exists in the socal sciences.  One could start with basic theoretical work and empirical data collection that seems far removed from policy relevance, and move to finely detailed policy memoranda.  I don't think the latter are terribly useful without resting on the former -- and one could argue that it's the former that would be underprovided without NSF funding. 

But I could very well be wrong -- perhaps policy analysis can be done independently of more abstract theories and models of political science.  That's a discussion worth having.  Requiring NSF-funded projects to have immediate policy relevance, however, cedes way too much terrain to critics of the discipline.  As Nobel-Prize-winning Elinor Ostrom pointed out, sometimes it's worth investigating the seemingly obvious -- because sometimes the obvious is wrong. 

Following up on the Tom Coburn saga, Patricia Cohen has a round-up in the New York Times about whether the study of political science contributes to the public good.  Some excerpts: 

Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. “But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it,” he said. “We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.”

Mr. Isaac is the editor of Perspectives on Politics, a journal that was created by the field’s professional organization to bridge the divide after a group of political scientists led a revolt against the growing influence of statistical methods and mathematics-based models in the discipline. In 2000 an anonymous political scientist who called himself Mr. Perestroika roused scores of colleagues to protest the organization, the American Political Science Association, and its flagship journal, The American Political Science Review, arguing that the two were marginalizing scholars who focused on traditional research based on history, culture and archives.

Though there is still jockeying over jobs, power and prestige — particularly in an era of shrinking budgets — much of that animus has quieted, and most political scientists agree that a wide range of approaches makes sense.

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

[Full disclosure:  I'm not now on the editorial board of Perspectives on Politics, and therefore am obligated to link to Isaac's Chronicle of Higher Education essay on this topic.] 

Coburn's focus has been on the past ten years, and I think the biggest irony of that focus is that, compared to a decade ago, there's more policy-relevant research and less paradigmatic navel-gazing. 

[Got any hard evidence, smart guy?--ed.]  This is very tough to measure (if only we had an NSF grant!), but consider the following:

• A political scientist just won the Nobel Prize in Economics using a cluster of different methodologies;
• Demand for the services of political scientists has never been greater.  The Defense Department has awarded political scientists through its Minerva program.  Political risk consultants are all the rage now -- and while I won't fully endorse their product, the fact that firms feel like they are worth paying gobs of money is an example of revealed preference;
• In the past year, political scientists have influenced the public debate on issues such as the Bradley effect in elections or U.S. standing in the world.
• Whether you agree or disagree with them, one can point to several episodes in recent years in which political scientists have provoked some roiling debates over a public policy issue. 
• This is an insufficient sample, but I'd note that political scientists are better represented in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs than they were in the issue from a decade ago.  Assignment to aspiring researchers/bloggers:  go through the archives of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, Policy Review, and The Washington Quarterly and see if there are more political scientists publishing in these journals recently than, say, a decade ago. 

I'm planning on posting why I think political sciece is in better shape than it was a decade ago later in the week.  But for now, a question to readers:  are these examples persuasive, or do you need to see more evidence? 

When we last left off with Tom Coburn's jihad against public funding for political science, Coburn was arguing that, "Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers' wallets."

After the blog mockery that this observation received last week, I see that Coburn is doubling down on this strategy: 

[T]he Oklahoma Republicans office was not shy in its point-by-point rebuttal, with jokes about tweed jackets and the cushy life of the average college professor, and questions about whether ivory-tower political scientists aren't overmatched by the semiprofessionals on the cable and network talkfests.

"The irony of this complaint is that real-world political science practitioners employed by media outlets - [George] Stephanopoulos, [Peggy] Noonan, James Carville, Karl Rove, Paul Begala, Larry Kudlow, Bill Bennett (the list goes on) - may know more about the subject than any of our premier political science faculties," Coburn spokesman John Hart said.

Well, one could respond with jokes about the uber-cushy life of the average U.S. senator, or proffer jokes about Coburn's belief that he's a human lie detector, or just marvel at the vast foreign policy knowledge that Stephanopoulos, Noonan, Carville, Rove, Begala, Kudlow, and Bennett possess. 

But I honestly don't see the point anymore.  Matt Blackwell at the Social Science Statistics blog explains why:

In the 111th Congress, Coburn has had very little success with his amendments [batting 3 for 29, or .103--DD]...

Seven of the rejections are instances when Coburn's amendment was tabled without discussion. Most of the rejections have been of proposed budget cuts or banning funds from certain projects And this is just in this year. Out of all the roll call votes on Coburn-sponsored amendments in the Senate over his tenure, only 8 out of 68 have actually passed....

Tom Coburn knows that putting out no-win amendments is a great way to take positions in the Senate without committing to anything. Minority amendments are a costless signal of the blandest kind--even a political scientist can see that.

Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom for their work on what economists call "governance" and what political scientists call "politics" (and what Larry David would call "unwritten law").  In awarding the prize to one economist (Williamson) and one political scientist (Ostrom), the Nobel committee awarded exemplars in the study of political economy.

Lots of (positive) blog reactions to this Nobel.  Henry Farrell does note a trenchant irony: 

It is also worth pointing out in passing (as an email correspondent has brought to my attention) that she has received roughly a dozen grants under the NSF program that Senator Tom Coburn wants to abolish. Tom Coburn vs. the Nobel committee as a judge of scholarly quality – you decide.

And for those who would argue that Obama's Peace Prize makes that decision an easy call for Coburn, bear in mind that the two awards are given by different committees.   

Steve Leavitt has an economist's take: 

What’s interesting is that in the ensuing 15 years, it seems to me that economists have talked less and less about Williamson’s research, at least in the circles in which I run. I suspect most assistant professors of economics have barely heard of him. Yet I suspect the older generation of economists will applaud this choice....

The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test....

This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.

I think Leavitt is overstating the case a little.  Looking at the last 15 years' worth of winners, I see a few winners who are more appreciated outside of economics than inside the profession (Amartya Sen, Daniel Kahneman, Thomas Schelling).  More of them, however, easily fall within the boundaries of mainstream economics (Lucas, Phelps, Hurwicz, Meyerson, Kydland, Prescott, Heckman, Merton, Scholes, Krugman, etc.) 

Nevertheless, Leavitt's conjecture raises four dandy questions for readers of this blog: 

1. Who will be the next political scientist to win this Nobel? 
2. Who should be the next political scientist to win this Nobel?
3. Who will be the next international relations scholar to win this Nobel?
4. Who should be the next international relations scholar to win this Nobel?

Fire away, readers! 

[And what are your answers to these questions?--ed.  They are closely guarded secrets that will be revealed at an appropriate time.]