At “Indolaysia”:http://blogs.cornell.edu/indolaysia/2011/12/21/omfg-exogenous-variation-or-can-you-find-good-nails-when-you-find-an-indonesian-politics-hammer/, via Chris Blattman.
bq. I am teaching the Government department’s Comparative Methods course in the upcoming semester, and that has gotten me thinking quite a bit about the newest trends (or, maybe, fads) in empirical political science. One stands out: experimental or quasi-experimental research designs that promise that we can have clean identification of causal relationships that matter for politics. This post is about the pernicious things that can happen when we find a quasi-experiment, and their consequences for contemporary Indonesian political studies.
bq. …The implication of all this is that when we do find an independent variable that is clearly exogenous to the outcome we want to study, it’s very exciting. OMFG exogenous variation! But the fact that variation is _exogenous_ has nothing to do with whether that variation is _useful_ or _interesting_ for the study of the outcomes that political scientists care about. Even less so for those of us who have a reason to care about a particular country.
bq. … The problem, in other words, is that the search for exogenous variation has superseded the study of causal relations that cannot be cleanly identified. One of my colleagues relates the story of his grad school colleagues who instead of learning languages or reading history, “sat around in [BUILDING NAME REDACTED] trying to think up instruments.” Again, I am more than guilty of doing this myself, but when this trend dies down, we may be left with a discipline of political scientists who are unable to say anything about politics. (As a personal aside, I should confess that this is my greatest fear as a researcher, that I am good at research design but just not sensitive enough to say important things about the countries that I care the most about.)
bq. … If we as political scientists train our students to focus on identifiable questions, we will only be able to study identifiable causal relations. We will not study what most Indonesians care about. Angus Deaton put it best: “we have at least some control over the light but choose to let it fall where it may and then proclaim that whatever it illuminates is what we were looking for all along.” That is bad news for Indonesian political studies in the United States, and it should be cause for concern.