Choice and Narratives of Blackness

By illuminating the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, it becomes clear that there are options in how we choose to use and interpret crime statistics. They may tell us something about the world we live in and about the people we label “criminals.” But they cannot tell us everything. Far from it. For good or bad, the numbers do not speak for themselves. They never have. They have always been interpreted, and made meaningful, in a broader political, economic, and social context in which race mattered. The falsity of past claims of race-neutral crime statistics and color-blind justice should caution us against the ubiquitous referencing of statistics about black criminality today, especially given the relative silence about white criminality. The invisible layers of racial ideology packed into the statistics, sociological theories, and the everyday stories we continue to tell about crime in modern urban America are a legacy of the past. The choice about which narratives we attach to the data in the future, however, is ours to make.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Urban America,

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Mischaracterizing Poverty and the Limits of Liberalism

The notion that poverty is generated within a self-reproducing “cycle” of material deprivation and behavioral or cultural dysfunction was itself an expression of a way of thinking that had deep roots and many variations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American social thought and has been the source of a disproportionate amount of theorizing ever since. Despite considerable change over the course of centuries, this theorizing has consistently centered on the most thoroughly subordinated or socially “submerged” segments of industrial and postindustrial working-class populations—Marx’s lumpenproletariat, the Victorians’ “dangerous” or “vicious” classes, the ghettoized American “underclass,” Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”—and on the behavioral pathologies that, even when understood to be adaptive to circumstances, supposedly perpetuate these groups’ marginality. The War on Poverty helped to institutionalize such theorizing, but also to embed it within a consciously developmentalist, putatively sympathetic frame: Liberals embraced deeply flawed ideas about a “culture of poverty” as a rationale for remedial intervention, and not, as such ideas quickly became for their conservative critics, as an explanation for why intervention would only make things worse. The War on Poverty was an especially important venue for cultivating and trying out theories about how to help the “culturally deprived” children of poverty that were emerging within the specialized field of child development—in particular, ideas about the imperatives of early intervention that would quickly be embraced as gospel truth.

Alice O’Connor, Poverty and Paradox

Description, Explanation and Social Science

I recently started reading The Unheavenly Chorus by Schlotzman, Verba and Nie. It’s an interesting book addressing inequalities in ‘political voice,’ which focuses not solely on the individual level but combines this with the organizational level. The title is a reference to E. E. Schattschneider’s famous line “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.”

While I plan to have more to say about what the book has to say about inequality, for now I wanted to highlight their discussion of explanation and description in social science. 

Society Does Not Consist of Individuals

(Nothing is more erroneous than the manner in which economists as well as socialists regard society in relation to economic conditions. Proudhon, for example, replies to Bastiat by saying (XVI, 29): ‘For society, the difference between capita] and product does not exist. This difference is entirely subjective, and related to individuals. Thus he calls subjective precisely what is social; and he calls society a subjective abstraction. The difference between product and capital is exactly this, that the product expresses, as capital, a particular relation belonging to a historic form of society. This so-called contemplation from the standpoint of society means nothing more than the overlooking of the differences which express the social relation (relation of bourgeois society). Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. As if someone were to say: Seen from the perspective of society, there are no slaves and no citizens: both are human beings.  Rather, they are that outside society. To be a slave, to be a citizen, are social characteristics, relations between human beings A and B. Human being A, as such, is not a slave. He is a slave in and through society. What Mr Proudhon here says about capital and product means, for him, that from the viewpoint of society there is no difference between capitalists and workers; a difference which exists precisely only from the standpoint of society.)

Karl Marx, The Grundrisse

 

On Judicial Decisions

Judicial decisions are not what they seem. Their claims are often vastly disproportionate to their effects. The very idea of the decision rests on a model of political power that is rarely realized: one in which authority flows from a hierarchical point, directing the behavior of political institutions as well as ordinary citizens. This model rests on a conception of the sovereign as the decision maker, the person who directs how the rest of the polity will lead their lives. Regardless of whether we put the king or the representative of the people into this role of the sovereign, the model of a single authoritative source of power remains the same. Legal scholars are, for the most part, arguing about how this sovereign should rule. But our legal universe does not work this way.

The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship, Paul W. Kahn

A Legalistic Heritage and a Democratic Ideology

A legalistic heritage and a democratic ideology have predisposed American political science to search outside the Washington community for explanations of behavior in that community—legalism looking to the Constitution as a determinative influence, and democratic ideology looking to public opinion and constituency ‘pressures’ as determinative influences upon the conduct of men in office….Political science has yet to confront squarely the proposition that the governing group in Washington…has an inner life of its own—a special culture which carries with it prescriptions and cues for behavior that may be far more explicit than those originating outside the group and no less consequential for the conduct of government.

James S. Young, The Washington Community, 1800-1828, quoted in
Donald R. Matthews and James Stimson, “Decision-Making by U.S. Representatives: A Preliminary Model.”

David Truman on Democratic Efficiency

The incomplete incorporation of nonparty groups into explanations of the dynamics of democratic politics has many and complicated causes. One of them, however, probably lies in the nineteenth-century heritage, largely English, that the study of politics shares with economics. In crude terms the classical theories in both fields implicitly or explicitly started from the isolated individual. Both economic man and political man, it was assumed, exercised rational choice and acted independently for the maximization of individual advantage. No one man, behaving in this fashion, could affect significantly the general result, whether it was a governmental policy or a price in the market; only the aggregate of individual behaviors was determining. Deviations from these behaviors were increasingly recognized by both economists and political scientists, but for a long time they were treated as pathology rather than as evidence that the underlying theory did not account for the observed facts. The values associated with these theories were heavily loaded with emotion, and modification was therefore both a slow and a painful process. The reconstruction of classic explanations to accommodate group behavior [i.e. mediating institutions] has been common in recent years, however, to both economics and politics, although in the latter field it has proceeded rather slowly.

David Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion

Chalmers Johnson Skewers Rational Choice

I’ve been thinking a bit about areas studies and it’s role in the field of political science, in part as an analogy for judicial politics (forthcoming [Update: How Judicial Politics is Like Area Studies]) and it led me back to this piece by the late great anti-imperialist Chalmers Johnson, defending area studies and the verstehen on which they are built against the academic imperialism of rational choice. It’s unfortunate to me that many dissenters within the field are willing to concede the science mantle to standard approaches, and it’s always good to see someone challenge it on these terms. Even better to note the political underpinnings of these approaches whose proponents insist that they and  alone are apolitical.

Theory and History are Unavoidable

It has been rightly said theory, if not received at the door of an empirical discipline, comes in through the chimney like a ghost and upsets the furniture.  But it is no less true that history, if not received at the door of a theoretical discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps into the cellar like a horde of mice and undermines the groundwork.

Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts.

Reading is Fundamental: The State of the Discipline of Political Science

From the outgoing editors of the American Political Science Review.  I largely agree, and have since the first time I looked at the journal in the mid-1990s.

On the negative side, we have two main observations. First, although the discipline as a whole is less fragmented than we had feared (noted earlier), some subfields—and you know who you are—continue to be riven by ideological or methodological conflict. Too often, a paper in one of those fields draws recommendations of “reject,” “minor revision,” and “accept” from three equally esteemed referees. When reviewers diverge so greatly, the editorial team’s judgmental burden increases significantly, compelling editors to discount some expert advice (if possible, without antagonizing reviewers) in order to provide coherent advice to authors. We have no answer to this puzzle, but simply note a pattern accurately described by one co-editor: increasing engagement across sub-disciplines, sustained fratricide within some.

Second, we have become painfully aware of how badly (or how little) some of our colleagues read. Articles are too often cited, by authors and by referees, as making the exact opposite of the argument they actually advanced. Long books are noted, with a wave of the rhetorical hand but without the mundane encumbrance of specific page or even chapter references; and highly relevant literatures, even in leading political science journals, are frequently ignored. We may have fallen victim to an occupational disease of editors, but we have often found ourselves moaning, “Doesn’t anybody read anymore?” It is cold comfort that this sloppiness extends well beyond political science. A recent study has shown that, even in “gold standard” medical research, articles that clearly refute earlier findings are frequently ignored, or even cited subsequently as supporting the conclusion they demolished.

So we advise our successors to maintain, and even expand, vigilance against jargon and murkiness; and we advise authors, referees, and readers generally to further and broaden the conversation, not least by reading seriously what has been, and is being, written.

(This reminds me that I was thinking of writing a post that discussed books that seem as though most people only knew their title, and how they were misrepresented as a result.)

I have two additional thoughts  One is that the solution to the problem noted in the first quoted paragraph isn’t very hard.  It is that when someone is clear about what they are doing, the important question is how well they do it.  This is generally expected of those who come from a more heterodox perspective (like me), but the expectation should be that everyone should.  That you prefer a different theoretical or methodological approach is, at times, irrelevant.  Part of the problem is that so much of American political science takes so much for granted that it can’t usefully discuss these issues.  Only foregrounding them, and discussing them, can allow us to move forward.

The other thing is about the lack of reading.  It’s a matter of faith among many orthodox social scientists that the cluster of work that involves case studies, qualitative research, non-positivist methods, etc., does not lead to advances in knowledge because they don’t build on each other.  (There are other objections too, but that’s for another day).  But the whole conceit of hypothesis testing actually fails to make clear the central role of reading what others have already said.  According to Karl Popper, where hypotheses come from is irrelevant.  The rhetoric of hypothesis testing suggests that a single test can lead to the rejection of a theory, when in reality it’s difficult to find any theory (in political science at least) that has been rejected because it failed one or even a series of hypothesis tests.  Of course a case study is partial, but so is any study.  The important question is not whether one study can settle anything on its own (it can’t) but rather what it, along with what is already known, can tell us.  The scientific method does not include reading and writing, even though all research begins and ends with these things, and usually involves it along the way.  Graduate training organized around statistical techniques obscures this.  An approach that more self consciously and explicitly situates our research within the work of others is necessary to solve this problem.

Of course, it’s unlikely the editors would agree with all that.

Unfortunately, I doubt this will have much impact.  For years the APSA presidential addresses have included trenchant criticisms of the discipline.  But individual beliefs and values do not drives social outcomes, despite what orthodox political science would have you believe.

I learned that from reading.

Via Chris Blattman.