This radio program about research in social science really interested me. It features interesting topics and interviews with leading social scientists and thinkers. Political science seems to have a pretty good presence among them. I’ve listened to the broadcasts for the past three weeks – of particular interest in those were a discussion with Michail Rykin on Russian democracy and the rehabilitation of Stalin, with Anthony Giddens on the politics of climate change and with Kevin Doogan on “New Capitalism”. A pretty impressive lineup.

As a program from perhaps the most established public broacasting institution in the world, we expect the technical quality and the host to be of top notch quality, and they are. There isn’t anything to put my finger on there. The host, Laurie Taylor, isn’t a scientist himself, but he seems to have enough insight paired with being a good radio host. It all makes for interesting radio.

The professional radio format is however also the program’s biggest weakness. It isn’t made for political science nerds like me, but for a general audience. Because of this, interesting topics are compressed into smaller sound bytes than I’d like to see. For the most part they’re not deep, lengthy analyses, but quick interviews and science teasers. For example I was very frustrated when the extremely interesting insights by Michail Rykin were cut short after just 10 minutes. I’m used to people getting to speak for one or two times 45 minutes. Still, I’m really happy I got to hear it, and it spurred my interest into looking up those perspectives on my own.

One last little annoyance also needs to be mentioned. For some reason, the podcast feed seems to include only the last program at any given time, unlike most podcasts that include a backlog of several episodes. If you wait for more than a week between updating your podcasts that means you’ll lose an episode. Luckily it’s possible to get old episodes from the website, but it’s a bit annoying that they’re not in the podcast stream itself.

The blog Anne is a Man also has reviewed this podcast.

Econtalk is, like its name implies, talking on economics and related spheres – mostly political economy. If you regard the more policy-related parts of economics as being within the interest sphere of political science, there is an abundance of good material here.

By looking up Browse Archives|By category in the left hand menu you can see only those categorized as “political science”, although this seems very narrowly defined. I picked three broadcasts and listened to them a couple of times to make up my opinion. The three were:

• “Acemoglu on the Financial Crisis“
• “Coyne on exporting democracy after war“
• “Weingast on Violence, Power and a Theory of nearly everything.“

The style of the Econtalk series is quite different from the LSE series. These are not recordings of lectures, but radio-style broadcasts made for podcasting. At least all the three I listened appear to be studio-recorded interviews with scientists, some of them being conducted over the phone or otherwise from some remote location. The posting schedule seems to be quite consistently once per week.

The technical quality of the broadcasts is very good, as is to be expected to studio recordings as opposed to lecture halls. There’s no distracting noise (except for telephone voice, but that’s something I can live with) or other things making the broadcasts hard to follow, as was the case with the LSE recordings. This is all in good radio quality as you’d expect from a professional radio station. All the broadcasts appear to be audio only.

The interviews are conducted by Russ Roberts, professor of Economics at George Mason. He’s clearly an economist and not a political scientist, but he is one of those apparently open-minded economists that have a bit broader outlook than only formal models. I’d like to classify him as a proper political economist. Like the great majority of modern day economists he’s clearly very much a neo-liberalist, not very surprising considering the publisher. This clearly also influences both the selection of interview subjects and the questions asked. I occasionally get the idea that he deliberately tries to trick his interviewees into confirming that classical neo-liberal ideas are the logical conclusion of their theories. At other times, however, he comes across as quite moderate in reevaluating these conceptions, as for example in the Acemoglu interview regarding the faults of modern economics.

I could say a lot about the interview format. On the one hand, there is much space for the scientists to express themselves, on the other hand Roberts clearly “leads the witness” in his talks, steering them in the direction he wants the conversation to go. This is both a good thing and a bad. Occasionally it appears he goes a bit too far in offering his own explanations of the theories presented rather than letting the authors themselves explain. On the other hand, he is able to control things and make the conversation stay on topic in a way you can’t in a recorded public lecture.  Still – this has been done with great success on radio for decades, and this is in just that style. It works, but not with the same unpredictability you get from recorded lectures, especially with a Q&A session.

The three broadcasts I listened to were all interviews with authors of recent books that present interesing theories of political economy. Two of them (Weingast and Coyne) are related to the development of democracy, while the third (Acemoglu) deals with new explanations of the finance crisis. They are all very interesting, dealing with new ideas and explanations that make sense. The interviewees are all people who can explain things simply enough to be interesting, yet presenting cutting edge scientific theories. Prof. Roberts also asks insightful questions and help clarify along the way.

What makes the whole thing less interesting, is that there is no opposition or confrontation at any point. This is all conversation without the slightest hint of “difficult” questions or trying to challenge the theories put forward. I’d love to see Prof. Roberts challenging his subjects further, putting their theories a bit more to the test.

So, to sum things up in short: I’ll warmly recommend this podcast, but I miss the academic spirit of critical examination of the theories presented. This could have raised them from good to great. The good technical quality is a big plus.

Let me start with loudly acclaiming the very thought of recording lectures and making them available to everyone over the internet. It’s part of the whole idea of open access to scientific material and knowledge that I happily notice seems to be gaining more ground. The LSE is a prestigious institution in an international metropolis, allowing it to attract names for guest lectures that I could only dream of here in my small Norwegian city. That’s why it’s so fantastic that I can still gain access to these lectures from some of the most brilliant minds of the world through the internet.

So, one point already to the LSE just for the effort. But what have they actually put out there? All lectures generally follow the same format. First there are one or more speeches by prominent scientists or society persons followed by a Q&A session with the members of the audience. They are conducted in an orderly manner with one of the LSE academic staff as moderator.

To no surprise coming from LSE, a majority of the lectures are within the realms of political science and economics. Within this area of interest, they span as diverse topics as policy responses to the financial crisis, the idea of global democracy and the Israel lobby in the United States. The main emphasis seems to be on International Relations and Political Economy. They also show an interesting range of lecturers, including names like Ben Bernanke, David Reynolds, David Cameron, Cherie Blair and Jonathan Steele.

The technical quality of the podcasts vary somewhat. The majority of those I’ve tried seem to be very good, but a few are lacking in recording quality and a couple are almost impossible to hear. It appears that one or more of the lecture halls have very well suited recording equipment while some of the other locations require ad hoc solutions that don’t work so well. Unfortunately this means a few lectures are next to useless. All podcasts are also audio only. I’d love to see the occational video podcast as well (they do have some video recordings  but they’re only available through a web page flash player). It really makes a difference for those of us that own a modern media player with video capabilities. You lose somethign when you don’t see the speeker – particularly when they make use of Power Point slides.

One particular point that that becomes more critical on a podcast as opposed to a live lecture is the oratorial skills of the speaker, particularly voice use. Speakers that speak monotonously, slurred or with thick accents occasionally become very hard to follow when you have audio only and don’t see them in person. Fortunately this isn’t too much of a problem with the predominantly high-quality speakers that are represented in this speaker series, but there are the occasional exceptions that are prone to make me lose my concentration when listening.

So what are my conclusions? Unfortunately, I don’t have much to compare with just yet, but I do suspect that the LSE podcasts will rank highly among my favourite podcasts also in the future. They provide interesting speakers on interesting topics. Some improvements might be made on the technical side, but they’re mostly very good.

EDIT: The one thing I forgot to comment on in this review is also the sheer amount of lectures that are part of this podcast stream. For the last few months, more than 10 lectures have been added every month, making it an average of at least a couple every week. I find that number quite impressive!

Recommended lectures:

• Obama and the Empire of Liberty – Speaker: Professor David Reynolds
• Why 2009 is a crucial year for Europe – Speaker: Bruno Le Maire
• Georgia: has Europe let Russia off the hook? – Speakers: Dr Sabine Freizer; Professor Salome Zourabichvili
• Policy Responses to the Financial Crisis – Speaker: Dr Ben S. Bernanke

I’ve never really had a player well suited to listening to podcasts before, but over the last two days I’ve been trying it out. And I was excited to find out how wonderful a tool this can be for those of us that have a somewhat more than average interest in political science. Now I can have political science lectures in debates in my ears all the time rather than just getting it in snippets on BBC or Norwegian broadcasting whenever they send something interesting. Now I can really cater to my nerdiness and be a political scientist even when out walking or skiing!

Henceforth, I will try to spread the gospel of political science podcasts through reviewing and recommending good podcast sources for political scientists from time to time. I’m currently trying out the podcasts from LSE, which show some real promise. A review will follow after I’ve listened through a couple of broadcasts and made up an opinion.