Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • The Benefits of Peer Reviewing

    There is a great article on peer reviewing (sorry, gated) by Beth Miller, Jon Pevehouse, Ron Rogowski, Dustin Tingley, and Rick Wilson in the current issue of PS: Political Science and Politics (HT Marc Bellemare). My favorite part of the article is not the guidelines on how to be a good peer reviewer, but why it is important to review manuscripts even if you are purely and utterly selfish. Peer reviewing, after all, can take a lot of time, and is viewed as an onerous task that distracts from other professional activities like research, writing, teaching, and going to get coffee. I quote at length:

    • Refereeing allows you to keep up with cutting-edge research in your sub-field, while also helping to keep your sights set more broadly;
    • Too often, we only see the final product, which can give us a false sense of elegance. Reviewing manuscripts in their early stages reminds us that everyone (and every published bit of research) has to go through a process of refinement;
    • By exposing you to diverse examples and writing styles, reviewing allows you develop an appreciation of effective writing and helps you improve as a writer;
    • Related, refereeing allows you to understand and apply the subtle differences between writing papers for seminars, conferences, and journals;
    • Finally, many academic journals allow reviewers to see the other reviews of the same manuscript, which allows you to assess your own review and compare your assessment of a manuscript to what other researchers think about it. It also allows you to see how much disagreement may prevail in evaluating even important manuscripts.

    I could not have said this better myself. One thing to note among these comments is the emphasis on improving your own writing by reading and critically evaluating others’ work. I think that PhD students, especially, fail to appreciate just how important writing is: style, form, clarity, argument, all the things that you learn in high school English class.

  • Migration and Governance in Java

    I wrote several months ago about a long-term project on the colonial origins of local economic governance in Java, and in particular, on the importance of ethnicity and colonial migration. The first substantial output of that project is now available. Here is the abstract:

    The social exclusion of trading minorities—Lebanese in West Africa, and Indians in East Africa and the Caribbean, Chinese in Southeast Asia—is common across post-colonial states. This paper uses demographic data from the 1930 Census of the Netherlands Indies to study the long term effects of the social exclusion of trading minorities in Java on contemporary economic governance. I show that districts in Java that were densely settled by Chinese migrants in 1930 have more accommodative business-government relations today. To highlight the importance of social exclusion rather than other factors that may differentiate colonial districts with large Chinese populations, I exploit variation in the settlement patterns of Chinese and Arab trading communities in Java, which played comparable roles in the island’s colonial economy but faced different degrees of social exclusion. These findings contribute to recent work on the colonial origins of development, ethnicity and informal institutions, and the historical origins of democratic performance.

    The full working paper is available here. Comments, as always, are very welcome.

    I am particularly excited about the disciplinary border-crossing in this project, drawing on some classical works in Indologie (all the way back to van den Berg 1886!) as well as the theoretical insights from the (not so new) New Institutional Economics. EDIT: Obviously, this recalls my earlier post on Morck and Yeung, economics, and history. The goal is to have history complement my not-so-super-duper regressions.