Episode 138— Ruth Bloch Rubin: "You are the captain of your own ship."

As an academic studying American politics at the University of Chicago, Assistant Professor Ruth Bloch Rubin recognizes she is living in an unprecedented time that future political historians will be studying intently. It is equally a great time to indulge in her political nerdiness with her students. In this episode, Professor Bloch Rubin discusses the importance of feeling driven by one's research focus but also being open to pivoting and adapting to one's experience and social changes.

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Ruth Bloch Rubin of the Department of Political Science. Professor Bloch Rubin has a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. She's the author of Building the Bloc, Intraparty Organization in the U. S. Congress, and of the forthcoming book Divided Parties, Strong Leaders. She's here today to talk with us about what political power really means, what it's like to study it at such a unique moment in American history, and how she became a University of Chicago professor.

Professor Bloch Professor Bloch Rubin, it is lovely to meet you. How are you this morning? 

Ruth 00:37
Good. Thank you so much, Stephen. 

Stephen 00:39
Well yeah, let's just get right into it and get some of the basics out of the way. Can you tell us what your role is at UChicago and just a little bit in your own words of like what it is that you do and what it is that you study.

Ruth 00:52
I'm an assistant professor of political science in the University of Chicago, and I teach and research in the area of American politics and specifically, I study Congress and political parties and they often do so historically. So I look over time and try and understand patterns and how our political institutions operate and how they've changed over time.

Stephen 01:14
So we, we like to go back and start pretty much at the beginning, and ask people like what they imagined they would be doing when they were a kid. In the pre interview, I think you said you thought you would be a biologist. So yeah. How far down that track did you get?

Ruth 01:29
Not very far. I discovered that I was very bad at biology, but I really liked the idea of observing how the world works. And I thought that biology was the way to do that. In part, my parents were scientists, so that was sort of the world I grew up in. And then I realized that I was terrible at biology and science was not for me, but that there were other organizations and organisms that you could observe and learn about. And so I decided I would study politics and American politics in particular, which is its own sort of ecosystem.

Stephen 02:06
Yeah, I yeah. So at what point did that kind of choice occur? Like when you were in college, were you pretty sure that that's what you wanted to study? Or like what hooked you?

Ruth 02:17
Well, the other aspect is I grew up right outside of Washington DC. And so most of my family and friends’ families worked or were in some ways, you know, peripheral to the federal government. And so politics was just always in the air. And it was something that was always interesting to me, but I never really thought of it as a career, and I knew I didn't want to be a politician, so then it wasn't obvious what you could do. And it was really only when I got to college that I realized that you could study politics, and that didn't just mean that you were going to be a talking head or a pundit, but that you could actually study it like any other kind of institution or organization or group of organisms in the world, and so that's sort of what I got fascinated by.

Stephen 03:00
Interesting. Like, so what do you remember sort of like early questions or, I don’t know, projects, things that piqued your interest? Like maybe when you were I guess an undergrad?

Ruth 03:11
I think what interested me most, and this is sort of at the core of study of politics is like, who gets power? And why do they have power? And when do they lose it? And when do you think that people have power when in reality they don't? And when do you think there are weak people who actually do have power?

And so thinking about that, I think it transcends institutions. It's a way to think about, you know, why are some presidents good at their jobs and others are bad? Why do people dislike Congress? When Congress seems to be working just fine internally because people aren't within the institution trying to change it.

Why, you know, are federal bureaucrats sometimes able to get what they want from a hostile legislature or an unsympathetic president? And when are they prey to their sort of higher up bosses? And so all of those questions are really about power at the end of the day. And I think, you know, maybe that's what, if I were going to look back on what interested me about biology, it's like you think about ecosystems, there’s somebody who's a top predator, there are organisms or animals that have tried to figure out how to survive in a particular context. And so, sort of understanding those strategies is really interesting, but you can do that with politics too. 

Stephen 04:27
Yeah, I'm curious, like, how would you define or measure power? Like, that's obviously a concept that would come up all the time, but like, yeah, when you're talking about it in sort of an academic way, like, what are we actually talking about?

Ruth 04:40
That's a great question, and it's really one of the most contested concepts in, like, all of social science. Probably the most famous definition has been offered, at least in American politics, by a political scientist named Robert Dahl, who argued that power was getting others to do that which they would not otherwise do.

That's a pretty high standard, especially when you think about it observationally, because you have to know what it is that you're getting someone to do. What it is that they would prefer to do and you need to really know like what's the delta between those two things, right? You might see someone do something that doesn't seem obviously good for them from your perspective, but in fact, you know, unless you can read their mind, you can't really know for sure if it's something they wouldn't want to do. And so when it's practically applied, it's really difficult.

In my work, I've adopted a kind of softer definition. It's a little weaker. And so it's, I think, a little easier, which is essentially to say power is getting more of what you want than other people get. So it doesn't mean that people aren't getting some of what they want or that they're always going against their own interests, but that the real powerful person is going to be sort of the person who's getting the best deal possible, or the best deal out of all of the other potential deals on the table as compared to what others might have wanted.

Stephen: 05:58
Can you just sort of walk me through like your decision to go to grad school and, the course that you set yourself on there, like what does it look like to study this kind of thing at a graduate level?

Ruth 06:10
Well, I will caveat this with the recognition that I was like the most clueless perspective grad student, probably in the history of graduate students, so it didn't really occur to me that you could be a professor, even though I was taking classes with faculty members in college, and it was only until one of them said, you know, you might think about going to grad school and, you know, becoming a faculty member, like myself. That I was like, Oh, that's a job you can have.

So it was really at the very end of college that I was like, okay, if I'm going to do this, what do I do? And so I turned to the professors who I trusted to say, like, well, where should I apply? Like, what do I do? So I just listened to what they told me to do which was, you know, apply to a range of places and then you talk with the faculty members there and you get a sense of like, who would be helpful and interested in the stuff that you're interested in. But they said something really useful, which was, you know, with a caveat that what you're interested in will change and a good graduate program will change you.

So you want to think about, you know, who will have the people who will help you grow as opposed to sort of just help you be more of who you already are. So that was how I approached where to go to grad school, it was essentially finding people who I thought would help. Be sympathetic to the things that I was interested in but would push me to do things better than I would have sort of otherwise done them.

And so, I ended up at the University of California, Berkeley, where there were a variety of folks who are interested in studying political institutions and all of them did so from a variety of different perspectives and it was really dynamic place to be at the time where. You know, you had folks studying Congress and the bureaucracy and courts from a variety of different perspectives, and they were using a bunch of different methods to do so.

In political science, we have folks who rely on collecting a lot of data, and they do a lot of statistical analyses. We have people who are more theoretical and use formal models, which are sort of like simplifications of political dynamics to understand relationships. And then we had some folks who were doing more historical, qualitative work. And I had always been interested in history, but that's not exactly something that most mainstream political scientists were doing. So Berkeley seemed like a place where I could have my cake and eat it too. I could learn how to study political institutions using all of the methods that other folks were using, but I could also indulge my interest in political history. 

Stephen 08:47
Can you draw that distinction of like, you know, what it was that you were really interested in focusing on?

Ruth 08:53
Well, to be fair, I grew up in a household with people who were interested in politics, sort of at a level that you had to be if you worked for the federal government, but in the sciences, so it's, you know, a kind of, I don't know, I would say politics runs parallel to the work you do, but it's not involving, you know, your day to day life, except to structure, you know, like, how much money does your lab get? Do you have a new director and things like this? 

But both of my family's like my parents, my grandparents were deeply interested in history, to the extent that like family vacations meant going to like civil war battlefields. You know, when you went to New York City, for example, you would go see the different, like military ships that were being housed in the harbor that were from like World War II. So it was a sort of weird way to grow up, but it meant that I really loved history and I understood to the extent that I understood anything about politics always in terms of comparison. 

So well, our current president, do we like him? Well, was he better or worse the same than the president we had 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Let's talk about Franklin Roosevelt. Let's talk about Teddy Roosevelt. There was sort of this coherent comparative perspective and a view that. If you didn't like current politics, a good way to escape was to think about past politics, and maybe better eras, maybe worse eras, and that's sort of give you perspective.

So that is, I think, a very intuitive way to think about politics, but it's not necessarily the one that we have in our discipline today. Although at various points in time, political scientists were sort of more interested in studying history as a way to understand the present. Today, I think folks are in part because of a desire to have better data, more likely to focus on contemporary politics and try to understand relationships based purely on data from today, or in the past, like, decade or so. And so, you know, digging into the politics of the 1850s or the 1900s was just not something most folks were interested in doing, in part, because you would have to know how to go to an archive and collect data in that way.

Or you would have to rely on oral histories and things like this, which I think are great resources, but, you know, have limitations in terms of the kinds of inferences you can make from them because you're not collecting that clean data yourself.

Stephen 11:29
Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about, what your, you know, graduate work focused on? I'm also curious, maybe we can get into this like more down the road, but I mean, it seems like your kind of area of focus has shifted a bit in some interesting ways.

Ruth 11:43
When I started grad school, I knew I wanted to study political institutions, but I wasn't sure exactly which ones. I'd written a thesis as an undergraduate on Congress and the president and in periods of wartime. So I thought, oh, well, you know, maybe I'd study the presidency, Congress, is a literature or has a literature that I think felt very well till there was so much being written already.

It was hard to know how to make an intervention that would be useful to people, but the presidency, I mean, it's just exciting and interesting and you know, it involves not just the president but the bureaucracy, and so it was just a good opportunity to sort of think about those things. And so, I came into grad school thinking maybe that's what I'd want to do.

And I even thought about writing my dissertation about the Bureau of the Budget, which was the predecessor agency or organization within the executive branch to the Office of Management and Budget, which does some really important work within the federal bureaucracy. But I think I, at some point, realized that while I would be fine writing a dissertation about federal bureaucrats, it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do, and it was going to be hard to wake up every day and work on a project entirely of my own about that.

And I think that's one thing that, perspective graduate students really have to think about and graduate students too. I tell this to my students all the time. It was like, you have to be motivated to do this work and to do it well. And so if it's not going to, if that's what if it's something that, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're like, yes, I am interested in this. I am going to do this, then you know, that's great. But if not if you if you're lukewarm, it's not going to be enough because there's going to be a lot of times where that work is incredibly frustrating, and you feel like you're making no progress and no one else is going to be interested in it but you, and so you really need to find something that drives you. 

And for me, the Bureau of the budget was not that. And so I realized I had to find something else. And I was taking a class with a faculty member at Berkeley on the U. S. Congress, and I was reading all these readings at the time that they were, the Congress was fighting over the Affordable Care Act, or what would become the Affordable Care Act, and there was an organization of members, known as the blue dogs. And I felt like none of the theories that we were reading about, we were reading this thick canon on legislative politics, so all the heavy hitters. And I was like, none of these things really help me understand what's going on in Congress right now. We have this group of people in this kind of organization and no one has a theory for why these organizations exist.

And they're doing all this important work, but no one's telling me why they have power and why party leaders and, you know, President Obama, who's, you know, very excited to pass the Affordable Care Act or what would become the Affordable Care Act, some kind of health care legislation, have to listen to these guys.

And so I realized that that question was enough to keep me motivated to write a dissertation. So I sort of put that question at the center of what I was going to study, which was why do these sorts of groups that exist within political parties, what I called intraparty organizations in Congress, why do these groups, today we can think about organizations like the House Freedom Caucus or the Congressional Progressive Caucus, they exist across the ideological spectrum.

Why do these organizations have power in the legislature? When do they have power? Why do they look the way they do? Why do they organize in particular ways? Why do they vary in how they organize? And what explains why some of these groups have power and others don't? And so that became sort of the seed of my dissertation project and is really animated the kind of work I've done for about a decade now, or more, I guess, if I'm really being honest. 

Stephen 15:34
That's really cool. And yeah, I mean, no offense to people who do study federal bureaucrats, I'm sure you could write something fascinating about that but sounds like a really important moment for you just realizing, like, I don't want to wake up every day and focus on that specifically.

Ruth 15:50
Yeah, it was, I think, an important recognition. You know, it's like, I think it's just the reality of doing graduate work is it's almost entirely self-motivated, and so if you're not motivated, you have a problem. 

Stephen 16:01
Yeah, I mean, I actually can see pretty clearly, I guess, from that to the connection to what you currently are working on, but can you just describe a little bit about, some of your recent projects? I mean, I understand basically you're still focusing on these political institution and on America's political parties. Is that correct?

Ruth 16:17
Yeah, so I just finished a book called Divided Parties, Strong Leaders, which explores how the presence of these organizations, like the House Freedom Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the New Democratic Coalition, the Blue Dogs, and the House, how the presence of those organizations can shape the power of party leaders.

I think an interesting puzzle to think about when you look at the American Congress today is that power of party leaders varies by party and by class. And the theories we have to explain leader power would tend to presume that the power of party leaders is going to vary, but over time, not within party or across chamber within the same period of time, if that makes sense.

So to sort of put that in concrete terms. We don't really have a good explanation for why, like, Nancy Pelosi was so good at her job and wielded a lot of power, and Speaker Mike Johnson is really struggling to govern, and is really facing a lot of chaos within his own party. And there are many reasons that, you know, that contribute to this, but one that I think is underappreciated is that when you look at the factional terrain that leaders have to traverse, it varies within party and within across chamber within the same period of time. 

And so, you know, even if you're facing the same kinds of polarized headwinds, even if you're dealing with the same narrow majorities, the Republican party has a different factional landscape in the house than the Democratic party does in the house. The Republican party's factional landscape in the Senate looks different from its factional landscape in the house. And so, paying attention to those sort of features of the ecosystem or the organizational ecosystem, as you might say, is helpful to understand why some leaders do really well and others do poorly.

And it's not just about personality or charisma or indelible features of their personality, but it's this sort of context in which they're operating. And believe it or not, I think one of the things that political scientists often have a hard time adjudicating between is how much context matters and how much agency matters or how much sort of individual go getterism or autonomy really shapes politics.

Like, we have a hard time figuring out which of those is at work and when, and so this book project is a way to sort of think about when individuals are going to matter because they face sort of the same factional context. And so then individual skill sets, you know, maybe you have a really charismatic person, or maybe you have someone like Kevin McCarthy, who was just perceived to be a liar, and so he had a harder time governing.

When that kind of thing matters and when actually what's doing the work, what's shaping why someone is successful or good at their job and why someone else is floundering is actually not really a function of them at all, but about the factional context in which they're operating. 

Stephen 19:15
That's really interesting. And I feel like that's a really important thing to keep in mind looking at the American presidency. Cause like, it's such a powerful position and it's like, you know, pretty much every president most of them anyway, have been like such charismatic figures. We have these huge personalities in our politics today.

And like, I feel like it is very tempting to put all of the focus on these individuals when in reality, as you're saying, we're seeing it play out right now, how much the structures matter that's a really interesting insight.

Ruth 19:47
Yeah. And I think, you know, my work in many ways is borrowing or is borrowing from or taking inspiration from a really awesome book that was written by a political scientist at Yale, Stephen Skowronek, called The Politics Presidents Make. And so, he too makes the argument that we can think about presidents not simply as sort of successors to the person who came before them, but existing in different kinds of political time.

And so you can make interesting comparisons across time by note, by understanding that different presidents face different structural constraints. And that if you can sort of categorize them into similar problems, like each, some presidents face this kind of problem, and some presidents face that kind of problem, then you can more readily compare the people who are in the same bucket, but it's really not fair to say, you know, is Jimmy Carter better or worse than Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln or John Adams is like, that's not the right comparison. 

And I think, you know, when you think about what is social science, what is the point of social science or what does it teach us or what skills do you get from studying social sciences, it's making the right comparisons, it's being able to categorize and identify precisely so that you can, you know, find the right counterfactual or think about what the right comparator is.

Because if you're just comparing apples and oranges, you know, maybe you care about fruit, but beyond that, your ability to draw inferences or to think about theorizing to be limited.

Stephen 21:15
Right, yeah. And none of these political figures just fell out of the coconut tree. They exist in the context of whatever the rest of the quote was.

Ruth 21:23
Yes, no, you're right. Exactly. Pamela was on to something. 

Stephen 21:27
I wanted to ask as well about this specific upcoming election. I know that you will be a part of, this webinar series on the election that's coming up and just curious, like, what you're finding interesting like from a professional perspective, about like how this election season is shaping up and kind of like, what are you looking out for, like, really interested in seeing in terms of like your own work, from what is happening in American politics today.

Ruth 21:57
It might be easier to say, what are the things that are not interesting about the current election? I mean, as someone who studies history, I think it's important to acknowledge that a lot of crazy things have happened over the past 12 months that are just if not unprecedented, very unusual, or that there are very few good historical comparators.

So that in and of itself, you feel like you're living in history, like people some decades from now will be looking out at this period of time and sort of studying it in the way that I study the New Deal or the Great Society, you know, or Presidents Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt, or, you know, go farther back, right?

So that's just cool. It's fun to sort of see that. It's also, I think, an interesting time to sort of think about what are the assumptions that we make about politics and like, how often should we be confident in them? I mean, I think a lot of folks thought it was very unlikely that Joe Biden would step down and it was hard to imagine that the Democratic Party could get its act together. 

There's a sort of thread of scholarship right now that argues that the political parties are hollow, that they're organizationally inept. And I think folks worried that, you know, if Biden stepped down that, you know, the Democratic Party would just not be able to coalesce around a single candidate and that it would just be a huge organizational mess. And that didn't happen, which I think compels us all to be a little bit more humble about the assumptions we make about the institutions that we study and our ability to know for certain or to, you know, predict what is going to happen. So I think that's just a good gut check to have in general. 

So that in and of itself has been interesting in some ways I think, I mostly study Congress, so I've been watching what Congress is doing, and in that way, there's some comfort in just how predictably chaotic it's been. Congress are fighting about the same things that they've always been fighting about, maybe with slightly different rhetoric, or, you know, the terms are a little different, but the factional politics plays on as they have for, you know, the period of time I studied Congress, which dates back to like the 1910s.

So that in itself is, I think, strangely comforting because, you know, I think there's in periods of sort of turmoil or unprecedented things, it's really easy to be like, oh, no, we can't know anything for certain. And maybe it's all going to end and certainly some of the rhetoric around the election suggests that this is such a consequential choice that it, you know, is the American democracy is at a crossroads.

And so it's comforting to look at an institution and be like, nope, that's not things are basically the same. And we've survived this long with that kind of institution so probably we'll be okay. Obviously, that's Congress and not the presidency, but I think, I think the lesson applies elsewhere. 

Stephen 24:48
Yeah, that's interesting and that is kind of comforting to hear at a time when, yeah, it certainly feels like people are going to be studying this for a long time. You know, we like to ask people just kind of their likes and dislikes about like their job at UChicago. I mean, what would you say you particularly enjoy about where you are right now? And is there anything in particular that you do not?

Ruth 25:10
Well, I would say that there's really nothing to complain about. I love working with students. I think, especially with undergraduates, there's a great deal of pleasure in sort of watching people become themselves. And to become confident in the work that they're doing and to indulge, especially since the courses I teach are like on Congress or political parties or American politics to watch people indulge their sort of political nerdiness is really delightful.

I think there are a lot of folks who are interested in politics, but feel like that's not a cool thing to be interested in. And so it's really only when they get to college and they realize that you can do it seriously that folks get really interested and not just because, you know, they want to run for office, but because they find it fascinating.

And so watching folks like watching students. you know, get into that is, I think, really delightful. And I think it's important, you know, you're going to be, even if you spend zero of your time in the future thinking about politics, you're going to be living in a world that's shaped by politics. And so to feel like you have some sense of what's going on is, I think, really helpful and empowering.

And, you know, I think for similar reasons, I like working with graduate students, but as I said, I think the thing about being a graduate student is that you're the captain of your own ship. And so as a faculty member, you're there to be a mentor to comfort people when they get a rejection from an art, you know, for an article or to buck them up when they have a conference presentation and to sort of help them think through and brainstorm problems. But. you're not the captain. Like, you just are there riding sidecar to the extent that the student needs you. And so it's just a different relationship than with undergraduates. 

I think the thing that is hard is just, you know, If you study in an institution like Congress, you just have to have a stomach for a lot of dysfunction and chaos, And so every day when you read the newspaper, it's not just, oh, this happened and I can go back to not thinking about it.

It's like, oh, this happened and now I have to think about how it reshapes my research or how I should think about integrating that into the work I'm doing or, man, I really just wish I could avoid reading articles about Congress or political parties even dominating the headlines, but it's like that would be irresponsible. So that's the part of the job that's hard, you know, you can't feign ignorance and move on to the style section of the paper. 

Stephen 27:35
Thank you, Professor Bloch Rubin for your time today. And Course Takers. If you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.