Mark Carl Rom

A Wider Race? Interstate Competition across Health and Welfare Programs

Does interstate competition reduce welfare generosity? Most analyses of this question focus on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefit levels. The welfare-reducing logic of interstate competition should apply to all redistributive programs, however. We test for competitive effects more generally, examining several measures of welfare generosity for AFDC, Medicaid, and Supplemental Security Income-State (SSI-S) policy. We find evidence of interstate competition across multiple programs and measures over which states have authority. We also find variation in the effects that is consistent with variation in political debates across the programs.

American Federalism, Welfare Policy, and Residential Choices

The relationship between welfare benefit levels and the residential choices of the poor raises two issues for federalism in the United States. Do state benefit levels affect the residential choices of the poor? Do residential choices of the poor affect the level at which a state sets its benefit levels? Empirical studies have seldom studied the interconnection between these two issues. This research estimates simultaneously the mutual effects of welfare benefits and poverty rates while controlling for other economic and political variables. When benefit levels become high, the size of the poverty population increases. Conversely, when poverty rates become high, benefit levels are cut. The findings are consistent with the claim that state-determined benefit levels distort policy and residential choices.

From Welfare State to Opportunity, Inc.: Public-Private Partnerships in Welfare Reform

In the old days, our governments provided cash assistance to the poor. Today, our governments increasingly contract with nongovernmental organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, to deliver a wide range of services to the poor so that they may become less so. Will these new public-private partnerships solve our nations welfare poverty problems? It is far too early to tell. However, now is the time to begin assessing these partnerships, and find out how they are arranged, what their goals are, what they do, and how they will be evaluated. This is an initial step toward this assessment.

THE SCHOLARLY CONFERENCE: DO WE WANT DEMOCRACY AND MARKETS OR AUTHORITY AND TRADITION?

The main attributes of the American Political Science Annual (APSA) Research Conference, and other similar regional conferences, have not changed in decades. These structures and incentives are governed more by authority and tradition than by careful consideration of how best to create stimulating and engaging environments for teaching and learning. As a result, conventional conferences are neither as effective at promoting teaching and learning nor as enjoyable to the participants, as they might be. This article proposes an alternative, the Customized Conference, that uses democratic and market principles to create scholarly conferences that meet the preferences and needs of individuals while building stronger academic communities.

Numbers, Pictures, and Politics: Teaching Research Methods Through Data Visualizations

Data visualization is the term used to describe the methods and technologies used to allow the exploration and communication of quantitative information graphically. Data visualization is a rapidly growing and evolving discipline, and visualizations are widely used to cover politics. Yet, while popular and scholarly publications widely use visualizations, the skills necessary for developing analytically powerful and aesthetically compelling graphics are not widely taught, at least not in political science. This article thus focuses on two innovative aspects of teaching research methods through the use of data visualizations. The first aspect concerns what is taught and the second concerns how the relevant material is taught. Unlike a more traditional course that emphasizes probability theory, inferential statistics, and formal hypothesis testing, my “Numbers, Pictures and Politics” (NPP) course spotlights the visualization tools and skills useful for understanding and communicating political and other social phenomena.

Grading More Accurately.

Grades matter. College grading systems, however, are often ad hoc and prone to mistakes. This essay focuses on one factor that contributes to high-quality grading systems: grading accuracy (or “efficiency”). I proceed in several steps. First, I discuss the elements of “efficient” (i.e., accurate) grading. Next, I present analytical results indicating how often our grading schemes are likely to be inefficient, and I also discuss the causes for grading inefficiency. The following sections describe ways to make our grading systems more efficient, especially by increasing the number of scores and by providing clearer guidance on what constitutes high-quality performance. Finally, I offer data from my own “natural” experiment in grading and offer some concluding comments.

Fair and Balanced? Experimental Evidence on Partisan Bias in Grading

Is grading polarized in political science classrooms? We offer experimental evidence that suggests it is not. Many have argued that instructors’ grading in political science classrooms is skewed by the political characteristics of the instructor, the student, or an interaction between the two. Yet the evaluations of whether such biases exist has been asserted and denied with little evidence—even though prominent theories in political science suggest that the charge is not entirely implausible. Using a set of anonymous essays by undergraduates graded by teaching assistants at a variety of institutions, we test for the presence of bias in a framework that avoids the usual selection bias issues that confound attempts at inference. After evaluating the evidence carefully, we find that the evidence for bias is much weaker than activists claim.

Political Outcome Bias in Grading: Identifying Problems and Suggesting Solutions

Political bias in the academy is a topic of great controversy. Many conservatives have argued that liberals dominate American campuses and use their classrooms to indoctrinate students or to discriminate against those with differing political beliefs. Liberals have responded by calling studies that purport to demonstrate these claims as flawed or as attacks on academic freedom. Regardless of the magnitude of campus political bias, it is ill-advised for the scholarly community to argue that it is immune from bias because scholars simply are fair. This article focuses on one element of political bias: partisan “outcome” bias in grading. We proceed in several steps. First, we provide an overview of the problem of grading bias and the concerns about political bias. Next, we consider the attributes of political grading bias and the forms that it can take. We present the analytics of partisan outcome bias and logic of using “paired” assignments to eliminate outcome bias. We provide data and analysis concerning outcome bias from a course Rom has taught. We conclude with a discussion of the ethics of grading.