The First Ever Electoral Map?

The good folks at Handsome Atlas have scanned the entirety of the 1880 Statistical Atlas of the United States, and look what's in there:

No, that's not from David Leip. That's a very detailed, county-level map of the 1880 presidential election results, published in 1889. (The abstract contains similar maps of earlier elections, as well.) Not only does it show which party won each county, but it also shows the intensity of the vote using gradient shading. This may just be the earliest geographic depiction of American election results -- please let me know if you know of earlier ones.

Why might people have suddenly become interested in geographic maps of election outcomes at this point in history? I was just speaking with Susan Schulten on this topic (she introduced me to the website and is a great curator of awesome political maps) -- here's her take on it. But one thing that I was thinking is that the 1880s was a period of rapid change in political campaigning styles. As chronicled by the likes of Daniel Klinghard and John Reynolds, this period saw a sharp increase in the number of candidates interested in running for office at all levels, and it also saw the rise of candidate-centered campaigning. For the first time, it was considered acceptable for candidates to aggressively seek office on their own, rather than just be spoken about in the third person by their backers and party leaders. A map like the one above would have been very useful for such ambitious candidates, helping them allocate their resources strategically.

Anyway, cool stuff.

Star Trek's Lesson for Graduate Students: Your Dissertation Topic Doesn't Matter

Pike's dissertation will be available
at your campus library in 2234.

I recently re-watched "Star Trek" (2009) with my kids. As many others have noted, one of the more clever plot devices in that film was having it begin with a futuristic Romulan vessel coming back through time to destroy an early Federation ship. This not only provided for a solid story but also created an alternate Trek reality, giving the new franchise a chance to build on old characters and plots without being bound by them.

The Federation ship that was destroyed turned out to be the USS Kelvin, of course, and one of its victims was First Officer George Kirk, who was about to become James Kirk's father. So we see the effects that the timeline shift had on young Jim, who is now growing up fatherless. This may make him angrier, a bit less disciplined, maybe even more of a womanizer (if that's possible), but he still has his aptitude for command, and he still becomes the Enterprise's captain -- earlier than he would have in the original timeline.

Here's another interesting twist: We learn that Christopher Pike, the Enterprise's captain prior to Kirk, wrote his dissertation at Starfleet Academy on the destruction of the Kelvin. I have no idea what his dissertation was about in the old timeline, but it was most assuredly on a different topic. And yet we still see him growing up to command Starfleet's flagship. All of which means that your dissertation topic doesn't matter. So don't worry about it.

Well, I guess it is an "opinion" piece

In Sunday's New York Times, Gail Collins has a fairly interesting examination of corruption levels in state governments. While her piece is hardly a comprehensive study, she does actually allude to some scholarly work on the topic, and her reflections on corruption in New York, Illinois, and surprisingly-clean New Jersey aren't bad.

But then comes the part when she assesses why some states have greater corruption than others do:

What does make a difference? I think it’s just that some states have a good political culture.

Well, okay, it's great that she thinks that. And she's not necessarily wrong. It's just that some political scientists have actually looked into this question and come up with some answers. Amanda Maxwell and Dick Winters, for example, found that states with informed and highly-participatory electorates tend to have less corruption, while states with greater ethnic and racial diversity tend to suffer greater corruption. James Alt and David Larson, meanwhile, found that states with divided partisan governments and elected supreme court justices tend to have fewer corrupt officials. These are hardly the only scholars investigating these questions.

Again, it's not that Collins' guesses are wrong, it's just that we don't really have to be guessing about stuff like this. Lots of scholars are looking into these sorts of questions and coming up with intriguing findings. It's okay to use them.

Elections and Parties in Pakistan

I wanted to provide a shout out and link to an excellent piece in the Christian Science Monitor about upcoming elections in Pakistan, written by my old friend Meg Rinker.  She opines that cricket-star Imran Khan (PTI party) offers hope for the future of Pakistan's democracy, despite a terribly violent election season.

Athar Hussain/Reuters

Three Chairs Unite

The political science department chairs from the University of Denver, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Colorado State University have come together to urge that Congress fully restore National Science Foundation funding for political science. Our op/ed in the Denver Post can be seen here.

Marijuana: Bipartisan agreement, partisan voting

The Colorado state legislature adjourned for the year yesterday after passing a series of bills setting regulations for the legal sale of marijuana within the state. It was a pretty amazing moment, really. And even in a pretty divided legislature, members worked together across party lines to come up with some sensible regulations concerning where pot can be sold, how it can be advertised, how it can be taxed, how to determine if a driver is high, etc. But note how the Denver Post's coverage ends:

The bills were written by a bipartisan committee and received support from both parties in the state Senate. 

But the final votes on the bills in the House on Wednesday split along party lines — Democrats voting for the measures and Republicans voting against. That division occurred even as Republicans grudgingly accepted that the last two bills needed to be passed. One of those bills, House Bill 1317, contained the most significant regulations for marijuana stores. The other, House Bill 1318, held the marijuana tax provisions.

"We do need to do something," Rep. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, said. "And that something is House Bill 1317."

But he joined his colleagues in voting against the bill's repassage.

Why did Republicans, who had worked on the legislation and had spoken in support of it, ultimately vote against it? As reporter John Ingold explained, this was partially their way of registering dissent with marijuana legalization, which Colorado's voters as a whole approved last fall but most Republicans opposed. Some were also protesting taxing provisions in the new laws. And some may have just wanted to stick it to Democrats after a session of feeling marginalized and steamrolled. 

But there's also a sense that these bills were going to pass the Democrat-controlled chambers anyway; why should Republicans help? As we learned in Frances Lee's excellent book Beyond Ideology, divisive legislative voting behavior has a way of bleeding from ideological issues to non-ideological ones. This seems like a perfect case for such voting. After all, as with any piece of consequential legislation, this one will have victims. Some business that had planned to sell marijuana will not be able to. Someone will be improperly detained for driving while high. Some parents will come home to find their kid smoking weed she obtained from a store on the way home from school. There may as well be a party that stands to benefit from this sort of outrage in the future, and for now, that would be the Republicans.

Mischief of Faction Ranking of Worst Think Tanks in the World

It seems that the "Center for College Affordability and Productivity" has issued a ranking of "worst college teaching" using data obtained from...ratemyprofessor.com. Based on a similar MoF analysis of think tank punditry, this is the worst "study" ever from the worst think tank anywhere.

People, we at MoF understand the urge to rank colleges. As centers of education or places to work, some universities are better than others, and good rankings can help us make important choices.

And while no ranking system is perfect, some systems at least try to collect and analyze meaningful data. The ubiquitous U.S. News & World Report rankings are based on a combination of quantitative measures and a survey of college officials--not perfect, but not based on nothing. Or, if one wants to focus on college-as-an-investment, there are rankings of schools based on return on investment (spoiler alert: science & engineering nerds make more money).

And then there is the "Center for College Affordability and Productivity." To be fair, the Center's rankings do bring in some conventional measures of college quality: retention rates, the aforementioned ROI rankings, graduation rates, student indebtedness. The hokiness, however, comes in the form of "listings of Alumni in Who’s Who in America" (10% weight) and "Student Evaluations from Ratemyprofessors.com" (17.5% weight). The RMP data, in turn, provide the grist for news articles on the supposed quality of university teaching...lazy data for lazy reporters.

Why does this sound wrong? The term you are looking for is construct validity. I will put it in bold caps so you can see it from afar: CONSTRUCT VALIDITY. Construct validity is "the degree to which an instrument measures the characteristic being investigated; the extent to which the conceptual definitions match the operational definitions" and it is what the CCAP study lacks. Let's consider the two weakest features:

Rating Ratemyprofessor

• Quality CCAP wishes to measure: Faculty teaching skill
• Data Source: Ratemyprofessor.com (RMP)
• Data Generating Process: students (or, really, anyone) log in to RMP, rate a professor on several dimensions, and make comments. Note that, since this from the perspective of (presumably lazy) college students, "easy" professors get higher scores. There is also a system for denoting "hot" professors with chili peppers (full disclosure: all four MoF contributors have good RMP ratings, but only one has garnered a chili pepper--I will not single her out). 
• Quality actually measured: for a given professor, the ratings of a small, non-random sample of students-as-consumers. That is, students who really like or really dislike a professor express how much they like or dislike...but not how much they (could have) learned or did not learn. For a given school, the rankings generated through this process probably say more about the student body than the university faculty, so the list of "best teaching schools" is dominated by military academies, religiously affiliated schools, and Southern schools. Perhaps--and I am just floating this as a "what if"--what this really measures is the extent to which students respect and defer to authority figures. Gosh, I sure hope the CCAP has considered that they may have incorporated "student submission to authority" into their rankings. 

How do we know that this is a poor measure of teaching quality? The director of CCAP says so, albeit indirectly. In this column, Richard Vedder decries the lax standards of college education:

Students do less yet are rewarded more. Several recent surveys have concluded that undergraduates study less frequently than their parents did (fewer than 30 hours a week on all academic chores, including class attendance, paper writing, etc.), but get higher grades: above a “B” average for all students, compared with a “C+” to “B-” average 50 years ago.

Why, then, would Vedder cite a website that promotes this culture of declining standards? Here's a hypothesis: chili pepper blindness. That's right, it's a certified fact: Vedder is a hottie. And perhaps Vedder, seeing the plain truth of this rating, may have assumed it extended to RMP's broader assessment of teaching ability. That's my best guess why anyone would use RMP ratings as if they were real data.

What's What with Who's Who?

• Quality CCAP wishes to measure: Alumni career success
• Data Source: Marquis's Who's Who in America? 
• Data Generating Process: Marquis selects the entrants in this most prestigious publication by....??? The website does not say. However, it does have an interface where one can provide data on one's awesomestness. Now, I am not saying that Who's Who just publishes the names of people whose desire to see their names in print is all-consuming (that's what blogs are for!) but, based on their stated methodology, I can't rule it out either. And, certainly, to the extent that Who's Who contacts people for inclusion, those individuals must self-select into the volume by providing their biographical information.
• Quality actually measured: signal of quality? Not sure. Self-selection into self-promotion vehicle? Yes.

MoF Ranking of Worst Think Tanks in the World

In order to put this awesomely bad study in perspective, I did a similar study ranking think tanks. Specifically, I checked my Twitter feed to see which think tanks were hated by people I was following. Having done so, I noted this tweet: 

 

Seth Masket‏@smotus

Did CBS really just rank best and worst profs based on RateMyProfessors data? RT @Prof_BearB: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505145_162-57570111/u.s-colleges-with-the-best-professors/ …

Having finished my survey, I tabulated my list of worst think tanks in the world:

WORST THINK TANKS IN THE WORLD
1) Center for College Affordability and Productivity

After that they are all tied...my Twitter followees don't talk about think tanks very much.