Summer Reading?

So coming out of my first year of graduate school there are a few things I wished I had more time to pursue during the school year, but the geenral busy-ness and overlapping commitments of each semester kept me from ever adequately pursuing my own interests. The benefit of this is that now that summer is here, and there is a reprieve from school (and unfortunately work) I have a full slate of interests to follow up on within the discipline of political science.

From my introduction into the discipline this year two things really stand out to me.

First, political scientists studying the United States tend to focus fairly exclusively on the federal institutions. There is work out there on local and state institutions, but the sheer diversity and limited scope of such institutions really slows the study of them down.¹ This oversight is unfortunate because for many Americans such local governing institutions form the touchstone of their democratic experience. Local and state bodies decide where our roads our built, what our schools teach, and how we organize the places we live.  Yet for all of this, systematic studies on the way these decisions are made are few and far between. The American subfield in political science had studies of local politics at its roots, but now this has largely been replaced by intense study within the subfields of national institutions like the federal courts, the bureaucracy, and the legislature.

The second is that I am really interested in geographical and regional influences on politics. There isn’t a bunch of work done in this area either, and the work that is done is predominantly focused on urban areas. In some ways this makes sense–America is becoming increasingly organized–but in another way it does not make sense as a democratic system should feature a proportional amount of participation from both urban and rural areas. By overstudying the urban areas we paint a distorted view of the political process as a whole. Recently Politico ran an article discussing just such a divide among the Democrats. ²

This leaves an interesting gap in the discipline. While our understanding of the American political system is still so nascent that there is plenty of room for more scholars working on questions of urban political behavior or federal governance, there is even more room for work to be done on state and local governments and governance/political behavior in rural areas. I hope to pursue this point because I do feel that this gap biases much of the conventional wisdom in the discipline (adding to the problem is that naturally most of the major research centers in the discipline are located in urban centers).

One of my goals for this summer is to work out the implications of this gut instinct. I have a short reading list I put together on the role of place in politics both institutionally and behaviorally. This should allow me to start thinking of questions that remain unanswered, and hopefully, along the way, push me toward a dissertation topic.

In addition to this I want to make sure I have the tools to produce research that is conclusive and convincing to my colleagues that place does matter. This means brushing up on my mathematics a bit. While still in the early stages of my statistical training, I find a lot of utility in working on basic mathematic principles and shoring up the foundations there before I am bombarded with a lot of new concepts in another course. Those foundations will consist mainly of matrix algebra and differential calculus.

In addition to this I hope to work on learning GIS software and create some basic maps representing social science data geographically. I have had a brief primer on this through my department, which was thoroughly helpful in introducing me to the topic. Building on that and achieving some basic competency here will not only give me a new set of software tools to use in my career, but also help keep me focused on thinking about compelling ways of displaying data to aide my argument.

All in all it sounds like a busy summer, but it is good to work on these things now because next summer is filled with studying for prelims and all of the anxiety and work that comes with preparing for high stakes qualifying exams…