Reflections on the past academic year...

...and 9 things I read and loved

Some reflections

I am writing this blog post as I am flying back home for the weekend after my Major Upgrade. In an academic market where the current narrative is publish or perish, I am reflecting on what I have achieved in this first year as a PhD student. I guess the first thing one could say is that passing your Major Upgrade from PhD student to PhD candidate is already a pretty good achievement. But even so (and here my love for counterfactuals), would I still feel accomplished if I didn't pass it? I'd like to think that I would actually feel satisfied about and grateful for the past academic year even if my deliverables didn't meet the standards. I am trying to convince myself that not everything is about deliverables.

I started this programme with no clues about what my PhD would be about. I only knew I wanted to work on political identities. Before a couple of months ago, I had never actually run a code on R that was not part of a problem set, let alone cleaned a dataset or used ggplot. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I had never put together nor written a quantitative paper, let alone one with a causal inference design.

What is the common feature of all these things? By figuring out how to accomplish all these things, I have actually learned more than I could have ever imagined.

And it all started from reading. Endless reading. I spent the first months of my PhD just reading. I loved it. Then I hated it. Then I loved it again. Here is a list of my favourite articles or books that I have read in the past 12 months and absolutely adored. Mostly political science. Mostly about political identities. Exciting nonetheless!

The List!

Yeung, Eddy S. F., and Kai Quek. 2024. ‘Self-Reported Political Ideology’. Political Science Research and Methods, February, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.2.

What if respondents do not think about ideology the same way political scientists do? This paper embodies any methodologist's wildest dream. Simple design, ambitious claims, and the potential to question the entire body of work on political ideologies ever written. The findings show that when provided with the unlabelled definition of liberal and conservative, Republicans appear more liberal and Democrats more conservative.

Roccas, Sonia, and Marilynn B. Brewer. 2002. ‘Social Identity Complexity’. Personality and Social Psychology Review 6 (2): 88–106. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0602_01.

"How do individuals construct their social identities in relation to multiple, nonconvergent ingroup memberships?” and how can their relationship influence how we view the world? This is one of my all-time favourites. Roccas and Brewer try to tackle one of the most interesting yet particularly understudied aspects of social identity theory: people's identities multiplicity, what they call social identity complexity. In practice, they show how "the more a person perceives the groups to which he or she belongs as being similar to each other, the less complex is his or her social identity.” (Roccas and Brewer, 2002, p. 94). Under this perspective, individuals that live in more diverse societies are more likely to have a more complex understanding of themselves and others in terms of identities, compared to people that live in monocultural or stratified societies.

Huckfeldt, Robert, and John Sprague. 1987. ‘Networks in Context: The Social Flow of Political Information’. American Political Science Review 81 (4): 1197–1216. https://doi.org/10.2307/1962585.

This paper tackles the question that has been the main reason for disagreement between sociologists and psychologists concerned with social identities. What is the relationship between social contexts and individuals? Does the social context shape and influence the individual, or do individuals embedded in any given social context shape it? According to this paper, while individuals have a choice on the networks of people they interact with, this choice, to an extent, is bound by the context they find themselves in.

Zhang, Nan, Johanna Gereke, and Delia Baldassarri. 2022. ‘Everyday Discrimination in Public Spaces: A Field Experiment in the Milan Metro’. European Sociological Review 38 (5): 679–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcac008.

Can we measure everyday discrimination in a real-world setting? This paper tackles one of the things that bothers me the most about experiments: the fact that we do not directly measure behaviour but often just proxies of behaviour, self-reports (which are often biased) or behaviours that are bound to the experimental setting. They do so by adopting a field experiment to test how the ethnicity of people in public spaces can trigger physical avoidance.

Brewer, Marilynn B. 1991. ‘The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 17 (5): 475–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167291175001.

I have nothing to say about this one except that it is so beautifully written and that even just the title elegantly summarises years of research on social and political identities in a few, effective words.

Friedman, Sam, Dave O’Brien, and Ian McDonald. 2021. ‘Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self’. Sociology 55 (4): 716–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520982225.

Recent addition! But hard to forget. A masterpiece of qualitative research. Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? This paper starts from a simple, almost common observation, that people like to tell stories about themselves that showcase their hard work, and, on the other hand, hide their privilege. Perhaps many of us are also guilty of it. Me included. It looks at the inconsistencies in participants' discourse to show how the depiction of their "‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege."

We all found it infuriating when Rishi Sunak was trying to convince us that his family was struggling when he was a child and he had to suffer through the absence of Sky TV. This paper does not question the (inherently subjective) struggle that people go through but highlights the overt lack of objectivity in evaluating one's life trajectory.

Mason, Lilliana. 2018. Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo27527354.html.

How are different social groups mapped into Republican and Democratic parties? This book shows how both parties have grown increasingly socially homogenous, and what this entails for citizens' attitudes and affective polarisation.

Achen, Christopher H., and Larry M. Bartels. 2017. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, UNITED STATES: Princeton University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/londonschoolecons/detail.action?docID=4987203.

Is democracy as we know it dead? No, but let's be real. Nothing about democracy as it stands today leaves space for idealism. The book explains how the idea of democracy as the voice of the people, who supposedly are rational and well-informed, is distant from our democratic reality. In many countries, democracy is more akin to a fierce competition for leadership where individuals rely on affective group membership rather than rationality when casting their vote. Human life is group life.

Dinas, Elias. 2014. ‘Does Choice Bring Loyalty? Electoral Participation and the Development of Party Identification’. American Journal of Political Science 58 (2): 449–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12044.

Last but not least. Do people become stronger partisans as they age? Yes, but not in the way we think. This paper shows that partisanship is reinforced by voting. This challenges theories that tie partisanship to political learning, showing how the very act of voting fosters partisan attachment. This act leaves a long-lasting imprint on people's partisan outlooks. Amazing design. Beautifully written!

To conclude

In the end, it is not just so much about the papers published or the milestones reached, but the knowledge gained, the skills developed, and the personal growth experienced. I hope these reflections resonate with fellow PhD students and researchers, reminding us all that the true measure of success lies in the journey itself and the learning that accompanies it.

I hope you'll love these readings as much as I did!