The proposed Coburn amendment to eliminate the political science division of the National Science Foundation and funding for political science research has once again raised the question of whether academic research is relevant to real-world problems.
The controversy over electing judges provides interesting insight into this question, particularly when examining the reactions of the advocacy community to scientific studies of judicial elections published in the nation’s leading academic journals, law reviews, and commercial presses. While there certainly are valid criticisms of empirical studies of judicial selection, it simply is the case that empirical findings that contradict political strategies and goals will not be acknowledged and incorporated into the public dialogue no matter how relevant or compelling.
It has not mattered, for example, that empirical evidence has shown for decades that there are no measurable differences between judges chosen in partisan elections and judges chosen by other “less political” methods. Nor have many in the “reform” community demonstrated concern with the fact that nonpartisan elections effectively disenfranchise large segments of the electorate, raise the costs of seeking office, and open supreme court races to idiosyncratic forces. Similarly, recent evidence showing that confidence in courts is not lower in states using partisan elections has not been incorporated into the public dialogue, or the fact that elections are perhaps the most powerful legitimacy-conferring institutions in the world.
The bottom line is that contradictory evidence is irrelevant to actors pursuing their own agendas, an irony in the case of judicial selection since many of the most aggressive advocates against judicial elections are judges and attorneys. The same evidence also may seem, without effort to understand it, incomprehensible.
In fact, many advocates in the judicial selection controversy engage in forms of fact-finding quite removed from the standards and practices of scientific journals in political science, including the use of anecdotes to claim general tendencies or to discredit them, public opinion polls with biased question wording and flawed sampling strategies, incorrect and selective interpretation of poll results, and reliance on the opinions of “experts” as concrete evidence of problems that cannot yet be seen but nonetheless purportedly are looming. These are attempts to seek the truth but often produce evidence that does not withstand more rigorous scientific scrutiny.
There is another kind of problem, however, quite apart from sincere though flawed attempts to seek the truth. Best explained by Princeton University Professor Emeritus Harry Frankfurt in his illuminating essay On Bullshit, there is a distinct form of expression – “bullshit” – the defining characteristic of which is offering statements to suit one’s own purpose without much regard for whether the statements actually are true or false. Given the instrumental nature of political action (no matter how altruistically the goals of many advocacy organizations are stated) and the willingness to argue positions that may lack empirical support, academic work is ignored or dismissed, usually with flimsy arguments not befitting a badly educated high school debate team (more on this in my next post). As part of this, econometrics become easy to caricature among non-academics as being divorced from reality or as having some fatal flaw. Thus, “bullshit” is a powerful countervailing force to science.
In short, science and politics often are not compatible, and no amount of careful study, scientific rigor, or attempts to contribute constructively to the political process will change that. Even so, truth intrinsically is important, and the difficulties political scientists may encounter when engaging political actors does not render the enterprise any less worthwhile.
In the midst of furloughs and massive cut backs at many state schools, the University of Alabama’s announcement of Nick Saban’s 42.35 million dollar coaching contract is almost humorous … almost. The Faculty Lounge details the announcement here. But college sports pay for everything else at the university, right? As you may recall we already dealt with this question.
I did some hiking (glorified walking) at Taughannock Falls yesterday. It’s about 10 miles outside of Ithaca, NY. It takes about an hour to an hour and a half to do the loop around the falls. Here are some pictures.
Here's a nice view of the gorge
Here's a rickety bridge you cross to get over the falls
And finally, here's the view of the falls from said rickety bridge
In my last blog, I noted the problem of selection bias in studying appellate court decisions and also pointed out that Harold Spaeth is coding a sample of denied certiorari petitions that will help us assess the degree to which this problem exists at the SCOTUS. In a recent email from him, he let me know that the Burger Court sample is completed (available at the South Carolina JURI site), and that:
“I am not quite finished coding Blackmun’s docket sheets on the Rehnquist Court (1986-94), but I expect to finish this database by early Fall. It will contain a sample of the Court’s denied petitions allowing individuals to ascertain the proportion of petitions dealing with various legal and constitutional provisions that the Court accepted. No longer will any basis exist for selecting on the dependent variable. The direction of the denied petitions is also provided along with other more or less pertinent data.”
Thanks to Harold for this information.
Of course, this does not solve the problem of selection bias at the U.S. Courts of Appeals or even the trial courts, since the concern could be expressed that disputes settle and therefore there is selection bias in any study of judicial decision making.
This problem ultimately cannot be resolved completely because, as I said in my last post, at some point, it becomes turtles all the way down. Of course, the extent to which selection bias matters depends on the questions the researcher is asking. If you are using court cases as your database to say something about disputes writ large, you’ve got a problem. But if you are studying court cases to say something about court cases, well, then I’m less concerned, even in appellate courts–assuming they have mandatory dockets. The problem obviously becomes more pronounced when courts exercise discretion over their own dockets.
In my next blog, I’ll have something more to say abuot alleged inaccuracies or miscodings in the Spaeth or Songer Databases.
it makes headlines — Judicial politics scholar Chris Zorn (and methodologist Jeff Gill) are featured in the Wall Street Journal discussing the DH rule and political ideology.
This morning, CNN released the results of a survey regarding public support for Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court. About 47% of Americans support confirmation while 40% oppose it (13% had “no opinion”). To provide context, these results suggest that she is faring better than Harriet Miers did at this point. The percent supporting confirmation are comparable to Alito’s (and probably within the margin of error for Ginsburg and Thomas at a comparable point in their confirmation processes), but she also has more negative ratings than Alito, Ginsburg, and Thomas had. Naturally, though, her qualifications (“Well Qualified” ABA rating as noted by Paul Collins noted below) along with 60 Democratic votes in the Senate continue to make this look like a nomination that will end with a successful confirmation.
One of the problems in answering questions as to how liberal or conservative a judge might be is coming up with some acceptable measure of ideology. There is no generally accepted measure of lower court ideology. A judge’s own partisan affiliation and the ideology of a judge’s appointing president have often been employed as useful surrogates of judicial attitudes. Scholars have sometimes ignored the ideology of the judge, and inferred his or her ideology from that of the appointing president. For example, Tate and Handberg (1991) proposed a measure of the ideology of the appointing president: -1 for ideologically conservative and presidents, 0 for nonideological presidents, and 1 for ideologically liberal presidents.
A recent and now widely used ideology measure was devised by Giles, Hettinger and Pepper (2001). This uses the Poole Nominate scores of the home state senators or of the nominating president if there is no home state senator of the same party as the president. The scores can range from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative). If we examine the nomination of Sotomayor to the United States District Court in 1992, she was nominated by a Republican president with a Republican home state Senator – Al D’Amato. That would peg her ideology at the time at .14, very moderate and just slightly conservative, befitting a then Republican Senator representing a very Democratic state. However, it was well known that both New York Senators employed a courtesy relationship in reference to judicial appointments. Depending upon the party of the president, the Senator of the same party would get 3 out of every 4 judicial appointments and the other Senator 1 out of every 4. Sotomayor was clearly an appointment of Daniel Moynihan. So if we peg the ideology to Moynihan, -.562, then Sotomayor is very liberal. Of course this shows one of the problems with this particular measure, and indeed with any measure of ideology.
Her appointment in 1998 to the Second Circuit presents no such problem. Clinton was president, so we can use Moynihan’s score, which at this time was even more liberal, – .614. Thus by using the Giles, et. al. measure, Sotomayor is very liberal.
Another measure was developed by a former colleague of mine, Dave Nixon, developed a more direct measure for each judge. We first used this in a paper published in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy (2003), and Scott Graves and I use it in our forthcoming book on recess appointments and I use it some other publications and it will be in another forthcoming book of mine of Courts and Tax policy. The calculation begins by using the nominate scores of congressional representatives who later served as federal judges as a formula for determining a nominate score comparable to Nominate scores. The formula then uses various circumstances surrounding the appointment such as unified government, wartime, party of the judge and party of the president, among other factors. Unlike the Giles, et. al. scores the Nixon/Howard scores allow for differences for judges even if appointed from the same state by the same president. The scores range from about -5, most liberal to + 5, most conservative.
Given all that, what is Sotomayor’s ideology based on both appointments? Although appointed first by a Republican president and then by a Democratic president, her ideology is similar in both, particularly since both took place under divided government. Her first score is – .21, while her second is -.28. Both liberal, to be sure, but both more moderate than the Giles, et. al. score.
Which is correct, what better predicts her future voting? Who knows, perhaps neither. We have not even begun to discuss the Segal Cover measure, more on that later.
… something light and fun to get you through the rest of the week – video of a guy named Ray attempting to break various items while wearing a strong man suit. The circus music and chimpanzee sounds are an especially nice touch. Thank goodness for the serious and thoughtful posting activity of our guest blogger program or you’d probably just get silly stuff like this from me during the summer.
For those of you who are frequent Adam Carolla podcast listeners and know Ray’s backstories, this will be especially fun. But even if you have no idea who he is, it’s still somewhat mindlessly entertaining.
A word of caution: it’s all fairly wholesome fun, but there is some course language when Ray gets frustrated. For what it’s worth, the link (above) works better than the embedded video below, which requires more manual labor to get the videos to all run one after the other.
I want to thank Jeff and Andy for the introduction and opportunity to guest blog periodically on their website. Although I publish on all areas of law and courts, my particular area of expertise is on law and policy and I hope to blog about that in the near future.
However, one thing that is striking to me as I write for a blog that straddles the lines of political science and law are the differences in citation rates between law and political science and even between fields and subfields in political science.
I am very happy that my work appears to be cited highly and I am particularly pleased that many law professors cite my work. In fact, at least half of my citations are in law related journals and law reviews. However, one reason for that is law reviews cite many more sources than political science. The emphasis on footnotes and careful citation is the norm for law reviews. The entire citation process is very different for political science.
Indeed even within political science there are significant differences. In a 2007 article in PS: Political Science and Politics, Mike Giles and Jim Garand note the significantly lower citation rates of articles and books in American Politics (Giles and Garand, 2007 pp. 746-747) as compared to international and comparative studies. In our department we put some emphasis on citations for those seeking promotion and tenure to Associate Professor and it is very important for promotion to full, yet it appears to hurt those who write and research in American Politics as compared to those who specialize in IR and Comparative Politics.
Maybe I should not complain too much because public law encroaches on legal scholarship so we get the benefit of citations in law reviews and law journals.
It seems like Andy and I have gone through endless alternative titles for our book (no, it is not the one pictured above) which should be out this summer on Johns Hopkins Press. However, I’m really glad that none of our tentative titles really rivals (in terms of oddness) any of the titles you will find in Oddee’s collection of strange book titles. You’ll note that one of the books is written by a famous academic. Another one, “Foreskin’s Lament” I have actually read, or more accurately, listened to on Itunes. It’s very funny and you might recognize the author, Shalom Auslander, from his guest appearances on Chicago Public Radio’s program “This American Life.”
… the high end financial executives, of course. Gawker provides a funny youtube video chronicling life after the high life in NYC (below). Perhaps this guy can find fulfillment on Odd Todd – a site devoted to helping those who are unemployed pass the time. Warning: pretty much all of the links in this post (and the youtube video) contain what some may consider coarse language and potentially offensive subject matter; nothing horrible, but not “G” rated, by any means.
In summary, while most mathematical treatment of statistical modeling tends to be focused purely on prediction, there is a good reason why the cost of interpretation should be considered. Epstein’s list of why interpretability matters should motivate us to care:
1. Explain (very distinct from predict)
2. Guide data collection
3. Illuminate core dynamics
4. Suggest dynamical analogies
5. Discover new questions
6. Promote a scientific habit of mind
7. Bound (bracket) outcomes to plausible ranges
8. Illuminate core uncertainties.
9. Offer crisis options in near-real time
10. Demonstrate tradeoffs / suggest efficiencies
11. Challenge the robustness of prevailing theory through perturbations
12. Expose prevailing wisdom as incompatible with available data
13. Train practitioners
14. Discipline the policy dialogue
15. Educate the general public
16. Reveal the apparently simple (complex) to be complex (simple)
… more specifically on hiring trends, on Leiter and Alfred Brophy on the Faculty Lounge Blog here and here. They make some interesting comments and predictions. I may post on this later when I’ve had more time to think about the topic, but I’ll posit two quick thoughts here: 1) any downturn in the economy creates institutional reactions, true, but it also creates personal reactions to those reactions. If teaching loads go up or tenure becomes more difficult (two of the predicted effects of the economic downturn), then academia becomes less attractive to certain individuals who may pursue alternative career paths. This, in turn, has its own implications. 2) A downturn in the economy also creates opportunities for those institutions who are better situated to deal with it – poaching may become more prevalent as more financially flush institutions are able to attract laterals from relatively less well off institutions.
While the satirical candidate public service announcement video (below), starring Tina Fey (as Sarah Palin) and Amy Poehler (as Hillary Clinton) is good fun, if you want to see the actual presidential candidate commercials they are available on “The Living Room Candidate.”
Get ready for the Battlestar Galactica finale by watching show video clips below! You can skip the “Caprica” ad video and go straight to the final season recap if you prefer.If you’ve never seen the show, then you might start out with the earlier recap here. Warning: these recaps have spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen episodes and want to watch them without such knowledge, then don’ watch the recaps.
The New York Times reports on Innocentive, a company that’s all about solving problems – and highly varied ones at that. Here’s an excerpt:
Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.
“Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Mr. Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products that were innovated on the InnoCentive network.”
InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, an in-house innovation “incubator” at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Mr. Spradlin said, with the company posting problems that its employees had been unable to solve. From the beginning the results were good, he said. “Most of our companies tell us they have a one-third or better solve rate on their problems and that is more cost-effective than anything they could have done internally.”
Here are some of the problems that are currently available to be solved:
We are interested in finding ways for people to make long-term habit changes in lifestyle. This is an Ideation challenge so your creativity and experience qualify you to participate in this challenge. Responses are expected to be about 2 written pages. (award $20,000)
My solution: spankings for adults when they engage in bad habits; problem solved, but there may be limitations
Design a long chewing product that does not require disposal. The product can dissolve in the mouth or break-up and be swallowable with no negative health impact on the body. (award $100,000)
My solution: I have this product I’m “developing” – I call it “salt water taffy”
We are looking for a technology that allows a timed-release flavor change to occur in a food product. (award $50.000)
Wait a minute, didn’t Willy Wonka already invent this? Oh yeah, he did, but it turned Veruca Salt into a giant blueberry.
The New York Times has an intriguing article on how the city of New York was influenced by and how it reacted to the cholera epidemics of the 18th century. It is an interesting case study for students of public policy and perhaps topical given recent threats of epidemics.
Despite the epidemics of ’32 and ’49, people still flocked to New York and other teeming cities. But the first outbreak bolstered support for the Croton Aqueduct system to bring clean upstate water to the city, a project, completed in 1842, that led to the phasing out of private and neighborhood wells that were often polluted with human and animal waste. In 1849, the municipal government banished more than 20,000 pigs to the outer reaches of the city. A similar effort in previous years had provoked riots, but this time a public chastened by epidemic complied.
Finally, after the work of Dr. Snow in London and a lesser cholera outbreak in New York in 1866, the Metropolitan Board of Health was established with doctors in commanding roles and broad powers to clean up the city. Inspectors went to houses and burned clothing of people who had just died. They cleared the filth, spread lime and instructed survivors in proper sanitation.
Cities had learned, or should have, that epidemics as a consequence of urbanization were their responsibility to prevent and control.
Over on Concurring Opinions Blog, Daniel Solove and crew are featuring a three part interview with the creators, writers, and producers of the sci-fi tv show ‘Battlestar Galactica‘. The focus of the interviews is the role of law in the show; topics include trials and tribunals, necessity vs. moral principles, torture, and deference to the military, among others.
Finally, two independently great nerdy things (i.e. sci-fi and legal academia) come together to produce something really great. Surely, supernerds Ira Glass, David Sedaris, and Sarah Vowell are involved somehow.
I think that the title pretty much says it all. Congrats to the television writers on their successful strike! What did they actually win and what did we learn? (Hat tip to Balkinization)
As the presidential candidate field narrows and the parties begin to square off against each other we will be hearing many familiar “competing yet somehow similar” solutions to how to handle the economy. Will any of the usual strategies offered by the candidates work? Robert Reich doesn’t seem to think they will. In his NY Times op-ed piece,”Totally Spent,” he writes:
The problem lies deeper. It is the culmination of three decades during which American consumers have spent beyond their means. That era is now coming to an end. Consumers have run out of ways to keep the spending binge going.
The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle- and lower-income Americans more buying power — and not just temporarily.
He adds that familiar fixes such as tax breaks for businesses or fed rate adjustments will not ultimately be effective solutions. The problem, he explains, is much deeper.
In The Atlantic, Lori Gottlieb’s article, “Marry Him!The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” advises women to heed just what the title indicates. While it’s certain to be an argument-starter, it’s also a very interesting read, regardless of how you feel about her views. Here are some excerpts:
What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way. (Emphasis added)
and…
Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.
and finally this …
But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”
The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”
Not one person has taken me up on this offer.
I initially saw this article posted on VC and the comments there are almost as interesting as the article. There’s also an interview with Lori concerning the article here.
Update: The men respond here. Actually, it’s Dr. Helen Smith’s post, but a ton of male comments follow (along with some comments by women). Perhaps this puts a whole new spin on John Edwards’ “Two Americas” – apparently it’s split on gender lines, not class I had no idea that there was this much discontent out there.
