Princeton Readings in American Politics
One feature of the American political media that I’ve oft had occasion to the lament is the lack of influence by the field of political science. It’s generally taken for granted that some familiarity with economists’ research is relevant to writing about economic issues, but people seem very comfortable making broad, sweeping assertions about the American political system that are totally uninformed by research into it. It’s true that political science isn’t really science like physics that’s going to definitively answer every question you might have, but empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues. Certainly it seems to me to stand up to economics as a viable body of research, so I don’t know why people are so comfortable ignoring it.
One issue, however, may be that it’s not very accessible. So I’d like to offer a preliminary recommendation to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of American politics to check out Richard Valelly’s edited volume Princeton Readings in American Politics. This is academic work, so it’s a bit slow-going and I certainly haven’t read it cover-to-cover yet (full disclosure: I got sent a free copy by PUP) but what I have read has been interesting. And as you can see from the table of contents it covers a nice broad range of important topics in US politics.
16 Responses to “Princeton Readings in American Politics”
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October 24th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Thanks for the recommendation. I have also enjoyed many titles in this Princeton series too:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/pehww.html
October 24th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Matt, don’t bother with page 164. The title looks promising but essentially the argument is lobbyists balance each other out, which is, of course, is utter balderdash. And when the Supreme Court gets around to passing Campaign Finance Reform Legislation, the article can be placed in a folder “Quaint Thoughts of a Bygone Era,” and slammed shut in file cabinet.
Chapter 14. Joseph Stiglitz, “Central Banking in a Democratic Society”
I haven’t read it yet, but maybe old Joe has a plan. We need one. You can toss the whole book in the trashcan if we don’t solve this relationship -and soon. Like yesterday.
October 24th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
And just why should anybody sensible care what self-proclaimed “political scientists” think about anything?
Serious question — try to give a real answer, with data.
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~ckennedy/nra.htm
October 24th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I’d also like to take this opportunity to point out that it’s not like economics is a science either. I just like pointing that out whenever given even the slightest opening.
Actually, relatedly, I think economics itself doesn’t take political economy and economic history nearly seriously enough. My view of economists’ view of these two subdisciplines might be skewed by the company I keep, but I still hear all the time about how economists want to “explain the human universe” (this was when one particular economics grad student was trying to explain to me how our research programmes were similar; I the natural scientist had to stifle a laugh). My feeling is that there’s still a wide swath of economists who are driven by ideological physics-envy rather than wanting to actually understand the real economy. Even now post-meltdown. All you have to do is listen to how derisively economists talk about the work of Elinor Ostrom. It’s quite amusing!
October 24th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
People who think in terms of there being some interesting distinction between SCIENCE and (everything else) are dumb.
October 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
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October 24th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Economics isn’t a science either. Politics and economics are the same thing. When Political Science was called Political Economics they had it just right. Their divorce was and is a profound intellectual error.
While the absolute inseparability of government and economics is explicit in Marxism it’s hare brained prescriptions about how to run nations economies, since the economies cannot be ‘run’ or managed, allowed this most basic insight to be thrown overboard.
It is almost beyond irony that the death of Communism brought forth the idea that central banks could manage economies and made Alan Greenspan a demigod. That his ‘management’ and control of the economy was considered a great thing by free market advocates was simply insane. Greenspan was deeply political armed with an ideology, which he now claims to have discovered was flawed. This is unlikely. Greenspan saw the greatest transfer of wealth in history and I will always believe that was his objective. The other, the destruction of the Treasury is well along as well. While every genuine Libertarian in the world hates Greenspan they are short sided. He has done everything in his power to advance their cause. It isn’t pretty and it’s an ongoing process but he tried.
October 24th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
“empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues”
Name some.
October 24th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
“empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues”
Name some.
I think Pierson’s and Hacker’s work on the welfare state and institutional change has “shed a lot of light” on important issues.
October 24th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
How?
Look, when somebody asks a question like “name some”, it helps to, yanno, actually say.what.they.are.
F’r instance, one of the brilliant, original insights associated with these guys is their innovative discovery that the US Congress is divided into a Senate and a House of Representatives, which are distinguished by being allocated among these things called “States”. Further exploring this hitherto unknown insight, Pierson and Hacker have conducted groundbreaking research into the idea that in this “Senate” , each “State” gets two Senators, regardless of population.
You doubt me? Read: “Republicans enjoy a lead right out of the starting blocks thanks to the geographic structure of American elections. In the Senate, Republicans have a tremendous built-in edge because small states, which lean Republican, are so overrepresented…”
Dammit, somebody should be FUNDING this sort of powerful research.
It is a controversial finding, but Pierson and Hacker even argue that a majority party controlling the House of Representatives might actually be able, in certain highly theoretical circumstances, to arrange that the majority provide enough votes to pass a piece of legislation that their caucus supports, while STILL allowing individual members of that party whose districts do not favor that legislation, to vote against it, anyway: “After the leadership has assured itself that a controversial bill will pass, moderate Republicans are released to cast highly publicized votes of “conscience….”
Dayum, can you imagine if someone like Sam Rayburn had known about this innovative technique? Or Henry Clay?
I’ve even heard that these guys have bucked the conventional wisdom and boldly followed where the evidence leads to conclude that, of all things, MONEY actually counts in political decisions.
“Between 1974 and 2002, the amount spent by successful House challengers rose from $100,000 (in 2002 dollars) to $1.5 million. And money isn’t equally distributed between the parties. Over the last decade, Republicans have cultivated close ties to deep-pocketed donors and special-interest groups….”
Sweet Jayzus, stop the presses. Does the Associated Press know about this?
Yeah, the case that political science ought to be more influential is just sooooo easy to make.
Perhaps this time you’d like to, yanno, make it?
C’mon, use quotes. Show a couple
October 24th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
You are being kind of an ass. I mentioned the welfare state and institutional change and you went off on a stupid tangent. Specifically, Pierson was prominent in showing that despite the conventional narrativeof privatization and a conservative surge to beat back the welfare state during the Reagan and Thatcher eras, spending on the welfare state as a % of GDP did not decrease in the OECD. This isn’t something your average pundit was or even is saying. He also constructed a framework to explain why, basically welfare programs create self-sustaining interest groups. True, we know about the “third rail of politics” in the US, but he put it into a larger framework that dispelled false notions floating around out there. Hacker has done interesting work showing that despite what Pierson’s research, deregulation and globalization have created new risks that the old welfare state would have adapted to handle if the same commmitments to pooling risk had remained in place. In other word, here is where we can really see conservative ideology at work changing institutions. I find all of this highly relevant to today’s politics and do not think this is simply somethig that political pundits would have noticed on their own. And those are just two examples.
October 25th, 2009 at 8:56 am
LOL — this sorta begs the questions why anybody should care what pundits think, either, but since you’re having trouble focusing on the first question, let’s stick with that one.
You cite as Pierson’s great insight, that ” basically welfare programs create self-sustaining interest groups.”
Wow. You mean the research REALLY indicates that if you spend a shitload of money, people will line up to take it? My goodness, has anybody told the people who run for office?
And then Hacker courageously counters, as you note, with “…interesting work showing that despite what Pierson’s research, deregulation and globalization have created new risks that the old welfare state would have adapted to handle if the same commmitments to pooling risk had remained in place.”
Uh-huh. Translated into English, you’re impressed cuz Hacker thinks changes in the world create different versions of the old problems, and that the welfare state coulda changed along with ‘em, except of course… it didn’t.
The key, in case nobody has explained it to you, is that a phrase like “the same commitments to pooling risk” means literally nothing. Honest — try to use concrete examples for this sort of intellectual fakery, and it becomes obvious even to the educated that it’s bullshit.
The origin of government-provided welfare in the United States was money given to widows and orphans so that mothers without husbands wouldn’t be forced into prostitution. It is an INTERPRETATION, a reading into rather than a reading OF the facts, that this was some sort of “pooling risk”. In fact, those who enacted the origins of the welfare state in the US said plainly that their motivation was moral — not about ‘pooling risk’, but about protecting women and kids.
You don’t seem to know the difference between a fact, and an explanation.
The question if it is a good interpretation is whether “pooling risk” is a useful way to understand, and even predict, how the welfare state developed and then failed to change, as Hacker bitches it did not.
Well?
See, the great intellectual sin of political “science” is that it creates theories and interpretations of history, which it then pretends ARE the history. The field does not prove out.
It has demonstrated literally zero value in predicting how voters or elected officials act. Hell, let’s be clear — poli sci has always pretended to be like economics or mechanics (rather than, say, math), fields in which utility is clear from RESULTS.
So “political” science is only useful to the extent it provides practical help to folks who run governments.
By that plain standard, it is worse than useless.
Consider just its sins as “science”. Dennis Chong directly contradicts the utility of the scientific method for political “science”: “”A theory cannot be rejected because of disconfirming facts…”
WTF? That’s the whole POINT of theories in science — that they can be DISproven. An academic field that encourages the idea that a theory can’t be disproven by a contrary fact is an intellectual fraud — and it only dresses in drag to insist the failed theory can ONLY be replaced by “an alternative theory”.
Um — what’s wrong with actually focusing on what happened?
James Q. Wilson knows a little about this failure of the poli sci profession: “”If you want to teach undergraduates, which is supposed to be what we do, and explain how the courts work, it’s increasingly difficult to find people who do that, because these people don’t study these things… they don’t read Supreme Court decisions or history. They just sit around and make models.”
The thing is, there ARE ways to apply science to politics. It’s just none of ‘em are done by political scientists: Rule of 4 polling, testing what moves votes, the use of issues as a vehicle for imagery, etc. — these are all precisely uses of the scientific method in politics.
And NONE of it is reflected in “the literature”. Why? Cuz it doesn’t model well.
An example: I know a guy, tenured political scientist, wrote a well-received book about the politics of immigration in Congress in the late 1990s with lots of charts, graphs, data analysis. Somebody who didn’t know anything about it (which includes pretty much all political scientists) might think, gee, this is where to look to figure out what happened — and why. He aimed at a MODEL.
Except, you know what? The guy utterly missed The Deal: “immigration yes, welfare no”. Republicans who were swing votes on legal immigration were persuaded not to take it up, because legal immigrants would be treated as essentially illegal aliens with valid documents. This guy wrote a significant piece of “political” science — and managed to entirely miss the actual politics.
Typical.
If you think I’m wrong, cite some real examples. Cuz, if you’ll notice:
I have.
October 25th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Nobody’s paying attention, but just for fun: here’s an actual theory — that is, something that could be proven wrong by a single fact — which gets at why poli sci fails: Reporting.
It used to be said of journalism — before it became a ‘profession’, when it was still a job — that the way to learn the craft was to successfully write an obituary, report on a fire, and cover a municipal election. The reason for those three is that they are all difficult to write, but test different skills: an obituary generally requires getting facts from people who are grieving (how many kids did Aunt Mabel have? Can you spell their names, in birth order?), as well as interested (or else why would they be interviewed for an obituary), so writing one that the deceased’s life is interesting as well as accurate is a real test of skill — and sometimes, either requires handling the juiciest stuff either discreetly or with fascinating candor.
Covering a fire is difficult, because a lot happens in a short time.
But a municipal election takes place over a few weeks or months. Moreover, the key to good reporting on a municipal election is realizing that people will lie to you. If all you know is what the candidates and political parties tell you, you will be almost invariably be surprised how an election turns out.
Much of journalism has gotten away from this apprenticeship approach, which has been largely replaced by J-school degrees: kids with double majors in journalism and poli sci wind up on TV gabbing about politics and world affairs…. because they have great hair and a marketing niche.
About 10 years back, the story goes that Ann Coulter visited with Al Hunt, then the DC bureau chief of the WSJ who had become a pundit (a role that David admires), and asked him: basically, I want your job — how do I get it?
To his credit, Hunt didn’t take her seriously, explaining that he had worked for 20+ years as a beat reporter before he would have even considered himself ready for the commentariat. His advice to her was to get a job for a big paper in a small state, learn skills on a smaller stage, and develop a foundation to build on.
She sorta skipped all those steps, and seems to have done well in the market of “ideas”, for want of a better term.
And yet, there are dozens if not thousands of examples of J-school graduates whose reporting method is “he said/she said”; in which statements of fact by either side in a controversy are treated as claims, while factless charges are treated as valid opinions on which reasonable people can disagree.
Thus, the theory: journalism and poli sci are correlated phenomena. The quality of either is related to the other. What MattY considers worth complaining about, poli sci’s lack of influence on political media, is actually caused by the symbiotic failure of both fields to Have.A.Fucking.Clue.
Now, as a REAL theory — I do not accept Chong’s typically poli sci idea that a proper theory cannot be disproven — mine is vulnerable to even a single contradictory fact.
If anybody wants to cite a fact that shows a genuine political science insight that good reporters miss, that would show my theory is wrong. (No, the revelation that people often vote against what somebody might argue is their interest is not an insight. Nor is the “fact”, cited above, that the OECD did not follow Thatcher’s example on welfare a particularly useful bit of data.)
Or you could prove I’m wrong by demonstrating how good political science is ignored by bad reporting — but to do THAT, you’d also have to show how it is good political science, i.e., it would be useful.
So far, the examples cited (mine backed up with quotes, mind) have been: 1) there are States, which means the Senate does not represent population; 2) money counts in politics; 3) a political majority can achieve its agenda while allowing individual members to dissent; 4) when the government spends shitloads of money, people will organize to take it; and 5) a poli sci text about the Congressional politics of immigration that, er, missed the Congressional politics of immigration.
If there is a REAL case that poli sci’s lack of influence on the political media is worth complaining about, somebody’s gotta do better’n THAT: anybody?
Contrast, say, the way Tim McCarver comments on baseball: he will often make remarkably accurate predictions about the next play, derived from his own experience as a catcher handling pitchers and setting the defense. He’ll say ‘this is the time to throw a breaking ball inside’, or ‘when you draw your infield in, you have to hope a hard grounder is hit AT somebody’, just before the pitcher does exactly that, or the batter drives one past a shortstop on the grass, that he’d have gotten if it wasn’t past him on the first bounce.
The point isn’t that those are great baseball insights — it’s that there is NOTHING like those kinds of insights, especially as predictions, in “political science”. (and damned few in political journalism — where it is even more damning, since so many former political aides are now essentially like ex-jock color commentators.)
October 25th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Hell, let’s be clear — poli sci has always pretended to be like economics or mechanics (rather than, say, math), fields in which utility is clear from RESULTS.
Are you serious about economics?
October 25th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
No.
More precisely, while it’s a bit overbroad to talk about a whole academic field like this, economics DOES claim to be like mechanics: Mechanics is essentially applied physics — gears and levers and pulleys, pistons and pivots, and you can get what you need, done well and efficiently.
Just so, economists will say, if you understand the Invisible Hand or the labor theory of value, free trade and free markets, etc., you will be able to figure out lots of real world stuff.
To be fair, I didn’t actually say that economics DOES do this, I just noted that it’s what economists claim.
MattY deserves some credit for recognizing that we’ve had a real test not only of economists, but of ‘economics’ itself since 1998, when Long Term Capital Management damned near destroyed the global economy through derivatives. Major players in the field (like Greenspan) were oh, so impressed with the innovative financial instruments that seemed to be creating so much wealth, but turned out to be just so many tulip bulbs, with no real value at all.
Kinda thing that shows you the Emperor’s bare ass. Put it this way — if the economics profession collectively didn’t recognize that the MBS/derivatives boom wasn’t a bubble even AFTER the LTCM mess in 1998: why should anybody pay any attention to them?
Likewise with political science: I keep asking for a couple examples, hell, even ONE good one, of political “science” demonstrating some insight that can be tested as an accurate prediction, the way Einstein’s relativity predicted the way the Sun’s rays would appear during an eclipse that happened 15 years AFTER he published.
Hell, I’d settle for even a series of mundane insights, the kind that Tim McCarver provides twice an inning.
Well?
October 26th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I liked theAmericanist’s (#13) post, good stuff.
For the sake of future search results, I’ll add some theories for why poli sci don’t get the respect econ does:
1) poli sci is frequently known as pre-law. Most of the talent runs off to get a JD, and makes itself known via contracts and courtrooms.
2) the bar for entry into practical politics is pretty low, just ask Karl Rove.
3) rich industrialists haven’t found a use for them, yet. when poli sci Ph.Ds start getting the fat retainers for publishing BS that big name economists do, THEN you’ll see some respect.