The Quantitative Peace

The Future of Political Science (summary, short discussion)

I have mentioned, in a previous post, all of the books that fill up my summer reading list. As of now, I have at least one book completed and several more have been added to my list.  I have recently finished The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives, a collection of 100 short articles aimed at discussing what has not been properly analyzed or should be analyzed in political science.  The book ended up being more oriented towards the fields of American and Comparative than I had originally anticipated (mostly by the title); however, this is more my own fault than anything else. Quickly browsing the titles of the 100 articles and the authors or knowing that the book is a festshcrift for Sidney Verba easily conveys that information.

The book is not homogeneous.  For example, the two initial sections take opposing views with Arend Lijphart arguing that the United States is more unique than comparative scholars give it credit for and Russell Dalton taking the opposed position that US institutions have far more in common with other states than what has been examined previously. There are clusters of articles that deal with similar topics (e.g. elite behavior, institutions, voting, parties), but not all topics have a set of opposing viewpoints (nor should they necessarily). The introductory chapter offers a few rubrics for organization of the book that were ultimately rejected and provides some glimpse of the diversity of the subjects that are covered.

Beyond several substantive propositions, the book also has some focus on methodology. None of the articles that discuss political methodology were overly technical or beyond an average political scientist's comprehension of what is being discussed. The range of approaches vary form those who question the utility of quantitative political science in research to those who articulate more inclusion of qualitative methods or theoretical understandings of applying econometric techniques to political science.  For example, David Butler has a very short piece that argues "Everything happens in a historical context. It is wise to be sceptical about articles on politics that never mention individual politicians. Specific leaders do make a difference. What if Gore not Bush had been adjudged the winner in 2000? What if Blair had yielded precedence to Brown in 1994? No numerical approach will explain the impact of Churchill in 1940 or of Kennedy in the early 1960s The run of history is not inevitable."

The collection is diverse.  For Comparative and American scholars looking for potential dissertation topics or a new topic to work on, this might be an ideal book to thumb through and read. I will have to recommend some of the short pieces on elite behavior and third party representation to two different friends.

Summer Reading List?

This is a partial bleg post. While finishing up some weekly chores in the laundromat I realized that my kindle was quickly running out of content and needed some fresh additions. Summer can be a good time to catch up on reading that we intended to do during the semester or to check off some divergent topics that we had not had time to get to earlier.  As such, what is everyone reading this summer and/or what do they recommend?  I am generally looking for books that are in international relations or methodology and can be bought for the kindle, but any discussion on any summer reading would be desireable. If you already have a blog post with a reading list for the summer or create a new one, leave a note in the comments. Below is my partial list.

Books I have completed so far:

Dawkins, Richard. 2009. The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution. This was the subject of a recent post and was a wonderfully fascinating book.  Beyond providing overwhelming evidence for evolution as a causal fact, it provides a plethora of intriguing examples (lab experiments, geological and biological evidence, etc.) as well as analogies that are useful for political science.  A great read for someone who is interested in research on evolution but would prefer not to go to the source scientific articles.

Watts, Duncan. 2011. Everything You Know is Obvious (once you know the answer). I picked this book up not too long after Andrew Gelman recommended it over at the Monkey Cage. He has a long review of the book and I will not go into detail here, but it does some decent work at shoring up Social Science as a worthy exercise even if it is testing otherwise obvious implications.

The next two items on the list:

Gary King et. al. (editors) 2011. The Future of Political Science. The title seemed compelling enough to download.  I have yet to crack it open and see what is inside.

J. Samuel Barkin. 2010. Realist Constructivism: Rethinking International Relations Theory. This book was recommended to me in a conversation after it was noted that my constructivist-fu was weak.  Since this particular theoretical approach to international relations is a weak point for me, I am partly reading it to see if I could usefully assign it to an introductory level graduate course on international relations.

This list, of course, are in addition to the books I am using for my courses next semester and may exclude some of my non-fiction indulgences as well (Doyle's Holmes is looking a bit tempting right now).

Evolutionary Path Dependency

A few colleagues and I have started to delve into Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.  Apparently, our leisure reading involves reading science based books.  For those of you who are still reading the book, this blog post goes into detail about Chapter 11 and this introduction will serve as my official spoiler alert (in case you do not want your science spoiled); for others, we can venture on.

 

Finally Choosing Sides, Huh?

This isn't terribly surprising, but it seems that some NATO states have finally made their preferences publicly known.  The UK is sending a small group of military advisors to Libya to...well, advise, and train Libyan rebels.  This is apparently part of a joint British and French operation.  

I don't think it was a secret that most of the states involved in the intervention in Libya wanted Ghadaffi gone---They have said as much.  However, I think most of these states expected that their objective could be achieved under the guise of acting on a UN mandate, whereas the prolonged fighting has now led these states to a point where they must become more directly involved to achieve their desired outcome.  What will be interesting to observe is how far they are willing to go---the rebels have seemed to be on a seesaw over the past few weeks, and their victory (whatever that looks like) is far from guaranteed. 

NATO has already been calling for additional jets, suggesting that their resources are fairly limited (apparently no other NATO partners are willing to pitch in any more).  Although, this may simply be the British and the French wishing for their gradual escalation of involvement in Libya to appear more multilateral than it really is.  Alternatively, it may be that the British and the French, having exposed their enthusiasm for removing Ghadaffi, have sent a signal to their partners regarding their willingness to carry the weight.  Hmm...Some guy wrote about this sort of thing once...  In any event, it seems that there are increasing costs to the British in the French in terms of manpower and material, or, possibly in terms of reputational costs. 

Citing eBooks

I got my Amazon Kindle about a year ago and I really enjoy it, but I am  finding myself become increasingly frustrated by the apparent lack of standards when it comes to citing eBooks.  On some occassions this isn't really a problem---if you need a particular page number you can often times type a phrase into Google Books and find what you're looking for (assuming the correct edition is available).  But to some extent this defeats the purpose of having an eReader.  Furthermore, Google Books often censors the content of a variety of books, so it's not guaranteed that you will be able to find the specific page that you happen to be searching for.  

I am clearly not the first person to find this frustrating.  Upon searching for an answer I came across this page with some comments written by a certain Stephen Smith.  The location numbers that eReaders like the Kindle feature should indeed be more accurate, as I understand it.  Depending on the reader's preferences you can change the size of the font.  But, as this will change the content featured on each "page" of the eReader, page numbers are not particularly useful guides when searching for specific content. 

The page referenced above suggests a solution offered by the Chicago Manual of Style, wherein a section title or chapter be listed for eBooks in place of page numbers.  But this is really not much of a solution.  Depending on the writer's style and length of the book, particular sections or chapters could be enormous, thereby making it difficult to track down what it is that you are looking for.  True, as this page points out, even hard copies of books have some issues with page numbers varying across different editions.  But this is only a problem when tracking content across multiple readers.  And even in a situation where two or more readers are working from different editions, the content is often similar enough where the page different might only be a matter of a couple of pages. 

The problem with eReaders seems to be that the reader/author themselves cannot accurately convey, by current academic standards, where it is that they are drawing information from.  And it is more difficult to translate a location number into a page number than it is to navigate from a page number from one edition to the correct spot in another edition of the same hard copy.  I haven't yet seen an article published in a political science journal that features eReader locations for some readings, in addition to page numbers for others.  A quick Google search for political science style guides did not seem to shed any light on the issue either.  I'm not sure this problem affects that many people at present, but it does seem like an issue that would, conceivably, be fairly simple to resolve.                

A Couple of Things...

Just a quick post on a couple of things:

Rum and Revolution

NPR has an interview this morning with Tom Gjelten, the author of Bicardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause, which  details the rum company's history in Cuban politics and the role it played in the Cuban Revolution.  The company was very supportive of the Revoultion at first, as its success was derived essentially from its cubanismo, if you will:

In the 1950s, the family's support for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution was a natural carryover from 100 years of involvement in Cuban nationalistic movements. Pepin Bosch, the chairman of the company at that time, gave tens of thousands of dollars of his own money to the cause — as did other members of the family.

The audio of the NPR interview, along with an excerpt of the book, can be found here.

More from SSRN: Publishing Advice for Graduate Students

It appears that I might be a little late to the game judging by the Technorati reactions; however, that will not stop me now or in the near future.  After some initial prompting from Richard Frank, this stellar introductory piece for graduate students posted back in January (universalized for all disciplines) details four avenues for publication: book reviews, conference presentations, articles and replies, and books.  Abstract:

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

For those who are already familiar with the publishing game, this article may not be overly useful - but passing it on to others who could use a basic instruction manual would benefit.  Not all of the advice is germane to every journal and discipline (for example, it seems less journals do actual paper submissions as suggested by the article section, but dealing with e-mail submissions are covered elsewhere) - however, lacking specific advice in every section is to be expected from anything less than a multvolume book series.  It is currently one of the most downloaded articles for Political Science on SSRN and worth the read.