A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.
It might sound something like that. Chris Beam of Slate takes a stab. It’s inspired by the Columbia Journalism Review piece that Henry noted previously. Brendan Nyhan and I supplied Beam some of our pet peeves—e.g., this one and this one—although the humor is all his.
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Alternatively, it might end up looking something like the Monkey Cage’s relative coverage of the UK election, and the Eurozone Crisis. Looking at all entries back to the beginning of February, I found 22 entries about the UK election, against 7 in some way related to the Euro debt crisis.
I realise this is neither an economists’ blog, nor a blog primarily about current affairs, but given the Monkey Cage’s apparent mission to, among other things, 1) “publicise political science research” (which I read, maybe wrongly, as publicising the relevance of political science to contemporary debates)and 2) “provide informed commentary on political events and issues … including topics unrelated to polling or elections”, this relative weighting of coverage seems a little unbalance. The UK election was an important event – but mainly for those in the UK. Conversely, the greatest political(!)-economic crisis to date in the world’s second-largest economic area is surely an event that matters to those far beyond the Eurozone’s borders. Moreover, from my admittedly cursory reading of media outlets other than the FT, it seems to me to have been not that well covered, especially in regard to the political dynamics of the crisis. The discipline contains plenty of people working on European political economy – maybe an opportunity for some guest blogging, esp. guest blogging from political economists and/or students of elite politics, rather than of “polling or elections”?
NM: I see your point, but . . . there are a heck of a lot of high-profile economics blogs out there, from Krugman on down. I think it makes sense for us here to offer something different than you might find elsewhere in the blogosphere.
If you’re looking for sober commentary on political economy, you might start with Mark Thoma’s blog and Vox EU.
NM: I see your point too. The greater prevalence of UK stories probably also reflects the fact that Josh Tucker, Andy, and I do some research on political behavior and elections, the fact that Henry Farrell is Irish and so keeps an eye on his former overlords across the way, and the fact that elections in general tend to attract disproportionate attention in the media and blogosphere (and the UK election was no exception).
We’ll do our best to discuss polisci in light of a range of current events, but I’m sure we’ll always have some blind spots, as well as issues where one or more of us simply lack the expertise to comment intelligently. Certainly that is true for me regarding the European debt crisis.
We would also welcome any and all guest-bloggers to add expertise on any issue.
Of course one could easily argue that political science is being just as self-serving in its insistence that human agency plays a minimal role in world and national affairs, as journalists are in insisting that these myriad actions and activities matter.
Political scientists have every incentive to minimize and trivialize the events journalists suggest are important. This is how they can distinguish themselves, and defend claims to expertise and specialized knowledge.
In the end, those claims need to be examined by people *other than* political scientists (and their fellow travelers in related fields). But they probably won’t be because political science is rarely important enough for other people to bother.
J. Gimpel: If what you said were true, wouldn’t some political scientists have tremendous incentive to gain fame and notoriety within the field by exposing the biased research practices of the political scientists you describe?
Not if no one cares b/c no one much reads ps in the first place. How can there be fame in critiquing something almost one reads and no one cares about?
Political scientists don’t even read, much less cite, the works of other political scientists. Others certainly won’t.
Gimpel:
I read, cite, and admire your work all the time. But, I’m only a relatively new asst prof of poli sci.
Still, I understand your point; I often feel like there is so much good work out there, even in my own narrowly defined field, that it is hard to keep up. Just one of the reasons I love The Monkey Cage, Gelman’s stats blog, Bernstein’s Plain Blog, etc.
But then what incentive is there to “distinguish themselves” in the first place if no one cares? Who are they “defending their expertise” to?
It’s a very small audience, increasingly specialized, that’s the point. Papers are written for a few insiders, and are becoming increasingly specialized in topic and method.
The consequence is that much of what gets into print just isn’t read or cited, even by insiders. The evidence of this is in the Social Science Citation Index, where the average paper published in leading political science journals is receiving between 0 and 2 cites after several years of print.
There apparently aren’t that many who do, in fact, care.
But it is this very specialization that protects the field’s claims to possessing a unique storehouse of knowledge and expertise. Ironic.
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