Modern social science and lessons from Latin America

Discussed topics include: 

• Interdisciplinary cooperation 
• Publishing advice 
• Competitiveness of Latin American and Czech elections 
• (Dis)similarities between post-communist Europe and Latin America 
• Troubling Czech elections 

How is political science coping with the general need to diversify its perspective with other disciplines? 

I certainly see a lot of potential for interdisciplinary work; political science is interdisciplinary almost by definition. There is no clear core in the discipline itself, no single meta-theory. Instead, it has a messy centre. And it borrows and utilizes knowledge and approaches from various other disciplines, ranging from anthropology to information technology, especially when it comes to big data analysis. 

But other disciplines in social science must be more closely related to your work, right?  

Of course, for example, the historical approach is very close to my research. It adds a lot of value to political science research. Political science is empirical. And that means, by definition, that it needs to be historical. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we must go back to the 18th century to understand what is happening today. What it means is that in order to understand what's going on in today's Czech politics, we can go to Latin America of ten years ago. For example, there is a lot of talk about populism and how it has swayed European societies. But this was what Latin America was living through ten or fifteen years ago. And populism was and still is a crucial issue there. So, in understanding the varieties of populism and populist politics, you must compare the historical cases and look at different countries to learn about your own society.  

As an associate professor at the Department of Political Science, you tutor many aspiring PhD candidates. What advice would you give those who want to pursue a PhD in Political Science? 

Political science is a very competitive research field. Especially given our PhD programme has a very specialized Latin Americanist focus, we are competing with leading universities that produce a lot of innovative research. And we somehow have to adjust. I'm a competitive person, so I constantly try to improve my research. I try to keep up with new articles; I do a lot of additional research. Therefore, I recommend to all new PhD students that starting their own scientific research and writing as soon as possible is vital.  

Honestly, I think only a minority of PhD students understand from the very beginning that they must compete in the academic environment. Most people's motivations when enrolling in a PhD programme vary and are not necessarily related to their future career prospects. Their motivations often relate to their enthusiasm for the topic they are developing in a dissertation. Or, in our case, simply the love of Latin America. But over time, our PhD students come to realise that they really must start working hard on their research skills to be able to compete in an international environment. Science is global; the job market is international. They need to be fully focused on having a decent track record of publishing in respected international journals.  

So, if I want to be a successful PhD student, all I need to do is publish many articles?  

Well, not just that. Because no matter how good you are, if nobody knows you, you can be a genius hidden somewhere in a cellar in Hradec Králové, but it makes absolutely no difference. And one way of getting the world to know one's academic quality is through networks. You know, going to conferences, co-authoring articles, joining collaborative research, joining projects, spending time abroad etc. So, especially in our field of study, it's only natural that people strive to become internationally recognised scholars.  

Some people feel that the result of their PhD studies is that they produce an extensive and exhaustive dissertation. But nobody's going to judge them on the quality of their dissertation; academic employers in the future will evaluate them based on the quality of their peer-reviewed articles and the quality of the journals where they have published them. So it might be a little bit unfair. But these are the current rules of the game.  

That leads me to another question, why have peer-reviewed articles become so important recently? What are the benefits?  

Well, peer-review maintains a high level of objectivity, and it can weed out low-quality and irrelevant research. And although it is far from perfect, it is the best organizational principle of science that we have: we can compare and weigh journals based on the quality and clarity of this article evaluation and publication process. 

Ok, but how is it objective? How does peer-review work?  

Right. Double-blind peer review is the central feature of maintaining research quality in my field. An author writes an article; they think it's an excellent article, of course, and sends it to one of the best journals in their research field. We measure the quality of a journal by its Impact Factor (IF); there are other metrics too, but the IF is the most widely used one. The editor of the journal looks at the paper and evaluates it. The editor rejects it immediately if it simply doesn't fit the journal's purpose. If it meets the journal's purpose and standards, the editor sends it for peer review to other researchers in that field. That's an anonymous process; the reviewers do not know the author's identity, and the author does not know the identity of the reviewers. There are typically at least two reviews. And then, the editor decides whether, based on these reviews, to reject the article or to accept it subject to some revisions. Usually, the reviewers demand some additions and changes. It is a very long and often arduous process. The better the journal, the higher the rejection rate.  

I see, and have you had any big publishing success lately? Do you ever get rejected?  

 I was enthusiastic about having two of my papers accepted last year by leading journals in political science, both of which were published by the prestigious Cambridge University Press. One was a co-authored piece on the democratic effects of presidential term limits and re-election in Latin America. The other introduced a forgotten constitutional episode in the late Austro-Hungarian empire, which experimented with compulsory voting in some crownlands (including Moravia and Silesia since 1907 – but not Bohemia). I looked into the political effects of these reforms, especially their effects on turnout and the class composition of the electorate. It is essential to note that neither journal was the first one to which I sent my article. So yes, even I get rejected sometimes, and this is my other advice. Don't get depressed after rejections and overly critical reviews. It is a complicated process, and you must build some resilience and patience.  

Let's talk about your academic interests; what topics do you mostly write about?  

I specialise in electoral institutions, electoral rules, and political behaviour in Latin America, but I also work on Central European comparative politics. One thing that I'm working on right now is a project on political competition, or rather the lack of political competition. 

Over 1,000 of our more than 6,000 municipalities have only a single candidate list, so those elections are not competitive.

 

Could you elaborate on that?  

Sometimes, even in democratic countries, you have elections with no genuine political alternatives to choose from. This is very troubling from a democratic perspective. For example, in Czech municipal elections, over 1,000 of our more than 6,000 municipalities have only a single candidate list, so those elections are not competitive, obviously. As a voter, you don't get to choose. What interests me are the effects of such non-competitive constellations in terms of electoral participation and in terms of governance. I am also interested in what causes these non-competitive elections. And it's a feature that also occurs a lot in Latin American elections, especially at the local level.  

Another big project I am involved in focuses on re-election and term limits. Term limits are an electoral rule prohibiting incumbents from running for office again. Some constitutions, for example, ban presidents from running for consecutive terms. And it's a very controversial rule because, in Latin America, many presidents have changed it to allow themselves to run again. For example, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, to name but a few. And in a recent article that I mentioned, I looked at the effects of this phenomenon on democracy. What happens when presidents change this constitutional rule to allow themselves to be re-elected? How does it affect democracy? The article's co-author is one of my PhD students, Jan Pumr. I like engaging PhD students in my research topics, which was very fruitful cooperation.  

That's great. I imagine this helps a lot with starting their academic careers. But you mentioned comparisons of post-communist countries with Latin America. How are these societies similar enough to allow us to compare them?  

These comparisons are valuable because we've been at a similar starting point regarding our democratisation since the 1980s and 1990s. And many of the problems that new democracies have dealt with were similar to post-communist Europe and Latin America. Some of the issues were institutional, like electoral rules, division of power, etc. You can also track similarities here. A part of my research explicitly connects both areas of the post-communist countries and Latin American countries.  

Do you think we can learn from the Latin American experience?  

Well, of course, we have a relatively robust electoral system, but it has some flaws that could be eliminated by using solutions and examples from successful Latin American democracies.  

One of the flaws, or unwanted effects if you will, which we were reminded of in the last election (eds. Note: 2021 Czech legislative elections), is the existence of open lists that allow voters to select their representatives within the list of candidates. This discourages cooperation, consensus, and pre-electoral alliances between parties, among other things. This time, it strongly affected the joint candidate list of the Pirates and Mayors. They might have made some arrangements before the elections, arrangements concerning the division of seats within the coalition. But voters cast their preferential votes for Mayors by a significant margin, so any prior agreements fell apart.  

I understand that even though some people might have voted for that coalition because they like the Pirates' programme, they gave their preferential votes to the Mayors candidates. This is what's wrong with the open candidate list, right?  

As I mentioned before, this discourages cooperation between parties. Of course, these parties will think again and very hard about whether to join such an alliance in the future. Our system has too many parties, and we have a very fragmented party system. The existing open lists system does not work correctly, which is why I support closed lists. A closed list means that people can choose only between the parties; they cannot vote for particular candidates. We used closed lists during the First Republic in the interwar period. It is a system that works, for example, in the most advanced Latin American democracies, like Argentina or Costa Rica. It helps create stronger parties. We need this because our parties are weak; they are too personalistic. 

Preferential votes are also used at a lower electoral level in local elections. So we would also need to change that, wouldn't we?  

Well, that is a different story. There are many problems with the electoral system for municipal councils. The method we use is a complete mess and needs a dire reworking. It's misleading for the voters because they often have no idea how the counting operates after the votes are cast. By counting, I mean the conversion of votes into seats.  

It is tough to grasp, indeed. A voter has three options, cast a vote for particular candidates (up to the number of seats available in the election), or cast a vote for a whole party, or combine the two options.  

This is good so far; more possibilities offer more freedom.  

Yes, but let me give you a hypothetical example. The voter dislikes some candidates; she calls them the rotten apples of a party she otherwise genuinely likes. These rotten apples are at the top of the party list, and some of his preferred candidates are at the bottom. So, she's willing to vote for the party but not for the rotten apples. So, she deliberately chooses some candidates from the bottom of the list, hoping they will pass over those top candidates. But in Czech municipal elections, we calculate the mean number of votes for the candidates on the list. For a candidate to jump to the top of the list, he must receive at least 10% more votes than the mean. This is typically very hard to do. So, all the ballots our voter cast for the non-rotten apples are usually actually going to go to the rotten apples, simply because her preferred candidates did not meet the mentioned threshold. That's troublesome. People might unknowingly vote against their interests.  

And one more thing that is alarming in the municipal election system. If our voter is voting in a big city, where there are, let's say, 45 members of the assembly, and she only casts a vote for a single candidate, the value of the vote is just 1/45 of the vote of another person who voted for an entire party. And that creates enormous voting inequality.  

Ok, this is far from ideal. Can we change it? Maybe we're getting back to my initial questions. How does social science influence social and political reality?  

To be honest, it's anything but direct. Science creates an environment where policymakers can choose from various ideas available. As a political scientist, it is not my primary purpose to be an applied researcher who invents new policies. We need to take care of our academic autonomy. When researchers are pushed into having to produce social guides and tools and procedures, they lose this autonomy. There's a trade-off. I'm not saying we should be isolated from the real world. But we also need to maintain a certain level of distance from political power in order to provide relevant answers to essential questions.