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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Bargaining with Your Right Brain

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A friend outside of political science linked me this post asking if we deal with bargaining models in political science.  For those of you who are not in the know, one of the mainstays of contemporary International Relations game theory treats war as a bargaining process between states.  As such, the author argues that traditional … Read more

“The Fun Theory”

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The makers of Volkswagen have developed a fairly interesting "theory" about human behavior: if you make something fun, you can change people's behavior for the better. They call this The Fun Theory and have dedicated a website to demonstrating how it works.  In the first video of the website, they demonstrate how pedestrians leaving a train station can be … Read more

Studying Social Sciences and Religiosity

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A new study by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan suggests that individuals who studied social sciences in college were the least religious compared to their classmates six years after graduation. This conclusion is not surprising. Social scientists study the development of man made institutions and organizations. This probably makes religious organizations … Read more

Political Science Entertainment Night

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Tonight, a few of us are going to gather to participate in a movie and game night.  The goal of which is to be entertained by both while also having it relate to what we study in political science. Tonight's Agenda: The movie for tonight is the classic The Princess Bride. The inspiration for having … Read more