Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • -Isms Are Out, -ities Are In

    To start off 2015 on a light note, I refer you to a recent post on academese over at Savage Minds. It seems that at least in anthropology (the purview of Savage Minds), -isms are out, and -ities are in.

    “I am an –ism person,” Temma Kaplan, Rutgers historian said to me. “I don’t do –ity.”

    I gave her a knowing look.

    “It used to be all –isms. Now everything is –ities,” she said.

    “But you can’t get a job in women’s studies without working on an –ity.” I said, “–ities are the thing these days.”

    She sighed and shrugged.

    It goes on like this.

    But you will be au courant if you abandon the –ism and go with the –ity. The worldview of an individual subject becomes “subjectivity.” The imposition of certain social norms is “normativity.” The close reading of literary texts for the influences of previous texts is “intertextuality.” As with the old -ism, you should probably use these in plural as well: “subjectivities,” “normativities” and “intertextualities.”

    How about in political science? Does seem to be the case that the -isms are no longer au courant, especially when it comes to mid-level theorizing in international relations. But other -isms—positivism, constructivism, behavioralism, institutionalism—continue to thrive.

    We also have not yet embraced the “weighty -ity” the way that other disciplines have. For example, we political scientists should be all over “governmentality” but we don’t agree exactly what this means. The only weighty -ity words that I encounter with any regularity are “performativity” and “intersectionality,” and of these two, only intersectionality has entered my own research lexicon. (There are other -ities like rationality and heteroskedasticity, but I don’t think that these are what the anthropologists are on about. Although I do think that rationality, at least, has the grad-school-argument-inducing qualities that the other weighty -ities have.)

    Should we jump on the weighty -ity bandwagon, come on in for the big win just like the anthropologists? Should we say that the mode of scholarly inquiry characterized by concern over causal identification is, say, experimentality? Should we consider the ways of being constrained by the committee structure in Congress as, uh, institutionality? Maybe the conditions of monetary unions without fiscal unions reflect incentive incompatibilitality?

    Think these sound lousy? Perhaps you are subject to the bionormativities of ordinary language as a mode of communicality:

    Don’t worry if you’re not entirely sure what a term means; with the correct combination of prefixes and suffixes, you will most likely arrive at something that at least appears fashionable, if not profound. When you deploy terminology that might mean any number of different things, you ensure that no one knows exactly what, if anything, you are arguing.

  • DAGs, Horserace Regressions, and Paradigm Wars

    Thanks to the PolMeth listserv, I came across a new paper by Luke Keele and Randy Stevenson that criticizes the causal interpretation of control variables in multiple regression analyses. It’s a really simple argument, really: using directed acyclic graphs (DAG) to interpret the causal structures that underlie multiple regression analyses, they show that there are many situations in which control variables X can help to identify the causal effect of D on Y, but the causal effects of X are not actually identified.

    Here are two implications of their argument that they did not explore, but which are worth considering. One for applied work in general, and another for International Relations in particular.

    1. The fact that conditioning on alternative causal pathways to achieve identification in D usually does not allow for causal interpretations of pathways in X is one more argument against horserace regressions: testing competing theories by putting two or more independent variables D1 and D2 in a regression and then comparing coefficients and t-statistics. (These are different from garbage can regressions, in which a bunch of Xs are dumped into the regression garbage can in order to achieve identification for D.) The complications of attempting to identify D by conditioning on X only expand when attempting to identify both D1 and D2 by conditioning on X or set of Xs. It could be the case, for example, that D2 is identified only by conditioning on D1 and X1, but that D1 remains unidentified without conditioning on X2, and that conditioning on X2 prevents identification of D1—the problem of “conditioning on a collider“. (Someone else can draw that DAG for me.)
    2. An implication of the previous point has particular relevance for the so-called “Paradigm Wars” in International Relations, what David Lake and others often refer to as the third “Great Debate” in International Relations. There was a time in which quantitative research sought to sort out among paradigms by testing realism, liberalism, and constructivism “against one another” in multiple regression-type analyses. Lately such efforts have become rarer, at least in my read of the literature. Keele and Stevenson’s paper is a reminder that this is a really good thing. To the extent that paradigm wars continue to simmer, they do so at the epistemological or theoretical level, and that is appropriate given the limits of regression-style quantitative research for identifying the effects of multiple causal variables at once.