The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 4

September 28, 2019

So where do I start?

With a bit of inside baseball—apologies for the sports analogy, I don’t even like baseball all that much particularly when the Detroit Tigers suck but I don’t have a better analogy. Please feel free to send me one…..

Science (the journal) is one of the top ten journals on the planet as far as impact factor goes.

Science’s impact factor is 37. The American Political Science Review’s—political science’s most important journal—has an impact factor of 3.3. (The higher the number the better--there are all sorts of problems with this metric but i don't want to get into it.)

Science normally publishes research from either the biological or physical sciences. A recent issue for example deals with “ruminants” (mammals that live off of plants). The lead article in the issue “Large-scale ruminant genome sequencing provides insights into their evolution and distinct traits” has approximately 60 co-authors (by comparison it’s rare to find a social science article with more than four authors, and as I think about it, more than six or seven words).

But every now and again Science publishes social science articles. The articles it tends to publish tend to blaze new trails in social science. Given that social sciences all to some degree “want” to be viewed as “real” science, any concept that a “real” science journal like Science deems important enough to publish will be viewed with extra importance in social science.

A bit more than ten years ago, Science published “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits” by Douglas Oxley, Kevin Smith, John Alford, Matthew Hibbing, Jennifer Miller, Mario Scalar, Peter Hatemi, and John Hibbing. The article suggested that conservatives and liberals respond differently to threats because of how their brains are wired. In other words the differences between men and women who listen to Rush Limbaugh and men and women who listen to Rachel Maddow are at least partially physiological. It isn’t quite “men are from mars, women are from venus” (which is also wrong) but it’s closer than not.

The Oxley et al article wasn’t the first article in the modern period to make claims that political attitudes and behaviors are not the function of politics as much as they are somehow the function o feither physiology or genetics. In 2008 the APSR published John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing’s “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?” (Note that Alford and Hibbing are also co-authors on the Science article.) Three years before that it published “Genetic Variation in Political Participation” by James Fowler, Laura Baker, and Christopher Daws. Here’s the abstract for the Fowler et al article:

The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades. Theoretical models predict little or no variation in participation in large population elections and empirical models have typically accounted for only a relatively small portion of individual-level variance in turnout behavior. However, these models have not considered the hypothesis that part of the variation in voting behavior can be attributed to genetic effects. Matching public voter turnout records in Los Angeles to a twin registry, we study the heritability of political behavior in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in voting turnout can be accounted for by genes. We also replicate these results with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.

Humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.

Remember Pookie?

"You've got to grab your friends, you’ve got to grab your co-workers, you know, don’t just get the folks who you know are gonna vote, you’ve got to find Cousin Pookie. He’s sitting on the couch right now watching football, hasn't voted in the last five elections, you’ve got to grab him, and tell him to go vote.”

It isn’t that much of a stretch given the arguments already made about “the underclass” to suggest that maybe the reason Pookie didn’t vote is because he was genetically predisposed to not do so? This is the type of “natural” followup to the “politics is genetic” line of research these folk are making.

Turns out though that the article published by Science?

It’s wrong.

Replication lies at the heart of the scientific method. If a given finding is True….then you should be able to replicate the method and arrive at the same finding. This is science 101.

A group of scholars interested in the same phenomenon replicated the study published by Science….and couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get any findings, no matter how they modified the study. They thought they were doing something wrong, until they’d tried so many times unsuccessfully they realized it wasn’t them, it was the original research.

So they wrote up their work…sent it to Science.

And Science rejected it. Didn’t even send it out to peer review.

Anyway, given the impact of Science on the field, and given how the “politics as genetics” argument has begun to take hold in part because of the article Science published, one would think that Science would actually publish the article.

Nope.

We’re seeing a resurgence of arguments that posit that the differences between populations are fundamental and ontologically antagonistic. This isn’t just Trump supporters believing that kids should be separated from their parents at the border. This is Trump antagonists believing those supporters to be unreachable and somehow genetically distinct.

So the stakes for this particular argument are actually a lot higher than one might think.

….

With impeachment upon us (and it’s worth mentioning that as abnormal as this event it, we’ve potentially had three of them in the last fifty years) I thought I’d just mention one thing. Polls are dynamic. Public opinion polls measure attitudes at a specific moment in time. There are durable opinions—I think even now people like their particular congressperson more than they like congress—many opinions are time slices. When we’re talking about a dynamic event the best thing we can do is talk about what opinion is at a moment in time. 

I mention this because over the past several months as it’s increasingly clear that Trump violates the oath of office every single day he lives in the White House, pollsters have been using the lack of  majority support for impeachment as proof somehow that impeachment shouldn’t happen, or that it’d be a bad idea. In some instances they've even noted that it is divisive. This last idea is....well, in as much as impeachment involves removing someone from office that approximately half of the ballot-casting population voted for it's going to be divisive by nature.     (Although we know the answer it's worth questioning how someone who'd make that claim as a reason not to proceed has a job.)     But anyway, even if impeachment goes through the full process only to fail at the level of the Sentate (20 Republicans in the Senate would have to vote in favor of impeachment for it to take place), the decision to impeach will change opinions by itself. Further as the process will reveal even more information it'll likely change opinions in durable ways. Even among those who voted for him.       I realize I never got around to talking about what I thought about Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Will do so next time.       (Spoiler alert. It's dope.)      Damn it's a beautiful fall day here. Will go outside and edit a bit in order to take advantage of it (I know. work. work. and after that work. working on it, no pun intended.)    Until next week.