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The APSA meeting was held in Toronto, Canada.
The Political Communication section had a preconference which was hosted by the University of Toronto. I attended and presented The Public Face of Transparency.
There was quite enough at the meeting to keep me busy. I presented What if You Had a Choice? on Friday afternoon. After the panel I attended the meeting of the Communication Section and, as chair of the committee, made the presentation of the Doris Graber Award to Rod Hart. Kathleen Jamieson and I had taken him to lunch on Thursday to celebrate his award. I picked out the restaurant and she used her funds to pay. He talked about using the software he developed for the book to differentiate democrats and republicans.
I attended a number of panels and took notes during the presentations. They are a bit odd -- 140 characters per note constraint, most recent on top and earliest on the bottom. The typing/spelling was not always the best.
The ITP section asked me to chair a committee on ITP connect -- the APSA's new 'impoverished' social network. Members of the committee are: Diana Tracy Cohen (cohendir@ccsu.edu) and Merrill Shanks (jms@csm.berkeley.edu). There will probably be other members depending on how this develops. I started making notes on the way home from the meeting.
Interesting ideas presented by friends at the meeting:
David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: Internet Fundraising and the Second Interest Group Realignment. The argument is that changing communication technology will dramatically change the way interest groups operate; little infrastructure, direct appeals for money, moving from one issue to the next. What he did not talk about, it may be in paper, is how what they do with the money will change.
Ann Crigler, Emotions and Horserace Framing: Studying the Effects of Anxiety and Reassurance on Partisan Identifiers. They draw on a literature about fans rooting for their teams to specify emotions that should result from different circumstances. Fans is good.
Selcan Kaynak, Young Voters in the U.S. and Turkey: The Changing Landscape of Political Attitudes, Media Use and Individual Traits. The interesting idea was efficacy as a member of a group. That surely makes sense as a complement to our standard atomistic version of efficacy. She also looked at expectations for the future, but did not do one's own future efficacy.
Russell Neuman, Needles and Haystacks:The Explosion of Political and Non-Political Information Flow. He wanted to trace the increase in flow of information, and he attempted to develop a common metric for text and video. This is the macro, macro view of information flow.
People with whom I had extended conversations.
Craig Brians, Virginia Tech. We talked about computers and learning, and it turns out we have a number of common interests.
Vincent Raynauld, Canada. We share an interest in new media and politics. He promises to send his papers.
Finally, the restaurant review. Dick Jankowski and I had dinner Saturday night at banu. It specializes in Iranian food of which pomegranet seems to be an important component. We did a bit of overdosing on pomegranet flavored dishes: green olives flavored with, steak cubes flavored with, and pomegranet sorbet. It was all very good -- along with lots of cotes de rhone wine.
