Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Wikis as Reading Tools

    A common problem in teaching advanced undergraduates is helping students to draw broader theoretical and conceptual lessons from the readings that they do. In the past, I have especially struggled in seminar-style courses, where I presume that students come to class having done the reading and ready to discuss it. Why were students having such a tough time discussing, say, corporatism after reading Governing the Market?

    I have come to realize is that most undergraduates, including the very best ones, read course materials differently than most faculty expect them to. There are lots of ways that this is true, but particular issue is, students gloss over terms of art, especially those that happen to look more or less like words that they already know. To give an example, if a student encounters a word that she’s never seen before, something like prebendalism, she is likely to pause to look it up. But if she encounters a word like corporatism, or agency slack, or mercantilism, she will breeze past it without pausing to reflect on it or what it means. As a consequence, this student will not only miss out on that term of art, she’ll also miss the broader point of the reading tied to it.

    It’s not the student’s fault, of course. They are not to be held responsible for knowing which familiar-looking words are the important ones. The question for the teacher, though, is how to focus the student’s attention on those terms in advance?

    The solution that I use is the “Course Wiki.” As I described some years ago, the wiki works like this. First, I scan all of the readings and identify four or five key terms in each that I want the students to know. Then, I assemble a wiki page (using Blackboard) that contains each of these terms—organized by week to keep things manageable. Then, students construct the wiki themselves, defining key terms, explaining where they show up in the reading, why they matter, and (in the best cases) how they relate to one another. I assigned the “wiki updating” task to each week’s seminar discussion leader, so that teams of student collaborate to do the editing each week, and others can watch their progress.

    The best part of wikis is not their construction, but how students use them. All motivated students end up looking at the wiki before doing the reading, and this gives them a sense of where they should be directing their attention as they do it. The activity also creates a kind of seminar community, because all students rely on one another to do a good job with the wiki—if not, everyone suffers. In the several times I’ve used wikis, I’ve also come to understand that it’s a useful way to help students navigate sources found online. Under what conditions are wikipedia entries good clues for what we mean with a particular term? When do they need to look elsewhere?

    This semester I’m using a wiki once again for my Asian Political Economy seminar (syllabus [PDF]). Here is the list of all the terms that they’ll need to define and understand this semester. Can you get them all? Better yet, can you explain how they matter for the political economy of contemporary Asia?

    Accommodativeness, Adverse Selection, Agency Slack, Allocation Breadth, Allocative Efficiency, ASEAN-4, Asian Tigers, Asset Mobility, Asset Stripping, Big Bang, Big Push, Block Vote, Bureaucratic Capitalist, Bureaucratic Centralization, Capital Controls, Central Committee, Centralization and Powerlessness, Chaebol, China Model, Citizen Revolt, Clientelism, Collective Rights, Colonialism, Command Economy, Commitment, Common Market, Competition vs. Privatization, Competitive Liberalization, Contagion, Convergence, Cooptation, Coordination, Coordination Problem, Corporatism, Creative Destruction, Credible Threat, Daitou Zhifu, Decentralization, Decommodification, Delegation, Deliberation Council, Demand Groups, Democracy, Democratic Values, Development versus Growth, Developmental State, Diffusion, Disarticulation, Distortions, Distributional Conflict, District People’s Councils, Doi Moi, Dual-Track Price System, Economic Governance, Economic Rents, Efficiency Costs, Embedded Autonomy, Embedded Mercantilism, Embedded Particularism, Endogenous Technological Change, Ethnic Chinese Capitalism, Evolutionary Reform, Exclusionary Corporatism, Export-Led Recovery, Expropriation, Externalities, Extractive Institutions, Faction, Factor Mobility, Federalism, Fence-Breaking, Fiscal Contracting, Fragmentation, Franchise System, Gaige Kaifang, Gini Coefficient, Growth Accounting, Hajj Network, Hard Budget Constraint, Hawthorne Effect, High Performing Asian Economy, Household Responsibility System, Human Capital, Ideas, Ideology, Incentives, Indirect Rule, Individual Rights, Industrial Development Bureau, Industrial Policy, Informal Institutions, Informal Sector, Institution, Institutions of Private Property, Interethnic Complementarity, Interjurisdictional Competition, Internal Trade, Keiretsu, Land Dispossession, Liberalization, License Raj, Lost Decade, Macroeconomic Stability, Majoritarianism, Marketization, Middle Peasants, MITI, Monopoly, Mutual Hostages, National Champions, National People’s Congress, Neopatrimonialism, Neoutilitarian Theory, Networks, Norm Entrepreneur, Oligarchy, Owner Control, Panchayati Raj, Path Dependence, Path-Breaking, People’s Political Consultative Conferences, Persistence, Personalism, Pluralism, Policy Risk, Pork, Pre-Modern State, Precarization, Price Scissors, Princely States, Private Property Rights, Private Taxation, Pro-Social Behavior, Property Rights, Protective Repression, Red Capitalists, Redistribution, Regime Type, Remodelling Thesis, Rent Seeking, Schumpeterian Rents, Scope of Authority, Screening, Sequencing, Side Payments, Single Member District, Single Nontransferable Vote, Social Exclusion, Sogo Shosha, Sophisticated Geography Hypothesis, Structural Adjustment, Synthetic Control, Systemic Vulnerability, Technocrat, Total Factor Productivity, Township and Village Enterprises, Transaction Costs, Transborder Regionalism, Tripartite Negotiations, Troika, Twin Crises, Unitism, Vertical Investment, Veto Player, Volatility, Zaibatsu

  • Ethnicity, Identity, and Meaning in Comparative Politics: A New Approach

    One of the hard things about studying ethnicity is that socially-embedded meanings and ideas about ethnic identity are hard to uncover. Qualitative and contextual research is essential, but this stands in the way of other important goals such as generalization and inter-group comparison. Political scientists who study ethnicity in the comparative context have struggled to characterize exactly how understandings of ethnicity differ across contexts. Some of the most important work on identity relies on situations where “objective cultural differences… [between groups] are identical,” which obviously makes it impossible to study differences. Other work comparing ethnic groups is forced to assume that they can be treated identically aside from their population share and distribution. This, for example, is implicit in the creation of ethnic fractionalization indices (PDF). There are alternatives to fractionalization that rely on some metric of cultural similarity or distance, but such metrics are coarse, usually unidimensional, and imposed by the researcher. It is always possible to embed questions about ethnicity or identity in surveys, but to be useful, the survey creator already must know what questions to ask, what dimensions matter, and how important they are relative to one another.

    In a new working paper I propose a different way to identify the “content” of ethnic identity and how it differs across groups. In survey data collected in 2017 in peninsular Malaysia and in three provinces (and one city) in Sumatra, enumerators asked each respondent to say two things that came to mind when respondents thought of the Malay ethnic group. Most respondents were able and willing to answer this question. Sometimes the answers are sorta funny (one Javanese respondent in Sumatra said “talk too much” [= suka bicara panjang], one Malay respondent in Malaysia said “easily colonized” [= bangsa yang mudah di jajah]). But we don’t want to pick out to silly responses, we want to pick out general patterns.

    To do this, I used a text-analytic procedure called structural topic modeling to uncover, from among the nearly 2000 responses, coherent “ideas” (or “topics”) about what Malayness means. I then used features of the respondents—age, gender, their own ethnic group, and most importantly for my purposes, whether they are Indonesian or Malaysian—to predict the likelihood that any respondent would invoke each of these ideas. (The method comes from Roberts et al. 2014.) To visualize the results, see the figure below.

    The result is a test of the hypothesis that, say, Malaysian respondents are more likely to talk about Islam (or religion in general) when describing Malays than are Indonesian respondents. That is what the above figure shows. It also shows that Malaysians are more likely to use words like “lazy” [= malas] and to invoke royalty (or more generally governance) [= raja].

    There are many other ways that one might slice these data; this is just an illustration. For a longer and more detailed introduction to this method and its uses, including exploring differences across groups within one country, see here.