As I signed my name to the third piece of paper recently (or was it the fourth), I am wondering, where is that person who swore they would never write a book. Now, with this signature, I have three book contracts, and even an edited volume forthcoming soon.
So lets talk about these a bit. It is good to take stock of what am I doing.
I am very much looking forward to this one. A little over a year ago I wrote an opinion piece in Nature where I argued for the importance of systematic comparative analysis. This book is our (Team Populism‘s) first attempt at this and, while not perfect, I am pretty happy with the outcome.
Then there is the almost finished book with my former students, Bruno Castanho Silva and Constantin Manuel Bosancianu on Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling. There is no book dedicated to the subject, to date. There are a few good book chapters, but we wanted to do something more accessible to a less technical crowd (and since Bruno asked me if we could just write this equation in landscape, I am not sure we succeeded). We pitched the idea to SAGE’s Little Green Book series a while back and they liked it. We managed to workshop earlier draft chapters at the 2016 and 2017 ECPR Summer Schools in Methods and Techniques and in a few weeks we will do it again. Hopefully it will be a complete draft by then. This solely depends on my writing and editing superpowers. (Yeah, I should be writing that and not blog posts.)
(On a side note, how inept I am at up to date quantitative methods technology will become clear at the bottom of this post, but I am proud to see that my former students’ webpages are on github – a platform I very much need to learn how to use. (And they aren’t the only ones to have their pages on github.) Not having the time to learn everything I want to learn, I hope, is compensated somewhat by pushing my students down rabbit holes they need to tumble-down to get (well) ahead of where I am at. #FeelingOldUnder40. I know, I know, I am embarrassing…)
Riding on the success of this idea and after years of discussions on what we should collaborate on, Jochen Mayerl and I sat down after the 2016 ECPR Summer School and spent two days discussing (and pounding out) what a short introductory Structural Equation Modeling book would look like if we wrote one. Fortunately SAGE’s same series, that was visibly missing a modern SEM book from the 170+ book repertoire, sounded convinced. We spent some time a year later working out some of the details, but the work starts early next year and hopefully we will have a draft to pilot at the 2018 ECPR Summer School.
But even before that, Cambridge University Press approached Kirk Hawkins to write a short book for their new Elements series on how the 2016 US election (read: Donald Trump, but we think also Bernie Sanders) fits into the comparative world of populism. Americanists in the US can be quite detached from the world of comparative politics and it is clear that current events caught them (as much as everyone else) by surprise. Americanists want to look into Trump and populism, so instead of reinventing the wheel (or rather, further confusing an already massively muddled concept – there is a lot of that going on nowadays), maybe placing the US in a comparative context where populism has been studied for decades is not a bad idea. And the Elements series looks like a great medium to do this. This also gives some opportunities to show off systematic comparative research (which is still the exception in populism studies).
The irony of Kirk (the American) asking me (the Hungarian) to write a book with him on American politics (not his field, much more mine) should not escape anyone. Between the two of us, I think we have sufficient chops in systematic comparative research on the level of elites, masses, focus on Latin America, Europe and, of course, the US to do this right. This is going to be fun. I am very much looking forward to it. And it is going to be tough as deadlines are tight. They want the book by the end of January. (February might actually be doable. At least these things are short, which, in the case of the SEM book may be more a challenge than an asset, but…)
There is another reason I am looking forward to this. Recently, a medical researcher colleague asked me to help with some stats. I figured I will finally do this the right way. I have been teaching R and good coding practices for years to my students but I never internalized them myself. I figured I will do this right, for once. (I won’t open SPSS, etc.) It was so much fun. For most of my political science work I rarely get to open a stats package. I rarely open
R and not realize it is way outdated and I should upgrade. When I have to run something, it is usually in Mplus and I can usually get a collaborator to give me clean, Mplus ready data (or I am in a rush and do it in SPSS, thought it has been a while). Now I have a project where I can and will do everything myself and do it right. Looking forward to learning more about visualization in R. I did a workshop with Martin Molder but still never had to open ggplot2.
So I have three books to write before the start of my sabbatical (assuming the request goes through to leave next fall for a year). What will I do on my sabbatical? I guess I have ideas. CEU’s Comparative Populism Project will start to produce data. There are multiple other grant proposals, grant calls in the pipeline with the potential to keep me busy doing populism research (or, at least, scientific busy work with hopes of generating something useful – like data – for research). Maybe another book? Definitely articles. I do have a plan at the back of my head to write one more stats book, this one on experimental design for political and social scientists. We will see if that happens. I need to do a lot more research on what is out there before I commit to writing even a proposal for this.
