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James E. Campbell is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences.
You recently were appointed chair of the political science department. What do you see as the department's focus and strengths? What are your plans for the department?
Let me answer the second part of your question first because it bears on where our focus and strengths are. Although understaffing has been a problem in many departments at UB, it has been an especially severe problem in political science. We have more than 560 majors and teach a large number of students in both the interdisciplinary social science program and beyond. We also have a graduate program with more than 50 students. Despite these numbers, we currently have only 14 faculty members. With the support of Bruce McCombe (interim dean, College of Arts and Sciences), my plans over the next three years are to recruit an additional six political scientists to our faculty. A department of 20 faculty members would still be small as political science programs go, but it represents a major step forward. In the past, the small number of faculty members forced the department to make some hard choices. Since the department could not cover the waterfront, we eliminated coverage of some fields and concentrated on others. We have excellent faculty in American politics, international relations, comparative politics and public law. I think that we are especially strong as a department in international relations and American political behavior.
Your research expertise includes election forecasting. How do you forecast the outcome of an election? What are your predictions based on? What's your accuracy rate?
My forecasting models are based on statistical analyses of the historical relationships between key indicators of elections and the actual election results. For example, preference polls are likely indicators of the election results. But accepting preference polls at face value is ignoring a great deal of prior experience with them that we could take advantage of. If we know from previous elections how a candidate's poll percentage at a particular point in a campaign is related to his eventual vote, then we can extract more information from the current poll. If candidates regularly lose half their lead from Labor Day to election day, then that helps us forecast that a candidate with a 20-point lead probably will win with a 10-point lead. The first thing that I always say now when I report a forecast is that it will be wrong. By that I mean that no election forecast can be expected to be perfect. Unexpected things always happen between the time that the forecast is made and the election. We include imperfectly measured indicators in our models and the forecasting models themselves are imperfect. What we strive for is to be more accurate than non-scientific forecasts made at the same—or even later—times. The record on that score is quite good. My presidential vote forecast, made about two months before Election Day, was within two-and-a-half points of the vote in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. This beats the average poll error two months out from the election by about a point and a half.
What's your forecast for the midterm Congressional elections? What impact, if any, do you think the Mark Foley scandal will have on the local Reynolds-Davis race? Do you see any impact nationally, other than perhaps on House Speaker Dennis Hastert? Will voters now be more likely to choose a Democrat over a Republican?
Control of the U.S. House of Representatives looks like a toss-up at this point. My forecast using data available since July is that the Republicans probably will lose 10 to 16 seats and it is quite possible that their losses could exceed 20 seats. The big unknown in predicting congressional elections is how many seats will actually be seriously contested by both major political parties. This number has been shrinking and is a greatly underappreciated problem in modern American politics. In 2004, just barely over two dozen of the 435 congressional districts in the nation had seriously contested elections. The number will be more this year and this should help the Democrats, but will still be less than 15 percent of all districts. The Foley scandal caused the Reynolds-Davis race to be added to the list of seriously contested races this year. The Foley scandal has diverted attention from some of the larger issues that Republicans were hoping that voters would turn to—since Republicans are trying to make up some lost ground in the last weeks of the campaign—but my guess is that voters in the end will be registering their votes according to their sense about which party will better handle the Iraq War and the larger war against terrorism.
It's no secret that your own political views are conservative. UB is fairly liberal, as are most college campuses. What's it like being one of a relatively few conservatives among the liberals at UB?
Well, it is nothing new to me. I am in a small political minority in my discipline. I was in a small political minority when I began my teaching career at the University of Georgia and when I later joined the faculty at Louisiana State University. The situation may be worse here, but it is bad everywhere in academics. I am sure that calling it "worse" and "bad" will rankle my colleagues, but they should consider it a problem. That is perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative in the liberal hegemony of academia: most academics do not think of a collectively blindered academy as a problem, but it is a very unhealthy situation—particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Our political perspectives come into play in almost everything we do, even in fields that have well-defined or strict methodologies and with scholars strongly committed to professional values and keeping their biases or preferences out of their work and teaching. Academics extol the virtue of diversity when it comes to protected social groups, but somehow fail to take seriously the even greater virtue of diversity when it comes to political ideas. Moreover, liberal dominance of universities is not politically healthy, either. It provides good grounds for large sections of the public to "write off" what is done in universities as the mere opinion of professional liberals backslapping other professional liberals.
What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
Let's drop down a dozen notches on the abstract-o-meter. Why isn't something done about parking at UB? Good question. We had that amazing study a year or so ago that concluded that there was no parking problem at UB. The problem was only the lack of convenient parking. In other words, the lack of parking was not a problem unless you object to circling parking lots for half-an-hour and trudging 300 yards in blizzards with a packed briefcase to get to your office. I think that enough people get to their offices early enough to fill up the parking lots and so they don't think the lack of parking is such a big deal. This leaves the later arrivals, another minority I am in, to deal with the shortage of reasonable-distance parking. I think that the lack of an adequate supply of parking on this campus has wide-ranging negative repercussions for how the university serves its students—from how often faculty members are in their offices to meet with students to their moods when they are there. My hope is that in the development of UB's comprehensive master plan much greater attention will be paid to the parking issue than in the past. It is absolutely critical to how well the place functions. Distance learning should not refer to how far away you have to park your car.