The Gregynog Ideas Lab, a thinking space for scholars interested in studying global politics from a range of critical, postcolonial, feminist, post-structural and psychoanalytic traditions, takes place every summer at Gregynog Hall in mid-Wales (UK). This unusual...
In the Matrix, it's trivial to specify the underlyingdata-generating process. It involves kung fu. Given PTJ's post, I wanted to clarify two points from my original post on Big Data and the ensuing...
I have been doing a lot of work with survey data lately, as well as some reading in critical theory. Maybe that inspired my deconstruction of the gendered language of stats. Or maybe I just like to...
PTJ has one of the most sophisticated ways of thinking about different positions in the field of International Relations (and, by extension, the social sciences), but his approach may be too...
Qualitative scholars in political science are used to thinking of themselves as under threat from quantitative researchers. Yet qualitative scholars' responses to quantitative "imperialism" suggest that they misunderstand the nature of that threat. The increasing flow of data, the growing availability of computing power and easy-to-use software, and the relative ease of training new quantitative researchers make the position of qualitative scholars more precarious than they realize. Consequently, qualitative and multi-method researchers must not only stress the value of methodological...
One of my tasks since getting back from hiatus has been to wade through political science journals that piled up over the summer. In the April issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, I discovered this little gem: a one-page "article" entitled "Picturing Political Science" which consisted of the following: "What do political scientists study? As part of a larger project, we coded every article in 25 leading journals between 2000 and 2007. We then created a word cloud of the 6,005 titles using https://www.wordle.net. The 150 most-used words appear in the word cloud. The size of each word...
"If the U.S. merely doubled its annual aid [to Pakistan] from $700 million to $1.5 billion, America’s influence in the country would significantly jump, while the militants’ would drop drastically. Why? Because with that sort of financial flow, corrupt rural officials would suddenly profit more from helping the U.S. than from helping the Taliban."So says the computer model that predicted Khamenei's rise to power and the timing of Pervez Musharraf's fall.This from yesterday's NYTimes expose on political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who helped popularize the application of game theory to...
If you've not done so, open up your Political Science & Politics and read James Fowler's article "The Colbert Bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful than Truthy." In this brilliant piece, Fowler empirically tests whether support exists for Stephen Colbert's claim that Congresspersons who appear on his late-night comedy show receive a "bump" in their approval ratings.Now I need to go back through my video archive to make sure I'm correct in thinking the correct indicator of approval ratings, according to Colbert, is opinion polls (Fowler uses donations to Congressional campaigns as a...