aptly diagnosed
[closed]
The mess this discipline has become
(106 posts) (4 voices)-
Posted 2 years ago #
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Yup. But the author focuses largely on formal modelers who have lost touch with real world politics to some degree but at times produce some really good stuff that has real world applicability.
He neglects the critical theorists who do nothing but, um, criticize almost anything and everything that people in the real world do.
I have yet to meet a critical theorist who has proposed a serious solution to a policy problem. If you are a critical theorist and would like to prove me wrong, go right ahead. Let's see what you've got.Posted 2 years ago # -
^ That is a fair cop. Though critical theory is far more enjoyable than formal modeling.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I wonder if the author of that op-ed has read Unequal Democracy?
Posted 2 years ago # -
Can I please get the 3 minutes of my life back from reading this piece? Seriously- what a gross misrepresentation of our discipline.
Posted 2 years ago # -
^ It's an excellent book. I'd be far more optimistic about this discipline if our phd students were being trained and professionally incentivized to do engaged, politically relevant work like that. It's a book that makes good sensible use of standard quant tools, but is not methodologically 'innovative' or 'sophisticated'.
Posted 2 years ago # -
^ was responding to hilarious re: Bartels book
Posted 2 years ago # -
Maybe the author has a point, but I can't get past a couple of glaring contradictions.
1. **** in paragraph 3 about the need to take so many methods courses at the expense of substantive courses, but then in paragraph 4 bemoaning the lack of archival research and ethnographic training.
2. **** about the lack of a theoretical framework, one sentence after complaining about the required seminars on the "canon." Right--where does this student think the theoretical framework comes from? Maybe it's different in AP, or at Princeton, but when I got my PhD the IR seminars were where we gained that framework and then it was applied to specific problems in substantive courses or in our own readings and papers.
I don't see why it is bad that students might focus on answering narrow questions very well. I also don't think quant. training necessarily pushes people in that direction--witness the democratization literature in comparative politics.
And using the financial crisis as a way to slam quantitative methods is just **** ridiculous and I've seen it too often. That's a pretty big leap.
Plus, does Princeton really require six quant and formal courses, or is that just for students that want to take them?
Posted 2 years ago # -
I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is mostly well reasoned and makes some legitimate points. If someone wants to study where power lies (what's wrong with that?), then comes to a politics department and can't find the resources to start building an answer, then there's something wrong with that. And I say this from a mainstream quantitative perspective.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I'm a political theorist, and so (presumably) am supposed to be sympathetic to this Princetonian rant. But I'm not. The trouble with this article, as with most such articles written by whiny graduate students, is that it trots out tired old refrains that everybody knows by heart without adding a scintilla of constructive anything. Here's an idea: Graduate training is too obsessed with quantitative methods? Then find a goddamned interesting problem and apply your fancy methods to that! That what theorists do. Who's stopping you? Not enough qualitative courses? How about you go read something on your own? Or organize a reading course? IMHO, it's just *true* that you can sort of half-figure out ethnography, etc., on your own by reading examples of it, whereas to try your hand at quantitative methods without formal training is just dumb. That might explain the 6 to 1 course ratio, or whatever it is. If you're not willing to take some initiative, the complaint about quantitative methods amounts to "wah wah wah, they're giving us too many potentially useful research tools." Grow up.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Huh. Everything that this article describes is the exact opposite of what I do. And yet here I am--gainfully employed and having no problem getting my research published in top outlets. I guess I must be one of those "few professors who fight the good fight," but I don't think that is particularly descriptive or appropriate. In fact, it is a complete mischaracterization.
Sure, I could occasionally gripe about the "mess our discipline has become" after reading a particularly sloppy and not-particularly-relevant-to-anything piece, or sitting through a methodologically-sophisticated-yet-completely-vacuous conference presentation, but then I pick up something more my pace, and the urge to rant diminishes. I agree with those previous comments that suggest that the author actually DO something other than whine about it. Take some courses in history/sociology/anthropology, etc. I did, and it definitely gave me some greater insight into 1) just how expansive our discipline is, and that the segment that the author describes is only a portion of the whole, and 2) that there is tremendously fertile ground to be found (in terms of interesting research questions and approaches) to be found at the fringes of the discipline. If the author feels that there is overgrazing at the center of our discipline, then stake out an original position, where there is plenty of grass, undeniably greener than on the other side.
Posted 2 years ago # -
This person simply does not get it. I just finished a PHD, landed a TT job for next year, and my fields are IR/CP with a strong focus on quant methodology. Sure, I sometimes feel bad that I don't know as much about the region I study as I would like (or that I should know), but I tell myself that getting a PHD is all about getting skills to use for your research for the rest of your career. I have plenty of time to get the substantive stuff down; its unlikely I will be motivated to learn whatever new stat package will replace R in five years.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Yes.
Posted 2 years ago # -
^^^makes a good point, ^^ ignores relevance in favor of careerism.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Question to the author of the piece and defenders: would Benjamin Barber's involvement with real-world politics be considered a positive case for theorists' or qualitative political scientists' role shaping real-world events?
Would it be fair to use that as a straw man in order to discredit theorists?
Also, does the author know all the ways in which quant political science is used by policymakers, and still thinks it's not enough? Or is he just ignorant of those cases, and simply assumes that there must not be many since he hasn't heard of them? I'm thinking here of the many, many quant AP scholars whose work helps shape things like voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance, campaign strategy, polling, etc.
Posted 2 years ago # -
"a cold shoulder to theory and the abandonment of reality"
Since when did theory have anything at all to do with reality?
Posted 2 years ago # -
^ That's what happens when someone wants to rail against both formal theory and brute empirical research. They're forced into dumbass contortions. On one hand they hate formal theory because it is overly simplistic and does not represent reality, but they can't bring themselves to admire quantitative scholarship even though it is much more closely related to actual reality than critical theory or whatever the author likes.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Some articles need not be written, as they are overtly clear to those who can see, and not accessible to the blind.
Posted 2 years ago # -
They really, really should. Honestly, it would show they have a sense of humor at least. I would read it, even though I'm a quantoid or whatever the qually used to call us.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I am a careerist = I am employed
Posted 2 years ago # -
I'm just bewildered by his claim that he must "type feral howls in hope of inciting debate." At the two other top-ten programs I've spent time in, this debate consumes the first couple of years of grad school at the expense of acquiring substantive knowledge or discussing the merits or flaws of individual pieces of research rather than entire research approaches.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I am completely unsurprised that the PSJR masses are shouting this guy down.
Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!
Crowd: [in unison] Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
Crowd: [in unison] Yes, we are all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
Crowd: Shhh!
Posted 2 years ago # -
^ so **** brilliant
Posted 2 years ago # -
Since the author is a grad student, let's keep this about the article, and not about the author.
Posted 2 years ago # -
If you read the comments posted under the article, there is a long one written by a current Princeton PhD candidate which rebuts several of the claims made in the article. Subsequent defenders of the author's position, in response, are forced to trot out the old "hegemony" cliche.
Posted 2 years ago # -
discipline has become
so when people make arguments like this, in the past tense, what 'golden age' are they referring to? That is, when was political science at its *peak* of interestness/goodness/sensibleness/usefulness? 1902? 1960? 1990?
I am genuinely curious. Just give me a decade if you like. If you can't, maybe drop the hyperbole and sloppy rhetorical ****.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Whenever they were undergraduates and didn't have to worry much about the credibility of their arguments and their classes mostly focused on substantive issues rather than theoretical, methodological or professional concerns.
Posted 2 years ago # -
The hilarity of this is that the author has some idealized version of what political science is like, arrives at grad school and finds it isn't what he assumed it was. Ergo, it is the discipline's fault.
Posted 2 years ago # -
^ has it correct. Some of this has to do with the fact that prospective students talk to professors who have finished their PhDs in the 1970s and 1980s (maybe the 1990s). Pol Sci has changed a great deal since then. So when they get here, they say: "Well, this is not what my professor told me. This is not what I expected. My professor worked with (insert a dead, famous political scientist here) and he had a totally different experience.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I didn't find the article insightful, but his claim was not that one needs no methodology, rather that there are methodologies other than what we habitually call "methods" that might be useful (or perhaps better). Not just methodology-free journalism.
Posted 2 years ago #
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