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The Monkey CageDemocracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. - H.L. Mencken |
At the request of a reader, I have created a new “Senate procedure” category for our posts. A number of old posts are now cataloged under that heading, including Greg Koger’s posts on the filibuster and Sarah Binder’s recent posts on reconciliation. Find it here or in the listing to the right.
The Atlantic’s Chris Good says that it is:
Gallup released findings today on economic confidence by state, and it appears anxiety doesn’t give a clear partisan edge one way or the other.
Conventional wisdom says that an improved, or improving, economy is good for President Obama and Democrats, while economic anxiety is bad for the president’s party. Of the 10 states with the highest confidence ratings, five voted for Obama in ‘08 and five voted for John McCain; of the 10 states with the least confidence in the economy, six voted for Obama and four for McCain.
Five minutes later, the commenter “jennis psycho” said:
Your thesis does not follow from the data you cite.
And jennis psycho is correct. Good falls prey to our old friend, the ecological fallacy.
Better data is actually sitting immediately to the right of Good’s blog post: the ABC/WP consumer confidence index. You click on that link, then you click on the pdf in the ABC story.
Here is the consumer confidence rating of the three partisan groups (no word on how independent leaners were classified, but I am guessing they were classified as independents):
Republicans: -46
Democrats: -51
Independents: -49
So the difference here are small — especially compared to the differences across income groups, where consumer confidence ranges from -75 among those making $15,000 or less to -6 among those making $100,000 or more. It appears that a lack of consumer confidence is bipartisan.
But the most recent numbers obscure an important trend that indicates partisanship is at work. If you compare Democrats now to one year ago, their consumer confidence has improved by 10 points. But Republicans’ confidence has declined by 12 points. A year ago, Democrats were 27 points “less confident” than Republicans. Now they are 5 points less confident. Independents, meanwhile, are virtually unchanged.
A while back, Andy and I wrote up this basic finding and a number of others under the heading “Red and Blue Economies. The broader point is this. Even if Republican and Democrats currently have similar views of the economy — “bipartisanship,” in Good’s terminology — partisan bias may still be at work.
As Henry mentioned, Lee’s memorial service was on Friday. I thought I would share a few stories about Lee that I had not heard.
And there was this rueful bit of self-deprecation from my GW colleague Chris Deering. In his eulogy, Chris talked about interviewing Lee as an outside candidate for the chair of our department:
In 1990, Jeff Henig and I were part of a committee to find a new chair for the political science department. During the interview, someone asked Lee why he wanted to walk away from his position as Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Arizona.
His response was telling, and it wasn’t about basketball: “I have to make a choice between moving up and moving down the administrative ladder,” he said. To Lee the answer was obvious: more time for political science, more time for recruiting and mentoring, more time to do the things he loved.
Jeff and I were brilliant of course; we knew right away that Lee was our guy. He had the disciplinary knowledge to lead recruitment, the personality to foster collegiality, and the kindness to mentor new and existing colleagues. Alas, our brilliance wasn’t completely unalloyed. We actually offered the job to someone else first.
Thankfully this person declined. And speaking of what Lee loved, Chris also offered this moving conclusion:
Lee often said that he loved three things. He loved Carol. He loved his cats. And he loved political science. He was fond of a quip about the South Dakota farmer, emblematic of the reserved and modest Midwesterner, who loved his wife so much he almost told her.
As a good South Dakotan, Lee didn’t cotton much to sentimentality, self-aggrandizement, or over seriousness. All this left a lot of us in the position of loving him so much…we almost told him.
According to a recent report from Public Policy Polling, Democrats were rooting for the Saints by a 36%-21% margin, while Republicans were narrowly pulling for the Colts by a 26%-25% margin. Interestingly, Independents looked much more like Democrats, preferring the Saints by 33%-20%. Alas, no info on Tea Party supporters.
Oh, and one other vaguely related point. I watched the Super Bowl (very late at night…) in Madrid, Spain, where we had the UK feed of the game. The commentator they had for expert studio analysis: the Southern Methodist University wide receivers’ coach. Despite the fact that we got a good laugh out of this when he was first announced, I have to admit he actually provided pretty good commentary.
[Hat Tip to Pollster.]
Lee’s memorial service was today; we’ll have more, and more substantive posts on it soon. But one thing that I learned to my surprise was that Lee had had over 200 collaborators on his published work (he had, I think, around 280 published articles). Could that be a record for political science? It certainly is more than a couple of standard deviations from the mean. Nor were these collaborators limited to a specific corner of political science (this would have been hard; no corner of political science that I know has 200 odd research active faculty); Lee was notably catholic in his interests and his collaborators (although he had some basic standards - he never collaborated with me . This history is reminiscent of that of the even-more prolific mathematician Paul Erdős. Some mathematicians publicize their ‘Erdős number’ - those who collaborated directly with him have a number of 1, those who have collaborated with collaborators have a number of 2 and so on. I suspect that Lee would be pretty centrally located in any mapping of co-authorship networks in political science - would it make sense for political scientists to calculate their Sigelman number? Fwiw, mine would be 2 (through Melissa Schwartzberg, Eric Lawrence and maybe others too).
Which state’s politics are the bigger trainwreck, those in Illinois or New Jersey? I am always happy to give the nod to New Jersey, but Illinois is coming on strong.
Voting geeks and political scientists can sometimes engage in quite vigorous arguments over which system of vote-counting is best. But entertainment value is rarely one of their criteria. It should be - and from my personal experiences as a tallyman in Ireland when I was a teenager, it is one on which PR-STV (proportional representation with a single transferable vote) scores very highly. In PR-STV, the voter votes for the candidates, recording her order of preference (Farrell 1, Tucker 2, … Sides 6 and so on). The votes are then counted. If a candidate reaches the quota with first preference votes, then she is deemed elected, and her surplus votes are distributed to other candidates, according to the second preferences recorded on them. If no candidate reaches the quota with her first preference votes, then the weakest candidate is eliminated, and his votes are distributed to the other candidates according to the second preferences, and so on, until all the vacant seats have been filled.
What makes this system entertaining is that much depends on the order in which candidates are eliminated. If one candidate goes first rather than another with a nearly equal share of votes, this can have significant knock-on repercussions for who gets elected and who doesn’t. The candidates are usually present at the count, and observing them, whey-faced, trying to figure out whether they will lose their jobs or not, as wizened old mountainy men, (who know their end of the constituency from decades of tramping its back-country roads and boreens, and have a good idea of where the second, third and fourth preferences are going) offer predictions based on the way that this or that ballot box seems to be going, is enormously entertaining for heartless teenagers with a predilection for politics.
Which brings me to my proposal. Under the new Oscars system, the ten Best Pictures nominees are chosen under some PR voting system, which may not be PR-STV but is likely to be at worst a closely related cousin. So the Oscar ceremony, rather than cutting to the smug accountant who presents the results as a fait accompli at the end of the ceremony, should instead be cutting back and forth to a vote counting process which would be happening simultaneously, live. Alongside the main Oscar broadcast, one might even have CNN running an “Oscars Voting Special” in which underemployed political pundits could opinionate on who is winning and who is losing, who deserves to win and so on. This would make gripping television for a substantial subsection of the population who is uninterested in Oscar dresses and awards for best fly-grip camera and so on. I can see three possible objections. First - that CNN political pundits don’t actually know anything interesting or useful about the movie industry. This seems to me to be both true and uncompelling - they don’t (with a few exceptions) know anything useful or interesting about politics either. And they can always hire me for a moderately outrageous retainer fee. Second - that the US public would be unlikely to find processes involving complicated math at all entertaining. For rebuttal, I offer you the countless millions of baseball statistics bores to be found in this fine country. Third - that this will lead inevitably to family friction over whether we should watch the Oscars-proper ™ or the Oscars Special Vote Count edition ™ from the Finest Names in News (or whatever the slogan is this week). This seems to me to be the most plausible of the objections (but since I’m the only person in our household who really knows how to use the remote-controls, I’m not particularly worried about it meself).
In recent days, from Tampa to Nashua, Barack Obama has been pressing Congress for action on a number of fronts as he defends his legislative agenda. Big, new, things need to happen; lots of change is required. As he put it in the State of the Union address: “From the day I took office, I’ve been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious…. I’ve been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while. For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?”
Well, if one reads the scholarly literature on the topic the answer is pretty clear: for a little while longer. At least on most fronts.
True, the literature on presidential agenda-setting generally finds that presidents should “hit the ground running”: that they should bring their policy priorities to Congress as quickly as possible. There are dissenters, perhaps most notably Richard Neustadt, who worried that a combination of ignorance and arrogance mars most large-scale proposals brought quickly forward, especially after a shift between parties. Most scholars, though – while not disagreeing with either the arrogance or the ignorance part – see little alternative to moving fast, given the “declining cycle of effectiveness” that Paul C. Light has traced across the course of most administrations.
Even so there’s an awfully big “but” – move fast, BUT with a small, focused agenda.
The International Whaling Commission is an international organization that is, among others, responsible for the moratorium on all commercial whaling and the issuing of permits for scientific whaling. Membership and voting rights are available to any nation-state willing to pay a modest annual fee. As Christian Dippel documents in a recent paper (again from the terrific PEIO conference), this sets a perfect scene for vote-buying. Small landlocked developing countries suddenly become remarkably eager to join the institution and support Japan in its quest to overturn the moratorium and acquire more scientific permits. Not entirely coincidentally, Japanese foreign aid to these countries happens to increase following their newfound fondness for whaling.
Dippel’s paper has at least three interesting findings. The first is simply that the U.S. is not the only country in the world that uses foreign aid for strategic purposes. This may sound self-evident but so many of these studies are targeted at strategic uses of U.S. aid that it is quite refreshing (or depressing) to be reminded that this is not a U.S. specific issue. Second, countries that pledge allegiance to the whaling cause do not get net aid gains. The West (especially the UK) cuts aid following votes in favor of whaling causes. The difference is that the Western aid cut is mostly in the form of loans whereas the Japanese aid comes in no-strings-attached grants. Third, there is very little chance that Japan can buy its way into lifting the moratorium. There are too few small developing states in the world to make this feasible. The fact that Japan keeps spending just to get a larger minority and the minor economic significance of commercial whaling suggest that domestic political reasons drive Japan’s behavior. So perhaps they are buying votes for votes rather than whales. Go check out the full paper.
Remember that Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll from earlier this week that swept through the blogosphere (see here, here , and here). Well, like any poll with new, dramatic take-away healdines, it’s probably worth a second look. I had put that on my Monkey Cage to do list for later this week, only to discover one of my own graduate students, Andrew Therriault (who incidentally will be on the job market next year), had already beaten me to the punch, providing a - dare I say it - fair and balanced look at the poll’s methodology here, which he has graciously allowed me to re-post on the Monkey Cage as a guest post:
There’s a new poll out from Daily Kos, conducted by Research 2000 (story, crosstabs), that’s getting a lot of attention this week (see discussion at FiveThirtyEight and Politico, for example). In brief, it claims that an alarming number of Republicans believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win, believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election, and hold other similarly-extreme beliefs and opinions. While the findings are pretty striking at first glance, there are a number of potential problems with the poll that should throw a little cold water on anyone getting too hysterical about the results:
Sample selection
The poll asked these questions of “2003 self identified Republicans”, but no details are provided about the screening process—-what the specific eligibility criteria were, what the response rate was, what percentage of respondents fit the eligibility screen, and so forth. I would wager that Republican leaners are not included, but that’s only part of the issue. The poll measures the opinions of people who (a) answered the phone and were willing to be polled far from election day, (b) identified as Republican without any follow-up prompts, c) were interested and patient enough to sit through a moderately-lengthy survey, and (d) did this despite a list of questions which sounds awfully like a push poll. Each of these factors could be reasonably expected to favor respondents who are highly engaged with politics and predisposed toward a particularly conservative viewpoint. As such, it is highly unlikely that the sample of respondents who sat through the full survey is even close to representative of the typical Republican electorate.
Opinion strength
Every opinion question is binary (yes/no, favor/oppose, etc.) with an option for “not sure”. Looking at the percentage of “not sure” responses, almost every question has double-digits in this category, and many have 20-30% or more. This is a much greater incidence than for most survey questions (though data is scarce when it comes to questions comparable to these in tone), and suggests that there is a wide range when it comes to the strength and certainty of respondents’ opinions. So of the 63% who think Obama is a socialist, for example, it’s unlikely that all of those respondents think he’s the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin. More likely, a handful really believe that, some more think he’s socialist in the European, democratic-socialist sense, others have heard their friends say it and think it might be true, a few more don’t really know but are guessing (not wanting to admit to the interviewer that they don’t know), and a bunch have no idea what a socialist is in the first place but know that it’s evil and so Obama must be one. By only allowing for binary answers, this poll ignores the complexities and uncertainties of public opinion, and force responses into categories which sound much more extreme than they might otherwise be.
Continue reading "Revisiting that "Republicans are Crazy" Daily Kos Research 2000 Poll" »
Matt Stephenson points me to this BBC article, “Why do people vote against their own interests?”, that was full of the usual errors. This would seem to fall into the dog-bites-man category of “This is important. Someone is wrong on the internet”—but it is the fabled BBC, and it is written by a political scientist at fabled Cambridge University—so maybe it’s going through some problems.
It is striking [says David Runciman, speaking on the BBC] that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.
B-b-b-but . . . what about this?
The people who dislike healthcare are primarily those over 65 (who already have free medical care in America) and people with above-average income. No, these are not really the ones the new bill is most designed to help.
To be fair, though, my maps are based on survey data from 2004. I haven’t been able to grab more recent individual-level data to replicate our analysis with current public opinion. Still, my guess is that it is the older and richer who most strongly oppose changing the health-care system.
Next:
If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best. There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.
Hey, I didn’t know that! Maybe it’s true. I thought that in a relatively peaceful and prosperous country such as the United States, there’s nothing voters hate more than an economic downturn.
Beyond this, there’s little evidence that people vote based on their individual interest or even that they should vote based on their interest; rather, survey data and theory both suggest that people vote based on what they think is best for the country. (See here and here.) This is not to say that the psychological models of Drew Westen, which are touched upon in this article, are wrong or irrelevant, but merely to point out that “people voting against their interests” is not such a surprise or paradox.
And then there’s this:
Continue reading "Why do people write news stories against their own interests?" »
The Financial Times had a piece a few days ago on the politics of aid relief organizations in Haiti.
In an editorial published on its website yesterday, The Lancet said the situation in Haiti remained “chaotic, devastating, and anything but co-ordinated”. It accused agencies of needless competition for funds. “Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts,” The Lancet wrote. Aid workers in Haiti deny any suggestion of rivalry. “To say that there is something of a bad feeling amongst us is totally false, period,” said Louis Belanger, a spokesman for Oxfam. “This is a massive disaster and it takes time.”
This speaks to a broader debate about the motivations of aid NGOs, where (perhaps surprisingly) political scientists have played a prominent role. Much recent work has suggested that aid NGOs are as motivated by the need to maintain their own revenue flows as by broad humanitarian aims. For example, James Ron and Alex Cooley argue that “principal-agent problems, competitive contract tenders, and the presence of multiple principals exacerbate INGO insecurity and create organizational imperatives that promote self-interested action, inter-INGO competition, and poor project implementation.” In a vignette reminiscent of the Lancet criticisms, Ron and Cooley write about how in Goma:
The combination of vast sums of donor money, short-term contracts, and an overabundance of NGOs created an unstable and competitive environment for Refugee Help and others. NGOs constantly renegotiated old contracts whose due dates were fast approaching, while competitors kept lobbying the UNHCR for new contracts. “It’s perhaps embarrassing to admit,” one midlevel Refugee Help manager recalled, “but much of the discussion between headquarters and the field focused on contracts: securing them, maintaining them, and increasing them. The pressure was on: ‘Get more contracts!’” … Goma had become a “three-ring circus of financial self-interest, political abuse and incompetence” where aid had become “big, big money,” and any NGO “worth its salt . . . recognized that it had to be in Rwanda.” … Another Western reporter described Goma as an “aid agency supermarket” in which aid groups “blare[d] out their names and logos like soft drink manufacturers,” plastering everything from water pumps to T-shirts with advertisements.aid groups were desperate to be involved in the Goma relief effort so that they could bolster their fund-raising capacities back home.
While Ron and Cooley acknowledge that the NGOs were also motivated by normative concerns, their explanation highlights organizational survival as the key motivating factor. Susan Sell and Aseem Prakash argue too NGOs are driven by material interest as well as normative principle.
However, there is a recent very interesting paper by Tim Büthe, Solomon Major and André de Mello e Souza that comes to quite different conclusions. It looks at where major US aid organizations decide to allocate aid and its arguments, if not entirely at odds with those of Ron and Cooley and Sell and Prakash, at least suggest that cynicism doesn’t explain everything by a long shot.
In sum, we estimate a statistically and substantively significant effect for every one of the seven measures of objective recipient need, which provides strong support for the “altruistic” hypothesis that NGO allocation of private-source development aid is indeed very importantly driven by variation in the need of recipient countries. By contrast, we fail to find any statistically significant support for the “cynical” hypothesis, and in many of these models, the estimated standard error for MEDIA COVERAGE is so large that, more likely than not, the “real” effect of media coverage is indistinguishable from zero.
It’s important to note that there are limits to this set of findings. It only tells us about decisions over where to allocate aid; not the processes through which this aid is allocated once workers get there. It is also possible that smaller fly-by-night charities and subcontractors are more vulnerable to the dynamics Ron and Cooley discuss than bigger and better respected organizations. Still, it’s the first serious effort at data collection in this field that I know of, and a pretty serious and interesting contribution to debate.
Political scientists Jonathan Krasno and Gregory Robinson offer this modest proposal in Roll Call. In essence, they seek to preserve the tradition of unlimited debate, but make it harder to have those debates. Their three-pronged solution:
Make them vote…Filibustering Senators are the ones trying to prevent the Senate from voting. It would make more sense to require them, after some hours of debate, to assemble 41 votes to continue, rather than the other way around. Our compromise is to allow three-fifths of Senators present and voting to invoke cloture, making votes against just as important as votes in favor.
Make voting easier…allow a filibuster’s opponents to hold a cloture vote with little delay or warning. That would….force a filibuster’s supporters to be constantly at the ready to fend off cloture whether a vote comes at 3 p.m. or 3 a.m.
Reduce debate times…This would streamline the process and give the majority some leverage to strike deals to forgo filibusters in exchange for prolonged debate.
Not that they’re hopeful that these steps will be taken any time soon:
Unfortunately, the Senate’s rules make changes like these all but impossible.
In most circumstances, advocates for a group like to at least pretend that their group has a lot of political power. But these expectations were turned on their head when two expert witnesses took the stand in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial on the constitutionality of California’s ban on same-sex marriage, the evidentiary portion of which concluded last week. Each side had an unusual goal. The plaintiffs seeking to overturn the ban—with their expert, Stanford’s Gary Segura —were trying to show that, as a group, gays are “relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process” (San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez , 1973) and are therefore deserving of “suspect class” status. In equal-protection law lingo, such status would require heightened scrutiny of any law—including California’s same-sex marriage ban—that targets gays as a group. The defendants (and their expert, Kenneth Miller of Claremont McKenna College and like me, a somewhat-recent Berkeley Ph.D.) needed to do just the opposite and demonstrate that gay people actually possess a fair amount of political power and thus need no particular protection.
So are gays “politically powerless?” Hardly. Gay people’s votes (and their campaign contributions) are courted about as avidly by the Democrats as are those of another “captured” group in American politics—evangelical Christians—by the Republicans. (Exhibits A and B: would-be Democratic Senators, and recent converts to the cause of same-sex marriage, Harold Ford and Joe Sestak.) More important, acceptance of gay people and the notion of gay rights is now de rigeur among our nation’s elites. Nearly two-thirds of those with a graduate degree (64%) told the GSS in 2008 that they agreed with the statement that sexual relations between two men or two women is “not wrong at all.” No leading U.S. university worth its salt discriminates against gay people or denies them domestic partnership benefits (with the notable exception of religious-affilated institutions, and even they are changing). Almost all—85 percent—of the Fortune 500 have policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Continue reading "Perry v. Schwarzenegger Guest Blog: Gays and Political Power" »
In his comments to Senate Democrats yesterday, President Obama kicked into “Intro to American Politics” mode. The president invoked what has become known as “Fenno’s Paradox” after Hall of Fame congressional scholar Richard Fenno — basically, why do members of Congress always get reelected if no one thinks Congress is doing a good job?
The answer, as Obama put it, is that “When you look at polls, people hate Congress, but individual members, a lot of them feel, are really working hard on their behalf.” Thus (in Fenno’s famous phrase), “people run for Congress by running against Congress. (Here’s one useful discussion of the point, by UCLA’s Barbara Sinclair.)
This didn’t have the cheeriest implications for Senate Dems, and perhaps we might hope in any case that our U.S. Senators aced Intro to American. But as the Pew Research Center results released last week suggest, few Americans have. Only 26% knew how many votes it takes to stop a filibuster and 32% that no Republican senators supported the most recent health care bill. This suggests that the president - as so often - is really speaking not to the audience in the room, but to the public in their living rooms. Sadly, most likely the latter are watching Lost.
A decade or so ago Oona Hathaway and others noted that states that ratified the Convention Against Torture (CAT) appeared to be more likely to practice torture than states that did not sign this treaty. Ever since, scholars have been trying to make sense of this, especially since ratifying the CAT is somewhat costly (compared to other global human rights treaties).
A first set of explanations suggested that dictators signed the treaty to gain reputation or win aid concessions from Western Liberal democracies. Beth Simmons and others pointed out, however, that it wouldn’t make much sense for Western states to reward such obviously insincere behavior and that there is no evidence that authoritarian states actually get goodies for signing human rights treaties. This suggests that we should look inside autocracies. For example, my colleague Jim Vreeland’s article in International Organization argues that more pluralistic authocracies are more likely to exhibit pressures for signing treaties but also have more dissent, which provides incentives for torture.
James Hollyer and Peter Rosendorff have a new working paper that takes this quite a few steps further. They argue that dictatorships use signing the CAT as a costly signal to domestic opposition groups that they will continue to employ repressive tactics to stay in power (paper available from PEIO). Truly “bad ass” dictators are willing to pay the cost that CAT brings with it. So, these regimes sign precisely because they have no intention to comply and because everyone knows this. The model has an interesting set of empirical implications, such as that worse torturers are more likely to sign, that the CAT does help to reduce torture in those states but that the CAT also helps these dictators to stay in power longer.
I am oscillating between admiration for the sheer ingenuity of the theory and disbelief at the sheer implausibility of it all. Wouldn’t bad ass dictators have better technologies for committing to their bad-assness than signing treaties? Hollyer and Rosendorf do offer a number of anecdotes to support their mechanisms and the empirical implications they get out of the model are really interesting and largely consistent with the evidence. They are also upfront that this is not necessarily the only mechanism that explains CAT ratification. In any case, a really interesting and novel contribution to this debate that is well worth a read.
Update The Economist has picked up on this.
The popular perception of Russia these days is of a largely autocratic country with a fairly docile mass public. But as I have written previously, the Putin era shares a not just passing resemblance with the Brezhnev era: economic prosperity (or at least economic growth) was offered up as a trade-off for allowing political power to remain exclusively in the hands of the Kremlin. We all know how that ultimately worked out for the Soviet Union, but to date any discussions of a replication in Putin’s Russia have seemed premature. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth noting that figures released earlier this week show that the Russian economy contracted by 7.9% in 2009, the worst the economy has performed since 1994, which includes the economic collapse following the 1998 ruble default that did so much damage to the credibility of Yeltsin’s reforms.
While last weekend’s Anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow followed the traditional recent pattern of small numbers of protesters and a forceful response by the Russian policy, a protest in Kalingrad, a far-Western Russian region that is located between Poland and Lithuania, took an unexpected turn when between upwards of 10,000 people joined the protest, and, perhaps even more unexpectedly, was widely reported on in Russian newspapers (although largely ignored on TV). The photo above is from the protest, and the sign mocks the ruling United Russia party by saying “United Russia - United Against Russia”. For those interested in more analysis, see this post on the always excellent Power Vertical blog at RFE/RL.
Time emphasizes what Americans hate and distrust about the legislative process (which is, put simply, the workings of the legislative process), and that drives them away from the bill.
That’s Ezra Klein, drawing on the book Stealth Democracy, by political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (buy it here!). Ezra quotes this passage from the book, which nicely summarizes their argument:
…they are consequently turned off by political debate and deal making that presuppose an absence of consensus. People believe these activities would be unnecessary if if decision makers were in tune with the (consensual) public interest rather than cacophonous special interests.
But there’s one problem in trying to explain opinion about health care with process considerations. What about the extraordinary partisan polarization on health care? See the graph from Gallup below:
Klein talks about what “Americans” think about the process and the bill. But there are no “Americans” here. There are groups of partisans with strongly divergent views. Clearly, the lengthy process isn’t turning off Democrats. In fact, their support has increased of late, according to Gallup:
Is it turning off Republicans? Perhaps. But a much more plausible explanation is that Republicans either didn’t support health care reform from the outset because it was associated with Obama and the Democratic Party, or came to dislike it after a barrage of criticism from Republican political leaders.
Okay, but what about independents? Are their views on health care due to their revulsion at “the process”? That would strike me as plausible if independents support for the bill kept declining as the process dragged on. In the graph above, there was a decline from the middle of September to the beginning of November. But no decline thereafter, even as the allegedly “worst” parts of the process — the Cornhusker compromise, the backroom conversations among Democratic leaders, etc. — took place. This is a point I’ve made before.
In fact, most of the growth in opposition to health care took place in the early stages of the process, not as the process wore on:
So while it’s true that opposition to health care reform is positively related to the length of the process, that doesn’t imply any causal relationship. The rapid increase in opposition and the partisan polarization in opinion suggests that the lengthy process matters not by opening people’s eyes to the cruel realities of legislating, but by giving opponents of reform additional time to attack it.
Warning: complete time-suck. This site, Congress Speaks, will allow you to compare members of the 110th Congress in terms of the number of words they spoke, what words they used most frequently, and several other metrics. It’s pretty cool.
[Hat tip to Scott McClurg]
In his State of the Union address and budget message, Barack Obama spent no little effort reminding his audience that he had inherited a terrible fiscal situation. In the spirit of bipartisan blame-shifting, here’s a related gem from the archives.
This one comes from the Reagan years (and more proximately from the James Baker papers at Princeton): a 1984 memo from Budget Director David Stockman, writing to the president to defend the fiscal 1985 budget proposal. The conservative journal Human Events had turned on Reagan in this instance, arguing that “there is virtually no cost containment in this budget”: it was more spendthrift than Jimmy Carter’s budgets both in money and share of GNP and spent wildly on social programs. Worse than Carter? Ouch. Stockman had to admit the basic fiscal facts – and didn’t want to antagonize Human Events - but took twelve painstaking pages to argue they should be read another way and that the dire budgetary situation really wasn’t his (or Reagan’s) fault.
I’ve posted the full memo here. What’s most notable perhaps is the overriding pragmatism of the document - a facet of Reagan’s governing style that Reagan scholars realize about the administration but modern Reagan acolytes’ paeans to his conservative steadfastness often don’t.
Part of the problem, Stockman argued, was the stagnant economy of 1981-82, which had made even constant government spending take a larger share of the overall economy. But policy priorities – new, and inherited – were structural roadblocks to reform. Defense couldn’t be cut. Debt service had already surfaced as a problematic fixed cost. So of course had entitlements. Stockman rued the “screams and demagoguery” (from Republicans too) that met any attempts to cut spending. From education to farm subsidies to Black Lung payments, “Our hands were tied.” And “attempting deep cuts in Medicare and Social Security could wipe out the Republican party,” Stockman told the president. “…Some education of our supporters along these lines will be necessary after the election.”
Peter Orszag might well sympathize. And if he sends me his twelve pages, we’ll post that too.
Among the many interesting papers presented at the PEIO conference last week was a paper by Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak on the effect of malapportionment on gasoline taxes and support for climate change policies. Malappportionment results in the overrepresentation of rural voters in political systems. The U.S. system (especially the Senate) is unusually bad in this regard but many electoral systems around the world have this effect. Compared to urban voters, rural voters in industrialized countries drive more and thus have a greater preference for low gasoline taxes. Broz and Maliniak show that gasoline prices are indeed lower when rural voters are overrepresented. Moreover, they show that rural overrepresentation lessens support for the Kyoto Treaty. Here is the full paper.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is back in the news again, and in the spirit of the Monkey Cage, I started thinking about what social science had to offer this debate. MC Guest Blogger Pat Egan weighed in at Politico’s Arena on the likelihood of the policy actually being changed this time around:
Regardless of how you feel about whether “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be repealed, one thing is clear: the stars are much better aligned in 2010 for allowing openly gay personnel to serve in the military than they were when Bill Clinton developed the policy in 1993.
Public opinion has moved strongly in favor of the idea (from 44 percent support in a 1993 ABC/Washington Post poll to 75 percent in the same poll conducted in 2008). For the most part, the Obama team has not become identified with the kind of culture-war issues that so quickly engulfed the Clinton agenda. Whatever you think of Obama’s “surge” strategy in Afghanistan, it has provided some cover against the charge that he’s a squishy dove on military policy. And perhaps most important, the Joint Chiefs (or at least their chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen) are on board—not just reluctantly, but unequivocally, as we saw in Mullen’s testimony today before Congress.
Over in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol weighed in with something that looked like it was calling for empirical evidence, noting that “questions about the effect of open homosexuals on unit morale and cohesion in training and combat situations remain relevant”. My response to Kristol, posted at Politco’s Arena as well, took issue with his argument in the following way:
Exactly what are those questions? Is Kristol suggesting that men and women in the our armed forces will be unable to do their jobs properly if they know that that one of their colleagues are gay? I’d think he could have a little more confidence of in the professionalism of the soldiers in “the most professional force in the history of our country”.
At a time when, as Kristol notes, our “men and women in uniform are performing heroically in two wars”, how could it possibly serve our national security interests to dismiss some of them – regardless of their performance as soldiers – on the basis of their sexual preference? Talk about a blow to morale: watching good colleagues who have volunteered to serve their country lose their jobs for nothing more than what other consenting adults they choose to date.
Of course, at the end of the day, neither Kristol nor I presented any evidence to back up our arguments. I happen to think my assumptions - our soldiers are professional enough to carry out their jobs even if they happen to find out one of their colleagues are gay, and that morale might be hurt for seeing colleagues fired for reasons related to sexuality - are more valid than his assumptions, essentially that our soldiers will be unable to do their jobs as well if they realize they have gay colleagues.
So this is where The Monkey Cage comes in. I wanted to ask readers whether or not there was any social science research out there about the performance of soldiers who have served in units with openly gay soldiers, and whether this has had any discernible affect on unit performance. Any evidence from countries that allow openly gay soldiers to serve in the military? Kristol says questions are still out there - maybe we can help answer them. (And yes, I realize I wandering into that same ambiguous space I addressed last spring when posting on the ethics of research on the efficacy of torture, but since I’m not the one actually conducting the research and simply calling for people to respond with research already conducted, I feel like I’m on safe enough ground here. Plus the blogging format ensures that anyone who has research to share will be heard in the comments section.)
We discover and document errors in public use microdata samples (“PUMS files”) of the 2000 Census, the 2003-2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004-2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men ages 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15% from counts in published data tables. Moreover, an analysis of labor force participation and marriage rates suggests the PUMS samples are not representative of the population at individual ages for those ages 65 and over. PUMS files substantially underestimate labor force participation of those near retirement ages and overestimate labor force participation rates of those at older ages. These problems were an unintentional by-product of the misapplication of a newer generation of disclosure avoidance procedures carried out on the data. The resulting errors in the public use data could significantly impact studies of people ages 65 and older, particularly analyses of variables that are expected to change by age.
That’s from a new paper by Trent Alexander, Michael Davern, and Betsey Stevenson. See also Justin Wolfers’ post at Freakonomics.
Barack Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2011 was released yesterday, of course (here’s the official document), and there has been immediate attention to the ups and downs of total spending and the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ within it. (Here’s the Washington Post story on that point, and Politico’s.) There will be special attention on its rather red bottom line (here’s the take of the less holier-than-thou-than-it-sounds Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.)
It’s worth remembering in all this that Congress retains the “power of the purse.” But what I want to stress here, given the quick sequence of presidential messages these past days, is that over time the budget has arguably become more important than the State of the Union in presenting the president’s legislative agenda. As early as January 1946, in fact, Harry Truman melded his State of the Union and proposed Budget into a single message to Congress. “It is clear that the budgetary program and the general program of the Government are actually inseparable,” Truman said. “The president bears the responsibility for recommending to the Congress a comprehensive set of proposals on all Government activities and their financing.” Obama didn’t literally combine the two, of course, but one can’t fully understand the appealing rhetorical references to reform in the State of the Union without filling in the sometimes less-appealing details from the Budget Message.
By the way, these days, Truman’s claim that “the president bears the responsibility” for pulling together “a comprehensive set of proposals on all Government activities” seems like stating the obvious. We judge presidents by their legislative leadership, and that includes their programmatic prowess. But in 1946 Truman was laying claim to some important interbranch turf — not up there with Marbury v. Madison, maybe, but a big step past the constitutional invitation (not requirement) to “recommend to [congressional] consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
Indeed, the fact of a president’s annual legislative program — different from presidents taking positions on key issues of the day — reflects something of a power grab for the right to set the national agenda. And a successful one, if aided and abetted by Congress itself.
What happened? Back to the Truman years we go…
Continue reading "Agenda Setting & the Budget Message: The Back Story" »
The New York Times has a nice interactive graphic of Obama’s 2011 budget proposal.
[Hat tip to Scott McClurg]
Political scientists believe unanimously that economic conditions play an important role in shaping public opinion. I don’t think you could find one who would suggest that a president one year into his term facing double-digit unemployment could avoid a significant drop in popularity.
One complaint I have with the mainstream media is its habit of ignoring such structural factors and explaining changes in public opinion almost solely as the outcome of ideological positioning by candidates and elected officials. In defense of the MSM, they do this in a bipartisan way. Whenever a party suffers electoral misfortune, the media will attribute it to a failure to heed to wishes of the center, coupled with demands that the losing party purge itself of ideological sin and embrace the moderate center.
The rest of the piece is an argument with a former aide to Karl Rove. For the purposes of this blog, I’m just happy to see political science get its due. Chait also notes that he did not over-intepret the 2008 election as a sweeping mandate, for which he deserves credit.
[Hat tip to Brendan Nyhan.]
In the course of going through some archival notes on the president’s budget message and legislative program (on which some more extended comments soon), I came across a January 1951 memo entitled “State of the Union Message.” It’s from Harold Enarson of the Bureau of the Budget (now OMB) to Richard Neustadt, later the author of Presidential Power but at that time a White House staffer to President Truman. His comments still resonate, in various ways.
“The eternal problem of the ‘speechifier’ is to avoid overemphasis,” Enarson wrote. “Maybe civilization is at the crossroads and this is the year of decision — but crisis is now as annual as the budget….This is not in any way a nation presently dedicated to sacrifice and hence our words ought to more nearly fit the facts.”
By the way, the federal government ran a $6 billion (about $58 billion in 2005 dollars) surplus in fiscal 1951.
This one is making the rounds:
From the Orleans Parish coroner’s race.
[Hat tip to Eric Lawrence.]
Really??? He’s almost 80 years old! Yeah, I know, U.S. senator is a pretty cushy job, not much heavy lifting involved, but still . . .
P.S. If I’m still blogging when I’m 80, please don’t throw this one back at me.
David Shor writes:
I just read an idea for a pollster that crowd-sources statistical work, and was curious what you thought about the idea.
Here’s the idea:
Today, there is a new polling method available: IVR, or ‘Interactive Voice Response’ polling. Basically, the pollster records several questions, a computer auto-dials hundreds of landlines, and with the people who are willing to participate in the survey, they go through the script automatically.Even though the old media pollsters and traditional polling organisations like AAPOR are busy discrediting those polls that they condescendingly call ‘robopolls’, there is not much evidence that they do any worse than live-interviewer polls- but they are much, much cheaper. . . .
Now, the next step to make polls even easier to access for everyone is there- with the mid-January start-up of the IVR pollster Precision Polling.
From Precision Polling’s website:
Automated Phone Surveys are phone calls where a recorded voice asks you questions and you type in responses on your keypad (e.g. “Who will get your vote for mayor? Press 1 for Joe…”). This provides a fast and affordable way to get answers from real people.
What do I think? I think it’s evil. These robopolls “fast and affordable” for the pollster but not for the person being hassled by the phone call. I think these machine phone calls should be illegal—yes, I would eagerly support a law making it illegal to call someone if there’s no human making the call (fax and data transmission excepted, of course). This would have the side benefit of making all those pre-election endorsement auto-calls illegal, as well as various obnoxious calls used by collection agencies.
It’s simply an abuse of the phone system, just as it would be an abuse of the electrical system to sneak into your neighbor’s house one night, plug in a really long extension cord, and run it out their window to your house to power your appliances.
“Fast and affordable,” indeed! Fast, affordable, and abusive is more like it.
P.S. I feel bad even giving these dudes publicity, but I figure, once it’s on Daily Kos it’s already been read by a million people, so I hope the good I’m doing by disparaging this idea outweighs the harm I’m doing by publicizing it.
P.P.S. I’m not saying the Daily Kos diarist (“twohundertseventy”) is evil, or even that that the people at Precision Polling are bad guys. I just don’t know if they’ve thought through the ethical implications of their suggestion, which amounts to bombarding millions of people with irritating calls at dinnertime. Or perhaps they have a retort to my ethical argument, something like: Lots of people enjoy answering polls, or Polls are essential to democracy. OK, if they’re so damn essential, try paying people to participate in your poll. You’re making money off of them, why not give something back to the people you’re hassling? Grrrr.
This paper shows that people’s optimism towards financial markets and the overall economy is dynamically influenced by their political affiliation and the existing political climate. Republicans (Democrats) are more optimistic and they perceive the markets to be less risky and more undervalued when the Republican (Democratic) party is in power. These optimism shifts are more pronounced among individuals with lower financial sophistication. Further, when the opposite party is in power, investors lower their forecasts of market returns, keep own portfolio return forecasts unchanged and, therefore, appear more overconfident. These shifts in optimism, overconfidence, and perceptions of risk and reward influence people’s investment decisions. Specifically, investors with a pessimistic view of the domestic economy exhibit strong propensity to invest in foreign stocks and in the domestic setting, they gravitate toward less risky, familiar local stocks and trade more actively. Investors improve their raw portfolio performance when their own party is in power, but the improvement in risk-adjusted performance is economically small.
The paper is by Yosef Bonaparte, Alok Kumar, and Jeremy K. Page (here). Hat tip to this NY Times article. Some of these findings depend on categorizing investors based as Republican or Democrat based on the political leaning of the counties in which they lived. That is obviously imprecise, although not necessarily fatal. The results struck me as substantively small in magnitude — e.g., when the Democrats controlled the White House, Republic portfolios had a 9% greater foreign stake compared to Democratic portfolios. Similarly, in-party portfolios manifested 1.3% higher levels of risk and — based in part on higher trading in out-party portfolios — 2.7% better performance. But substantive significance is sometimes specific to the topic, and I profess no knowledge of this one.
One does not normally expect to find a political scientist in the midst of a debate within the pages of the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. Yet that is exactly where Scott Gehlbach of UW-Madison and co-author John Earle of the Upjohn Institute find themselves at the moment. Here’s the background (from materials posted at the Upjohn Institute):
Was mass privatization a “crucial determinant” of the increased mortality in postcommunist societies during the 1990s? This claim appears in a recent article [by David Stuckler, Lawrence King, and Martin McKee] in the British medical journal Lancet. The article shows a positive correlation between the extent of enterprise privatization and the adult male mortality rate using country-level data for 15 economies of the former Soviet Union.
The results of this study were widely reported in the mass media (see for example here, here, and here), including articles with titles such as Privatization Killed a Million People in Eastern Europe.
If true, the claims made by the article are profoundly important, both for assigning blame for suffering in the past but also as a guide to potential policy-making in the future. With that in mind, Gehlbach and Earle set out to examine the robustness of the findings in the original article. Their conclusion:
[Our] analysis shows that the estimated correlation of privatization and mortality in country-level data is not robust to recomputing the mass-privatization measure, to assuming a short lag for economic policies to affect mortality, and to controlling for country-specific mortality trends. Further, in an analysis of the determinants of mortality in Russian regions, the analysis finds no evidence that privatization increased mortality during the early 1990s. Finally, reanalysis of the relationship between privatization and unemployment in postcommunist countries shows that there is little support for the Lancet article’s proposed mechanism by which privatization might have increased mortality.
The full letter to the editor by Gehlbach and Earlecan be found here. You can get the response of the authors to the Gehlbach and Earle criticque on the Lancet website (you have to register for access first, but it is free). You can also find the full paper by Gehlbach and Earle here; more information, including a press release is available here.
A few quick comments in response. It seems clear that the claims in the original Lancet article are not robust to the re-specifications proposed by Gehlbach and Earle. Thus the debate shifts to the question of whether these are “legitimate” robustness tests, and here there seem to be two big questions in play (and I would welcome comments from readers of the Monkey Cage on both of these points) leaving aside some coding disagreements between the two sets of authors. First, Stuckler, King, and McKee argue that in “in a situation where mortality rates were undergoing fluctuations that were unprecedented in a peacetime era” it is inappropriate to add control variables that attempt to pick up other aspects of mortality time trends across the different countries. Gehlbach and Earle argue that the original specification assumes these trends are constant across all countries, and then present data to show that this was not in fact the case. Second, Stuckler, King, and McKee argue that the best specification for testing a relationship between privatization and unemployment is to use measures from the same period of time, justifying this on the grounds that “given evidence that workers’ stress rose in anticipation of privatisation, adverse causal effects could have occurred in the period before privatisation”. Thus, they argue, the findings do not need to be robust to re-estimation with one and two year lags in the effect of mass privatization.
[In the interest of full disclosure, Gehlbach is a friend of mine and I had the opportunity to see his research presented while in progress at an academic conference this summer.]
*****
Update: I originally posted this without the link to the full Gehlbach and Earle paper. This has now been corrected in the text above, and is also available here.
In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to have Paul Staniland, a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies present the following post-election analysis of the 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election:
Sri Lanka’s presidential election, the first since the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, further entrenched the incumbent government of Mahinda Rajapaksa. Rajapaksa’s major opponent, General (ret.) Sarath Fonseka, was the chief of the army in the victorious struggle against the Tigers but had turned against Rajapaksa when he was stripped of real power after the war. The campaign was ugly and sometimes violent, marked by charges of war crimes, coups d’etat, vote rigging, treason, and corruption. Approximately 800 violent incidents were reported during the course of the campaign. The aftermath of the election included government charges that Fonseka had planned a coup against his government, while Fonseka is reportedly now considering going into exile.
Rajapaksa and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-led coalition ultimately took 57% of the vote while Fonseka, the common opposition candidate, won 40%. Despite expectations of a tight contest, Rajapaksa dominated in ethnic Sinhalese areas and thus overcame Fonseka’s higher levels of support in cities and ethnic Tamil and Muslim regions. This map shows the demographic breakdown: Rajapaksa won the Sinhalese-majority southern and western parts of the country, while Fonseka did better in less-populous Tamil and Muslim areas in the north and east. What can we draw from both the process and the outcome of the election?
First, the government and SLFP used state resources and patronage to get out the vote. Fonseka was a threat because he could undermine Rajapaksa’s credit for defeating the LTTE. In response, the Rajapaksa campaign fully exploited the advantages of incumbency, in sharp contrast to a shambolic Fonseka campaign. Organizationally, the SLFP’s patronage machine was highly effective at mobilizing rural voters and at pulling away defectors from the opposition. Crucially, Rajapaksa’s campaign skillfully exploited its position in power. Rajapaksa was portrayed in the state media as the prime reason for the destruction of the LTTE while Fonseka’s gaffes on the campaign trail were ideal fodder for criticism and often-dubious accusations. Rajapaksa offered a clear Sinhalese nationalist political line that was linked to economic development promises. The election commissioner publicly protested these irregularities, but there is no evidence of massive vote rigging.
Continue reading "2010 Sri Lankan Presidential Election: Post-Election Report" »
Ben Bernanke begins his second term as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve on Monday. Yet, as recently as a week ago, his re-confirmation seemed to be on the ropes. The Republican upset in Massachusetts raised the specter that confirming Bernanke could become a liability this November. Amidst such concerns, Democratic and Republican Senate leaders refused to tip their hands about how they or their caucuses would vote. Democrats wanted Republicans to pony up votes to share the blame for an unpopular appointment; Republicans wanted Democrats to shoulder the load for confirming Obama’s nominee (even if he was originally a Bush appointee). At the same time, senators likely understood that if Bernanke were to be defeated, a more dovish nominee could not be confirmed and a more hawkish chair would not be nominated.
There is plenty of commentary on why Bernanke’s confirmation became so contentious. His critics (including the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Richard Shelby) charged that Bernanke was asleep at the wheel as the housing bubble emerged, that he failed to adequately deploy the Fed’s supervisory powers to regulate reckless banks, and that he then pushed to bail them out when the economy teetered in September 2008. To be sure, Bernanke had his fair share of defenders, who argued that his boldness prevented economic Armageddon and that rejecting a Fed nominee would wreak havoc in markets, undermining the recovery.
That a Democratic Senate might reject a Democratic president’s Fed nominee might seem unlikely to some. Still, we know that the White House felt it needed to make an aggressive push and that financial giants like Warren Buffett were enlisted to lobby selectively on Bernanke’s behalf. Even Bernanke called and visited with wavering senators in a public and unprecedented effort to save his job (this, on top of last year’s first-ever appearance of a Fed chair on 60 Minutes).
This past Thursday, the Senate confirmed Bernanke. Seventy-seven senators voted to cut off debate (invoking “cloture”) and seventy (including a bare majority of Republicans) voted for confirmation. Bernanke now holds the dubious distinction of securing confirmation as Fed chair with the smallest margin ever.
The vote raises two questions: What forces shaped the vote? And of what consequence is the vote?
Continue reading "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way (Back) to the Fed" »
I have spent the last few days at an excellent conference at Georgetown on the Political Economy of International Organizations, expertly organized by my colleague Jimmy-Ray Vreeland. The conference mostly attracts European economists and American political scientists (a good mix) specializing in international economic institutions, especially the IMF and World Bank, although there were also papers on the environment, human rights and other issues of cooperation. All papers can be downloaded from the conference web-site and are well-worth a look.
I am resuming my irregular Soccernomics blogging. One of the fun insights of the book is that no soccer club from any capital of a democratic country has ever won the European cup. The exception is Real Madrid which gained its status under fascism (the club was always strongly associated with Franco). Benfica from Lisbon also did very well under dictatorship. Instead, in democracies, the cup has largely been won by teams from industrial cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Milan, Munich, Eindhoven, Marseille, and Turin.No team from Paris or London has ever won. More generally, in authoritarian states, teams from the capital (and government seat) tend to win national titles with much greater regularity than in democracies.
Their explanation is a mix of resources (mostly coming from the state in authoritarian states but from the private sector in market democracies), capture (the state tended to interfere in the success of capital city teams in authoriarian states whereas industrials did so in democracies), and attention (not much else to do for fun in industrial towns). They also argue that this is all about to change as clubs are increasingly being financed by globe-trotting billionaires.
I am not sure if parallels exist to other regions (Latin America?) or aspects of social life. If it is true that authoritarian governments have tended to privilige investment in capital cities more than democracies, it would be interesting to see if these legacies persist once states become democratic. Any way, fun stuff to ponder.
ps. The authors have to make an exception for AJAX Amsterdam, which has won the cup four times. While Amsterdam is the Dutch capital, the government seat is in The Hague, which has had a dreadful team. Moreover, PSV Eindhoven, a team from a small industrial (Philips) city has also won the cup and has won more national titles in recent years than AJAX.
