Best of APSA

I've been at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. A friend told me that this sounded as exciting as a convention of dentists. Actually, I had a great time. These meetings are fun after the first 10-15 years of annual misery and abuse. Maybe because the abuse constitutes a new submissive subject, a subject capable of enjoying sitting through hours upon hours of panels? At any rate, I am that subject. I like seeing what folks are doing, what direction their work is taking, the little shifts in argument that appear over time. I also very much like seeing friends I haven't seen for a year or two.

Now, all sincerity aside, I will list some of the papers I didn't hear. I list these because political theorists are criticized for not talking to the rest of the field, for using jargon that no one else understands. But what about these guys?

"Using the Zero-Inflated Ordered Probit in  Pooled Cross-Sectional Time-Series Setting to Clarify the Political Economy of the Ratification of, and Compliance with, Human Rights Treaties"

"Correct Confidence Intervals for Time-Invariant and Rarely Changing Variables in Panel Data: A Boostrap Approach"

"Testing Copula Functions as a Method to Derive Bivariate Weibull Distributions"

Comments

[sandra simonds]

I should use some of these for titles of poems!

[Craig]

I didn't do sociology as my undergraduate degree, but I did my M.A. (and am completing a PhD) in it. The director of the graduate program decided to accept me as a student in the program on the condition that I did their third year undergraduate statistics and research methods course. The official reason, "You won't understand anything you read in your graduate courses if you don't take it." This, of course, was odd because the program in question has very few faculty and even fewer graduate students working with quantitative data. Most either doing qualitative, archival or theoretical work. Point being, I took the damn course, received a good mark, and still don't know what the hell these people are saying or why I should care. And, yet, the theoretical wing exercises tyranny over the entire discipline! (As in political science, there is usually one or two token theorists to teach the core undergraduate and graduate courses.)

[Marco]

shall we say, it shows how idealism seem to be surfing back again in our political interventions? obscurity and all other forms of trying to distort certain political events by virtue of such scientific sounding gestures try to obliterate the fact that class struggle and mode of production are still formidable grounds to interpret the state of things, what do you think?