Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • Methods Debates for Humanists

    One of the benefits of working in an interdisciplinary field is the opportunity to witness how different academic communities view one another. From the position of a political scientist, I commonly hear say, historians or anthropologists summarize what they understand political scientists to believe. Having done a fair bit of participant observation within the tribe of the tsitneics-lacitilop, those descriptions are often frustrating, describing something akin to what I understand were debates within the discipline during the 1990s. It is now 2016.

    Personal frustrations aside, such outdated or erroneous views of what “political scientists believe or argue about” are problematic for a couple of more general reasons. For one, they may stand in the way of interdisciplinary collaboration by proposing that political scientists do not study certain things or work in certain ways. They also encourage fence-building between disciplines, by portraying disciplines as having settled debates, doing work that is essentially uninteresting to those elsewhere. Finally, they affect how political scientists teach and recruit students. To preview some of the discussion below, if historians are teaching their undergraduate students who have an interest in comparative politics that political scientists only do rationalist or cross-national statistical research, then we might miss the opportunity to recruit some of the more promising graduate students who could be doing field research.

    In what follows I first recount the common misunderstandings I encounter about political science, and then offer my own perspective on what our core debates actually are. I make no claim to have correctly captured the views of all humanists, just those who occupy the particular corner of the academy where my interests intersect with theirs (Asia, Islam, colonial history). Nor do I make the claim to speak for all political scientists. The main audience for this exercise is non-political scientists—in particular, anthropologists, historians, and those working in the more humanistic disciplines. However, I suspect that political scientists too might find the discussion below interesting as one attempt to summarize some of the main methodological debates within our discipline. I welcome friendly amendments in the comments.

    With all that throat-clearing aside, let me start with the misconceptions.

    Two Common Misconceptions

    The most common misconception that I encounter is that political science is divided along a cleavage of quantitative scholars and rational choice theorists versus qualitative or historical scholars. The errors here are two. First, this view lumps together “rational choice theory” with quantitative methodology, which both mistakenly equates theory and methodology and misses that some of the strongest critiques of rationalism in political science come from a quantitative behavioral origin (and vice versa). Second, it misses the extent to which quantitative methods are used in service of historical arguments, and the extent to which rationalist arguments are frequently grounded in qualitative insights. There is probably much more to write on this, but the idea of a discipline characterized by this singular cleavage on this particular axis always makes me cringe. It is probably not even anachronistic, just plain false.

    The second most common misconception is that quantitative methods means cross-national regressions. This view is especially erroneous as a description of comparative politics and international relations, the two subfields of political science that scholars of Asia, Islam, and colonial history will encounter. In reality, there is a growing tension (I will address it below) between quantitative cross-national research and quantitative within-country research, with the latter having the upper hand at the moment. The most recent issue of the American Political Science Review contains no article whose evidentiary base is purely cross-national regressions.

    There are surely other misconceptions, but these are the two that I encounter most frequently.

    Actual Debates

    Without coming down in favor of any particular position, let me now describe what I view to be the most important actual methods debates or cleavages within mainstream political science at present.

    The first will almost certainly surprise humanists who work within a qual-versus-quant framework: quantitative social scientists are the biggest critics of other quantitative social scientists. This is a result of the identification revolution in the social sciences (in economics often termed the “credibility revolution“), which grounds statistical methodology in a theory of causality. The stakes for current quantitative research are extraordinarily high, because the body of data that can be analyzed using quantitative tools is much larger than the set of credible causal inferences that can be drawn from that data. For one recent articulation of how this new identification revolution, see Samii 2016 (pdf, ungated).

    Some related debates that arise include the following.

    1. Is it better to do statistics right, or not at all? It seems easy to conclude that of course we should only do statistics the right way, but if the standards for correct are formidably high, are we prepared to abandon whole areas of inquiry as unstudy-able? There exist quantitative political scientists who believe that we should basically never run cross-national regressions, for example.
    2. Experiments versus observational data. Experiments offer control, but almost always sacrificed realism in service of that control. What is the optimal balance between the two? On what terms should we make tradeoffs between the two?
    3. Microfoundations and macrostructures. Regardless of whether data is observational or experimental, research designs tend to be more straightforward with micro-level data than with aggregate or macro-level data. The problem of reconciling micro-level evidence (what individuals say or do) with macro-level phenomena (how institutions, countries, policies, and/or international systems work) will be, I suspect, one of the core issues that political scientists confront over the next decade.

    To reiterate, my point in this post is not to come down on one side or another on these debates, but instead to highlight that these are the terms upon which methods debates are occurring at the moment.

    A second methods debate in contemporary political science is between what we might call positivist qualitative synthesis and the post- or anti-positivist alternative. In essential terms, is there or is there not a single template that unites quantitative and qualitative research? If yes, then quantitative and qualitative research is ultimately doing the same thing, and can be viewed as two complementary endeavors with common goals. If no, then qualitative research is not and should not be made to be consistent with some version of a quantitative template. This is a debate within the qualitative methodology community.

    (And in fact, this debate is actually even more complicated than this due to the presence of qualitative comparative analysis, which expresses a fundamentally positivist but not quantitative template for comparative research. QCA has never really caught on in the United States but enjoys more interest overseas.)

    A third debate was addressed partially above, in my discussion of the first common misconception about political science. This is between logically consistent theories and credible empirical research. As with most debates this seems to be a false one—who would object to either? In practice, however, reconciling theory and empirics is a thorny problem in the philosophy of science, as Clarke and Primo (one of my favorites) argue. Suffice it to say, the discipline of political science remains unsettled. Positions range from “enough! no more theories!” to “enough! no data analysis without a deductive theory!” to “enough with this ‘testing your theory’ business!”

    What are the implications of these debates for humanists? One is that, as I observed in Sojourn recently, you probably know less about political scientists than you think just by knowing their disciplinary identity. More importantly, though, there is much more space for interdisciplinary collaboration than is commonly believed, because many things that historians and others care about are also of interest to many political scientists. The question for interdisciplinary work is not whether or not the political scientist care about history, national or regional specifics, or the details of particular cases. It is instead about how to reconcile those interests with the demands of theory and causal inference, something that scholars working in other disciplines may find more vexing.

  • On the Cuts to Asian Studies at ANU

    By now, many readers of this blog will be familiar with the recent decision to restructure Asian studies at the Australian National University, in particular through the elimination of professorial positions in the School of Culture, History, and Languages. These cuts have garnered wide attention, both because they include the shocking decision to fire giants in the field of Asian studies such as Professor Robert Cribb, and because they have stark implications for the ANU’s ability to be a world leader in fields such as Indonesian studies.

    Much of the commentary has focused on Professor Cribb. For example, the Southeast Asia Research Group (of which I am a part) recently released a statement about Professor Cribb, and there is an active trans-species movement to protest his “voluntary separation package”.[1] Personal stories surely abound as well. I count Professor Cribb as an inspiration, someone whose work I have read ever since graduate school, whose research has been foundational for my own professional journey. He has shared his time to talk about topics of mutual interest. Although our disciplines are different, I view us as engaged in a common intellectual enterprise.

    But to my mind, the entire package of proposed cuts is the problem. It amounts to a tragic mistake that will destroy Asian studies as we know it at one of the world’s leading centers for Asian studies. The implications go beyond just the elimination of faculty and teaching staff. Going forward, how can the ANU ever hope recruit top faculty without the rich intellectual resources that a deep area studies environment provides? Add to that the university’s inability to credibly commit, going forward, that faculty positions and academic units in Asian studies will be secure. Given the importance of undergraduate instruction as part of the revenue-generating model that the ANU seems to be following, it is surprising that academic leadership has concluded that cutting major faculty and teaching positions is a way to encourage enrollments. The proposed cuts to CHL set in motion a dynamic reactive sequence that can only undermine what was very recently considered a jewel in the ANU’s crown.

    Why would someone like me care so much about Asian studies at the ANU? After all, there is an interpretation in which another university, like Cornell, where I work, now has the opportunity to snap up some foreign talent. Maybe an opportunity to rise in some ranking scheme?[2]

    The answer is both personal and professional. Personally, I feel indebted to the ANU, a place that has generously accommodating me as a visiting researcher several times and which employs colleagues and friends with whom I can share my work. Many U.S.-based academics who work in Southeast Asian studies will tell similar stories. I have never visited CHL itself, but my goodness I don’t care which particular unit is which, it’s all ANU[3] to me. The proposed cuts to CHL mean that one leg upon which that community stands has been hobbled. It will have university-wide repercussions.

    Professionally, though, we all benefit from the ANU having a dominant position in Asian studies in general, and in Southeast Asian history, culture, and language in particular. The English speaking academic world does not pay enough attention to Southeast Asia. We need institutions such as the ANU that are bastions for cross-disciplinary, area-focused scholarship on this region. It’s hard to do this from North America. It ought not be so hard to do this from Australia, so long as university leaders are committed preserving existing areas of excellence. The proposed cuts to CHL will have repercussions beyond the ANU, and beyond Australia, for the production of knowledge about Asia. This is one area where the ANU really and truly leads.

    It is fine to be critical in this way, and to talk in the abstract about the consequences of deep cuts. But it does not offer solutions; and I have no reason to doubt that, as various published reports have indicated, CHL’s budget was ultimately unsustainable (although I’d want to see how that particular sausage is made). So what is the way forward? My expectation would be that those faculty and staff who themselves do the intellectual and pedagogical work within CHL would be tasked with developing a “change management” strategy. Were they to prove unable or unwilling to do so, then the case might be different. Perhaps this is an odd bit of American academic idealism, and U.S. universities are certainly capable of implementing big changes that have major effects on instructional staff [4]. Yet if the budget situation is dire, then CHL stakeholders have an incentive to work together to put the unit on a sounder footing. This is for the good of the faculty and teaching staff, as well as for the university and the wider academic community.

    NOTES

    [1] Which is Australian for “firing.”
    [2] To Americans reading this: as much as we are obsessed with rankings and metrics here in the U.S., our obsessions pale in comparison Australian and other university systems based on the British system (see e.g. Britain itself, Singapore). Seriously. I mean, the Australians ranked every f*cking journal in the world a couple years ago so that some bureaucracy could interpret research output. It’s part of the DNA of Australian academia.
    [3] Which is American for “the ANU.”
    [4] I know that you looked here because you thought I might have a comment on something specific. \Nelson{Ha Ha!}