Gov 2020: The Hidden Curriculum

Gov 2020 has two components: 

1. The first component is a popular semester-long project designed to show how to write and publish an article in a scholarly journal, beginning with an article replication. This assignment, an early version of which was described in the article “Publication, Publication” and previously part of Gov 2001*, has resulted in many students' first publications, conference presentations, dissertations, and awards.
2. The second component is newly designed to show how science (and, by extension, the profession) works.  It includes what a big idea is in our field; developing defensible answers; co-authoring; writing for impact; effective presentations; solving problems by changing the question; going beyond publication to impact; managing the transition academics undergo from private to public figure; leveraging universities, startups, industry, and government for research; and more.

A considerable body of wisdom about how to succeed in our profession accumulates informally as each PhD cohort learns, improves, and passes knowledge on to its successors. Most of this “hidden curriculum” is not taught in formal classes, but is essential to making the most of graduate school, producing high quality research, and securing the best jobs. Unfortunately, the 2020 pandemic severed the connection between cohorts, leaving individual students to try to piece together this knowledge on their own. In Gov 2020, we will formalize much of this informal wisdom to provide 20/20 vision (remember the course number yet?) into the hidden curriculum and go beyond what had been possible even before the pandemic.

What can we learn in Gov2020 that we can’t get in other methods classes?  When students and faculty ask for methodological advice, they say they have a simple technical question, but too often it makes no sense (e.g., “Someone told me I have a problem called `endogeneity’. Where is the button in SPSS to fix it?”). Other times, the question is coherent but comes with hopeless identification problems, 85% missing data, massive model dependence, a research question that no one would care about even if it could be answered, or a hypothesis that could never be confirmed with obtainable data. When the conversation works out, we discover together a new way of thinking about the problem, a restructured dataset, a more interesting way to frame the research question so others would care, and appropriate statistical methods that do not require impossible-to-defend technical assumptions.  Completion and publication then become far easier. As almost all methods faculty will confirm, this is by far the most common and most important impact methodologists have, and yet we do not teach this in technical methods classes.  We will in Gov2020.

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* A new version of Gov 2001, excluding the replication exercise, will be offered by others in the Government Department. Materials from when I taught Gov 2001 will remain available, including my online class lectures; the book Unifying Political Methodology; an app 2k1-in-silico: An Interactive Methods Non-Textbook and related paper Statistical Intuition Without Coding (or Teachers); Perusall.com, and the course website.