[In this post, Geist, our intrepid explorer, considers why much of the statistical work being done in political science is quite bad. Will he bore himself to death? Read below to find out!]
To the
layperson, statistics is oftentimes tedious and quite boring. So are laws. So
is anything that massively affects your life outcomes. It’s why I have no idea
what Obamacare actually is. And it’s why I don’t care to find out. From what I’m told, it’s why we need Obamacare in the first
place.
Pop
statistics sites, with their manifestos and self-proclaimed brio, have tried to
gussy up something that’s by its very nature rather unsexy. So inevitably, Five
Thirty Eight has succeeded at sucking the
fun out of everything from eating burritos to masturbation[1],Vox
has us memorizing flashcards for a Vox quiz that’s always seemingly just over
the horizon, and the Monkey Cage is, well, fine I guess. I doubt many people
ever click the link to the article being referenced or the book being cited.
Because
if they did, they’d likely see a lot of statistics. And statistics do two
things to high-minded, supposedly well-informed liberals: scare the shit out of
them and confer authority on whatever it is being said.[2]
Now, I’m not talking about basic findings like “Mitt Romney is responsible for 23% of the unemployment found among Hispanics”. People are pretty comfortable
citing these things when it helps their point and conveniently skeptical when
they don’t.
Instead, I’m talking about articles using techniques like maximum likelihood
estimation. Then fear strikes: most people will pledge blind devotion to
whatever the findings are because “Holy Shit! Look at those equations! I don’t
want to be seen as stupid in the company of my STEM overlords.” Others (the
liberal arts Left), though equally scared of something they don’t understand,
performatively thumb their noses at authority by trashing the whole enterprise
altogether.
As I’ll
discuss in my next post, there’s nothing inherently wrong with statistical
research when it’s properly conducted. It’s something that I think the Left
needs more of. That said, the statistics produced by political scientists
largely suck.
I’m not
going to spend much time substantiating this claim. It requires too much space
and it’s boring as hell. That said, having worked with one or two tenured political
scientists who are actually quite good at their job, the general feeling
among those who are highly statistically literate is sheer wonderment over
how most of the articles published ever get through peer review. Most political
scientists know a lot of advanced, sophisticated techniques just enough to use
them, but not well enough to know if they’re being used correctly. The result
is that political scientists bury many of their more suspect assumptions or
design decisions under layers of high level statistical techniques.
Perhaps
to uncover why this is happening we should conduct a sociological examination
of the discipline. While I don’t have any hard evidence for my following hunch,
it's certainly testable.
The problem, I think, is how the graduate
school is underserved by the undergraduate curriculum. A political science
degree essentially confers a bachelor’s in electives. Very few programs require
any statistical or mathematical training. All of the articles we have
undergraduates read are either purely theoretical or historical in nature. The findings
are presented either as fact or they’re debated like issues are on cable news—which
is to say, without any sort of rigor. Very few papers are ever assigned that
give the undergrad a huge dose of statistics (cuz it’s scary!) and if they are
the statistical section is not assigned. American political science students are
presented with a very skewed (and inaccurate) view of how the field works. They
think the field is what people were doing in the 80s and 90s.[3]
But
since the early 00s, the sophistication of our statistical methods has
increased by magnitudes. Everyone has to be trained in a whole battery of
quantitative methodological approaches in order to be at all employable.
Political science departments began hiring academics with PhDs from economic and
business school programs. The field has become massively teched-up as a result.
Much of the work done by these academics (largely in American political
science) requires a Masters in economics to understand what they’re doing.[4]
The other subfields—international relations, comparative politics, and even
some of political theory—have since borrowed from their techniques and methods.
Political
science graduate schools are not pulling from economic undergraduate programs,
however. Instead, they’re selecting primarily from a pool of undergraduates who
think political scientists either generalize from news stories and history books,
theorize endlessly, or conduct surveys all day.[5]
They’re pulling from a group of students who didn’t do much math or statistics
in college and then expect them to learn graduate econometrics in roughly a
year. This is a recipe for terrible, terrible scholarship.
What
usually happens is this: students attend “math camp” for a week or two where
they learn the parts of calculus that will later help ground their statistical
training. They’re then trained in a variety of statistical methodologies over
the next year and a half, frustratingly being taught as if they were
statisticians or economists in training. The economists or business school PhDs
who teach these courses teach in equations and proofs. These students only
understand in prose. They then have a political scientist explain the work in English, which gives them a grasp of the material at a basic
conceptual level. Unfortunately, statistics is ultimately a mathematical
discipline, so there’s very little sense among graduates students what the
mathematical reasons are underpinning any one statistical decision. The result
is what I talk about above: bad research.
Unless political
science departments change their undergraduate programs, this problem is not
likely to be ameliorated. Economists and statistician undergrads are not going
to apply to political science programs because the job opportunities are
terrible, especially in comparison to those in economic and statistics
departments or the private sector. And the field can’t go back to the
pre-millennium Stone Age.
Pt. V on the problems with Leftist political science will be posted soon.
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