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By Dylan Matthews
John Sides has a good, long rant at the expense of Matt Bai and his somewhat off-handed condemnation of political science. The whole thing's worth reading, but this point in particular deserves emphasizing:
Political journalism would be improved with a bit more rigor and somewhat higher empirical standards. It needn’t mimic political science faithfully, but it should push in that direction — at least when it goes beyond simple reporting of the days events into something approaching analysis.I'll just add that this notion of political science as entirely quantitative (or, in Bai's innumerate characterization, "Greek symbols and some algebra") is pretty exaggerated. It has become more mathematical in recent decades, sure, but a great deal of the discipline is still dependent on case study. No one is expecting reporters to start running ANOVAs or doing multiple regression analyses before they write trend pieces, but a more rigorous approach to qualitative analysis would go a long way.
