Earlier this month, I made a quick trip up to Chicago to present a paper at the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Annual Conference.  I was on a panel titled “Understaniding Opinions on Contemporary Issues,” and presented a revised version of the carbon tax paper that Alex Theodoridis and I have been working on.  We had been able to incorporate the feedback we had received from colleagues at Duke into the new version, which was entitled “Respond and Deliver? Examining the Risks and Rewards of Responsive Accommodation in the Politics of Climate Change.”  In particular, we had changed how we presented the data, and were looking forward to hearing the impressions of other political scientists.

Turnout was unfortunately pretty low, perhaps because of the applied focus of the panel and its lack of a clear connection to the sub-fields and sections of MPSA.  Nevertheless, the discussant who had read our paper, Donald P. Haider-Markel from the University of Kansas, had some very helpful comments on the paper and was generally very positive about both our conceptual framework and methodological approach.  Several audience members also had some interesting insights about how to interpret our results.  Our next steps are to make our final revisions and submit the paper, hopefully later this spring!