China Beats India at Visa Applications

Some time ago I ranted about the disastrously irritating procedure of getting a visa to India (and to the Andaman Islands) at the Indian Consulate in Edinburgh. I just applied to a Chinese visa through the private company that handles the applications in London, and it went perfectly smoothly, despite the many failure scenarii I could come with in my head (well, I did apply using a temporary passport to fly from a swine-flu infested country to a dictatorship that could have objected to my Amnesty International membership).

Correlation

You all know the xkcd strip, because it is so good, but this is quite a cool example too:

in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks, according to David Alan Grier, a historian and statistician at George Washington University. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association

From a very interesting read , via Simon Jackman.

Schmitter notes

Schmitter is always a good read. His interview in the Passion and Craft volume is very interesting. Some parts of his training were boring. Some of his teachers were not willing to have students disagree with them. Some parts of his own work are perfectible, and he regrets a few things. His description of academia (and of his own work) is genuine and does not try to make it sound more than what it is. I did not know he was a frustrated painter.

Now I want to read even more Przeworski and Hirschman, some Apter and Bendix, and many more classics. Schmitter says he treated Marx and Weber as contemporaries: I have noticed I do the same with Weber and Elias (and Foucault, to some extent). His belief is that political science is a historical science, and I find it hard to disagree with him (just like the "Clocks and Clouds" piece where Almond makes a pretty simple point: turning politics into some form of mechanical clockwork without taking into account the additional layer of uncertainty, risk-taking and contingency that affects political agents is intellectually fraudulent).

Schmitter verbatim on his methods, and more:

I was reading a lot of American social science, and I knew I would want to use statistics in my research, because you couldn’t just interview people, and you certainly couldn’t just use secondary sources and documents to tell a story. The notion of ‘‘qualitative methods’’—for example, of compiling a so-called analytical narrative—never occurred to me. I suppose, in retrospect, you could label me a ‘‘mixed method’’ scholar. [...] So, I learned statistics by reading how other political scientists, mostly students of American politics, used them.

[...]

The field has made important gains. The most obvious ones concern what I would label the spatial dimension. Today, as opposed to forty years ago, you no longer feel you have knowledge about politics if you have knowledge about just one country.

Both Schmitter and 'O'Donnell (same volume) recommend living a “comparativist” life along working on comparative politics. This means a lot, and there a lot of serious sacrifices to be made to go along that path. But this also says something about our ability as human beings to make scientific statements about the material world: our lifestyles are constantly in the way of our understanding (I think Buddhism also makes that point quite intelligently).

Oh, and last, Schmitter was a rebel. He rebelled against the prominence of parties and elections as the building blocks of politics. He rebelled against well-entrenched ideas (pluralism, first and foremost). He can easily identify what he thinks is wrong in the current scholarship, and he can easily name a few “ground-breaking” works which he thinks are not revolutionary advances in knowledge in any way (his comment on Bringing the State Back in is eloquent; let me paraphrase: “Only an American could write that and pass it as an original idea; to a European, that's trivial” -- spot on.

The Real Question

Will Chris Ansell manage to reconcile me with both governance and networks at the same time?

Causation

I have read far too much on causation, but I do not seem to be the only victim of that obsession--I remember reading Gerring and thinking we shared some kind of strange inclination for unified theories of causation. I have read about causation within political science, then drifted towards the fundamentals: philosophy and sociology of science, statistics (with an emphasis on counterfactuals, thanks to Judea Pearl). Analytic sociology, Elster, Swedberg, Abbott also contains an interesting debate and set of principles on causation. Finally, historical sociology has a lot n the topic, thanks to Mahoney (INUS, SUIN, etc.) and to the authors of the “informative regress” paper which won a prize at the last APSA.

Now I am back at reading political science approaches to causation. I was very glad to discover Parsons' last book, which has a very good (i.e. synthetic and almost exhaustive) approach to how explanation is handled by political scientists. This, in turn, helps map the slightly different forms of causation they apply. Kurt Weyland has an article in IO where he maps the causal factors of revolutions. His approach is excellent and very helpful to anyone who wants to develop his/her mental framework of analysis. See the form of the argument, my emphasis:

All this discontent constituted a supportive and perhaps necessary condition for the revolutionary wave of March 1848. But domestic problems were not coming to a head to trigger such widespread contention; they were insufficient for
producing the outburst of protest and violence. [...] While counterfactual inferences are tentative, no domestic developments seemed acute and widespread enough to account for the riptide of 1848.

Weyland then goes on to suggest diffusion/contagion was also at play (the section is entitled "Diffusion Studies: Focus on Process or Causal Impulse"). This is how I would like my demonstration to read like. Controlled, challenging, systematic looks at the literature, with old and new factors considered, tested and balanced.

Take Figure 1, a 2x2 classification of the causal arguments. Weyland understands the literature contains two ways of explaining how diffusion affects nations: countries learn on their own from the experience of others (two components: learning on your own, and an objective view of foreign experiences), or get persuaded by other countries that their experience has been successful (two components again: persuasion, or soft coercion, and a subjective account of foreign experiences).

(The notes above are not exhaustive mappings, just personal ramblings that I jot down to see how dense my mental map of causation theories in the social sciences is right now.)

Moving

Lots of stuff changed abruptly, or less abruptly depending on how you think about them. I was not the third desk anymore, and am not even a desk any more at the moment, as I am emptying the office to leave, definitely, my current research unit, after a long stay that has meant a tremendous amount of things to me.

New perspectives have opened in London. It might mean I will spend a bit more time on this blog, which no one reads. You are not reading it. I am barely writing it. But I want to write a bit in London. Perhaps even shoot pictures if the bag can contain the nice camera.

See you.

Still the Third Desk

Contrary to an earlier report, my office blog Third Desk is still active. See you there! Add. Contrary to a contradictory report based on a rebuttal of what was not supposed to be happening, I am not blogging at Third Desk any not more. Not.