The ASA election begins today, and you have your opportunity to vote for or against the dues increase as well as to elect our next set of leaders. Here are some resources:
- A list of links discussing the dues increase,
- A set of responses to requests for more information from the ASA (mostly from Secretary Catherine White Berheide, who deserves credit for this work),
- Jenn Lena’s collection of candidates who signed our petition to increase transparency within the ASA, and
- The SWS, as always, has published the responses to its survey of candidates, which asks ASA candidates to speak to their feminist research and activism.
scatterplot 
Are ballot initiatives about dues or other non-officer issues always phrased like this:
“To support the change in the dues structure in Table 2 as unanimously recommended by Council in February 2011 – Vote YES or NO (Click for details)”
I don’t remember the “unanimously recommended by Council” phrasing.
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Am I the only one who is uncomfortable with the SWS annual survey of candidates, from both intellectual and professional standpoints?
I agree that gender issues are pervasive and very important in academia and beyond. However, I don’t think whether someone attends SWS meetings or reviews for Gender and Society are particularly important criteria for being an effective elected representative for the discipline.
I recall an erstwhile blogger bringing this up a few years ago, but in an uncouth manner which I think precluded civil debate, and polarized people against them, while obscuring the reasonable arguments beneath their bombast.
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It’s up to members to decide what they think are the criteria on which they want to vote. If members feel SWS is providing irrelevant information, then they can ignore it. I don’t belong to SWS and have never looked at the survey responses, although I happily completed the survey when I ran for Pub Comm.
More generally, it’s not SWS’s fault that they are the only group of sociologists who have mobilized to obtain additional information about candidates.
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Of course people can vote according to whatever criteria they want, but should not those criteria be subject to debate?
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Sure. You alluded to a blog discussion that happened a few years ago; my recollection of that is that the person regarded SWS’s conducting the survey as illegitimate. To me, that’s simply wrong: SWS members can ask candidates for whatever. But it’s perfectly fine for you to question whether people should be using the information from the survey in making their voting decisions.
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You nailed it Jeremy. I don’t personally find the questions SWS asks very compelling but I have no principled objection to them collecting this information for the benefit of their members and other people who share their priorities. And I like the idea that it establishes a useful model/precedent were other caucuses/factions within ASA (such as us transparency/reform people) to consider doing their own surveys. This could even include people who wanted to create an explicitly anti-SWS (or public-sociology, or whatever) survey of candidate platforms.
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I am a member of SWS. I don’t always look at their survey. But I sometimes do when voting about people I know nothing about. It does matter to me how people articulate their positions on gender issues. So I look more at their write-in responses than anything else. Gender is not the only issue I care about. Indeed, there might be others I care more about. But the information is useful. I think you’re dead-on right, Jeremy. And I agree with you and Gabriel that it would be nice if other groups did something similar. Perhaps something to do for the next season of candidates on scatterplot or orgtheory?
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I am also a member of SWS and I second all of Shamus’s comments — I find many of the answers totally useless, but some turn out to be (inadvertently?) informative about people I really do not know at all. I’d be interested in what kind of questions the scatterplot sociologists could come up with — it is harder to be informative than you might think when the questions are asked long before the issues arise (if there actually are any).
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