Even though The Monkey Cage is now recognized as one of the “7 most powerful blogs in the world”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/11/forbes_magazine_names_the_monk.html, yet another reminder of the work that needs to be done to spread the word of political science research. One of my students thoughtfully forwarded me a link to “an article”:http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/the-psychology-of-party-ideologies/66304/ that went up on _The Atlantic_ today on partisanship, a topic near and dear to my research agenda. As a I read through the article I was pleased to see that the author, “Lane Wallace”:http://www.theatlantic.com/lane-wallace/ turned to an academic for insight into the topic, and wondered who it would be. “Larry Bartels”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/? “Don Green”:http://vote.research.yale.edu/? “Cindy Kam”:http://www.vanderbilt.edu/political-science/people/bios/?who=14? I could hardly wait!
Actually, it turned out to be clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto “Jordan Peterson”:http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/welcome.htm. By all accounts, Dr. Peterson appears to be a prolific and accomplished scholar. But a quick search of his vita revealed that neither the word “party” or “partisan” appeared anywhere on it. (“Political” showed up in one under review piece of work on personality and ideology). Now I have absolutely nothing against Dr. Peterson, and he certainly offered some interesting insights in the article. And the title of the article was _The Psychology of Partisanship_. But what does this say about the state of our discipline when a journalist writing an article on partisanship doesn’t even think to interview a political scientist as part of her research?
Clearly, there is more work to be done…
[Hat tip to Jasmine Dilmanian]