Author: profmikenelson

QAC Summer Research

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To stay on the theme of the great work our students are doing here at Wesleyan, I wanted to highlight the summer research projects that students completed with our Quantitative Analysis Center.

Each summer, a group of students is given the opportunity to do original research under the guidance of a professor here at Wesleyan. In a certain sense, this replicates for the social sciences what already happens in the sciences here (notably the Hughes program). The summer program culminated this year with a joint poster session that included work conducted by students in the sciences and the social sciences. It was a great fun to walk through Exley Science Center and talk with the students about these great projects, many of which are likely to be published.

Summer: Work, Vacation, and Balance

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A popular question I get during the summer is, “how is your break?” I wish that I could say that my “break” was wonderful, but that wouldn’t really answer the question.

The fact is that we don’t really get a break as professors. Summers are when we try to squeeze in all of our major research projects, our side projects in service and teaching, and — just like most people — fit in a little vacation time (about two weeks for me this year) with the family. So my level of activity did not really change much when classes stopped. I still have gone into the office everyday. However, it is very nice to have the change.

So what did my summer consist of? Revising a book manuscript, creating a new web resource for students on writing and research (will be tested this fall and hopefully made public next spring), writing letters of recommendation, redesigning our African Studies website and gearing up for my new administrative responsibilities there. Oh, and trying to stay on top of about six other research papers that I really need to just finish and send out.

And of course, doing this while experiencing all of the joy (and sleeplessness) the parent of a one-year old can experience.

The good news, is that I enjoy all of this!

Odede on Poverty Tours

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I’ve been meaning to post on this. Kennedy Odede, one of our majors, was recently published in the New York Times on the subject of “Slumdog Tourism”. It is definitely worth a read, especially if you are a Westerner considering a trip to a developing country. See it as an opportunity to reflect on what it means to travel and interact with people who live under such drastically different conditions. What Kennedy does here is try to have us see and feel the experience of being observed by such a tourist.

I notice Chris Blattman has a few posts on the subject of development, or poverty, tourism. Besides the New York Times, which has covered the issue a couple times, the Christian Science Monitor, also had a nice story a year ago.

Forbes: Wesleyan University is #15

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There are lots of college rankings out there. Forbes just released their annual ranking, which is one of the few (the only?) that combines public and private colleges and universities. They claim their index is constructed to focus on the “student’s point of view”. I’m not 100% sure what that means (how do we determine the representative “student” out there?). But one thing I do like about their website (besides Wesleyan’s decent ranking) is that they have a “do-it-yourself” ranking tool that allows you to determine what criteria is important. Unfortunately, there is no way to add in criteria that you might feel is missing.

My new co-authored article on patronage

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David K. Leonard, Jennifer N. Brass, Michael Nelson, Sophal Ear, Dan Fahey, Tasha Fairfield, Martha Johnson Gning, Michael Halderman, Brendan McSherry, Devra C. Moehler, Wilson Prichard, Robin Turner, Tuong Vu, Jeroen Dijkman. 2010. “Does Patronage Still Drive Politics for the Rural Poor in the Developing World? A Comparative Perspective from the Livestock Sector.” Development and Change. (p 475-494)

If one didn’t know any better, one might think that we were trying to set a record for the number of co-authors on a social science journal article. Indeed, the question of author order has come up recently in our discipline. David Lake has suggested we list people in order of their contribution, and I would have to agree that this is the fairest way to go. And when in doubt, listing alphabetically isn’t a bad backup plan. Essentially, this is what happened with our article, though I would suggest that David’s name deserves even greater recognition than simply being listed first.

I am actually very excited to see that co-authorship is on the rise. Fisher et al. noticed this back in 1998 and Lee Sigelman has updated this analysis more recently. I think this is a signal that we are really progressing in our discipline, which is not to say that collaboration is always a good thing. But when done well, it can be rewarding.

For those of you interested in what our article was actually about, here is the abstract:

Is the analysis of patron–client networks still important to the understanding of developing country politics or has it now been overtaken by a focus on ‘social capital’? Drawing on seventeen country studies of the political environment for livestock policy in poor countries, this article concludes that although the nature of patronage has changed significantly, it remains highly relevant to the ways peasant interests are treated. Peasant populations were found either to have no clear connection to their political leaders or to be controlled by political clientage. Furthermore, communities ‘free’ of patron–client ties to the centre generally are not better represented by political associations but instead receive fewer benefits from the state. Nonetheless, patterns of clientage are different from what they were forty years ago. First, patronage chains today often have a global reach, through trade, bilateral donor governments and international NGOs. Second, the resources that fuel political clientage today are less monopolistic and less adequate to the task of purchasing peasant political loyalty. Thus the bonds of patronage are less tight than they were historically. Third, it follows from the preceding point and the greater diversity of patrons operating today that elite conflicts are much more likely to create spaces in which peasant interests can eventually be aggregated into autonomous associations with independent political significance in the national polity. NGOs are playing an important role in opening up this political space although at the moment, they most often act like a new type of patron.

The spread of norms and the UN vote to make access to water a human right

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A friend from my Peace Corps days posted on Facebook the UN press release that the General Assembly has adopted a resolution “Recognizing Access to Clean Water, Sanitation as Human Right, By Recorded Vote of 122 in Favour, None Against, 41 Abstentions.”

This isn’t exactly getting major press coverage. And, indeed, just because the UN General Assembly calls something a human right doesn’t automatically make it so, though it can be important in the development of such a norm. Some, however, have argued that it already is a human right. Since we need water to live, and since a right to life is enshrined in the UN Declaration on Human Rights, then perhaps there is already consensus on this? (See the post by Jennifer Vettel at Columbia’s Earth Institute). But 41 nations did choose to abstain, including (please note with appropriate shock) famed human rights-leading Canada. Of course, the US also abstained. As did, apparently, some developing countries who were concerned about incurring greater legal obligations for providing water to their citizens then they could possibly fulfill (see the Huffington Post on this).

So what is the significance of this General Assembly vote? At this point, it seems to me unclear that much will change if change requires politically costly choices. As Iman Kurdi suggests in his post on ArabNews.com, it is unlikely that Israel or Turkey will change or reverse their dam-building, which has infuriated neighbors in the past. So I would expect others interested in building dams (Ethiopia, for instance) are probably proceeding without giving such human rights concerns a second thought. Possibly the biggest impact will be to act as a fundraiser for the UN’s various water and sanitation-related initiatives. As the International Law Observer reports, there is a clear non-binding appeal to states and international organizations to commit resources.

While the impact of the resolution is therefore limited. It does help bring needed publicity and international attention to an important problem. One of my students here at Wesleyan University, Oluwayimika Taiwo-Peters, is tackling this head-on in her home-country of Nigeria this summer. She is visiting local schools as part of a health education program she created, and installing a rainwater catchment system at a local school. Her activities remind me of my old Peace Corps days as a water and sanitation volunteer in Northern Ghana! But the bottom-line is that for many people in Africa — and close to a billion people worldwide — reliable access to safe water and sanitation is an important obstacle to development and happiness. So I will hold out the hope that this norm continues to grow.

And since we are talking about norms, this isn’t a bad place to mention Schrad’s recent book on The Political Power of Bad Ideas, which The Duck of Minerva reviews. The excellent point of the book is to explore how not just good ideas (we need clean water) but also bad ideas (prohibition counts as one of these, in his view) can be spread via advocacy networks. I haven’t read this yet, but Charli Carpenter’s post makes me want to!

Obama, Midterm Elections, and Foreign Policy

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I am far from being an expert on American politics and elections. But I do tend to pay attention when they intersect my interests in international relations and I’ve gleaned a few tidbits from my Americanist colleagues: foreign policy preferences can impact voter attitudes (Aldrich et al. 2006); there may be “two presidencies” (domestic and foreign policy), and Presidents have greater control over foreign policy (Wildavsky 1966); and that the President’s party rarely does well in mid-term elections (see Shenkman; in 1991, James Campbell wrote about how the Presidential “surge” is pretty regularly followed by a decline)

So I find it interesting, when procrastinating looking today at the Wall Street Journal’s “POTUS Tracker”, which analyzes how Obama spends his time, that foreign policy and defense seem to be less of a relative priority over the last period as compared with the similar period a year ago (see the images below). The number of such events that engaged Obama’s attention a year ago was apparently 309 and this year for the same period, 265. This, of course, is a crude measure. But it makes me wonder whether Obama is missing an opportunity. While the economy is important, it may be that he should be doing more about foreign policy.

When it comes to his foreign policy record thus far, the reviews are not the greatest. Stephen Walt wrote recently that Obama is “0 for 4” on foreign policy. Richard Haass seems to have a more nuanced perspective but still finds major problems in Obama’s approach to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

My current view is that Obama is doing an OK job with some of this, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Citing success in Iraq–as he has done in recent days–is a good move, but it will take a lot of spinning. He could be bolder on the closing of Guantanamo. (Somehow, I think that Congress would find a way to fund the new domestic facility if he made a realistic threat to close Guantanamo “no matter what”.) Afghanistan may not be an easy sell these days, but Obama should be thinking about other foreign policy opportunities. In particular, I think he needs to find a way to make the US appear as the key leader behind a major successful international initiative. It almost doesn’t matter what it is (environment, human rights, security, trade). But there are several things that would matter here:

  1. This has to be a multilateral initiative
  2. Other states need to seem excited about cooperating with the United States
  3. There needs to be some reasonable chance of success with the initative

I think that if Obama could find this, then he would be fulfilling part of the great hope many Americans had when voting for him. He was supposed to be a game-changer, especially when it came to international affairs. We were to have a President who the international community liked and could get behind. People would like America again. I think such a positive experience with Obama could also change the way he is seen in the upcoming election, though it may already be too late for that.

Or, perhaps I’m wrong. Clinton did well when he focused on the economy. And the world seems to resemble the complicated world that Neustadt (1991) seemed to think that American Presidents would face:

“In a multipolar world, crisscrossed by transnational relations, with economic and environmental issues paramount, and issues of security reshaped on regional lines, our Presidents will less and less have reason to seek solace in foreign relations from the piled-up frustrations of home affairs. Their foreign frustrations will be piled high too.”

From the Wall Street Journal:
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Rwanda’s Elections: beginning the habit of democracy

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Rwandans will be voting for their President Kagame next week. The overall outcome is not really in much doubt. And it is easy to be disappointed in the lack of real political competition in Rwanda (though Rwanda’s electoral commission claims there is real competition).

Indeed, those of us who were first introduced to Kagame through Philp Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You…, may continue to wish for that more heroic figure to reappear to bring democracy alongside liberation. It is old news to comment on the Gourevitch-Kagame connection and whether a journalist has become too influenced by his source(see here and here). But it remains a question we teachers face. There are still few books as accessible and engaging for undergraduates to read, as a colleague and I discussed just last week (I don’t use the book, but have considered using it).

Texas in Africahas a great roundup of what to expect with the upcoming election. And I think it is right to expect that, at the end of the day, the election won’t have much of an immediate impact. However, it may be that the habit of going to the polls is all that is needed. It has been the habit of democracy in Ghana, arguably, that has contributed to its success. Going to the polls repeatedly, and seeing gradual progress, has been key. And I really think that “habit” is something we as political scientists should not ignore. After all, in his reflections on democracy in the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that our “habits” are a clear contributing factor.

So, in that spirit, I hope the “election” goes smoothly, that many people go to the pools, and that regardless of how their votes translated into outcomes this time around, that the idea of voting begins to become a part of the national psyche.

“France attacked an African camp and killed Muslims”

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A little over a week ago, a French raid in Algeria to free an aid worker, Michael Germaneau, failed. He was already dead, and perhaps even dead before they got there.

Global Voices had a nice roundup of some of the African sources on this raid, one of which cited the quote I used for the title here.

Both France’s military and aid programs in Northern Africa has often been contentious (probably an understatement). Just a few years ago, French aid workers were jailed in Chad on child trafficking charges, where France has intervened militarily several times in the past decade. David Leonard has argued that there are reasons for cautious optimism about France’s evolving military role in Africa. At least, he seems to say, both the French military and French civil society seem to be more reflective about the nature of their interventions.

But the question the blogosphere seems to be asking is how fragile French relations with this part of Africa actually is. Were there clear winners or losers in this failed raid? France is clearly not a winner, having failed at getting the hostage, facing allegation that it negotiated with the al Qaida-affiliated group that held Germaneau, and having upset local politicians. One thing I would like to know is the extent to which Algerian muslims are identifying with the al-Qaida-affiliated groups in the region. But other than possibly increasing local opposition to France and the West, it is also unclear what the hostage-takers possibly got out of this. One possible winner? The US military’s counter-terrorism training program in the region seems more important than ever.

Getting Ready for Fall Teaching…

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While we still have some summer left (my vacation takes place in a couple weeks), it is often near the end of summer that many of us begin to figure out what exactly we will be doing for our Fall classes.  The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “ProfHacker” blog, has a couple useful posts on just this topic: