Episode 4: Dr. Maureen Stobb and Dr. Banks Miller

On the fourth episode of Art of Science, host Graham Ambrose is joined by Dr. Maureen Stobb from Georgia Southern University and Dr. Banks Miller from the University of Texas at Dallas to discuss their paper (co-authored with Dr. Joshua Kennedy from Georgia Southern University) ⁠"Mixed messages & bounded rationality: The perverse consequences of real ID for immigration policy."

Below is a transcript of their conversation, which originally aired as a livestream on YouTube. You can find the video at the end of the transcript. You can also listen to the conversation wherever you get your podcasts.

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Graham Ambrose:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Art of Science. I'm Graham Ambrose, the host here on Art of Science. And just as a reminder, this is a quarterly interview podcast that coincides with each issue of the Policy Studies Journal. So, if you're listening live, or if you're kind of listening through anywhere that you're getting your podcasts, just a quick reminder up front to both rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast today. Today I'm very excited, we have kind of two new guests here. So first we have Dr. Maureen Stobb, who is an associate professor of political science at Georgia Southern University. Hello, Maureen.

Maureen Stobb:

Hello.

Graham:

Second, we have Banks Miller, who's a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Dallas. How are you doing Banks?

Banks Miller:

Hello. Doing fine, thanks.

Graham:

And there's actually a third author that couldn't join us today but is on the paper: Joshua Kennedy, who is associate professor of political science, also at Georgia Southern University. So, in the August issue of PSJ, the three authors published “Mixed messages & bounded rationality: The perverse consequences of Real ID for immigration policy.” So just quickly at a high level, they're tracking that kind of tricky task of measuring the effects of bounded rationality and the outcomes of policy. They're doing this through Real ID legislation and the political messaging that comes out of that Real ID. And what they're actually measuring here is we see how it actually leverages the street level bureaucrats, in this case, the Circuit Court judges and how those judges’s actions are actually responsive to different and changing principles. So just to start off kind of that high level discussion of the paper would you mind kind of digging a little bit deeper into the publication itself? Either Maureen or Banks.

Maureen:

Sure. So basically, what we're focusing on, as you said, is this question of the immigration policy gap, why is it that the outcome doesn't tend to match the intent? And we're looking at the immigration judges, which are bureaucrats who essentially are the street level bureaucrats in this scenario, who implement it in asylum cases, so that would be when individuals are seeking refuge in the US, claiming that they're persecuted in their home country. And we're looking at the REAL ID Act because essentially what was found in Banks's book and then later research, which we found that although it was intended to give these immigration judges more discretion, so it was easier for them to deny these asylum applications based on finding that the applicant didn't have the credibility – wasn't credible, that it actually resulted in more grants, in more asylum grants. And so, this was a puzzle we were trying to understand and when addressing it, we were looking at three main factors, which is the language of the statute itself, and then the professional norms of the bureaucrats and then they’re – and then how much they're monitored by each of the – because it's one of those multiple principal situations where they have to respond to Congress, who writes the statutes, and they respond to the Court of Appeals who overseas and can overturn basically their cases and they also have to respond to the executive who is the one who hires and fires them, and then also reviews their cases. So, the Real ID was a good example of this and what we saw with a lot of immigration policy you would find, is this kind of ambiguous, conflicting language in the statutes and the regulations and policy coming out. So, I'm just trying to understand that, we looked at how that the language of the statute here was conflicting because they rejected the old standard, which made it hard to deny, but they ended in language that essentially made it seem like you should still be using the old standard, so it was confusing to the immigration judges. And so, what we expect and what we argue is that because of their professional norms, or you have to be a lawyer to be an immigration judge, and because of the fact that the Court of Appeals monitors more closely the particular –  and how they're reviewed by even the executive, they look at, they consider those reputation costs of how the Court of Appeals treats them, that we expect that the Court of Appeals actually that will end up having more influence even though it was the not what was intended when they wrote it. So, then we find evidence supporting that. Don’t know if you want to add anything, Banks, but that's basically it.

Banks:

No, I mean, I think you did a great job. Yeah. I mean we, you know, I think the main take away from the paper is we find, I don't wanna say, contrary to the literature, but maybe sort of outside what it has normally considered is that the circuit courts are really the ones that are put in control of policy or to whom the IJ's are more – the immigration judges to these are more responsive and we sort of expected that I think from some of Maureen's prior work and just thinking and looking about it and some of our joint work together. But I think that the clarity of the breakpoint around Real ID was kind of surprising. And if you look at it, you can see that in terms of like responding for instance to the ideology of the circuit, that the immigration judges before Real ID they essentially don't, right? But afterwards there's this, you know, this figure in the paper with this incredible slope, right, where you see that they are highly reactive to what they anticipate the Circuit Court would do, so.

Graham:

Wonderful. And I – I want to ask about some kind of practical implications, but I think there was a great discussion, I really enjoyed it, at the end of the paper and the conclusion I was thinking about kind of the mixed messages and how there's a practical implication there. But kind of what both of you are highlighting as well is, you know, the professionalization, right? So, is this kind of reflection or kind of big jump in the influence of bounded rationality, expected in kind of other domains, or kind of other more or less professionalized kind of bureaucracy. So, would you two be interested in kind of discussing both of that, of kind of the ambiguity and the practical implications of that, but also the practical implications of your work on what this means for professionalization?

Maureen:

I think that there's a lot in the literature talking about how there's more and more use of administrative adjudicators. And what we want to continue to explore in our research is what is the – what are the implications of that, in particular for what Banks is saying with the Court of Appeals, and depending – I mean this could be – it's also something you can look at cross-nationally. But this question of when you look – when you add the administrative adjudicator and you've sort of basically put the dressings of the court on the situation and a lot of that, I just speak specific to the immigration, there's talk about that's supposed to add this procedural norm as perception and add legitimacy to the situation. And there's research showing that for the immigrants in particular, they do see this as a procedurally fair process when they're – because of that. But the question then becomes when you professionalize, when you have the bureaucrats have to be lawyers and they're given these trappings of a court then – and you have review by the courts on a – on those details street level implementation, will you see greater and greater influence of the courts in these areas. And specifically in the immigration policy literature, there's less talk about the court influence, there's more talk about the courts basically in judicial review, right, deciding that this violates the rights of immigrants. But what is really interesting in the growing question is what is going to happen at that implementation, the street level, you know, that is the key and the impact on individual lives we're seeing more and more influence of the courts because you're professionalizing because you're bringing in, right, the lawyerly court-like appearance to it all.

Banks:

Yeah, I – to tack on to what Maureen is saying, you know, I think you – there's sort of two ways to think about this in my mind, and one of them is just to track or try to track the spread of the kind of adjudication administrative approach that we see in immigration across the federal, you know, across federal policy areas really and so, you know, one area where it's similar in terms of who's doing the deciding is the patent system. So, a lot of, you know, appeals and patent cases are going to be decided by, you know, adjudicated – judge-like adjudicators with law degrees, right? And then you also see it very prominently in, like, the Social Security Administration system, right? And so, there's a lot of mix of, like, high and low in terms of the difficulty of the law being interpreted. But the people who are doing it, and a lot of the like day-to-day decisions of policy implementation that people actually see are these adjudicators, are these sort of Article 1 type, you know, congressionally – theoretically, congressionally controlled people. And then the second way that you could think about this is in this sort of – kind of at the heart of my own like broad research program is the idea of discretion, right? And so, anytime that you are introducing discretion in the application of a law which, of course, is inevitable, right, you're inviting in questions about who the person doing the implementing is, right, and the larger the amount of discretion, the more likely that is to be the case. And so, to marry those two points together – and I think that in a lot of these instances where we have sort of lawyer-like, court-like adjudication, there's a lot of room for discretion, right? And it's a sort of – it's almost a selection effect is not quite the right way to think about it, but it's like where we see this process is also where there's likely to be a lot of discretion because of the kinds of questions that are being asked. And it's harder to track how that might play out in a situation where it's less law-like and/or where there's lower levels of professionalization. And so, you might think about this in terms of, like, an economist at the Federal Trade Commission or something, right, that's a professional – it's not necessarily legal in its decision making, and I don't know off the top of my head enough to say what we know about how those types of, you know, federal bureaucrats pursue implementation. And so, I think that's the point we try to make at the end of the paper is that there's just a lot that's unanswered and thinking about this kind of policies and stuff like that.

Graham:

Wonderful and thanks both of you are kind of pulling this apart. I guess to kind of move into this even further, right, you highlight that at the end of the paper there you kind of call out all the things we don't know around discretion and how bounded rationality actually influences this. I guess, like, a question that I then have is bounded rationality, especially in the policy process, is assumed, right, it's kind of underlying the models that I use or the models that maybe a lot of the people that are watching this or hearing this are using, but you don't have people that are actually engaging it or trying to measure it or think kind of critically and empirically about it. It's again this underlying assumption. So, I guess I'm curious where that – where this desire to directly measure it or to direct – kind of directly think about bounded rationality comes from and kind of how you kind of thought about this and conceived it and brought it into this paper.

Maureen:

Well, that would be – when we, when we were thinking about how the idea evolved, that would be the author who's not here, Josh, who's really our bureaucracy expert. He was the one that said this is bounded rationality as we're looking at it, we're thinking about it and picking it apart. That's really where that came in and the desire to understand that and connecting that to – personally, I think both Banks and I thinking about this in terms of from a legal perspective, what does that mean when you're talking about lawyers and how do you get at that for this new and continually growing practice, so.

Banks:

Yeah, I think Maureen and I both come to this from kind of a judicial behavior perspective where we don't talk about it necessarily in terms of bounded rationality, we think about it in terms of discretion, but it's really the same underlying issue. And so, coming at it from this sort of adjacent field, you know, we have kind of the three main theories of how judges make decisions and that really forms, I think, the basis for us in kind of putting the scaffolding in place in the paper to try to understand what's going on, but it's really the same question, I think, in a lot of ways. And I think it's the right question to be asking in a lot of these instances.

Graham:

Wonderful and if you're thinking about, kind of, these different kind of legal bureaucracies or immigration law, I'm just curious where for you that interest came from and maybe not tracking through the whole history, but, you know, where those original questions came from, but also how that has emerged into kind of this specific paper.

Banks:

I'll go first here because I think mine is shorter than Maureen's. My interest came from a colleague who brought me in on a paper when I was younger and had less gray hair in my beard and things like that and, you know, she was mainly studying it – Linda Keith was mainly studying it from the perspective of a human rights question, right, and more in an international context, it's sort of like, you know, IR scholars have approached this as thinking about, well, what does how the US looks at asylum seekers from different places say about our foreign relations, right, and we kind of wanted to invert that in a way and say, well, what – you know, how much control is there is actually present in this system, right, how much intention is there given that all of this has to be translated by these street level bureaucrats who are under, you know, incredible time pressure, you know, and who have, I think one immigration judge once described this as making kind of life or death decisions in a traffic court-like setting, right, where they're just moving people through. And so that was really interesting to me. I had a special interest from my PhD advisor in, like, specialized courts, so these are like kind of weird, one-off like things nobody thinks about, but from a theoretical perspective, they could be really interesting because you've got variation in things that you don't normally get in sort of more normal institutions. So that's how I came to it. I will let Maureen tell you her story.

Maureen:

Yeah, I'll try to keep it short, right. So, I think my – well I was – when I went to law school, I found myself, as we were chatting about – just kind of really fascinated by the immigration law and policy. So, then I practiced immigration law and in practicing it, one of the – for about several years – seven years before I went and got my PhD, and for me, when I was practicing and one of the things that was a driving force to go back and get my PhD was this feeling like does – what is the outcome of these laws? Because you're seeing this mess, it's incredibly complex, it's – there's these contradicting, ambiguous, so many things going on in this system and I'm doing – as you're doing on a case-by-case basis, you're thinking, is this really having the effect that it's intended to have? What is – and so I wanted to ask those bigger questions. And so, I guess I basically saw that immigration policy gap in the process of actually practicing in the cases. And so, I wanted to understand that. So then in my PhD – in the process of PhD, I read Banks's book, he was one of my mentors, so reading that it started to see, OK, I'm understanding immigration judges, I'm understanding them within this broader framework. And then moving and reading more of that immigration policy gap literature and really getting that to say basically, this is the theoretical framework for what I experienced. I think that's the short version of the story of my life.

Graham:

I guess one question that kind of comes to mind then is, Maureen, it seems like your interest is coming from a very practical aspect, right, you’re – you were living it, you're experiencing it, you're litigating it, and you're asking, well, what's the bigger question? And I guess Banks, I kind of see it from the flip side of you're thinking about the bigger question maybe in a different lens to what kind of IR scholars were doing at the time as you're talking about. But I guess if you could both speak to kind of marrying the practical to the bigger question and maybe like looking for the opposite kind of specialties if that makes sense.

Banks:

So, I guess you know I'm also a lawyer and I've actually never heard Maureen talk about this, but it's really interesting because I had kind of the same moment in law school where you know you're being told, well, this is – they decided this because of this prior case, blah blah blah. And in my own mind, I'm going, that's not like – there's no forcing there, it's just what are they able to do, you know, what do they think is good policy here. And so that kind of led me in a much more – much less specific way to these questions as well. I think you know this is why Maureen and I have worked well together, right, is that we come at it from slightly different perspectives. And the thing that she is really I think uniquely able to do well is to synthesize a lot of what is just incredibly all over the place immigration law, right. And so, you know, she's able to kind of tell me here's what the changes look like in the circuits, and then we go through the process of operationalizing that and gathering the right data and getting the right unit of analysis and all of that. And so, I think it's been important in our ability to kind of ask and answer these questions, right, is looking at both – so from my perspective what her practical experience brings is really the ability to say confidently here's what the law sets, right, does it actually matter. So that's my that's my take on it. I don't know about Maureen.

Maureen:

I think in terms of marrying the practical to the theoretical, for me it's similar because when – so Banks was my professor in grad school and then – so talking to him was that initial connect for me because he thought similarly, especially when it came to data. When I sat down with him and he was like, you really need to code your own data to understand – sometimes like for me to go through that process because a lot of the times when you first start in grad school, you're getting all of these you know, kind of canned data sets that you're playing with and I remember coming to him with the frustration – he probably doesn't remember, but I said to him like I cannot work – I need to connect what I saw and what I'm – my experience and I think because he's a lawyer also he was able to say OK, I understand where you're coming from on this, here's what you need to do, you need to sit down and just code some cases and code what you see in the real world and understand how that translates into the data that you're working with. So that plus having those conversations with him about – it took a while for me and I'll say, like with immigration judges, to situate them in the literature that clicked for me – so they fit into several different literature. So originally, I was looking at them with judicial politics lens and then immigration policy scholarship and looking at that and now connecting to the policy-specific, like the bureaucracy literature. Now I'm beginning to kind of really connect all these different theories that apply to them. And then understanding, I think for me was really just that connection with the data, like right, how are we actually measuring and modeling what's going on here. And then his advice to code it, I could see it – I can see it now, I say, OK, well, this is what that number means, this is what this means and kind of playing with models and understanding how, yes, I can see this in the cases and in the numbers, if that makes sense, right. So that's the big thing for me. So, nothing against canned data, we use it sometimes, but for me, if I can get in there and really understand I have to look at somebody's code book, I have to really get like, how did you translate what we're seeing in this, you know, in the real world and into these numbers and then how do we play with it, right, work out the model.

Graham:

So Maureen, you actually – you bring up kind of this point that I feel like most of the scholars that have been on the podcast actually bring up, right. And there's mixed advice actually, I've noticed over the past shows is some people really advocate for – know your theory, like really understand whatever that policy process theory is that you're interested in, or whatever it might end up being, and then try to find a domain to look at, right And the exact opposite but the common advice is kind of what you're talking about, right? So, you knew the domain – you, you know, practiced in that domain, and then you're kind of seeking out the right theoretical frame to think about what you're seeing. I guess, could you kind of talk a little bit more about that and how, you know, your practice really informed how you're looking at things on a theoretical side. And Banks, if you're willing, agree or disagree or how you kind of approach maybe similar questions, that would be great to hear.

Maureen:

Sure, I think one of the things – that's why reading Banks's book was so important for me in my process, because it was very kind of – what words to say – it reflected reality very clearly, right. So, if I – just to give one example, my experience with immigration judges and interacting with them and understanding that, yes, the law really – like that was one of the things that drove me really wanting to study the Court of Appeals because they really do focus on in the courtroom, in the – and then of course, the briefs that you'll see to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the Court of Appeals is who you cite, right. You cite the BIA, you cite the Court of Appeals. So, I knew that it mattered. And then I also knew the circumstances under which they worked. And I knew from other attorneys who are way more experienced than I did, immigration attorneys, who would say it really depends on the judge you get, right. And they would talk about how much discretion they have and then they would say to you, oh, that guy was a prosecutor, that person was a, you know, worked for an NGO, so you would see – so I could see in reading his book that this actually really does connect to reality. So for me, when I'm looking at a theory, I'm asking myself, does it reflect – do the variables, do their explanation of the theoretical mechanism, does that connect to what I've seen in the real world. And so really finding that initial was a big jump for me in terms of OK, now I know what I'm looking for. I have a harder time when – I can read a theory, but if I don't have a practical – doesn't have that kind of practical element to that and that connection to the real world as to what it looks like, then it's very hard for me to kind of move forward and really, really, really delve into that theory, I think.

Banks:

Well, that's – I'm glad it reflected reality, Maureen.

Maureen:

It does. It really does.

Banks:

That's good to hear. You know there's this sort of – and I'm going to paraphrase this incorrectly – this saying about, you know, like if you want to do well, focus on something that seems really boring or esoteric and just know it incredibly well and maybe that applies to theory, or, you know, substance. I don't know. But I think, you know, the comparative advantage way of thinking about this makes some sense to me, right? So, Maureen and I both have legal training, right? Maureen has extensive experience with immigration practice. You know, the other major policy area that I study is intellectual property and that's because I have a lot of friends who practice in that area who are like you should be looking at, this is crazy. And so, I think, you know, we are both aligned that the way you come to this is from subject matter first but it's certainly not the only way, and it's just – maybe it's just something about how our brains work, maybe it's something about the legal training first, you know. I don't know, but I am like Maureen, much more comfortable entering into an area where I can say OK, you know, I have a basic understanding of what's going on here, substantively, how can we explain it right and that also might just reflect the fact that we are – neither one of us are trained as public policy scholars per se, right? And so, you know, I kind of – part of my own research process here, as I said, is I'm really interested in discretion and the questions of like, what is it, what does it mean? How do you limit it? Do you want to limit it? And so, I tend to, you know, to the extent that I have a theory, right, I'm looking for places in the real world where I can get into those kinds of questions, right? And it just turns out that immigration is a place where we can get data and where we also both have some substantive expertise. And it's a place that, you know, people really, especially recently have started to care about, I think it's something that has begun to pop up, for instance, a lot more in policy studies in general, right, and intellectual property is a little bit of a harder sell, but maybe we'll get there someday. I don’t know.

Graham:

So, Banks, if I can kind of pick this up where you left it, you know, kind of talking about the intellectual curiosity, the kind of specific components that you're really interested in, the reality is, is that the data needs to be there. I'm just curious if you could talk through kind of the genesis of this specific project, right, you talked a little bit, I know Maureen mentioned that Josh was saying, OK, well, we're really talking about bounded rationality, but if you can kind of give us this background of, you know, where is this coming from, and you started out asking a completely different question and it morphed into this, or whatever that kind of back story is.

Banks:

I mean I guess, high level, to answer kind of the second question first is that this was – it was pretty inductive for us, I mean, we kind of knew – you know, we had theory, right, for sure, but we also wanted to learn a little bit from the data and I think this is maybe our slight preference or maybe major preference for practicality, right, how does this matter in the real world. And so, we don't want to build sort of sandcastles in the sky. What we want to do is take something that's going on and figure out for ourselves why. The story on the origin of this is long and arduous. Before Maureen was even in graduate school, we were trying to get and collect this data on immigration judges, and it started out with a series of initially futile FOIA requests to the federal government, where they essentially said no, we don't have the data you're asking for and we knew that wasn't true. But it turns out that the issue was of course they were going to stonewall us because they didn't want to deal with gathering it and what we had to do was figure out exactly how to ask for it. And what happened was they actually, I think, made a mistake at one point and in denying one of our requests sent us a list of variable names in their own datasets, so we immediately turned around and asked them for those variables.

Graham:

And they were shocked that you knew exactly–

Banks:

Yeah, and they gave it to us. And so that was the genesis of the book that Maureen is referencing. But later on, other people came in and I think used similar processes to create kind of an updated version of the data. And so, somebody shared it with us in this instance, the base dataset. And that is what we ultimately used to kind of build upon to create our own, what we needed for this for this paper.

Graham:

Maureen, do you have any kind of additional thoughts or where you're coming from on this project?

Maureen:

Well, yeah. But we had you know spending that time cleaning and figuring out how to work with that ID data was so fun, but we got that working and then I think for me the big part was – or at least – so this is kind of us lawyers will say kind of the fun part would be, right, like Banks would be like we're going to go through the case law and we're going to trail – do a trail as to when this credibility standard, which is what we're looking at – so like the Real ID when it was adopted, you could see pretty clearly, right, that's when Congress made their statement of their policy preferences, right? The other principle here would be executive and it was fairly easy for me to find when that was adopted, when they adopted that standard, that easier credibility standard, for the newer credibility standard and for the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the more in-depth was looking at the case law of the courts and coding that and determining when did they adopt that standard that Congress had, the initial kind of this rejection of the harder standard, when did they adopt it, and did they ever adopt it and did they sometimes try to reject it, right? So that's kind of the origin of what's interesting to me is what the Court of Appeals were doing. So, building that dataset and then combining it with what we have on immigration judges and really looking at the change and then of course – so we had the change in the standard, then we have the policy preferences in general of the courts and we can't ferret out exactly influence of law versus ideology here, like what the IJs are looking – and I've talked to IJs about this and I don't think they know for sure, right? I mean, they know they're looking at the law and they can say to you, right, this is what the law is, and the Court of Appeals is really key for that. They can cite precedent, but then there's that like Banks is talking about the digital politics literature, there's that level of – there's layers of discretion. And in both Court of Appeals, their ideology comes in, immigration judges’ ideology comes in, or their background characteristics. And so, kind of looking at how do we measure both of those influences – I guess the fun part for me in the data collection was going through the cases and pulling that together and explaining when those policy preferences were expressed.

Graham:

Certainly. And Maureen, you're alluding to it, I think a little bit, but there seems to be like a cart and horse, I don't know if you want to use that analogy, right. But did you go out with this question and looking for the data, or were you kind of looking for the data, seeing what you could get and then kind of the question then solidifies under the data. And even within this you allude to it right, you know you're asking the courts, you're asking to try to figure out, you know, what – where the holes are essentially, you know, what do we need to actually answer this broader question. So, would you be willing – both of you or Maureen to kind of talk about that process of question and data refinement, that whole process there.

Maureen:

I think I had the advantage of knowing that, you know, from Banks's book that there was the IJ data. And so, what we were wondering was whether we could get updated IJ data. So, we had some of it and then we were able to get further in because we wanted to incorporate Trump, we needed to incorporate the Trump period. And so that was part of it. And then I think looking at the Court of Appeals and I kind of knew, I mean for me, the question when I originally was thinking about this was that question of what's the Court of Appeals’ influence, knowing that precedent matters so much to immigration judges. But I think I already knew – I knew basically I was going to be able to find that key case in most of the circuits. But then when you're delving into it, it becomes a lot more complicated. I can tell, you know, because you're reading the case and you're like – I had read a lot of cases to figure out exactly when, you know, you have to – you read one and then they cite another and another and another. So, I think there was some question – the only concern I had was, you know, that question of whether or not what if they just don't ever adopt it, like, actually adopt the standard if they just – another paper I wrote talked about how they had tried to – the Court of Appeals judges tried to lessen the impact of the Real ID and how they had tried to not outright reject the standard, but try to tweak it a little bit when it happened, so I was thinking about how do I operationalize it. And there were several times I had, you know, like there was, I was going to do several more fine-grained – and then ultimately in talking to Banks we were like, OK, we're going to do, did they adopt it or not because that was that was the most clear demarcation that we could make in the data. So that was – so I think it was the question first, but I had the advantage of knowing from the grad school experience that there was already this basic data that they had gotten for their book and so that was the big process for me.

Banks:

Yeah, I'll just add sort of more generally, I think you have to have some kind of question first, right? And then – because you don't know what data you're looking for if you don't, and so in this particular project, it was driven by Maureen's question, right, which was, you know, what are – in this book that she's referencing that we wrote earlier, we did not really deal with the circuits at all. And so that was an obvious, you know, hole and she had practical experience to know it probably mattered. And so, from there it just becomes a question of, you know, we knew this data existed on some level and we got lucky because somebody had essentially gone through and, you know, updated it, right? And then, you know, then there's a little bit of an arduous process of like cleaning it, figuring out, you know, they had cleaned it, we needed to do some stuff to it for our own purposes and would it be, you know, useful for answering these questions and it turned out that it was after some work with it. But you know, I think in policy studies in general, you're often dealing with pretty messy administrative data. And so, there's a lot, you know, I think graduate students don't always understand at first that a lot of the job is really like figuring out, you know, what – is this data useful? Can I trust it? What do I need to do to it to make it answer the question that I want to answer? And so, for me it’s always a kind of dialectical thing, right, it's like, you know you have an idealized version of what you want that never exists, and so how do you get to a question you can answer with the data that you have, right, and kind of make them meet in the middle maybe.

Maureen:

Yeah, definitely. When you get the data, you're so excited and you're thinking, they've released all this stuff and then you start looking at how, OK, so they changed this variable at this point in time, they changed the name or they don't code this one anymore and they don't make it easy, for sure they don't.

Graham:

So do you have advice about this, kind of that process, Banks, that you're alluding to of kind of going back and forth, so starting with the question, especially our audience being kind of younger scholars, starting with the question, looking for data, refining, looking for more data, and then kind of finally emerging with whatever your question ends up being.

Banks:

Yeah. I don't think there's one way to do it. I think sometimes you become aware of data and then you start thinking about questions, that definitely happens. I would say – I mean my best advice is probably just to be opportunistic, to try to make room to read outside of what it is that you think you're interested in, either in something adjacent or, you know, sometimes you can just set aside time to go see what's in the ICPSR data archives, what's, you know – and so sometimes you just, you don't know, right? And I think either approach can get you where you want to go. What I would say is, I wouldn't spend a lot of time looking for a perfect canned data set, like they don't really exist because people I think build them to answer specific questions and that matters, right? And so I do try to tell the graduate students here, you know, you're almost always better off building one yourself, one, because it's likely that you're going to be able to answer a unique set of questions which will help you get published, and then the other is that on the backside, if you publish the data, that can also be cited, right? And so, you're going to build up extra citation counts, and I think Maureen is also right, right – I mean, you learn by getting into the data, right, and looking at it. And there's really, I don't think any substitute for that. I don't really crystallize on a project until I've been forced to sit down and think about what's the data, what is the structure, you know, what can we do as a unit of analysis and all those sorts of things. And so, I wish I could say like these are the steps always do them in order – it's more just I think being aware of opportunity and thinking about, you know, what questions aren’t being answered, what data would we need to answer it, is there a reason that nobody has gotten that data, sometimes there is sometimes there isn't. And I think the last thing I'll say here is I think it helps both Maureen and I that we work in a little bit of an interdisciplinary fashion. So, oftentimes there's data that's been created by, let's say, in this case – this instance when we got the data by law professors who have one set of questions and we can grab that data and use it to answer a slightly different set of questions, again, with some work on what's in there and what it looks like. And so, I think anytime – you're looking for those spaces, right, in the literature where you can kind of move in and provide something unique. And so being a little interdisciplinary probably helps there as well.

Maureen:

There's definitely a lot of ideas that we can get from looking at just law professors or just looking, you know, sometimes they'll send me an article and just say, you should read this long article and I think we're going to think about it in a totally different way, but there's an issue that they're bringing up, there's a question there.

Banks:

Yeah, it's sort of like that “there's somebody wrong on the Internet” meme, right? Somebody wrote something we don't agree with or like, we don't think this is actually the answer, like, let's see if we can figure it out, yeah.

Graham:

Great. I think that this has been great advice, especially about data and how to kind of formulate questions in conjunction with data. But to make it kind of bigger, do you just have broader advice that you would give young scholars, graduate students, given your experiences?

Maureen:

I think for me one of the big lessons and it was within this project that I've been working for is that I’ve had those questions and I have the habit of sitting on them for a while and feeling like I have to get it all perfectly laid out before I approach somebody to talk to them about it, right? So, these are things that I've been thinking out throughout grad school and I'm thinking, well, I can't go to Banks until I have like –  it was like I felt like I had to have the whole paper written, you know, and this was like the initial, you know – and then it probably, I don't know how many years it took me before I went to him, even it was after I had graduated and I just said, I really think this is a hole in the book and I had done so much preparation work, which was helpful, but in the end it was really in talking to him about it that I was able to move forward. So, I think when – and it was the same thing with Josh, when I wanted to work with him, I had read his stuff and I was like, he could work on this, but I just kept thinking and thinking. And I think when you go to somebody to collaborate or just talk to them about an idea, you need to have an idea, you need to have a basic research question, you don't want to go to somebody and say I want to do something on immigration, what's your ideas, right? Like, that's not really gonna go well. But you need to have kind of a basic idea of what's your research question, do you think there's data out there of these kinds of things, but realize that you don't have to have it all perfectly crystallized because really the point and the benefits of collaborating is because those people know things you don't know, right? And so, for me it was – that was one of the biggest hurdles I had to get over, right, is to say I don't have to have it all figured out, I can come to people and – but you have to find people obviously you can trust with your ideas and you feel comfortable with and that takes time. But that's one of the things I really encourage young scholars to do is to not think – because we're so pressured that we have to be the experts and we don't want to come out looking like we don't understand something or we're missing something, so I know for me that came out like, well, then I have to have it all perfect, right? But you don't, you know, you can talk to people about it.

Banks:

I think that's really good advice. One thing I would say is that I think often, you know, when you are a young scholar, when you're coming out of graduate school or you're on the tenure clock, there's a lot of pressure to move and to publish and to show, you know, to show that you can do that and that pressure is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of motivating you to do stuff. But I do think that sometimes you can get caught up in a kind of, like, grind kind of mindset where you're just like, I gotta put in X number of hours on this or I’m not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and I think that oftentimes there's real value in stepping back. You know, one of the things that I have trouble with – Maureen I think is really good at helping me with is that often I'll get really interested in a really narrow question that oftentimes I just want to answer for myself, I don't even really care about publishing. And so, one of the things she, you know, she's good at saying kind of like, well, here's what people are actually talking about and thinking about, right, and I often don't take the time to really back out and think about how would other people be interested in this, right? And so, I think that that's a really important step, that's kind of a framing question. Oftentimes, you know, I think you could write the same article two different ways and get vastly different outcomes in terms of where it's published. And so, I think, you know, making time in your process to really – you know, you kind of get into a thing, right, to kind of hit pause at some point and just say, OK, but wait, like how can I make this interesting to more people outside of the whatever – the 25 scholars who may actually be really interested in this, exactly the way that I'm asking it, and that can be hard, I think especially when you feel the pressure of time, right, when you feel like I don't have time to, you know, I just got to get stuff going, right? But I do think that there's real value in trying to figure out in your own process how to make that time.

Graham:

Wonderful. And I guess if I could follow up kind of at the intersection of these two points, right, so Maureen talking about reaching out and starting collaborations, Banks talking about the grind of tenure, but also, the advantages of reaching out and having collaboration. So, I guess if both of you could talk about you know kind of the value of collaboration, how you're looking for other scholars to collaborate and maybe even as Maureen is getting into, how to actually reach out, propose these kind of bigger projects. I know that's a loaded question, but in part or in full I think it would be great to hear what you both are thinking.

Banks:

Yeah, I think I have one solo authored publication and it was, you know, for my dissertation, which I hated by the time I was done with it, so I find incredible value in it in ways that Maureen has talked about in terms of other people know things that you don't, but also in terms of holding myself accountable, it really helps me to have somebody there that is relying on me to do something. And so, I think for me, those are the two big, you know, benefits of collaboration and then there's also just you’re spreading risk, right? I mean, you can probably work on more stuff if you work with more people, and you don't always know a priori what's going to hit and what isn't right. And so, it's also just if you think about it like a portfolio, right, it's kind of a way of spreading things out across multiple projects which you can do more of if you have help.

Maureen:

And then it just opens you up to more questions and more – I mean, in talking to people, I mean, being able to say to Josh or Banks I have this idea and them being able to say, you know, Banks say you can't get data for that or Josh will just say – or sometimes I mean we'll just – if you want to be able to come to somebody and say I have this idea, can you help me see where it fits in your literature, right? Because that way you have more outlets because there's more than one way to frame a piece, and there's more than one way to understand how it could work out and I think that for me, collaboration – so, I started out doing – all of my first stuff was all solo authored, and I gave 100% to each one of those, you know, I think I had like five solo author before I got the courage to go to people and say, OK, I feel like I can actually say here's what I'm bringing, here's what you're bringing, like, I felt like I had to prove myself, I guess, but then it becomes I bring 100% to the project, you know, Banks and Josh brought 100% of this project and now the project can get so much bigger, right, that was one of the big things cause you could say to yourself in some ways it was safer and easier to try to write things on my own. But whether it's in terms of the theory getting bigger and more and more able to actually reflect reality and connect to different literatures and bring insights from different literatures, or it's really being able to get the data like we were talking about, like understanding the data from different – or different methods that people have used and pulling that in, like for me that was the big draw for me, I realize that I could do much bigger projects and like Banks is saying you could do more than one at a time, you can be working on these several different projects. Whereas when I was doing it myself, it was, you know, it was the max I could do would probably be two or three at a time that I could have my hands in. And it was hard to move from more than that, whereas now when I can collaborate, I can be working in tandem with somebody who's got another expertise and we're able to make a bigger impact and get more out there at the same time and I feel like speak to more – especially when it comes to data, being able to have a larger dataset and be able to feel like I feel stronger about my results because I have this data.

Graham:

And Maureen you've talked about this a little bit already, but for both of you, what advice would you give a younger version of yourself, or even what advice were you given that at the time you're like, there's no way like that's – I'm not going to do that. But now in your older, wiser years, you've realized that that actually was really good advice.

Banks:

Well, I was told early on to build my own datasets, which I've mostly done, again, made possible by collaboration and I think that you – there's a fine line to walk here when you collaborate a lot about becoming kind of pigeonholed. So, you know, I tend to be kind of the data and analysis person on most papers that I end up on for whatever reason. But it's really, really nice sometimes to be able to flip that, right, and be kind of the person who gets to go out and read and try to put things together in a little bit of a different way. And so, I think, you know there's some value in specializing like that, if you can do it, right, it just makes you that much more efficient in the writing process. I have a long, long time collaborator that works with Maureen, and I mean for us, it's just – it's pretty modular, right, in some ways. Now it's not to say that we're not thinking about things, but you know, I know he's going to do this part, I'm going to do, this part, right, and we don't have to talk about it too much. So, I think you know trying to find those people early in your career, if you can, is awesome. And then I think you know I would say that – I mean, at least for me personally, and this may not apply to everybody, but if I'm working on something that I'm actually interested in versus something that I think will publish or interest others, there's a huge difference. And I just, you know, I've got to be motivated sort of intrinsically in that way to like care about the answer to the question. And so, you know, an example of this is that obviously, right, political science has undergone a kind of a credibility revolution in terms of, you know, causal modeling and all of that. And it's great, but it also limits the questions you can ask in some ways. And so, I think there's some – you should, as a young scholar, right, you should put some thought into whether or not you know you want to ask this question because you think you can use a particular method on it, or whether you're – and that's not wrong, right? I mean, that's a strategy – or you know, if you're going to ask a question that you're really actually interested in the substantive answer to. And I personally lean toward the latter. But that's just how my brain works, right? So, I think either approach works, but being maybe a little bit conscientious about which approach you're going to kind of try to use maybe is also worth thinking about.

Maureen:

Yeah, I think my advice is, one, definitely have that practical knowledge and the real-world applicability in the back of your mind like because you know we can sit and think about questions, but you want to get the information and talking to practitioners and reading what practitioners are writing, you want to really understand what is it for me personally, what is it, what is the impact of what I'm writing? Like, how would this be interesting to policy practitioners and to scholars themselves, like that is a big motivator for me. And if you're one of those people, then don't be afraid to do that – I mean, just really get in there and get into what people are actually doing and then be able to find those people you can collaborate with or you can just sit back and feel comfortable just talking about ideas, just talking about them and not like I said, don't feel like you have to have everything perfect. But then finding those people where you don't – you're not moving it – you don't feel like you have to impress, right, where you can say – there was an advantage to the fact that Banks saw me as a grad student until now. So, at this point, that's already out the window, right, like I don't have to worry about impressing him because he saw me through the grind of it all, right, so it's a little less of a worry, and that's how it is with Josh. He cannot – we can – we'll talk or text about ideas and just – and then somebody who's able to kind of go with you along with these but also say no, that's just not good, right, you need those people who are going to say – to be honest with you, that you feel comfortable enough and that you trust enough that will say to you, OK, that piece is not going to work or – and they're not afraid to say that to you, right? Like there'll be times when I get an idea – and I mean just happened the other day, I texted Josh, I was like, well, what if we went in this direction and he was like, well, maybe not, you know, and he'll do that to me because you can get excited about an idea and then start going in all these different directions. So, you need people that will help you both get bigger and get smaller, right? Say no, no, no you need to keep on this track, that's another paper, right? Like sometimes Banks will do that. That's gonna be another paper, we can do that on another paper, so I think really – yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Banks:

And in fact, that's how this paper came about, right, it grew out of another paper. And the other thing I'd add just briefly to what Maureen is saying about collaboration, I mean as somebody who's now a little bit more senior in the field or whatever, I love it when people come to me with ideas, right? I don't have to come up with the idea myself. So, it's never, you know, I have never felt like that is a bad thing. I almost never say no, if I can help it, even if the idea is not particularly well fleshed-out like it's got potential usually almost always. And so, I would say err on the side of asking you know, it doesn't have to be perfect and it's in some ways better if it's not perfect. If you don't have a rigid idea of what it is, then you can sometimes do more than you otherwise would.

Maureen:

And you could take those checks when somebody says to you, you know you're going a little too far in that direction, you kind of, you know, you have to bring it back because if you have too rigid ideas, I have to do this and this is how I have to do it, then you're not willing to listen to the feedback, and I know that there's a tendency in the field that you feel like you have to be critical, and sometimes that can be hard to hear because we probably hear it a lot if you go to a conference or, right, but being able to be open to that, again, when you build those relationships from somebody will say to you like, OK, no, that's – carve that off, focus on this. And you can do that for each other. I think that's one of the really great things about collaboration.

Graham:

Wonderful. We're coming up on the hour here. So just one last question, really broad. Any concluding thoughts that either of you have about this paper, about kind of our conversation or things more broadly?

Banks:

Maureen, you go first.

Maureen:

Well, I think if I try to draw it all together, I'm excited about this paper and the way that the three of us are taking what we know from our areas – judicial politics and the law literature and really delving more into where it fits within policy scholarship. I find that really exciting because there's that connection to the practical application and I think the three of us already have the background necessary to go into it. But the more you delve into the literature, the more I'm being inspired, inspired by more and more questions and different ways to attack it. And so, I think that that's what's really exciting to me is that benefit of a new perspective, which I always find exciting, but knowing that it is a perspective that connects so well with a lot of the stuff that we've already been doing, which is really exciting.

Banks:

Yeah, I'll say to make it a little bit concrete, you know, Maureen and Josh have a book project that's building on a lot of this stuff at the circuit court level and then you know Maureen and I have a separate project that's doing things like looking at how immigration has been sort of made into a criminal kind of policy in the federal district courts and what does that mean. And those are both outgrows of, you know, this project plus others that Maureen has been working on. And so, you know, once you kind of get the ball rolling it almost gets easier, right, as you go because the questions just crop up as you work. And so, I think that's another thing I would say is sometimes it can seem daunting to be like, oh, you know, to get tenure, I'm going to have to come up with, whatever, eight articles or whatever it is. But I often think that, you know, as long as you're active, you're gonna get there in terms of ideas, right? I mean, it's just – the social world is so messy and so hard to understand that there's almost always room to try to figure something out and that's certainly true in our research, right, is that it really has just built on initial steps and trying to understand you know what's going on.

Graham:

Wonderful. Thank you both, Banks and Maureen, for being with us today. Just a reminder for all those that are listening in whatever format you are, please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast here. I also just want to thank our kind of two sponsors that have been supporting this joint initiative, both Policy Studies Journal and the Center for Policy Design and Governance here at Syracuse University. So again, thank you so much. The hour went quickly, I know we're a little bit over, but thanks for the great conversation and for everyone else, we'll see you next quarter.

Banks:

Thank you for having me.

Maureen:

Yeah. Thank you so much.