Quantitative Research

The Imperative Of Military Spending — OR — Fun With Defense Numbers

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A lot of debate has been stirred up recently regarding the levels of military spending in the US.  Two wars running for the better part of a decade have dramatically inflated our defense expenditures, and the recent global recession has forced many to consider where costs can be cut.  This recent article by Foreign Policy’s … Read more

More More or Less

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This episode of the radio show 'More or Less', available in podcast, has a nice discussion of Arrow's impossibility theorem. It's a consistently good show for anyone interested in quantitative social science, especially how to teach it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless/ Ben FarrerBen is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at Knox College. He … Read more

The War We Don’t See

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This is a topic that I’ll probably expand on later, but I was just reading an article discussing the role of Hamid Karzai’s brother in the present Afghan conflict.  This article gets at an issue that I’ve thought about before.  From the FP article cited above: But he could not exist without the support of coalition … Read more

Lessons From the Past? Or Justifying an Idiosyncratic Research Agenda?

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I remember reading Michael Tomz's book Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt Across Three Centuries for a seminar a couple of years ago, and someone having made a remark about how Tomz was probably just really interested in the time period or the subject matter, but had to frame the research in such a way as to justify its relevance beyond what might be the author's more narrow interests.  Since then I've had a few discussions with some of my advisers on the topic of how we frame our research–essentially how we sell a line of research as relevant to our field.  Overall though, I've found that this is a topic that seems to have stayed out of in-class discussions for the most part.

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The Development of Geocentric versus Heliocentric Models of the Solar System: The Predictive versus Explanatory Powers of Models

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        The predictive power of a model does not always mean that it is accurately represents the true nature of what it is trying to explain. The geocentric model of the solar system is an example of such a case. Geocentric models dominated astrology and astronomy for almost 2000 years before scientists realized that these models, despite their predictive power, did not correctly describe the nature of the stars, the planets, and their movement. And even when the proper model, the heliocentric model, was discovered, it was not fully accepted until it produced better predictions. This case calls into question whether predictive capability alone should allow a certain model to dominate the discourse of a certain research program. It also suggests that scientists in general should be more open to non-conventional models in their discipline, even if these models do not immediately provide better predictions than the conventional models.

More after the jump…


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Economy of Force and Asymmetric Conflicts

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Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy had a piece posted a couple of days ago that just caught my eye.  It basically talks about the current status of terrorist training camps and what the itinerary for the typical attendee entails.  It's pretty brief, but I think it covers some interesting subject matter.  And let me preface … Read more

Faculty Salary, Compensation, and the Cost of Living.

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Voir Dire posted a working paper yesterday that is worthy of reposting given its broad implications. The paper "University Rankings by Cost of Living Adjusted Faculty Compensation" by Terrance Jalbert, Mercedes Jalbert, and Karla Hayashi in the International Journal of Management and Marketing Research can be found at SSRN. The abstract can be viewed at either Voir Dire or SSRN, so I will save the space and not repost it here, but a bit more information can be found after the jump.  It is perhaps sufficient to say that the aggregated and averaged data can be tremendously interesting to any of us that influenced by the academic job market.

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Best Practice in Political Science (or Any Field)

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Over the past year or so I've been getting more and more into network analysis–Both for its theoretical and methodological components.  For the most part, this methodological approach has not seen widespread use in political science, although network approaches are steadily growing.  Emilie Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander Montgomery have a relatively recent article about … Read more

Bayesian Approaches to Political Science

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I ordered Carlin and Louis 2009 “Bayesian Methods for Data Analysis” yesterday and have been left with some questions by the first chapter that I want to raise here, because it reinforces my belief that there’s an unfortunate lacuna in this and many similar books. Specifically, is there a specific Bayesian approach to political science beyond what we think of as the Bayesian approach to statistical inference? I believe that our discipline conducts empirical testing primarily for the basis of making a convincing attempt at falsifying ourselves. If a tool is confusing to the median political scientist, can it ever be convincing? And for Bayesian statistics in particular, is an effort to fit the best model really an effort to falsify the theory?


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