Yesterday I proposed piloting a public policy survey of political science researchers.

This blog post had about 400 hits, which is sadly a very good day for my new blog. Either this is a good idea or a dumb idea. Don’t answer that.

I’ve received some excellent feedback on the idea. A few things that popped up:

First, the William & Mary Teaching and Research in International Relations (TRIP) snap poll actually does something very similar to what I proposed. This survey panel includes almost 3,000 teachers and researchers in international relations. While this survey is pretty broad, they ask people to identify their main fields of interest.

Second, quite a few people mentioned The Good Judgement Project.  This project aims to use crowdsourcing to predict world events.  Check out their leadership team.  This is no joke.

I like both of these projects quite a bit. So why should I provide yet another public policy survey?

My goal is to harness the expertise of a group of researchers active on a particular topic. To be honest, I am not sure how much this will differ from TRIP survey or Good Judgement Project results. Yes, Tetlock, I have read your work.

But why not try?

The worst case scenario is that I look silly. This happens all of the time. The best case scenario is that this is a great idea and someone or some group that is better trained than me actually does the right.

Maybe there is no upside.  Similar to all of my NSF grant proposals.

Here is the plan:

• I have constructed a draft Qualtrics survey here: http://tinyurl.com/lv4rzba
• International Interactions did a quick check of their reviewer pool on the topic and we can easily find 50 researchers to survey.
• I refined the survey and we send it out.
• We collect the responses and post them.
• Nobody reads this post or the results.

Feel free to take the survey for kicks.  To be clear, this survey isn’t fielded yet.  Your answers are just for my amusement.