University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: November 29, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

Harvey Palmer says the most exciting thing about his new position on the UB faculty is that it affords him the greatest freedom of his career to pursue his first love when it comes to academic research—exploring the role of public opinion and voting behavior in U.S. and foreign politics.

Harvey Palmer was attracted to UB by the rich history of the Department of Political Science, as well as the university’s location near his parents’ home near Rochester.
PHOTO: NANCY J. PARISI

Palmer, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences, joined the UB faculty this fall after nearly 15 years in Virginia and Mississippi, where he served as an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and later as an associate professor of political science and director of the Public Policy Research Center and Social Science Research Lab at the University at Mississippi. He also spent several years in the late 1990s as a full-time independent consultant performing financial forecasts for high-tech companies.

“My research interests and teaching interests are rather broad for a political scientist,” says Palmer, who, as a recipient of a bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs and economics from the University of Virginia—as well as master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of Rochester—not only explores such subjects as public opinion formation, electoral behavior and election outcomes, but also asks questions about the intersection of economics and politics. “One of the things that makes my interests so broad,” he adds, “is that I do research both in terms of American political behavior and comparative political behavior.”

Palmer’s previous work related to politics in foreign nations includes an examination of the role of strategic voting in the formation of political parties in Hungary, as well as an investigation into political economics in Benin, a West African nation under communist rule until the late 1980s.

The project on Benin not only argued that everyone possesses an innate sense of property, he says, but also disputed the commonly held belief that market reforms are difficult to implement in fledgling industrial nations—findings whose real-world implications include the potential to influence foreign economic policy.

The principal investigator on both projects, which were funded through grants from the National Science Foundation, was Raymond M. Duch, a professorial fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, whom Palmer met while Duch was working as a professor at the University of Houston.

“I have the most ideas at this point relating to cross-national research,” Palmer says, noting that projects on comparative politics best represent the sort of research he hopes to pursue further at UB. “The thing about American politics is there’s already a lot of public survey data available,” he says.

In contrast to studying foreign nations, which requires fresh data in order to draw accurate conclusions, Palmer says the most important tools employed by political scientists working on U.S. politics are statistical models that are creative enough and powerful enough to tease new insights out of the information avalanche that pours in from our nation’s constant political polls and post-election surveys.

“Political science has become more of a science,” he says. “It’s different from the natural sciences in that we study human behavior, so there’s some randomness, but there’s been an expansion—starting in economics, as well as the social sciences—in modeling social or economic or political behavior to cut through the ‘noise’ or randomness and infer general patterns or relationships, despite those complications.”

Palmer also points out that the emergence of more sophisticated statistical methods—whose influences are felt in all of the social sciences, not just political science—have arisen in conjunction with significant advancements in computing power. “Something that had to be done on a supercomputer 30 years ago,” he says, “I can now do on my laptop.” He cites as an example one of his current projects, which involves applying complex statistical models to survey responses in order to pinpoint partisan voters whose thinking seems more independent than their typical counterparts in the same voting group—and therefore more apt to differ from their party’s official line on specific issues. The project is in collaboration with a graduate student at the University of Mississippi.

Working with UB graduate students also is on his agenda, says Palmer, who’s teaching a seminar course on important sub-fields in comparative politics. “The idea is to give students a sense of the major areas where research is being done and some of the classic pieces that inspired research in the different areas,” he notes. “We cover political culture, voting behavior in elections, the state as an institution, social movements and revolutions—basically a variety of topics that people have done research on in comparative politics.” Palmer hopes to engage UB students in his future research efforts, particularly on projects concerning American politics.

Coming to UB means joining a political science department with a rich history, he says, noting that UB has been home to some influential political scholars over the years. “When the department had about 30 faculty in the past,” he says, “it was a pretty prominent department in the discipline. The department’s growing again and I was attracted by a department where I have an opportunity to help build the department—where I can have an impact.”

A native of the Rochester area who now lives in Williamsville with his wife, Susie, and three children, Emily, 11, Zachary, 6, and Maxwell, 3, Palmer says returning to Western New York has been a good personal choice, as well as a smart professional decision. His new neighborhood not only pleases him as a parent because of its great public schools—just in time for his daughter’s transition to junior high, he says—but his own parents are thrilled about their son’s return to the region.

“My parents live south of Rochester,” he says, “and bringing three grandkids within 70 minutes of them definitely had some impact.”