Since my dissertation focuses on immigration (particularly subnational, pro-immigrant policies – p.s. I’m never making it onto the Today show), I thought this was an interesting, survey-based look at immigrant attitudes from 1928.  (http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Bogardus/1928/1928_toc.html). The more things change, the more they seem the same.  I haven’t made it through the entire book yet (thanks for Aleks for the heads-up and the Mead Project for the material, how would I cite that, by the way?), but it seems to be an early identification of aversion to immigration by “native” residents.  More when I finish it.

On that point, how much is the (almost universal) hostile reaction to immigrants a reaction to industrialization, the modern state, etc. and how much is psychological and an outcome of emotional, negative reactions to the “other?”  I mean, the Stranger is a typical aspect of historic (and modern) literature.  Usually not as a villain, but more as an agent of change, which, I guess, could explain some of the policy and publicity reaction.

Anyway, thank god this is a blog, I’m not sure that rambling about the connection between immigration policy and the literary archetype of the “Stranger” is getting passed my dissertation committee. However, I am intrigued by immigration policy, and how it has fluxuated between pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant policies since the founding.  Unlike, say, race, gender, sexuality, etc., which, generally speaking, have generally produced a long-term expansion of rights (more open and free for the “other”) through public policy, immigration has displayed an almost opposite directory.

During most of the 1800’s, public policy toward immigrants was generally generous, especially with access to social services, voting, naturalization, actual immigration, etc.  In the early 1900’s, however, (with, I’m sorry to say, an assist from the burgeoning social science fields) restrictive policies were enacted, initially against the Chinese and later against all immigrants.  For a good overview, see Tichenor’s Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America for a good historical treatment of national immigration policy in the U.S.

Basically, I’m interested in why “immigration” has not become a civil rights movement (and a successful one) like the gay rights movement, the women’s movement, the racial movement.  Obviously, those are the three that come to mind immediately, I could name more (the mentally ill, the disabled, etc.) movements where the object was for a greater acknowledgement by the state that the rights and protections of law applied to them as well.

Obviously, as an aside, none of the movements were unqualified successes, there are significant differences between the acknowledgement of rights and actual equality (de jure vs. de facto), and in real terms each of these movements has experienced significant setbacks as well as victories.  For every Title IX, there’s a Lilly Ledbetter (it deserves mention that while she lost in Court, she got a law. It’s actual effectiveness notwithstanding).  Anyway, my point is that, in so many other domains, the general, long-term trajectory has been an expansion of rights from members of different groups.  For immigrants, the opposite seems to have occurred.  Or, at least, the backlash is stronger and more persistent, with the status quo seemingly harder to move.

Why, of course, is the question?  Is there something more psychologically difficult about acknowledging the rights (humanity) of immigrants over homosexuals, members of another race, the disabled, etc.?  Or, is immigration more of a “standard” economic issue (that’s what Tichenor seems to think), and that labor needs drive pro-immigrant policy (or is it a feedback loop…)?

There are obviously immigrants-rights groups, powerful ones.  The Catholic Church, La Raza (pretty much any Latino group of any political clout), a number of agri-business groups, hi-tech firms need H2B folks and others.  They’ve pushed through directed bills, like DREAM Acts, H2A reform/AgJOBS (almost, a couple of times), etc.  But these groups don’t seem to have the clout (or the coherence) to push through a comprehensive, wide-ranging bill like the Civil Rights Act, or Title IX, or the ADA, something that provides a platform and a weapon for immigrants (legal and illegal) to fight the coercive power of the state and economic actors?

It should be obvious by now that I’m using this blog to do a little free-writing on my dissertation topic.  I’ll be working on my prospectus all summer, so expect more of these as I dig deeper into the topic.  These are just some unformed ideas off the top of my head, but hopefully something will turn into a theory of subnational pro-immigrant policy.  Politics, economics, civil rights, expertise – all of these influences come into immigration policy and I find it a fascinating subject.

Finally, apparently this guy is an illegal immigrant and a winner of the Pulitzer. Nifty.

First post in about 5 weeks, and no actual content to speak of.  In my defense during that period I: passed comps, had orthopedic surgery, had my wisdom teeth removed, moved to CT, got my car fixed, found a summer home for my cat, finished an online survey project about the Canadian election, and tried to keep up with my work at AJPS (to pay for said operations).  Most of that while on Vicodin. Basically, it’s been a busy month for me.  So, I’ll get back to posting and publishing in the next 2-3 days when I get started on my dissertation prospectus.  Expect a lot of comments and posts about immigration policy, particularly subnational immigration policy. Until then, let us all mourn the resignation of Anthony Weiner, not for the loss of a future leader, but for the forthcoming absence of thinly-veiled dick jokes in the news.

I’m taking a page from Adam Brown’s blog Abstract Politics, reviewing a recent piece of political science literature, in an attempt to make this blog look like something more than the random, unconnected musings of an academic dilettante. Also, it’s good comp prep.  Anyway, the article is available here (gated except for the abstract, sorry).

Basically, Gerber and Hopkins are arguing that partisanship in local policymaking only matters in areas where mayors (and assumedly other elected officials) have lack constraint.  Constraint, in this case, is defined by “where the money comes from.”  When the state and/or the feds are paying for something, partisan change in policy is minimal.  When executives are more free to act, the election of a partisan changes spending marginally, but significantly and substantively.

This finding/research is similar to Ferreira & Gyourko 2009, except that the lack of influence of mayoral partisanship was related mainly to Tiebour (1956) sorting.  Basically, people had homogeneous preferences, so partisanship of the leader had little effect.  Ultimately, I guess you could call this a constraint on the local executive as well, except one based on the nature of the electorate than the nature of municipal financing.

All told, I think Gerber & Hopkins’ (2011), as well as Ferreira & Gyourko’s, conclusions are reasonable, but may be looking for the policy effects of mayoral transition in the wrong place.  First, I’m still not sure about the applicability of the regression discontinuity design.  Yes, methodologists far more informed than I (including Hopkins) seem to like them, but in elections, they seem inapt.  This is primarily because, although RDD inferences are only biased if an ommitted variable is “unevenly distributed at the point of discontinuity”, small “true” population effects very well could affecting winning and losing at this level of measurement.  Just proof that this is an area I need to read up on more.

Secondly, and more importantly, while I agree with Gerber & Hopkins that constraint on finances is important, what they are primarily measuring in their model is changes in the magnitude of spending, rather than the distribution of spending.  First, we know from some of the race and politics literature at the local level that coethnic mayoral election can have effects of things like efficacy, turnout, etc. among the population.  So, executive differences can have some effect, at least among the mass public.  Secondly, if you can’t affect the magnitude of spending because of constraints, you might be able to affect the distribution of spending within agencies/departments.  More on traffic, less on homeless shelters.  More on public transportation, less on roads.

In short, I think a good place to look for partisan differences in local policy might be the distribution and targeting of local spending.  Who benefits?  Who wins?  Granted, that would be a difficult data collection effort to say the least (damned annoying, actually), but likely worth it.  Might put this one on the to-do list…

I wonder if our IAT results will show that Ignatieff is as disliked (or, at least, if people’s implicit attitudes about him, in comparison with the Liberal Party itself) as this Slate piece suggests.  I really can’t wait until our panel survey is complete and we can get to analyzing some sweet, sweet implicit attitudes about Canadian parties and leaders.

I’m going to start showing this article to anyone who questions the usefulness of social science, it’s status as an actual science, or what use my research (especially the implicit stuff) might be.  For those who aren’t interested in clicking the link, some social scientists are arguing that they can get a handle on a player’s future success in the NFL by doing textual analysis on college press conferences, etc.  These responses can then be used to map intangible psychological characteristics. Basically, they argue that it can help measure things like “leadership”, “winning attitude,” etc.

Honestly, I think it makes a lot of sense.  I’ve done some research with implicit attitudes, and I like implicit research, textual analysis, etc. because it’s a quieter way of measuring attitudes and behavior.  People construct answers to explicit things like survey questions, etc.  Methods like this textual analysis (and the IAT, and the Misattribution Test, Go-No Go, etc.) are sneaky and don’t illicit the same sort of interviewer, framing, question wording, comparability, etc. problems of standard surveys.  And apparently NFL Combine tests.

That said, there are obviously issues.  John Kerry, to the best of my knowledge, is not a terrorist and yet their analysis identified him as one.  Well, that’s not really a problem, but just an aspect of dealing in probabilities not certainties, but yeah, kind of a big mistake there.  And, the 4-quadrant graph that accompanied the bit about Aaron Rogers (who is awesome, by the way) and Aleks Smith is a little messy.  The relationships aren’t immediately clear (plus, on a visualization note, it tries to show too much.  I’d have done 80+ and >80 on QB ratings).

However, I think these issues have more to do with needing to refine the measures and theorize about which psychological aspects are most important to future success than any underlying problem with the concept.  I mean, just from a pro-sports perspective, once you get to the level of the NFL (or the NBA, MLB, NHL, etc.) you are so far to the right of the bell-curve on pure physical ability that distinguishing, physically, between Vince Young and Aaron Rogers (or Drew Brees, etc.) is probably next to impossible and likely useless if trying to predict future NFL success.  Analysis like that described in the link though, that can help you (probabilistically mind you) get inside the players’ heads and help managers/owners make more informed decision.  It may still be something of a crap shoot, but at least you’ll be playing with weighted dice.

Just recently read a brief blog post on Freakonomics (see here) about the rather poor quality of expert judgments.  Tetlock, a social scientist I otherwise strongly dislike because of his, rather anti-science, stance against the use of implicit attitudes (see here for a good smackdown of his objections), has also published an extensive and incredibly ambitious project on the fallibility of expert political judgments, primarily from a foreign policy standpoint (see here).  Basically, Tetlock finds that no one predicted the end of the Cold War and pundits are only slightly better and often worse at prediction than dart throwing monkeys.  Dubner is basically arguing that coaches and GM’s aren’t too good at predicting pro-success.  I’m not sure though how bad we (as social scientists, etc) really are at prediction or whether we allow non-relevant considerations (ideology, jersey sales, Tim Tebow) to cloud that judgment.  I mean, we’re pretty good at predicting vote choice, turnout, and a lot of other social phenomenon.  Then again, most social scientists aren’t pundits or consultants (BDM and the Freakonomics guys notwithstanding).  Also, it makes you wonder about the “wisdom of markets” and the “wisdom of crowds” if experts are so bad at prediction.  Provides a whole new spin on the economic crisis if even hedge fund managers, presumably experts, could be just as bad as chance at predicting what will go up and down.  Anyway, just an interesting area of research and an interesting aspect of social science to think about, especially considering how important we seem to think political knowledge is (Zaller 1992, 1996, Converse 1964, etc).

My and Aleks’ Canadian Election survey, complete with super cool implicit association tests (IAT) about the political parties, is up and running on Amazon’s M-Turk system.  It’s been up for about 12 hours now and, so far, we have exactly 1 respondent.  This is less than ideal, but we did post it fairly late last night, so hopefully we’ll get some more respondents today.  It took the one guy who’s completed the task only about 18 minutes to do it, which is less than we thought, so that’s a plus.  At least we’re learning about using Inquisit online and how to utilize the M-Turk system on Amazon, even if our response rate is somewhat limited so far.  The survey will stay in the field for the next week, so hopefully we’ll get a decent enough sample over that time frame.  The sample is restricted to Canada after all, maybe they don’t have wi-fi access up there in the great white north.  Anyway, so far, so good, at least functionally. I’m going to try and restrain myself from check the Amazon website every 30 minutes today to see who has completed the survey.

You might be a grad student if…

you have a catastrophic plumbing malfunction and you spend the entire time that the (very nice and competent) guy is working thinking about the strange principal-agent relationship involving you, your landlord, and the plumber.  Does this situation resemble a multiple principal relationship, a la Moe 1985 (& Moe 1990, and Lyne & Tierney 2003)?  My landlord is Congress, I’m the President, and the plumper in the bureaucracy?  Or maybe the landlord is President and I’m Congress?  I do have a singular overarching goal of being able to flush the toilet, similar to Congressional concern for reelection.  Might my landlord and I’s goals be competitive rather than cooperative, creating problems of control for us and discretionary opportunity for the plumber? I mean, I’m the only one who can directly evaluate the performance of the agent by having a functioning toilet and shower.  However, my lease is up in June and I’ll be leaving for Connecticut, so I have no incentive to monitor (or even ask for) a stable, long-term plumbing policy solution, while my landlord is likely interested in a cheap and effective long-term solution, doubly so since she’ll be moving-in in June.  Also, I don’t have to pay the guy (even to get reimbursed) so as long as the toilet flushes when he leaves (and it did, guy seemed good at his job), I have no interest in confirming if the job was hard/easy/accomplished/cheap/expensive/etc.  I guess that really does make me Congress, since as long as my toilet works (reelected), I’m less concerned with actual outcomes.  Which makes our cat chair-kitten of the Subcommittee on Trying to Escape the Whole Damn Time the Guy was Here.

See here.  Nice guest post from David (another Rice grad student) on arguably the most prominent blog in the discipline. Personally, I would have name dropped someone else in the first paragraph when discussing anarchy (never really liked the style over substance approach of the Sex Pistols, I was/am a Clash & the Damned kinda guy), but I guess you have to write for your audience.  As a general rule, political scientists have never struck me as being particularly conversant in 1st wave English punk bands.  Other than that, the points about studying caretaker governments are interesting and quite good.

Thanks to fellow Rice political science grad student Daniel Zaccariello for the link.  While facetious, the post “Stuff Political Scientists Like” has inspired me to go ahead and gather some original data for my dissertation.  Bring on the interviews and copious citations!  Maybe I’ll do some of that while summering in Connecticut this year.