catchermiscount

It only gets worse when you get to grad school. You look at the people that got admitted and you're like HOLY CRAP WHO WAS ON THE SEARCH COMMITTEE MY YEAR AND WHY HAVEN'T THEY BEEN FIRED?!?!?!

It really is remarkable how quickly people get the hang of grad school! In seriousness: the first year can get pretty existential. It should get existential. If you still feel like you're going to write the exact same dissertation that you mention in your SoP one semester into your training, something's amiss. Also: technical training can be added to the "make sure you want to do this" section. Not only are we absurdly abstract and useless: we're absurdly abstract and useless with lots of Greek letters.

All this time, I thought I didn't get into Michigan because I was just another old white guy. NOW I LEARN IT WAS THAT I WAS A CRAPPY APPLICANT. The horror, the horror.

You say that...

Also, many folks within the department proper study IPE using formal tools---certain gradcafe alumni come to mind...

Yeah I wish I could get away with that in actual papers.

Oh, actually I meant "it can't hurt." My coffee hasn't kicked in yet. THE POINT I AM TRYING TO MAKE IS THAT YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO THE AMERICAN SPELLINGS EVEN THOUGH IT PROBABLY DOESN'T MAKE THAT MUCH OF A DIFFERENCE THERE WE GO

Well, not only do you have two years, but you also get to have multiple fields. But for now, it sounds like you're most marketable in IR and that your interests most intuitively align with IR. And yes, the boundaries are dumb. They don't seem any smarter as you get further into your training or when you try to tell people what subfield your dissertation is in.

It's good to be thinking about details, but this one is largely at the margins. But, all else equal, it can't help to have the spellings readers are most used to.

If you want to do IPE, call it IR. If you want to do CPE, call it CP. It's really not too much more complicated than that---I wouldn't let the occasional curriculum change the views too much.

Sure. Note that I generally consider most qualitative and quantitative approaches to be in an "empirical" category distinct from theory, by which I mean formal theory for the most part. My nomenclature is bastardized by my home. But yeah, sounds CPish.

People try, but it seems inevitable that some folks will always lump you into one camp or the other.

So, we've had CPE searches a few times in the past few years, and this brings out a huge difference in interpretation of what "political economy" is. Our comparativists typically say it's "POLITICAL economy" and end up looking for applicants that study economic phenomena in non-American settings (corruption, rent seeking, vote buying, land, etc.). Generally the work is largely empirical: if there is a theoretical section, it's more about illustrating the argument instead of making some big technical contribution. Our theorists typically say it's "political ECONOMY" and end up very dissatisfied with these theoretical sections (or lack thereof). They're interested more in stuff that directly maps into, say, Acemoglu and Robinson or Persson and Tabellini or something like that. So, it's important to know if you intend to be an empiricist (be it via large-N work, or interviews, or whatever) or a theorist (be it informal or formal). One defining characteristic is "do you think you'll have to do field work?" If so, we're talking about something more similar to traditional comparative politics. If not, we're probably talking about IR (if it's about...international relations) or CPE or something like that.

Oh hey you won't get my wrath. First, I'm not that much of a technician, and second, I have no freaking idea what makes IR IR and CP CP. No idea at all. I'm pretty sure that what I do is IR (because it's about relations among nations...?), but that's anybody's guess.

Remember: There are six top fives. There are twelve top tens. There are twenty top fifteens. It is impossible to count how many top twenty-fives there are.

I think he had taken a graduate methods course or something like that. Maybe a micro course? Nothing super duper extensive.

It's anecdotal, but one of the best graduate students we've had in recent years was a philosophy major. He got into a number of excellent programs, and his philosophy training was very helpful in acquiring skills in formal theory and (to a lesser degree) methods.

Not that I can think of.

Man, see how nice the folks on here are? I was just going to say "yep, you worry too much." BUT THEY BEAT ME TO IT WITH KINDNESS.

So, that just happened.

Oh absolutely. Whenever I go to conferences, it takes me a second or two to readjust. It's obviously a more pronounced issue than it is at a full-service non-boutique, but I'd have to think it's an issue at all sorts of places. Personally, I have no idea why we keep going on about whether our methods comport with an old, old wooden ship from the Civil War era.

I'm a bigger fan of being more methodologically diverse than expected by pretending to be completely methodologically bigoted. NOT NAMING NAMES HERE OK PEOPLE

It doesn't get any better. I'm knee deep in a Hessian matrix of arbitrary size that has me completely existential. The fun normative bits supplement, but do not replace, digging in the mines.

Aw, come on, man. I ALREADY MADE THE ANSWER KEY FOR THE MLE HOMEWORK. Talk about meaningless numbers: it's the introduction to monte carlo analysis. That would make some folks' head just about explode. Are they making you teach? PS: Sorry I didn't respond to hospitality---I ended up having some family rigmarole and got off the grid for a bit.

By way of predilections: I am no technician, but my work is probably more technical than average. My program is one of the more technical ones. So, this should probably be read with a large handful of salt. I am also no fan of positivism, which seems to be the issue just as much as technique is. It might not be obvious during the very first semester---where almost all of the focus is on gaining competence with the basic building blocks of technical work---but eventually one gets to a point that the numbers are no longer "meaningless." This is especially evident when the numbers are the results of a very theoretically-motivated statistical model. Think about ideal point estimation. For those that don't know about this just yet, ideal point estimation refers to a class of methods by which one inputs congressional votes (so you have a big matrix of yeas and nays with as many rows as there are congresspeople and as many columns as there are measures voted upon), uses that data in conjunction with some spatial theory of voting, and then outputs estimates of where each congressperson falls in unidimensional ideology space.* Those estimates mean something, though that meaning is conditioned on how we imbue the model with theory. Ideal point estimation papers can be quite technical. The seminal paper by Poole and Rosenthal in the 1980s made such intense computing requirements that, at the time, it wasn't replicable. Today's bleeding edge stuff is Bayesian and uses markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Just looking at the papers can be very intimidating, but the process is still simple: get votes, use theory and stats together, and then interpret results. So where is the science? Does the fact that something is technical and difficult mean that it's scientific? Maybe? Who knows? Who cares? Despite all the Greek letters in their paper, Poole and Rosenthal didn't really test any hypotheses in their paper: they just measured political ideology. Most people would probably call what they did "good science." It was certainly deductive: if you buy this spatial model, and if you buy these data, then you should buy the results. Being deductive is probably a criterion for being "sciencey" for most folks, but it definitely isn't unique to data analysis. Rawls was a pretty deductive guy. That brings us to another point: if you don't like math, or functions, or their meaningless, or whatever, then this generalizes to your views of formal theory. But some of the very best theorists ever did things that were very technical but also very normative: Arrow's theorem, the work of Amartya Sen and John Harsanyi, the welfare theorems**...these things are deductive and they're technical but they're not in the vein that the OP mentioned. But when you learn theory, you again start from annoying building blocks that seem not to mean anything: truth tables, and set theory, and real analysis, and so on. These are just the technical requirements for being able to engage in higher-level thinking later on. While your average political philosophy scholar likely has little to say to your average applied empirical political scientist, they might have quite a bit to say to a formal theorist. Heck, a few years ago we took on a new student that already had a PhD in philosophy but that wanted to do philosophically-motivated political economy. He's a remarkable guy, but it's good evidence about how these things can work hand in glove. Note also that the best users of theory also think hard about what the theory means: Akerlof's diatribes about the real meaning of the Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium "utopia" are really interesting reading. The same for many of Sen's works. And again, this isn't just specific to mathematical theory: Schelling was a theorist that used no theory. Speaking in a language of models means that the numbers are imbued with meaning from the start. But most technical classes are about competence, not modeling. With enough perseverance, you get to use all these boring tools in fun ways, and that's really rewarding. Whether it adds up to good science from your average positivist is anybody's guess, but who cares what they think, anyway. ---------------------- *: Ideal point estimation is just one kind of data reduction technique, and it's used in political contexts other than the Congress (e.g. the courts). Most of the statistical machinery comes from psychometrics, where they wanted to estimate, say, intelligence using test answers. **: Science envy and economics envy are everywhere, and I just contributed to the problem by focusing on economic theorists. I could have thrown Riker or Shepsle or McKelvey or Ferejohn or some other really smart theorist from a political tradition in there. The economic examples are more obviously normative.