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The Monkey CageDemocracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. - H.L. Mencken |
Jonathan Katz sends along this paper, coauthored with the unrelated Gabriel Katz (no relation), on adjusting surveys for overreporting of voter turnout. They write:
Continue reading "Correcting for overreports of voter turnout" »
The governors of Alaska and Montana are famous for their folksy charm and broad popularity. But high approval ratings are not uncommon in small states:
See here for discussion.
In his review of Sarah Palin’s convention speech, James Fallows writes the following:
Twice in modern history very strong convention speeches have elevated politicians to an entirely different level of future potential and prominence. One, of course, was Barack Obama’s keynote at the convention in Boston four years ago. The other, which I remember watching as a schoolboy Goldwaterite, was Ronald Reagan’s speech supporting Goldwater at the San Francisco convention in 1964.
Fallows’s schoolboy memory fails him. Reagan didn’t give a speech for Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention. The famous Reagan speech of that year was a paid television address in late October called “A Time for Choosing.” You can see the speech below.
***Correction. It seems that Reagan did give a version of this speech at the 1964 Republican convention, though it was the televised version below that gained him the most attention. My bad. PAK
Key philanthropic and government programs offering grants for Ph.D. students appear to be excluding proposals for graduate students in sociology and political science, while favoring proposals from those in history, anthropology and a range of relatively small disciplines, such as art history and ethnomusicology.”
That’s the lead in an Inside Higher Ed story highlighting research presented by Rina Agarwala (a sociologist at Johns Hopkins) and Emmanuel Teitelbaum (a political scientist at, ahem, George Washington) at the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Agarwala and Teitelbaum “left little doubt that some social science fields get more than others. For the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, for example, 31 percent of grants went to those doing work in history, 30 percent to anthropology, and 16 percent to regional studies, languages and literature. Political scientists gained only 5 percent of the awards — less than the 6 percent awarded to arts and ethnomusicology. Relatively similar breakdowns were found in grants awarded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council for similar programs supporting dissertation work abroad. Some of the data suggest that the trends are getting worse.”
Are political scientists and sociologists getting so few of these grants simply because they’re not applying for them, or when they do apply do they have less success than applicants from other disciplines? Agarwala and Teitelbaum’s data suggest that, at least insofar as the trend over time in these funding patterns is concerned, it’s the latter — a lower success rate — that largely accounts for the difference. As the Inside Higher Ed story summarizes their trend results:
The drops don’t reflect a lack of applications, but lower success rates. Over the last 10 years of data for the SSRC program, anthropology’s success rate had one year at 4 percent, but was otherwise between 5 and 8 percent. Since 2000, political science has been between 2 and 4 percent. Sociology, which used to be close to anthropology in success rates, has fallen to the 2 and 4 percent levels in recent years. Notably, these shifts took place at a time that the composition of the selection committees for the fellowships was also changing. In recent years, the committee has had one or two each from political science and sociology, while three or four each from history and anthropology. While history has been consistently high, political science used to be its equal, and anthropology’s numbers have been growing on the panel as political science’s have been shrinking.
To read the full article, click here.
The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) has launched Survey Practice, an on-line magainze intended to “provide good, sound information to new survey researchers, be relatively flexible, be able to address current issues, and be easy to read.”
See especially this piece by political scientists George Bishop and Stephen Mockabee, which documents how the public’s mood has not only grown more pessimistic — a widely known finding — but also become more strongly linked to its assessment of President Bush. Thus, the “meaning” of the public’s mood has changed somewhat over time, becoming more clearly a referendum on the Bush presidency rather than a more apolitical statement about the country.
I’m Irish, and one perennial cause for complaint among my country people has been the way that Irish sports celebrities and pop stars are treated by the UK press as British (until of course they start losing, become embroiled in sex and drugs scandals or whatever, when they become Paddies again). Since becoming a political scientist, I’ve observed a similar pattern in the relationship between pol-sci and economics, nicely encapsulated in this MSNBC piece today:
Obama’s focus on kitchen-table issues is designed to attract voters whose top concern is the economy. In his brief remarks at the town hall, which was billed as a “Women’s Economic Event,” he criticized McCain on taxes, the economy, health care, and other issues. He also used a book by the economist Larry Bartels — “Unequal Democracy” — to argue that Republicans had a bad track record for helping ordinary Americans.
“There’s a book that’s come out right now, by prominent economist — irrefutable — looking at the evidence showing that when Democrats have been in charge of the economy, the economy has grown faster and it’s also been fairer in the sense that everybody benefits. And when the Republicans have been in charge, the economy has grown slower and there’s been greater inequality. And this is, you know, looking back over the last 80 years,” he said. “So we’ve got a good story to tell. We’ve got a good track record, we’ve gotta tell it more effectively in this election.”
It’s nice of course that Larry Bartels is getting mentioned in prominent speeches and all, but if you can find any evidence that he’s an economist of any description whatsoever, as opposed to a political scientist with lots to say about US political economy and its relationship to the electoral system, I’ll buy you a pint at the next APSA.
See here for Herzog and Tucker’s analysis.
Simon Jackman, who knew her.
NYU political scientist and Rochester PhD Fiona McGillivray passed away this morning after a long struggle with pulmonary hypertension.Despite her illness, Fiona had a great couple of years on the professional front. Indeed, there was a roundtable at APSA in Boston on Saturday on her most recent book.
Fiona was in the year of students immediately following me in the Rochester PhD program (a 1995 PhD, and if memory serves she entered the program in the Fall of 1989), where she met her husband-to-be, Alastair Smith. Fiona was a very bright light in the tight-knit Rochester PoliSci community back then: her pluck, charm and “a wee-bent” Scottish sense of humor was priceless there in Harkness Hall. Alastair and the kids are very much in our thoughts today.
I thought Neal Beck and Jonathan Katz (and others at NYU, I imagine) did a nice job this morning ensuring friends and colleagues in the profession got the news personally, rather than via something like this blog post.
PH sounds like a bugger of a disease. Alastair suggested donations to the PHA in lieu of flowers etc.
Seth Masket crunches some numbers on female Senate and gubernatorial candidates and finds little evidence that female candidates do systematically better or worse than expected. (I noted his similar analysis of black candidates here.) Caveats abound, but this is an interesting starting point for more rigorous analysis.
Seth was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. His thoughts as a “participant observer” are here. His take-away from the last night:
Obama makes you feel like you’re part of a movement. I fully recognize that it’s not a movement — it’s a candidacy. But it’s a rare politician that can convey that feeling. Sometimes we support politicians for purely instrumental reasons — we want lower taxes or particular favors or policies from government and figure we can get it from a particular politician. Sometimes we support politicians simply because they suck somewhat less than the people they’re running against. But people actually enjoy the act of supporting Obama. You feel like you’re part of something important and historical. That is rare.
This, I think, encapsulates the experience of many Obama supporters.
Nice analysis of the odds of various adverse health events for both candidates.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there’s no evidence I know of that VP nominees have much effect on presidential vote.
Lee points me to this news article by Anne Eisenberg about the website Many Eyes, which allows people to upload data and visualize it in cool ways. A great idea, but the example used to illustrate the article is just horrible:
It’s a classic example of a graph that looks cool but is just confusing. The data are presented in two dimensions, but the two dimensions don’t mean anything, there are lots of colors with no apparent rhyme or reason, and tons of cool techy-looking details that don’t do anything for me. I’d prefer some bar graphs or (if people can handle it) line plots. It was probably a bad idea that this tool was presented in a newspaper column entitled “Novelties.” I’d rather see graphics be in a column called “Essentials.”
But, hey, everything’s gotta start somewhere. At some point, maybe the fad of cool-looking graphs will go away, and people can settle down to something serious.
P.S. I have no problem with cool—for example, see here for a wonderful applet on the New York Times website—but I think graphmakers have to avoid the data-as-chartjunk phenomenon, in which real data are presented but in a way that makes little sense.
Smith Barney is owned by Citigroup, which is headed by . . .
Rasmussen has a poll out on Sarah Palin. Only 29 percent of voters think she is ready to be president. An August 1988 poll by Gallup for the People, the Press, and Politics organization showed that 40 percent of Americans thought that Dan Quayle was qualified to be President.
108% of Arizonans say . . . Huh?
I’ll be speaking from 12:30-1 on the Leonard Lopate show (in New York, on WNYC, 93.9 FM and AM 820; elsewhere online here).. I’ll be talking about Red State, Blue State (the book co-authored with fellow Cager David Park, among others). Maybe will even think of something to say about Obama’s speech…
P.S. The interview is here.
Mike Larsen sent me this and asked me what a Bayesian statistician would do. My answer is that, since it’s a meeting of tenured professors, they’d surely agree that the only reasonable solution is to hire some adjuncts. To which Mke replied, “Or form a committee.”
The other day I happened upon the presidential address that Simon N. Patten delivered a century ago at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association (“The Making of Economic Literature,” American Economic Association Quarterly 10 (April 1909), pp. 1-14). Patten held some strong opinions about what constituted good writing as well as good economics, and he did not hesitate to heap scorn on his fellow economists or academicians in general. He seems to have been something of a curmudgeon – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Here are some passages from his address.
Continue reading "Some curmudgeonly remarks about economists and other academicians" »
