Maybe the problem isn’t that scholars don’t know how to speak to U.S. foreign-policy makers, but rather that U.S foreign-policy makers don’t know how to engage with scholarship?
Bridging the Gap to Nowhere?
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methodology
Call for Participants: Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies
“Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies” A One-Day Graduate Student Workshop Sponsored by the International Studies Association-Northeast Region 9 November, 2013 • Providence, Rhode...
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Methodological Tools: Social-Network Analysis Alert
Is the society depicted in this film historically accurate? Let's perform a social-network analysis! Here's a helpful hint: the "realism" of social networks in the Iliad, Beowulf, and the Tain tell...
Terrorism and Terrorists: Political, Analytical, and Methodological Issues
Some commentators have suggested posts that pose questions to our readers. I think that the discussion on Peter Henne's piece, "A Modest Defense of Terrorism Studies," provides just such an...
More methodology Posts
Knowing and the Known
Although the majority of the offerings in the European Consortium on Political Research's inaugural Winter School in Methods and Techniques (to be held in Cyprus in February 2012) are pretty firmly neopositivist, at the risk of sound like a shameless self-promoter I'd like to call your attention to course A6, "Knowing and the Known: Philosophy and Methodology of Social Science," which I am teaching. The short description of this course is:"The social sciences have long been concerned with the epistemic status of their empirical claims. Unlike in the natural sciences, where an evident record...
New Statistics on Civilian Targeting
In a new paper, Michael Spagat and a number of collaborators explore the determinants of intentional civilian killing in war. Using sophisticated regression analysis they claim to have found "four significant behavioral patterns":"First, the majority (61%) of all formally organized actors in armed conflict during 2002-2007 refrained from killing civilians in deliberate, direct targeting.Second, actors were more likely to have carried out some degree of civilian targeted, as opposed to none, if they participated in armed conflict for three or more years rather than for one year.Third, among...
$h•! PTJ Says #2: on the difference between assumptions and conclusions
I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Spelling out your theoretical and methodological assumptions -- the contours of your conceptual equipment, so to speak -- is a vital part of doing good social science, because if I don't know what your assumptions are then I really can't fairly evaluate your results. In fact, if I don't know what your assumptions are, I probably have little choice but to apply my own standards, which may or may not be appropriate to your...
Semantic polling: the next foreign policy tool
George Gallup - what have you started? The traditional methods for a state to know what overseas publics are thinking are changing. Instead of relying on your embassy staff’s alertness, your spies’ intelligence and the word of dissidents, we’re reaching the point where foreign policymakers can constantly monitor public opinion in countries in real-time. The digitization of social life around the world – uneven yes, but spreading – leaves ever-more traces of communications to be mined, analysed and acted upon. In a paper that Nick Anstead and I presented in Iceland this week, we called this...
Crunching Drone Death Numbers
The Monkey Cage has published a detailed guest post by Christine Fair on the drone casualty debate. Fair takes leading drone-casualty-counters (Bergen and Tiedeman's New America Foundation database and new numbers out from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism) to task for their methodology, in particular focusing on their sourcing: While these methodologies at first blush appear robust, they don’t account for a simple fact that non-Pakistani reports are all drawing from the same sources: Pakistani media accunts. How can they not when journalists, especially foreign journalists, cannot...
$h•! PTJ Says #1: justifying your theory and methodology
I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."The fact that no one else has approached topic X with your particular perspective is not a sufficient warrant for approaching topic X with your particular combination of theory and methodology. In order to get the reader on board, you have to basically issue a promissory note with a grammar that runs something like:'Here's something odd/striking/weird/counterintuitive about X. Other scholars who have talked about X...
On Paradigms, Policy Revelance and Other IR Myths
I had every intention this evening of writing a cynical commentary on all the hoopla surrounding Open Government, Open Data and the Great Transparency Revolution. But truth be told, I am brain-dead at the moment. Why? Because I spent the last two days down in Williambsurg, VA arbitrating codes for a Teaching, Research and International Politics (TRIP) project (co-led by myself and Jason Sharman) which analyzes what the field of IR looks like from the perspective of books. It is all meant as a complement to the innovative and hard work of Michael Tierney, Sue Peterson and the TRIP founders...
Stuff political scientists like #5 — a Large N
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 work blue. Your girlfriend has told you, "Honey, your data set is big enough for me. It's OK if it doesn't get you into the APSR." She might tell you, "It is not the size of p-value that matters, it is what you do with it." A good theory can make up for a large-N, she reassures you. But political scientists know the truth. Size matters. Political scientists like a large-N.A large-N enables you to...