As this blog will offer my (i.e. Jay Cost's) analysis of the American electoral landscape, it might be worthwhile to offer a few insights on how I look at politics.

Here are a few basic parameters regarding yours truly.

1. I am writing a dissertation on the contemporary American party. It is going well. My central hypothesis has passed the "critical test" I had set up for it. I now have several chapters written, and plan to be finished sometime in 2008.

2. I am, as political scientists like to say, a "rat choice" guy. That is short for rational choice theory. If somebody asks me to explain why something happened, I would want to know who was involved, what were his goals, and what were the rules (formal or informal) that governed his behavior. I don't understand politics as a pitched battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. I understand it as the competition between divergent interests in the venue that Americans have set up to manage such conflict, namely our Madisonian system.

3. I possess a fairly wide and fairly deep knowledge base of how our system works. This is thanks in large measure to my study of the parties, which have pervaded almost all layers of our politics since the Founding.

4. I like math, and I think it is useful for studying politics. Yes - math and politics in the same sentence - you read that right! I am not afraid to trot out a few correlations, a few tests of means, a few ordinary least squares regressions. Hell, I might even toss out some probit analysis at some point. I'm that crazy! Seriously though, statistics is useful for talking about politics. And it doesn't bite. You'll see!

5. I am hyper-conscious of methodology. I am much more interested in how one makes an argument than what the argument actually is.

6. I am not really interested in the "should" of American politics; I am interested in the "is." Should Congress pass a comprehensive border plan, or should it just pass border security? I have my own opinions, but they are not what this blog is about. My interest here is in a question like this: Is it likely or unlikely that Congress will pass a comprehensive plan? This is not to say that my own preferences for the "should" won't creep into my analysis of the "is," but I am going to keep them as separate as possible.

7. Because I will not be able to keep the "is" and the "should" entirely separate, you should know a little about my worldview. I'll put it in two different ways, the hoity-toity philosophical and the meat-and-potatoes. Hoity-toity: my political philosophy lies at the nexus of Karl Popper, St. Bonaventure, and Edmund Burke. Is there such a nexus? Oh - you betcha! I spent my first three years in graduate school mapping it out, and then realized I could never find employment in the American academy as a political philosopher specializing in the Popper-Bonaventure-Burke nexus! Meat-and-potatoes: Demography is damned close to destiny. I grew up in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania. This is a northern exurb of Pittsburgh, in Butler County. Here's how the good folks in that part of Butler County voted in 2006.

8. That said, I have a great deal of respect for people with other points of view. By and large, I do not get frothy-mouthed over the "should." For three reasons: (1) I could very well be wrong on every opinion I have, have had, or will have. In this case it would be really embarassing to have been so frothy-mouthed over all of my wrong opinions. (2) In 100 years, people are going to be as frothy-mouthed over our disagreements as we are frothy-mouthed over the disagreements of 100 years ago. So, if I am not willing to be frothy-mouthed over "free silver," why be frothy-mouthed over anything? (3) It is hard to be frothy-mouthed about what should happen when you learn the dirty little secret of the Madisonian system: it is set up specifically to prevent much from really changing. So, why get all frothy-mouthed over my idea of the way things should be when our forefathers set it up so that my idea of "should" will almost always lose?

9. I try to avoid writing about things of which I know little. You'll see little talk of foreign affairs here. I will only say that my position on Iraq can be summed up by the classic antiques store warning: you break it, you bought it.