Political map of the world, 2001. Levanthal Map Center (CC BY 2.0)

My PowerPoint Presentation from Today

Using historical institutionalism as a method for qualitative process tracing in comparative politics from University of Canberra

The flyer for my presentation today The School of Politics, Economics and Society Presents September School Seminar   Presented by : Dr Michael de Percy FCILT

Using historical institutionalism as a method for qualitative process tracing in comparative politics Abstract Historical institutionalism (HI) is often regarded as the least rigorous and the more tautological of the ‘new institutionalisms’, but this reputation is undeserved. I argue that HI, when viewed as a method for, rather than a theory of, examining institutional stasis and change, can provide a rigorous approach to process tracing that is useful in examining the impact of institutional legacies on contemporary political issues. Famous HI scholars, including Kathleen Thelen, suggest that systematic approaches to comparative temporal analyses can help to overcome the shortcomings of the inductive method in comparative politics. While for Karl Popper the inductive method is, in effect, hopeless in its scientific utility, my contention is that the nature of the social sciences means that falsifiability is, for the most part, a bridge too far for comparative political research. Plausibility, as opposed to falsifiability, can be achieved using systematic HI processes that are more sophisticated than simply rummaging through the past to find evidence that supports a given hypothesis. In this seminar, I aim to present a method that is not only useful in conducting comparative political analysis over time, but that can also address some of the inevitable shortcomings inherent in the conduct of inductive, comparative political science research by providing a systematic and rigorous system of process tracing over time.   This seminar is aimed at improving my work-in-progress paper for a panel I am convening at the ACSPRI conference to be held via Zoom from Tuesday 1 December to Thursday 3 December 2020. The conference website details are here: https://conferences.acspri.org.au/2020/ and the call for papers here: https://conferences.acspri.org.au/2020/cfp. If you are interested in presenting, you can enter submissions until 8th October 2020 23:59 (Australia/Sydney time).   Bio Dr Michael de Percy FCILT is Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the Canberra School of Politics, Economics, and Society at the University of Canberra. He is a graduate of the Australian National University (PhD) and the Royal Military College Duntroon, and he is a Chartered Fellow (FCILT) of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. Michael maintains a blog on his research, teaching and community engagement activities at www.politicalscience.com.au and you can follow him on twitter @madepercy.

Perception in Stoicism, Buddhism, and New Thought: Creating an inner life through imagination

Drinking tea and reading books and enjoying the life of the mind. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy.

Mastering Your Inner World Neville Goddard Explained: Manifesting with Ease by Rita Faith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be no more academic snobbishness from here on in. Reading this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt, bringing back a bunch of lessons from earlier readings and confirming so many life experiences. I've noticed the difference already with some simple techniques that make life so much better. Is it the book, the techniques, the confirmation of naturally acquired skills? I don't know. But here is my attempt to explain.

I am at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in early 1993. The ropes test. 6 metres up and down then up and down again in patrol order (rifle and webbing). Not my greatest strength and I am on "sluggers" or remedial physical training until I pass. I am talking with a colleague about it, that last "bite" on the rope that we struggle to make. We decide that we should just do it. Take that last bite. The body won't let us down. Wrong. And the blisters are worse than the thump on the ground from 6 metres up. No shame though, I gutted it out.

That  night, I dream about the ropes. While everyone else is eating dinner tomorrow night, I (along with the other sluggers), will get another crack at the tests we haven't passed. All night I toss and turn and I am up the rope and then down and then up again and then down and it all flows. The dream repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats... zzzzzz.

The next day I pass and I never fail the ropes test again. It was a purely mental issue from an earlier experience with the rope obstacle on an obstacle course and an arsehole I have since cursed and forgiven and now whatever. I was just a boy. A feeling of cowardice and not good enough and immorality in that sense of the bayonet as a moral weapon and I was immoral. So much conservative crap that did more for that arsehole's ego than my motivation. Life experiences have proven the opposite and I have learnt to be much kinder to myself.

Recent experiences with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) have revealed a bunch of parts of me that I wasn't aware of. I have learnt to recognise the various parts of me, the good, the bad, the evil, the off with the daisies naive kid, the arsehole dirty fighter, the whole shebang. They are all part of me and they won't go away. But my imagination has been fired up to see the Council of Me, the various parts that run riot if the conscious me doesn't acknowledge them and keep them under control.

It all sounds hokey. I felt this recently when I decided that I needed to find my inner compass. I found the website Wanderlust and an exercise by Melissa Colleret to do just that. It felt hokey, but I came up with three of my core values that echo past exercises I have done. Love, Freedom, and Learning: Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina.

I realised that I have been manifesting my entire life. Be an army officer; be a theologian; be a politician (oh no, not for me! Well saved!); be a political scientist; live the life of the mind; live in the country but work in Canberra (my favourite city in Australia); live in a federation house (and other things too personal to mention). I remember after graduating from Duntroon how it struck me: Now what? It makes me think of a quote attributed to the actor, Lily Tomlin:

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I've been trying to practice Stoicism for the last four years, and along with every other endeavour of my idealism, I have trashed my ideals. My enthusiasm for Stoicism has not been able to overcome its shortcomings. Are we really to resign ourselves to our circumstances? Imagine if I'd done that when I was stuck in a job that was so bad, I contemplated the main problem concerning philosophy, a la Albert Camus.

Often, when teaching leadership classes, I get to re-live my shortcomings. For example, James Clawson's work separates the "what do I want to be" from the "how do I want to feel" (the Internal Life's Dream - LDint - versus the External Life's Dream - LDext - otherwise known as "Resonance").

I have found my calling and I am living in accordance with my inner compass (even when I felt I wasn't).  Nothing hokey about any of that.

But the Stoics don't feel too much. And, like Buddhists, they focus on managing their perceptions or impressions. And here is the common ground I have found with Goddard's ideas:

Imagination is God and God is imagination.

And finally I arrive at Rita Faith's book. It isn't hokey. Neville Goddard was an inspiration to Wayne Dyer. So you don't like Hay House? Well Dyer's PhD supervisor was Abraham Maslow. You know, the first theory you learnt at uni and the theory you tried to fit into all your first year essays because it was the only one that made sense? Yeah, him.

As I finished reading Faith's work on Goddard, I was half way through Jack Kerouac's Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha. I've been thinking a lot about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. (I am still trying to work out whether Hesse was writing about Buddha or a parallel to Buddha. I suppose it doesn't matter.)

The Britannica entry on Herman Hesse's Siddhartha reads as follows:

Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and learns to simply listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness... As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.

There was my connection. The aptly named Rita Faith tells me that Goddard says I have to die to my former state of mind. I have to imagine not how I will achieve what I want to achieve, but how I will feel (there's that Clawson again) when I have achieved it.

The Law of Attraction and other New Thought self-help books go back to the 19th century. The latest iteration by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, has some major issues. For starters, Wayne Dyer wanted nothing to do with it. Second, Neville Goddard didn't think it was a secret at all and (apparently) he taught for some forty years never charging for his lectures, only asking for a contribution to his travelling expenses.

And more recently, Mark Manson has called "bullshit" on The Secret. And then it takes an interesting turn:

Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Call me crazy, but isn't that what Goddard said? Isn't that what Rita Faith says, too? You have to actually DIE to your former self, not think it positively away with other positive delusionals!

Here is the key takeaway from Faith's short book. We can manage our impressions (or perceptions). For the Stoics, events are facts neither good nor bad, only our reaction to our impressions of these events is good or bad. To the Buddhists, as far as my reading takes me, our impressions of the world are the cause of our suffering. What if there was another way? And what if it wasn't a secret?

The Stoics leave out the how of managing our impressions. I still use Stoic philosophy, but as Seneca would have said, if Epicurus tells me something good I should use it. Rita Faith is telling me something good and I'm using it.

For all the times I have dwelt upon negative thoughts, becoming jaded at being overworked or overworking myself out of some sort of fear or self-doubt, or been afraid to be happy about something in case I jinx it, I can finally call bullshit.

There is no single way, religion, or philosophy. Human separateness (from Hesse), and individualism as a reaction to my senses (from Kerouac), versus re-programming my senses, or dying to my former state of mind, has provided me with a way to use my imagination to control my inner world. The Stoics tell me to do this, but they don't tell me how.

It's not the kind of delusional positive thinking that I abhor. It's like the law of attraction but it is also more like the experiences I have had when all of my mind and energies were focused and brought to bear on some purpose. And it can be done with memories, too. The idea of revision is to go back and reimagine the past. Not the events per se but the feelings.

It struck me that during one of my EMDR sessions, I recall an event as a kid in Western Sydney. I am in a fight with another kid. The mother of the kid I am fighting and her friend are standing by, telling the other kid how best to hurt me. 

I had mostly forgotten about the experience, but I remember a moment of clarity that makes me laugh. The mother's friend had mini-fox terriers. I looked at them and thought "wow they are cool dogs!" I have two of my own mini-foxies now! And so the memory is revised. No longer crapping on about a crappy situation, but grateful for my mutts and the revised memory.

And every day I think about how I will feel when I accomplish the things I aim to accomplish. Not how I will accomplish them. And much like giving myself time to think really works, giving myself time to feel works remarkably well, too. I am delighted that this book fills some gaps in my knowledge. Or, in the words of my sister:

Learning is cyclic, not linear. There are never any gaps, just the right timing and prior knowledge to build upon.

And all this from a 46-page page quick-read at AUD$3.99 via Kindle!

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Invitation to Submit a Paper to a Panel on Historical Institutionalism: 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Source: De Percy, M.A. & Batainah, H.S. (2019). Identifying historical policy regimes in the Canadian and Australian communications industries using a model of path dependent, punctuated equilibrium, Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2019.1581161.

If you are interested in participating in the panel (or other panels), please visit the 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference website at https://conferences.acspri.org.au/2020/. The early bird rate is half-price and is quite affordable at $20 for a an employee at a member institution and only $10 for students. The non-member price is $50.

Panel Details

While there has been much debate about the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of historical institutionalism (one of the three main approaches of "new institutionalism"), there have been relatively few examples of the use of historical institutionalism as a method in comparative politics research. Yet historical institutionalism provides rich and rigorous ways to conduct process tracing when comparing institutions over time, particularly at the meso-level (industry or sectoral level) of analysis. This session is designed for researchers interested in adopting historical institutionalism as a method for conducting cross-national comparisons of politics and policies over time. The focus is on the use of historical institutionalism as a method of process tracing and a way to organise qualitative data in political science research. Participants will be introduced to the concepts of institutional theory, path dependency, punctuated equilibrium, critical junctures, momentum, and stasis. The approach will focus on developing quasi-experimental qualitative research projects to produce plausible (as opposed to falsifiable) explanations for cross-national institutional outcomes. At the end of this session, participants will have the skills and knowledge to develop their own model for adopting historical institutionalism as a form of process tracing in cross-national comparative politics research projects.

Questions?

If you have any questions about the panel, or if you wish to submit a paper, please contact me via email at michael.depercy@canberra.edu.au.

When Philosophy is Not Enough (and other journeys of self-discovery)

Sunrise over Coogee Beach, 18th July 2020. Photo by Michael de Percy.

Reclaiming your Inner Harmony: A Practical Guide by Richard Marazita
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's sad that it's taken me this long to read another book. But it's clear there's light at the end of the tunnel, and reading this book has been inspirational. I've been working with the author of this book for the last few weeks looking at how to get all of my "parts" to work together, instead of having a free run, an experience that hasn't worked at all before.

Some four years of working on Stoic philosophy has been useful but there have been parts that don't work for me. I suspect that Stoicism's physics, stemming from Heraclitus, has an element of sadness in its resignation to fate. Epicureanism, on the other hand, with its focus on happiness, stems from Democritus' physics. Philosophical adversaries, to be sure, but even Seneca would accept the lessons of his rivals if the lessons are useful.

Journalling is my major vehicle for practising Stoicism. I wrote about the approach I have used in the past here. While reinforcing the foundational principle of Stoicism, best captured in the first page of Epictetus' Enchiridion, I also created a chronicle of evidence that continually "stacked up" with a clear message: I wasn't happy. Even though I was much calmer and more at peace with the world, I wasn't happy. The end result was a major crisis that disrupted my otherwise disciplined journalling ritual. 

I don't regret my experience of journalling and practising Stoicism over the last four years, but after the first three years it became a struggle. Only recently have I been able to get back into my journalling practice, but it is substantially different from my previous practice. 

Now, I am learning to incorporate other aspects of Eastern philosophy and religion, especially Buddhism, and more recently, Classical Indian Philosophy in the form of the Yoga and Siva Sutras. 

After a trip to Brunei in May last year the idea of the Chakras opened up a whole new world of healing, especially for my body which has long been neglected over the last twenty years while I pursued study and an academic career. Turning to Stoicism was the first step in a much broader awakening to life outside of the mind.

My first step was to do two Rapid Transformation Therapy (RTT) sessions and then a tarot reading. I had some Bowen, Reiki, and Kinesiology sessions, too. A key theme has been the relationship of the body to the mind. As a former soldier, the only real relationship these two parts of me have had was that my mind pushed my body as far as it could go.

The therapy I have been having with Richard has been useful in recognising the different parts of me that act and react on my behalf. A key part of the technique, known as Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), has been enlightening and brought to light a number of issues I have buried for many years. 

The approach is similar to Napoleon Hill's concept of the Cabinet of Invisible Counselors, except that the counselors are different parts of me, rather than other individuals. I am hopeful that the approach will help me develop a better sense of self and to become better at establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries.

I stumbled upon Reclaiming your Inner Harmony: A Practical Guide while checking out Richard's website. I found the book easy to read and quite practical. The basic approach is that, to achieve inner harmony, one must balance the mind, body, feelings, and gut instinct. Disharmony is caused by one of these parts dominating the others. 

For me, gut instinct is something I have buried for a long time. I think that Stoicism, which is clearly a form of ancient psychotherapy, is much easier to subscribe to for a soldier-turned-scholar. But it doesn't make any connection to the body. In fact, it tends to dissociate the body from the mind, in that it is not something that one can control. This makes sense in terms of illness or injury, but it seems to ignore the fact that my mind exists because of my body. I must admit to a feeling of dissociation which has only recently begun to retreat.

I found this short book useful despite my first attempt at using the tools leading to my gut instinct going for an off-leash run. Like the EMDR therapy, the point is to enable all parts of oneself to "check in". 

Much like Stoic philosophy (and religions, but that's another story), it takes practice to reinforce the habit, through use of the chain method, if you will. And that is where my journalling has found a new purpose.

My journey, which began with my mind before finding practical application in the form of Stoic philosophy, neglected the feelings, body, and gut instinct that I have rediscovered. It has given me a perspective that I think I initially buried, inappropriately in hindsight, and then suppressed further with Stoicism. 

The last time I felt the connection with my body was in training before going to Duntroon. I was practising Tai Chi at the time. Like Seneca, I can choose to use whatever works for me rather than trying to be a purist in everything I do. Given the obvious health and wellbeing benefits, it makes sense. 

And while many things and people have assisted me on this latest stage of my journey, this book has given me a logical framework for connecting with my different parts while also guiding me to develop my own, unadulterated, sense of self.

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