Lincoln University Missouri Blue Tiger Political Science Students and Professor visit MPSA Conference in Chicago
The study of politics is 2,400 years old and goes back to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Efforts to make the study of politics more precise, like the study of phenomena by the natural sciences, have in the last few hundred years given us the term 'political science.' Whether one is a devotee of an older understanding of politics, defined as argument about the good society, or of the newer ambition to systematize the study of human affairs, 'political science' is a living tradition practiced by college professors and their students today. Much of the study of politics today takes place in relativelly obscure academic journals and is conveyed by experts to experts in esoteric terms. More popularly, professors teach in their classrooms, just as young men did in Plato's Academy. Somewhere between these two extremes, but closer to the former, professors travel to annual meetings of professional associations, such as the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA), to present new research, listen to colleagues' new research, meet publisher's who might want to publish the scholars' research, conduct interviews of potential new colleagues, and network more generally. This year, I took four of my best political science students from Lincoln University - Missouri to the annual meeting of the MPSA.
Nia, Lyniya, Alex, and Will on LU campus about to
undertake the 6-hour drive to Chicago
Arrival to the 79th Annual MPSA meeting at
the swank Chicago Palmer House Hilton
As a practical matter, conferences such as the MPSA have hundreds or thousands of attendees that descend on a hotel over the course of four days. The proceedings are organized as a series of "panels" in which three to five presenters, usually college professors, give 10-15 minute talks on a group of related topics to audiences of five to 20 people. The audience members might be experts themselves, and after the professors make their ideas known, a dialogue may ensue in the question and answer session. For instance, I presented my research on rural local government in Mozambique, Bolivia, and Zambia on a panel titled "Political Economy of Decentralization and Local Governance," a title that is sure to mean little to non-experts. The panel included three other professors' presentations, including one about a regional development index created by machine learning (that is, artificial intelligence, or AI) from statistical data in 50 countries. A question posed to me by a 'discussant,' that is, a fellow professor who reads carefully the paper upon which my presentation is based, was 'where is the empirical component of the research?' By this, he meant that I had not included a quantitative analysis using statistics methods, which for some political scientists is akin to deviating from the strict form of a
haiku poem. My response was that 'empirical' means 'factual,' not 'quantitative,' and that I had travelled to the three countries on airplanes, and the observations that I report are factual, and therefore 'empirical' data were spread throughout my analysis. With great respect to my colleague, who took the time to read my paper, this exchange was less of an exchange of ideas on a topic of shared interest and more of two competing statements of well-defined beliefs of how and why political science topics should be studied. A more gratifying moment occured when an audience member found me after the panel and asked for a copy of my paper because she "really liked" some of the things I had said. At a minimum, my students, who were in the audience, got to see their professor 'in action.' They saw me, not in a position of authority in front of a deferential classroom, but as an equal in a room full of skeptical experts.
Lincoln students listen to PhD candidates present on rural/urban and
ethnic divisions in Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Germany
In a more intimate setting, Lincoln students listened to the presentations of PhD candidates, that is, graduate students pursuing their PhDs, on "divisive politics" and its opposite, "cooperative behavior," in countries as different as Germany, Bostwana, and Ghana. One very bright MIT PhD candidate convinced a Ghanan cellphone company to provide geolocating data from cellphone pings of individuals to see if frequent but superficial physical encounters were associated with peoples' responding to survey questions that they would be more likely to cooperate with people from other, and potentially antagonistic, ethnic groups. 'Familiarity breeds liking,' is the folk wisdom that describes the logic of the question that this young researcher was asking, but folk wisdom is unscientific. Another young scholar from Notre Dame tried to explain the connection between dominant political parties in non-democratic countries in Africa root their power in traditional rural areas. That is, there are non-democratic countries in which one party wins every election (think of the Democrats or the Republicans always winning in the US, unimaginable to Americans), and his argument was that these political parties do a good job of understanding the distinctive, and somewhat un-democratic, attitudes of rural dwellers in these countries. Another established scholar and I commented on these advanced students' research, and the Lincoln students had a ringside seat.
A particularly gratifying 'teaching moment' happened in one panel on 'state building, state capacity, and state power,' that is whether governments can affect their populations, irrespective of whether there are checks on government power. That is, though Americans from the time that they are knee-high to a grasshopper are taught to guard against government overreach, these scholars did not take for granted that government could help or hurt its population. One senior scholar presented a chapter in a forthcoming book, and he wanted to know whether affinity for flags (i.e., as a symbolic statement of patriotism) might be associated with quantitative measures of government capacity created by experts. The scholar used a machine learning, or AI, Internet search of images of flags in countries globally, and then tried to match these findings to the numerical ratings of 'state capacity.' The scholar for ten minutes described the logic and methods of the research, and then came to the conclusion that the evidence did not support the claim that people who liked flags a lot would also live in countries where the government had a more pervasive reach into society. This is what we call 'negative results' in the social sciences; we had a theory, and the data did not support the theory, so the theory is wrong, not the data. One of my students exclaimed, "You can do that?! You can argue something, and then it can turn out wrong?" This was a proud moment for me as a teacher because, though I try to convey this specific concept in the classroom, it is a very difficult concept to convey. It took the special setting of the conference and hearing the concept from someone other than me, the student's familiar professor, to make the concept sink in. There are dozens of such moments in so-called high impact learning activities such as taking students to a professional conference.
Lyniya and Nia listen to to an undergraduate from Wheaton College
talk about her poster on 'Modern Day Slavery of Human Trafficking'
One motivation for the trip with the Lincoln students was to inspire them to consider presenting their own research in the 2023 conference. One accessible form of presenting is to create a 'poster' on a given research topic. Instead of writing a ten to twenty-page paper on a topic and presenting the paper to an audience--presumably in anticipation of publishing the article in a journal--one may present the research on a large, professional-looking poster with grafics and text. The poster author stands in front of the poster at the conference, and answers questions about it from passers-by. Kylee, an undergraduate student from Wheaton College, told Lyniya and Nia about her research on human trafficking, that is abusive relationships between female international migrants, and 'handlers' who sometimes transport them across borders and keep them in bondage relationships in the foreign country to which the women have travelled. Kylee considers this a form of modern-day slavery, and she wanted to know if there was a relationship between relative affluence of a country and prevalence of human trafficking. That is, she thought that affluent countries might have a higher prevalance of trafficked individuals as relativelly wealthy individuals purchase 'services' of the women, who are from poorer countries. This argument was a little hard to follow initially for my students, so I gave the example of relatively poor Paraguay and relatively affluent Argentina. Protex is an anti-human trafficking unit in the Argentinian attorney general's office, and it fights the trafficking of women from poor-Paraguay to rich-Argentina for presumably just the purposes that Kylee was describing. This anecdote came from a previous study abroad experience of mine in which I took my students from another university to visit the Protex unit in Buenos Aires, and, as is typically the case, the students were RIVETED with my tales from abroad. In this case, though, the andectdote did help to make Kylee's argument more accessible, and Lyniya was intreagued to hear the counter-intuitive argument that human trafficking (something bad) would be potentially associated with higher levels of wealth (something good). I think it was important for the Lincoln students to see someone functioning at there level to better imagine what themselves doing the same in the year to come.
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