4 hours reading, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 120
I'm definitely coming down with something. Today was not very productive, and I'm not optimistic about Friday, but we'll see. One of the suggestions I got from a professor who's done historical work is to put my "critical-juncture" argument alongside other ones and see where it fits in. This kind of comparison is important to do, as the narrow specialization of academia works against the accumulation of knowledge, which is what social science is supposed to be about. So I gathered information about related arguments and compared them with each other. It's interesting, some are earlier than mine (1880-1910), some are later, and some are at the same time. I don't have anything to say about that yet, other than to observe that the ones that talk about Colombia emphasize the role of the party system, which I've considered incorporating, but isn't in there right now, and that several of them take the structure of the economy into account, which I haven't done in favor of political explanations for political phenomena.
I'm making progress on the to-do list I set myself for the month, but most of it is background stuff rather than writing. I'll work on writing up the critical-juncture piece on Friday.
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3 comments:
I am sorry you are not feeling well. I hope it is nothing that a good night sleep can't cure.
I'll let the absence of writing time and stagnation of the page count go for today in favour of the hope that you will be able to be more productive when you are feeling better.
After my time as a blog monitor is mostly up I have to apologize to not being able to comment on your actual work. I figure before I write something that helps no one I refrain from making stupid remarks.
But in case of todays blog I do have a question (excuse me if you already answered that in earlier entries): Doesn't the structure of the economy influence political phenomena in general? I mean can you explain political development without taking into account how the economy is set up? I always thought the two are heavily dependent from one another. That any given political situation is partly based on the economical situation. Or differently expressed; always look where the money is...
Hope so too!
It's a fair point about the economy. Part of the challenge political scientists have is to identify areas where specifically political factors - electoral rules, legislatures, presidential vs. parliamentary systems, party-system composition - impact the types of phenomena we care about. In other words, to develop political explanations for political phenomena, which account for things that economics alone can't account for.
For example, there used to be a mode of analysis that was fashionable 30 years ago (and persists to varying degrees today) called dependency theory, in which you could explain most of what goes on in Latin America by analyzing the structure of the global economy, in which Latin America and other developing countries were in a "dependent" status, providing raw materials for the developed world on the cheap and then buying back manufactured products from them at a markup. Supposedly, the alliance between global capital and local capital explained it all. But the problem was, it didn't: political institutions mediate the way that local and global capital operate in each country, with some countries able to operate with a greater degree of autonomy than others.
So, long-winded way of saying: my discipline points me toward emphasizing political factors, and how they lead to different outcomes in countries with broadly similar economic profiles. I guess there's a difference between explicitly modeling the structure of the economy, and assuming it's an important background factor. Like, the fact that the coffee economy took off in Colombia in the late 19th century is a huge incentive for the political settlements that I analyze. That's a key background condition, but I'm less interested in what caused the settlements than the impact that they had in the long term, via the types of institutions they set up and the incentives those generated for actors at the local level. And those incentives varied across countries, because the institutions varied across countries.
Anyway! Thanks for asking great questions and being a very diligent monitor!
I see - you gotta cut out something, otherwise its endless. I understand that analyzing a given economical situation and the reasons how it became to be this specific way, is a whole other thesis all by itself.
Thanks for answering.
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