Encountering Alan Wilson, filling the gaps in data sets (from the knowns to the unknowns) … and disciplinary history/progress

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines my interactions with Alan Wilson over more than four decades, focusing on my early work on gravity models and then my adoption of his entropy-maximizing procedure in the study of disaggregated voting patterns. Using that example, the essay explores its implications for the study of disciplinary history.

KEYWORDS:

• Alan Wilson
• gravity models
• entropy-maximising
• voting patterns
• disciplinary history

Acknowledgement

My thanks to Kelvyn Jones and Charles Pattie for discussion of many points and comments on a draft version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ron Johnston is a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, having previously worked at Monash University and the Universities of Canterbury, Sheffield and Essex. He is a quantitative social scientist with a particular interest in electoral studies.

Notes

1 See Senior’s (1979) exposition.

2 Gould (1975, 93) later similarly concluded that ‘the distance parameters appear to index the relative accessibility of a location’: I was somewhat disappointed that he didn’t refer to my 1973 paper, especially as his co-author for much of his work on mental maps – Rodney White – was another Toronto colleague with whom I discussed the issue!

3 Interestingly, in neither that nor their earlier comment were my papers cited!

4 Those two pioneering papers didn’t, in my view, receive the attention they deserved.

5 And, as I later became aware when the lead author of Bruna, Lopez-Rodriguez, and Faína (2016) visited us in Bristol, to other studies of spatial structure.

6 Alan Hay decided that as the study of elections wasn’t his research interest he would not be involved in the papers where I applied the method, only in those that presented its technical features. Clearly without his and Ian Masser’s original input, those subsequent papers could not have been written.

7 My quotation from Bogdanor’s book in a review article (Johnston 1986) stimulated a claim from him – which I refuted – that I had misquoted him (Bogdanor and Johnston 1986).

8 King published his software: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3965179. Accessed 28 March 2018.

9 Deltapoll – http://www.deltapoll.co.uk/; https://www.research-live.com/article/news/boon-flatters-and-twyman-launch-deltapoll/id/5035612.

10 That work provides a further example of the general argument being made here. I adopted and, with David Rossiter, Charles Pattie, Michael Thrasher, Collin Rallings and Galina Borisyuk, adapted Brookes’s method for identifying bias in the operation of electoral systems, that we have widely applied in the UK over the last four decades (e.g. Johnston et al. 2001). A version of that method was later developed in the United States (e.g. Gelman and King 1994) and deployed by them and others in challenges to gerrymandering that went to the Supreme Court but, although we had applied our version to American examples (e.g. Johnston, Rossiter, and Pattie 2005) and I had made presentations at conferences and seminars there, it received virtually no recognition and the Gelman-King method is recognised as ‘the established methodology for measuring partisan bias’ (McGann et al. 2016, 56: to be absolutely fair, McGann et al. do refer in passing to two of our papers and Grofman 1983, referred to it – and the Brookes papers – in the earliest American piece on what they term partisan symmetry, but in none of his later work; senior American political scientists who work on gerrymandering whom I met in 2018 were unaware of that substantial parallel strand of work).

11 All four PhD students I supervised who did quantitative electoral research and have entered academic life – Charles Pattie, Andrew Russell, Edward Fieldhouse and David Cutts – now occupy chairs in British university politics departments.

12 Just 33 citations according to Google Scholar^©.

13 Two books by American authors published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 illustrate this. Both have geography in their subtitles – Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Hopkins 2017) and The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Enos 2017) – but to them the study of geography does not embrace what geographers do. Hopkins does not have a single reference to a work published by an academic geographer; Enos has only five (Johnston 2018). A more recent book all about place and geography (Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2018) similarly does not embrace what geographers do – is that their fault, or geographers’, or just typical of the poverty of inter-disciplinary interaction? A recent exception to this argument, however, is Rodden (2019)

14 Martyn Senior was appointed to the geography department at Salford in the mid-1970s but later moved to the planning department at Cardiff (see Senior 1979); John Beaumont spent a short period in geography at Keele before moving to business schools. Paul Williamson joined, and has remained at, the Department of Geography at the University of Liverpool.

15 On a flight to Seattle in 2006 I read Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner 2005): one of its chapters stimulated a hypothesis that we hadn’t previously encountered in our work on campaign spending in the UK; on my return I found we had the needed data to hand, we tested the hypothesis, and the paper appeared later that year (Johnston and Pattie 2006).