Bringing Civil War history up to date

I used to attend readings of Voegelin Society papers at the American Political Science Association's annual conventions whenever they were held in Washington D.C. In those days, the APSA was in the iron grip of a very grim outfit called The Society for Political Methodology. If not that exact society, its imitators and competitors.

(By the way, attendees would ask me, "What institution do you represent?" and I would answer, "The reading public." The looks were priceless.)

This sort of research flooded the halls of whatever hotel was hosting APSA:

* Practical Issues in Implementing and Understanding Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation *

A quote from that paper: "Item-response and ideal-point models are inherently applied to multilevel structures, with data nested within persons and test items, or judges and decisions, or legislators votes."

Should be "legislators' votes" but these are not wordsmiths, needless to say. And there aren't that many words in these papers anyway. APSA and friends have turned to formulae:

That was an expression of political analysis from a poli-sci paper.

Tim Reese has generously agreed to help our dowdy field catch up with the poli-sci trailblazers. Here is his offering, which I trust you can decode without my help:

We're on our way to methodological excellence!