The Monkey Cage

Mike Axelrod writes:

I [Axelrod] am interested in building a model that predicts voting on the precinct level, using variables such as party registration, age, sex, income etc. Surely political scientists have worked on this problem. I would be grateful for any reference you could provide in the way of articles and books.

My reply: Political scientists have worked on this problem, and it’s easy enough to imagine hierarchical models of the sort discussed in my book with Jennifer. I can picture what I would do if asked to forecast at the precinct level, for example to model exit polls. (In fact, I was briefly hired by the exit poll consortium in 2000 to do this, but then after I told them about hierarchical Bayes, they un-hired me!) But I don’t actually know of any literature on precinct-level forecasting. Perhaps one of you out there knows of some references?

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the APSA meeting, there will be a panel honoring Lee’s scholarly and personal contributions. Here are the specifics:

Friday, Sept. 3
2-3:45 pm
Marriott Thurgood Marshall Ballroom North.

A variety of people will speak on Lee’s accomplishments and contributions, each of them with a very short time limit (as Lee probably would have wanted). There will also be cookies at the panel (as Lee definitely would have wanted).

Immediately following this panel, Cambridge University Press will sponsor a reception. This will be held in the room next door. Rumor has it that beer will be served. Lee didn’t drink, but I know he wouldn’t have minded if we drank in his memory.

Posted by John Sides at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the five years since the Hurricane, what has political science taught us about Katrina and its aftermath?

• Contrary to images of anarchy, there was substantial cooperation among the evacuees in the days after the storm. Sam Whitt and Rick Wilson’s research in Houston’s post-Katrina shelters undermines the popular image that the storm led to a breakdown in social norms. Evacuees played a “public goods” game, where they could divide $10 between themselves and the group. Donations to the group were then collected, doubled, and distributed equally. There is a clear incentive to free ride—to contribute nothing and reap the rewards of others’ generosity. But despite everything they had experienced, the evacuees showed considerable cooperative behavior, putting almost 40% of their money into the pool.

• Communities that hosted Katrina evacuees responded with a remarkable mobilization of volunteers, much of it coordinated through churches. Some of my own research on Katrina details that the call to help the evacuees led to a midnight traffic jam in Houston, as thousands of volunteers rushed to assist. In fact, 36% of Houston residents reported volunteering to assist the evacuees. In Baton Rouge, the figure was even higher, at 52%. Arkansas opted to mobilize church-based networks; there, an astounding 87% of weekly church attendees made Katrina-related donations.

• Networks could also work against the evacuees, keeping them out of communities. Daniel Aldrich and Kevin Crook (gated) find that communities with higher pre-storm levels of volunteerism were less likely to be sites for FEMA trailers.

• Public opinion in the host communities were shaped by the unflattering public image the evacuees brought with them. That’s from more of my research. Looking at a survey conducted in the months after Katrina, I found that Houston residents’ political attitudes looked very similar to people with the same demographics living elsewhere in the South. The one important exception: Houston residents were notably more worried about crime. In Baton Rouge, residents stuck out for being more opposed to public spending on the poor.

• The blame for Katrina’s aftermath didn’t fall entirely along partisan lines. Separate articles by Neil Malhotra and Alexander Kuo (gated) and Brad Gomez and J. Matthew Wilson (gated) consider how blame for Katrina was partitioned given that multiple levels of government were involved. As voters’ information improves, so too does their willingness to blame the poor governmental response on actors beyond the President.

Posted by Daniel Hopkins at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Loyal (and not so loyal) readers of the Monkey Cage might be interested in two roundtables on Congress sponsored this week by the Legislative Studies Section at the APSA annual meeting in D.C.. Roundtables typically consist of opening statements from the participants, moderated discussion with the panelists, and then an open audience Q/A. The more the merrier, so I hope to see you there. (You know, if we had Monkey Cage t-shirts— or aprons— we’d be easier to spot in a crowd.)

United We Govern? Roundtable on Obama and the Democratic Congress
Date: Thursday, Sep 2, 2010, 10:15 AM-12:00 PM
Location: Hilton Hotel, Cardozo Room

Participants: Steven Smith (Washington University, St. Louis), Tom Mann (Brookings), Norm Ornstein (AEI), David Mayhew (Yale).

Moderator: Sarah Binder (GWU-Brookings)

Filibustering and the 111th Congress: Too Many Hands on the Brake?
Date: Friday, Sep 3, 2010, 10:15 AM-12:00 PM
Location: Marriott (Woodley Park) Johnson Room

Participants: Steven S. Smith (Washington University, St. Louis), David Mayhew (Yale), Ezra Klein (Washington Post), Brian Darling (Heritage)

Moderator: Gregory Koger (University of Miami)

Posted by Sarah Binder at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Cosma, this Ta-Nehisi Coates post gives a nice critique of selection bias in action.

Ayres finds this depressing, and laments that black women have “an uphill battle.” TIME uses the study, and others of online dating sites, and concludes that black women “will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races.”

Look, I deeply suspect that, on a national level, there are an unfortunate number of people who think black women are less attractive then women of other races. The remnants of white supremacy are not just economic, they are cultural. I also think that’s less true today then it was twenty years ago.

But that said, I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women. One significant problem is that, as any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don’t go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they’re truly high post, they go to EliteNoire. (Dig the sensuous piano riffs and candelabra.)

Black people who are going to a site like OKcupid are generally black people who, with some exceptions, are open to interracial dating. But the same isn’t true of white people on OKcupid.
So the game is rigged—on OKcupid you have many white men who have no interest in dating black women, but very few black men with no interest in dating white women.

That’s because all the black men who don’t want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection.

Also via Cosma, Power law mugs surely outgeek APSA beer steins by a pretty substantial margin.

Posted by Henry at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Are events in Russia beginning to resemble those of the early perestroika period?

• Continuing bad news for Democrats on the generic ballot and advice from political scientists on how to translate generic ballot polls into election outcomes

• A great display of century old color pictures from Russia

• Very excited to see Messi, David Villa, and Iniesta get goals in Barcelona’s opener as well as Diego Forlan picking up where he left off last summer for Athletico Madrid

• Does anyone else think that the Dodgers complaining about Manny Ramirez is sort of like getting upset that the person you are currently dating is cheating on you if your relationship with that person started because they were cheating on someone else with you?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This story by Joshua Tucker on the popularity of the Polish twin politicians reminded me of these thoughts from a few years ago:

Continue reading "Twins" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via a colleague:

If CBO’s projected real GDP growth for 2012 (3.4% in Table C-1) is correct (and the administration and Fed projections seem to be in the same ballpark), Obama’s expected popular vote margin is 8 percentage points, +/- 7 (i.e., 85-90% chance of reelection). If GDP growth in 2012 turned out to be half of that, Obama would still be a 2-to-1 favorite.

The economy is not “all that matters” by any means. For one thing, there’s that +/- 7. Also, my projection takes account of how long the incumbent party has held the White House. Obama’s ace in the hole is that it is very rare for a party to lose after just one term. Given that fact, Obama doesn’t need a great deal of economic growth (or anything else) to be favored for reelection.

Posted by John Sides at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

John has already mentioned the political science meets journalism and Perspectives on Politics panels at APSA. In the twin spirits of promoting excellence and promoting self, I also want to mention a panel on campaign finance where John is presenting a joint paper of ours on the ‘Kos’ effect (it’s 8am on Thursday - but you get to see other awesome people too), and a “Future of IPE” panel (which I’m informally dubbing ‘can we have an IPE that doesn’t suck, thank you very much) panel that same afternoon. Details below. Others should feel free to mention the details of awesome-sounding panels that they are participating in, attending, or would be attending if they weren’t downing beer at the bar, in comments to this post.

————————————-

Where’s My Money? Donating as a Political Behavior

Date: Thursday, Sep 2, 2010, 8:00 AM-9:45 AM

Chair: Daniel A. Smith
University of Florida, dasmith@ufl.edu

Author(s):
Should the Evolving Role of the Internet in Political Fundraising and Organizing Alter Our Views About Citizens’ Participation in Elections? — Results of a Survey of 2008 Presidential Campaign Donors
Wesley Joe
Campaign Finance Institute
Michael J. Malbin
SUNY, Albany and The Campaign Finance Institute, mmalbin@cfinst.org
Clyde Wilcox
Georgetown University, wilcoxc@georgetown.edu

Understanding the Surge in the Numbers of Small and Large Donors to Federal Candidates, Parties and PACs in 2008 and What it Means for the Political Process in 2010 and Beyond.
David B. Magleby
Brigham Young University, david_magleby@byu.edu
Jay Goodliffe
Brigham Young University, goodliffe@byu.edu
Bradley Jones
University of Wisconsin-Madison, bmjones3@wisc.edu

The Political Geography of Campaign Contributions: Political Participation in a Complex Institutional Environment
Elisabeth R. Gerber
University of Michigan, ergerber@umich.edu
Jenna Bednar
University of Michigan, jbednar@umich.edu

The Kos Bump: The Political Economy of Campaign Fundraising in the Internet Age
John M. Sides
George Washington University, jsides@gwu.edu

————————————-

Daniel W. Drezner
Tufts University, ddrezner@gmail.com

Why the Rules We Got Weren’t Exactly the Rules We Needed: Transgovernmental Networks, Domestic Historical Trajectories, and the International Financial Architecture
Abraham Newman
Georgetown University, aln24@georgetown.edu

The Partial Rebirth of Keynesianism
Henry Farrell
George Washington University, henry@henryfarrell.net

The Mysteries of Markets: Risk Premiums for Sovereign Borrowers During the Great Recession
Layna Mosley
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, mosley@unc.edu

Politics and Publics in Large Open Economies
David Leblang
University of Virginia, leblang@virginia.edu

Market Power and the Future of the Dollar
Herman Schwartz
University of Virginia, hms2f@virginia.edu

Posted by Henry at 04:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You may or may not know that you can commemorate the upcoming APSA meeting by purchasing an 2010 APSA Annual Meeting t-shirt. Or coffee mug. Or messenger bag. Or wall clock. Or beer stein (above).

Me, I’m holding out for the apron. More is here.

Posted by John Sides at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Let me just say - if it is not immediately obvious - that this proposed blog, if it were to come into being, would immediately go on the blogroll (although, Andrew at least may not have time, since he is already contributing to three blogs including this one …).

Scott Rosenberg is too polite to suggest a more cynical reason for Carr’s anti-link obfuscation: it’s the latest episode in Carr’s profitable series as Web-critic-on-call. Nevertheless, Rosenberg’s piece is very worth reading especially for how it takes apart Carr’s misleading “studies show” appeal to scientific authority. I’m dreaming of a new blog called Studies Do Not Show with Rosenberg, Mark Liberman, Andrew Gelman, and Cosma Shalizi as founding contributors…

Posted by Henry at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When political scientists arrive in Washington, DC over the next few days, they’ll be stepping into a close closely contested Mayor’s race between the incumbent mayor Adrian Fenty and the City Council Chairman, Vincent Gray. Color is playing a role in the race, and not just because the Democratic primary features candidates named “Gray,” “Orange,” and “Brown.” Voter support has split along racial lines, with African American voters preferring Gray and whites preferring Fenty. (Both candidates are black.)

One criticism of the incumbent mayor Fenty is that he has favored predominantly white neighborhoods, like APSA’s host Woodley Park and its Northwest neighbors. Chairman Gray has echoed those concerns, telling a local radio station that “[b]e it real or be it perceived, there is a view that people in certain parts of this city, especially predominantly African American [parts], have not been well served by this administration.”

And that criticism—which is by no means unique to DC—points to a gaping hole in a wave of recent studies of local distributive politics conducted by economists and political scientists. While several of our studies have looked at the relationship between local ethnic/racial diversity and public spending across cities (here, here, or here), there is little systematic work on how public goods are distributed within cities. Our recent work has focused on the share of the city’s money devoted to parks or libraries, paying little attention to where within the city those resources are going. Claims like Gray’s are common in big-city politics. But political scientists haven’t been testing them systematically.

That’s what makes work now underway by Georgetown graduate student Lindsay Pettingill intriguing. Pettingill collected all of the calls made to D.C.’s 311 hotline—over 1.5 million calls in all—from 2000-2009. These calls are service requests, and the District tracks its response times to each request. Pettingill shows below how these response times vary both by ward and by year.

First, we see substantial improvement in average response times. In 2000, it was taking the District upwards of 40 days to respond. By 2009, that figure was down to 11 on average. Most of the decline took place during the tenure of Anthony Williams, Fenty’s predecessor. The other key fact: response times across neighborhoods have converged over the years, with just two days separating the neighborhood with the longest response time from the neighborhood with the shortest response time in 2009. Calls from the heavily black neighborhoods like Berry Farm and Kenilworth don’t seem to go unanswered. In fact, it was the predominantly white neighborhoods in Northwest that initially saw the slowest response times, although those gaps have closed. Of course, this is not the only metric of bias in District services—and capital projects could tell a very different story. But if you see a broken meter outside the Woodley Park Marriott, don’t expect special service because of that green Fenty sign on the nearby lawn.

Posted by Daniel Hopkins at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I don’t know how many of you reading this have ever fielded your own survey (or paid for someone else to field a survey you’ve designed), but one frustrating part of this enterprise is that you spend hours and hours trying to come up with great questions for your survey, only to revisit the data years later and realize that 90% of the questions you spent all that time thinking about have never made it anywhere near one of your published papers. Fortunately, we now have blogs…

With that in mind, here’s the result of a survey question we asked in Poland in 2006 at the height of the “Kaczynski era”, when Lech Kaczynski was president of Poland and his twin bother Jaroslaw was the Prime Minister. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time twins have ever held the two highest executive offices in the land simultaneously anywhere. So what did the Polish people think about this situation at the time?

Interestingly, when Lech Kaczynski was elected President of Poland in 2005, it was (a) immediately following the parliamentary elections, which had been won by the party his brother headed and (b) in the second round of of a two-round majoritarian system, which meant that a majority of voters had to vote for him in the second round for him to be elected (and indeed he had received 54% of the vote). Following the partliamentary elections brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski had announced that he, personally, would not become prime minister, in part to reduce apprehension over the prospect of twins as president and prime minister. However, J. Kaczynski installed himself as prime minister in July of 2006, and our survey was taken two months later. An interesting research question would be to try to disentangle whether the answer to this question simply reflected disenchantment with the Kaczynski’s and their Law and Justice political party - they would go on to be soundly defeated in the 2007 parliamentary elections - and how much hostility towards twins holding the two highest offices in the land was (is) exogenous to the performance of the Kaczynskis and PiS and therefore might have actually instead been a partial contributing factor to PiS’s defeat in 2007.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

At the an interesting-looking, and relatively new polisci blog, Rule22 (yes, that Rule 22), Jordan Ragusa takes a crack at this and supplies more detail here about a forthcoming article on repeals of major legislation.

Ragusa notes, of course, that no one thinks health care reform will be repealed in its entirety and that “repeal” is a catch-all for various proposed modifications to the ACA. In the paper, he defines repeal as repeal of at least one major provision. Ragusa then examines a large dataset of “landmark laws” from 1951-2006 and uses a hazard model to estimate the likelihood of “death” (i.e., repeal).

He finds that for the first 10 years after enactment, policies become increasingly likely to be repealed, maxing out at 13% . After the 10-year mark, the probability of repeal declines consistently. After 40 years, the chance of repeal is maybe 3%.

Here’s a graph that shows how the probability of repeal for each 2-year period (i.e., Congress) after passage.

Ragusa writes:

During “disequilibrium” (t<10 years) policies are increasingly likely to be repealed as time passes. At the second stage, delineated by the maximum of the hazard function, the likelihood of any repeal is about 13%...I refer to this period as a "policy reversal window of opportunity." After this point the instantaneous likelihood of repeal decreases monotonically over the life of a policy. In this final stage, “equilibrium” (t>10 years), each year that passes renders existing policies less likely to be repealed.

Ragusa then uses his statistical model to predict the chance of repealing health care (with caveats, of course; see his post). Here is the upshot: depending on the future partisan control of the presidency and Congress, the probability of repeal of at least one major provision of the health care reform bill ranges between 52% and 69%.

Ragusa concludes:

…the newly enacted law will be most “at risk” not in the next Congress, but a decade from now. So sit tight.

[And] there are some serious constraints the Republican Party will have to overcome to make major changes to the original law. True, some repealing activity is likely to succeed. But this is more a function of the law’s size than anything else. Still, if Democrats can maintain the Senate in 2010, and hold the White House in 2012, their prospects of defending the law from “repeal” is significantly greater.

Posted by John Sides at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In Sunday’s New York Times, Marc Ambinder writes:

Indeed, conservatives and liberals alike will continue to insist on nominating unadulterated candidates and will become more successful in doing so. And those candidates are likely to distrust their own establishments as much as they ideologically oppose the people at the other end of the political spectrum. In such an environment, the parties will be useful to help raise money, set the presidential nominating calendar and organize conventions, but that’s about it.

Whither the national parties? They’re already withered.

I asked Hans Noel, a co-author of The Party Decides, to respond. He writes:

Marc Ambinder is the latest commenter to find evidence of “withered” parties in the small recent spate of “outsider” upsets in primaries. Ambinder predicts that new technology spells the death of parties, as more and more independents will use it to beat the establishment. In The Party Decides, we argue that party insiders have much more control over presidential nominations than some might think.

In short, this parties-are-dead diagnosis makes three mistakes. First, it extrapolates from a small number of cases, forgetting that such cases happen all the time. Second, it assumes that party insiders are incapable of learning from outsider challenges, despite all the evidence that they do. But most importantly, it misunderstands what an “intra-party squabble” really is. Today’s outsider is tomorrow’s insider.

On the first two points, recall that “outsider” Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination by exploiting a new technology — the sudden increased importance of primaries and caucuses. But the Democratic Party quickly figured out how to respond, and no one since Carter has done the same. In 2004, Howard Dean (then also an “outsider”) came close, exploiting the Internet, but again, the party quickly learned how to use that technology. Now, everyone is doing it. You can see this pattern repeating itself since long before Franklin Roosevelt sent phonograph records of his speeches to important players in 1932.

But the more important problem is that such challenges to one authority in the party are coming from another power center in the party. Parties are not strongly hierarchical organizations to begin with, so the way in is just to start playing. Whatever else she is, Sarah Palin is the party’s most recent nominee for vice president. That’s not an outsider position. And so neither are the candidates she backs. And these candidates are contesting party primaries. But “outsiders” like outsider rhetoric, but they are in the tent. The Tea Party’s agenda — as well as the agenda of a diverse group can be defined — is indistinguishable from the Republican agenda of the last decade.

In fact, this particular intra-party tension is the most common, between the impatience of activists and the complacency and risk-aversion of elected officials. But it tends to work itself out. As “outsiders” win office, they quickly become insiders. If we want to extrapolate from today’s events, the right thing to expect is that the parties will continue to nominate ideologically consistent candidates, which they’ve been doing for decades. And these ideological partisans will quickly play their typical role in the party.

Both of these phenomena are so well know that they were given names ages ago. John May in 1973 called the first the law of curvilinear disparity, while we’ve know the second as the Iron Law of oligarchy since Robert Michels spelled in out in 1911.

Posted by John Sides at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This June I had the opportunity to attend a planning conference for establishing a new European Political Science Association, which will hold its inaugural conference next June in Dublin, Ireland. Here is the latest information on the EPSA, including information on a reception at APSA this Friday:

*******

Dear colleagues,

The newly formed European Political Science Association warmly invites you to attend its reception at this year’s American Political Science Association meeting.

Date: Friday September 3, 2010
Time: 19:30-21:00
Place: Mariott, Wilson C Room

The European Political Science Association is a professional association of individual political scientists. The European Political Science Association was founded in 2010, to pursue the following objectives:

To represent and promote political science in Europe.
To foster development in postgraduate training of political scientists in Europe.
To promote undergraduate teaching of political scientists in Europe.
To facilitate networking by political scientists worldwide.
To host an annual general conference of political scientists, with the first to be held in June 2011 in Dublin (at the Guinness Storehouse Conference Centre).
To publish a general journal of political science that will have a profile, impact, and structure on a par with top general political science journals in the United States.

Please check our web page at http://www.epsanet.org for more information. We also have a Facebook page. Details on joining EPSA and on the 2011 General Conference can be found on the website (or will be very soon!).

Hope to see you in Washington! Best wishes,

Kenneth Benoit, ken.benoit@epsanet.org
Raymond Duch, ray.duch@epsanet.org
Thomas Plümper, thomas.pluemper@epsanet.org

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“We’ll be the checks and balances on this out-of-control, criminal government.”

Comments like that one were par for the course this past Saturday here in Washington, D.C. In what must have been a trial run for hosting the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association later this week, TV personality Glenn Beck led a “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial. I want to focus not on the rally’s content but on the motives of the many thousands who attended.

(Photo credit: Lee Drutman)

Even before it took place, the rally was being discussed as another example of the “enthusiasm gap” between Democrats and Republicans leading into the 2010 midterm elections. I think a better name might be the “threat gap.” That’s because the Tea Party appears to be the latest example of a mobilization in response to a perceived policy threat—in this case, a Democratic policy agenda being pursued by at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Nobel Prize-winning social science tells us that people are generally loss averse (gated), meaning that we’re likely to be more worried about shifts away from our preferred policies than excited about shifts toward them. That’s exactly what political scientists Richard Lau (gated), John Patty (ungated), and Joanne Miller and Jon Krosnick (ungated, gated) have separately argued: in motivating political behavior, threats are more energizing than opportunities. And that asymmetry hints at why there was no “Taxed Enough Already” movement driving the actual enactment of the Bush tax cuts in 2001.

Are such mobilizations in response to perceived policy threats rare in American politics? Not in the slightest: in October of 2002, January of 2003, and again in September 2005, many thousands of Americans of a very different political stripe came here to D.C. to protest against the War in Iraq. In fact, the quotation that opened this blog post, so seemingly at home in a discussion of the current right-wing mobilization, actually came from anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan at a 2005 demonstration. Yet strangely, discussions of the Tea Party almost never mention its recent left-wing analog.

At least in part, the Anti-War movement in the early part of the decade and the Tea Party movement at the end were both responses to shifts in public policy that many Americans—especially those not identifying with the party in power—saw as at odds with their values and deeply threatening. For one bit of evidence on this, take a look at national survey data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

In both the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2006, the survey asked Americans about their political ideology, and also asked if they had attended a political meeting or rally in the last year. It’s not that ideology shifted much, at least on the left. In both years, only about 7.5% of Americans called themselves “very liberal.” But the participation of that 7.5% differed substantially. In the fall of 2000, with a Democrat in the White House and no major policy changes in the works, the very liberal respondents were only slightly more likely than other Americans to be manning the proverbial barricades: 25% had been to a rally or political meeting in the last year. In the spring of 2006, with the ongoing Iraq War and unified Republican control, that number had jumped to 39%. The participation of other ideological categories seemed unchanged. Not long ago, the threat gap cut the other way.

Posted by Daniel Hopkins at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We welcome Dan Hopkins, a professor in Georgetown’s Department of Government. He will be guest-blogging for the next two weeks or so, talking about Katrina, race and ethnic politics, the Tea Party, and whatever else catches his fancy. I posted previously on Dan’s research about the “Bradley effect.” You can be more about his research here. Welcome, Dan!

Posted by John Sides at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gary Andres has a nice piece in the Weekly Standard that discusses two new books about parties and partisanship in American politics: Sean Theriault’s Party Polarization in Congress and Matthew Levendusky’s The Partisan Sort.

Levendusky describes the process by which partisanship and ideology became increasingly aligned in the public. Interestingly, it stems more from partisans changing their ideologies than ideologues changing their partisanship. Theriault carries this story into Congress itself, noting how party leaders increasingly use procedural devices to deliver the legislative victories that their fellow partisans (and activists back in their districts and states) desire.

Andres’s bottom line:

Some think the November elections might produce more bipartisan harmony. Political forecasters predict Republican gains in the November elections. Won’t more parity between the parties forces the two sides to get along? Probably not. Understanding the roots of today’s polarized landscape explains why partisanship won’t be unearthed anytime soon.

I agree. When I read Mark Halperin yearning for bipartisanship, my reaction was to agree with Seth Masket. It’s not that bipartisanship is undesirable — although perhaps highly overrated — it’s just that we shouldn’t expect partisanship to dissipate into the ether, for precisely the reasons that Levendusky and Theriault describe.

Seth calls Halperin’s view a “Beltway fantasy.” To me, Halperin — and, similarly, David Broder — are political romantics: they proffer this idealized vision of politics that does not betray any real understanding of why politics is what it is, how we got here, what leaders’ incentives are, and what reforms might change those incentives. I’ve always found it odd that two veteran reporters would have romantic tendencies. You’d figure that after these many years or even decades they’d be pretty clear-eyed and even cynical about political leaders.

Posted by John Sides at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jeffrey Isaac, the editor of the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics, has put together an interesting-looking panel that will discuss trends in various subfields, with an eye toward the mission of the journal (which is the most publicly oriented of the APSA-sponsored journals). Here are the details:

Saturday, September 4
10:15 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Omni Ambassador Ballroom, Omni Shoreham Hotel

The participants are Dan Drezner, Stathis Kalyvas, Paul Pierson, Dara Strolovitch, and Lisa Wedeen.

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Ari Kohen’s blog — mostly political theory and human rights, with pop culture as leavening. Here’s a cool Tumblr visualization of its content.

• What makes people susceptible to political smears?

• It turns out that third parties have a hard time in American politics.

• The LAPD tries to predict crime.

• Parenting science.

• Bathroom posture: Does it matter?

Posted by John Sides at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Normally keeping Matt Bai honest is John’s job (see here or here ). However, with John off at Ezra Klein’s blog this week, I figured I would step into the breach.

Bai had a piece in the NY Times on Wednesday on reasons why progressive might want to think seriously about combating the deficit, which essentially revolved around a conversation he had with Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon). The central argument is interesting - that progressives need the government to be solvent and trusted so that it can continue to fund programs that progressives hold dear, including Social Security. My problem with the article, however, concerns Bai’s explanation for why Social Security is in trouble. He writes that:

The coalition bases its case on the idea that Social Security is actually in fine fiscal shape, since it has amassed a pile of Treasury Bills — often referred to as i.o.u.’s — in a dedicated trust fund. This is true enough, except that the only way for the government to actually make good on these i.o.u.’s is to issue mountains of new debt or to take the money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or perhaps impose significant tax increases — none of which seem like especially practical options for the long term. So this is sort of like saying that you’re rich because your friend has promised to give you 10 million bucks just as soon as he wins the lottery.

Really? The last time I checked 30 Year US treasuries were trading at 4.06%; 10 year US treasuries were trading at 2.99%. And it turns out that China owns about $843 billion worth of US treasuries. So apparently there are at least a few people out there that think the US government is likely to repay its debts. Perhaps it is more like saying you’re rich because you have a friend who has promised to give you 10 million bucks and can access international capital markets.

To be clear, there are plenty of problems with the Social Security trust fund; owning a bunch of US treasuries is just not one of them.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina gave the Benedictine monks at St. Joseph Abbey a new calling. After the storm pummeled much of a pine forest they had long relied on for timber and income, the monks hatched a fresh plan: They would hand-craft and sell caskets.

But now, local funeral directors are trying to put a lid on the monks’ activities. The state funeral regulatory board, dominated by industry members, is enforcing a Louisiana law that makes it a crime for anyone but a licensed parlor to sell “funeral merchandise.” The morticians are serious. Violators such as the monks can land in jail for up to 180 days.

It gets better:

St. Joseph’s 36 monks, whose pastimes include baking raisin bread for the homeless, are putting up a fight. On Aug. 12, they filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Orleans to try to overturn the state edict. In the filing, the monks argue that the state law violates their right to pursue a gainful occupation. “We’re not just going to sit back and let these guys bulldoze us,” says Deacon Mark Coudrain.

The monks are have a name for “these guys”: the “casket cartel.” The casket cartel does not come off well:

Boyd Mothe Jr., a member of the fifth generation of his family to run Mothe Funeral Homes outside New Orleans, says Louisiana’s law should remain on the books because licensed directors have the training to sell caskets—transactions he calls “complicated.” For instance, he says, “a quarter of America is oversized. I don’t even know if the monks know how to make an oversized casket.”

The story is here. Go monks!

Posted by John Sides at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Pew center poll that found that fewer Americans believe Obama is a Christian and more believe he is a Muslim or simply don’t know what his religion is. The question is: why have people’s beliefs changed?

One hypothesis proffered by Newsweek and Jack Shafer is that some Americans are just dumb. They believe in stuff like ghosts and astrology, so why not this about Obama?

That doesn’t get us very far. It seems hard to imagine that Americans suddenly got dumber between March 2009 and August 2010, when the Pew polls were conducted.

A second hypothesis comes from political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who notes that there have been numerous attempts by some media commentators and political leaders to insinuate that Obama is Muslim. He writes:

Rather than faulting the public for the weaknesses of human psychology, we should identify the elites who deceive citizens with false information and hold them accountable for their role in fostering this myth. It’s time to stop blaming the victims.

If Nyhan’s hypothesis is true, we would expect to see sharper changes over time among people who are, first, predisposed to believe bad things about Obama. This implicates Republicans, and, indeed, Pew found that Republicans registered the sharpest increase in the belief that Obama is Muslim. Second, among Republicans, we should see especially sharp changes among those who pay attention politics and the news, because these people who would be more likely to watch, read, or hear any commentators and leaders suggesting that Obama is Muslim.

Via a contact at Pew, I asked them for additional information from their March and August polls: the results broken down not only by party, but also by political attentiveness.¹ The best measure of attentiveness in their surveys was the respondent’s level of formal education, which is a plausible but imperfect proxy for attention to politics. Nevertheless, it’s what I had to use.

Here are the trends from the March 2009 to August 2010 polls in the perception that Obama is a Muslim. I divide the sample into Democrats and Republicans. Independents who lean towards a party are counted as partisans (see here for why), so this analysis includes about 90% of the sample. I then divide the sample into the education categories that Pew provided: those with a high school degree or less, those with some college education, and those with a college degree or more.

The growth in this perception among Democrats is small and is consistent across education levels: a 2-4 increase within each level. By contrast, the growth in this perception among Republicans is more notable among those with some college education (a 19-point increase) or a college degree (15 points) than among those with a high school degree or less (9 points). In other words, better educated Republicans have changed more than the less educated Republicans. This flies in the face of the “dumb Americans” idea and provides some support for Nyhan’s hypothesis. The people most likely to hear the “Obama is a Muslim” meme are the ones whose beliefs changed most dramatically in the past 17 months.

Below is the full set of results, including the percentages who said Christian, Muslim, or expressed no opinion. (Click to make it larger.) Again, this tells a similar story: larger changes among the better educated Republicans. For example, the decline in the percentage of Republicans who believe that Obama is a Christian is larger among those with some college (-31 points) or a college degree (-24 points) than among those with a high school degree or less (-11 points).

Obviously, we cannot draw definitive conclusions from this analysis. It does not prove that some media personalities and political leaders are responsible for the increasing perception that Obama is a Muslim. But it points in that direction.

[Cross-posted at Ezra Klein’s blog]

¹ I thank Jocelyn Kiley of Pew for providing additional data. Neither she nor the sponsors of the polls — the Pew Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life — bear any responsibility for my interpretation.

Posted by John Sides at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Most recently, chocolate milk has emerged as both villain and victim in a cafeteria drama that pits the milk industry, administrators and parents against one another.

The story is here. I love that there is a webpage defending chocolate milk.

Posted by John Sides at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Perspectives on Politics has a new issue, stuffed full of interesting looking articles on the Obama era. And Cambridge is making it open access to non-subscribers. Contents below.

Editor’s Introduction
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 733-736

“There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama”: The Policy and Politics of American Multiracialism
Jennifer Hochschild and Vesla Mae Weaver
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 737-759

How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting
Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 761-792

Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency, and the Obama Presidency
Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond S. King
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 793-802

Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era
Suzanne Mettler
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 803-824

Institutional Strangulation: Bureaucratic Politics and Financial Reform in the Obama Administration
Daniel Carpenter
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 825-846

The American Labor Movement in the Age of Obama: The Challenges and Opportunities of a Racialized Political Economy
Dorian T. Warren
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 847-860

The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened
Jacob S. Hacker
Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, Issue 03, September 2010, pp 861-876

Posted by Henry at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John has the keys to Ezra’s place and is having fun.

[[Weaver and Lerman’s paper] shows the apparent effect of contact with the criminal justice system on whether people are registered to vote, actually vote or participate in at least one civic organization. People are far less likely to do any of these things as their contact with police and prisons ranges from no contact to being questioned, arrested, convicted, serving time in prison or serving at least one year in prison (“serious time”).

But it’s only fair to point out that the very same hypothesis was advanced by Public Enemy a couple of decades ago (John, who is a classic rock guy through and through, is likely unaware of this).

I got a letter from the government The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me given’ a damn I said never
Here is a land that never gave a damn
About a brother like me and myself
Because they never did
I wasn’t wit’ it but just that very minute…
It occurred to me
The suckers had authority
Cold sweatin’ as I dwell in my cell
How long has it been?
They got me sittin’ in the state pen
I gotta get out - but that thought was thought before
I contemplated a plan on the cell floor
I’m not a fugitive on the run
But a brother like me begun - to be another one
Public enemy servin’ time - they drew the line y’all
To criticize me some crime - never the less
They could not understand that I’m a Black man
And I could never be a veteran
On the strength, the situation’s unreal
I got a raw deal, so I’m goin’ for the steel

The citation is It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam 1988) should Weaver and Lerman want to add it to their biblio.

Posted by Henry at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A new paper by economists Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen uses google search data to investigate whether people show less interest in environmental issues as they become more concerned about unemployment.

We find that higher unemployment rates within a state decrease internet search activity for global warming, but increase search activity for unemployment. Based on this revealed preference for interest in global warming, therefore, it appears that recessions crowd out concern for the environment, while not surprisingly increasing concern about unemployment. Interestingly, the magnitudes of the two effects are very similar despite having opposite signs, which is at least consistent with the notion that one crowds out the other.

The decline is larger in Democratic leaning states, perhaps because people in these states have initially higher interest in global warming. The authors also find that increases in a state’s unemployment rate are correlated with increased beliefs that global warming is a hoax.

The authors argue that this supports the notion that environmental concerns are a luxury good, in the sense that these concerns seem to rise to the front when economic times are good and recede when times are bad. In political science and sociology we would call this a post-materialist concern. This characterization is quite old (although not entirely uncontroversial) but the use of internet search data is novel and interesting. All of this does of course not mean that recession is bad for global warming (at least in the short -term): it is hard to think of any policy initiative that would reduce CO2 emissions more than a good old fashioned economic downturn.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

Posted by John Sides at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Alan Simpson writes emails.

• China’s nine-day traffic jam.

• Ayn Rand fan is, well, dedicated.

• Microtargeting in the CA gubernatorial race.

• The Hatch Act and social media. Wonkette comments.

Posted by John Sides at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today’s email:

Our client wants people like you to sponsor their products and will pay you to do so.

They’re launching an educational product on September 7th that teaches others how to make money on the internet by using Facebook and Social Media.

We want to pay you for recommending that product to your loyal blog readers and we will pay you up to $200 for each person that you refer. If you make just one sale a day you’re looking at making around $6000 per month.

All you need to do is create a few blog posts that recommend this product. You may also use one of our nice banners and place it on your blog.

It’s pretty simple, takes very little time (10 minutes or so) and will be very rewarding.

All sales that you refer are tracked through your own special link and you will get paid every week. Payments are always on time and will be sent to you via Check.

Well, they had me at “special link” but who can refuse payment via “check”, or, rather, “Check”?

Posted by John Sides at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the past couple weeks, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the tax rates of the rich and the super rich. Much of this is of course motivated by the coming expiration of the Bush tax cuts (see Paul Krugman’s column yesterday for example.) James Surowiecki takes this one step further by making a very thought provoking argument in The New Yorker that our current system of progressive tax rates is hopelessly out of date with its top bracket starting at $200,000 a year for individuals and $250,000 a year for households. He adds the memorable observation that Lebron James and his dentist both probably pay the marginal tax rate on additional income. Nate Silver responded to Surowiecki with a discussion of the economic implications of some of Surowiecki’s proposals, concluding that:

Let’s say we go with the plan of taxing marginal income above $1 million at 3 percent, and marginal income above $5 million at an additional 3 percent. That would produce a theoretical $39 billion per year. However, there would be some productivity losses, and perhaps some additional offsets resulting from people finding ways to transfer their income into more tax-advantageous activities, so perhaps revenues on the order of $35 billion per year, or $350 billion per decade, are more realistic.

I think the economic implications of the proposal are interesting as we head into an era when we need to consider all possible sources of tax revenue, but I am even more intrigued by the potential political implications of the tax. With the dominant political narrative these days being how President Obama is having trouble delivering a credible narrative of what he actually stands for, wouldn’t taxing the super rich be a political no brainer for the Democrats in the US? Wouldn’t this be an outstanding question for all Democratic candidates for congress to be able to ask their Republican opponents where they stand on the issue? Think the ground zero mosque in reverse. Commercials could be run saying “my opponent wants to keep taxes lower for millionaires - I want to keep them lower for you.” It seems like such a simple message that it would be perfect for a campaign year where the dominant trend - the state of the economy when you are the incumbent party - is running against you.

So I went looking for some data on this. I unfortunately couldn’t find any public opinion polls about a millionaire’s tax, so I’m hoping readers of the Monkey Cage can help. What I did find was the following, admittedly from last year, over at the Gallup website:

While I’d like to see these data broken down by party, it sure seems like there is plenty of support out there for increasing the tax burden on the right.

So I’m throwing the question out to readers of The Monkey Cage: convince me why it would be a bad idea for the Democrats to double-down on this taxing the rich issue and start pushing proposals for new tax brackets for those making over $1 million a year and those making over $5 million a year? Why couldn’t the Democrats emulate the Republicans 2004 gay marriage strategy? I’m particularly interested in comments from anyone who follows New Jersey politics, where Republican Gov. Chris Christie obviously did not fear vetoing a millionaire’s tax in his state. Are there any surveys of voters’ opinions in the aftermath of his veto out there?

*****

[I just came across this post from Ed Kilgore that makes a very similar point to the one I’ve made here, so I want to be sure to give him an ex-post hat tip….]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Henry and I have organized a panel on this topic at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, which is coming up next week. The panelists are all journalists or editors or bloggers of some kind:

Marc Ambinder (National Journal)
Ezra Klein (Washington Post)
Anne Kornblut (Washington Post)
Mark Schmitt (American Prospect)
Jeff Zeleny (New York Times)

I wanted to highlight this for any readers who are going to APSA and may be interested. I think it will be a fun conversation. Here are the details:

Thursday, Sept. 2
2:00-3:45 pm
Woodley Park Marriott
Thurgood Marshall Ballroom North

Posted by John Sides at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Things aren’t looking good for freshly minted Ph.D.s — and they are looking especially bad for political theorists. Inside Higher Ed reports Michael Brintnall’s numbers on the political science job market and John made a graph:

Update: Commenters ask, and John delivers:

Posted by Henry at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The New York Times has a front page article today devoted to web alternatives to peer review. The most interesting part is a description of a trial by the respected journal Shakespeare Quarterly:

[..] the journal posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts — what Ms. Rowe called “our crowd sourcing” — were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network. Others could add their thoughts as well, after registering with their own names. In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors. The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.

This is of course not an alternative to peer review but an alternative way of doing peer review. The system is interesting in that it takes advantage of the speed and accessibility of the web, which lower the cost of engaging in debate. Yet, a web-based system that would allow for broad-based access and anonymous comments would surely make the cost too low, granting academics the opportunity to affect the reputation of others without reputational consequences for themselves.

It seems like an experiment worth trying in political science although I doubt it will replace anonymous peer review, which remains Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery of academia. There are, of course, opportunities to combine this system with peer review, for example by creating a forum in which scholars can leave signed comments on published articles. This obviously wouldn’t transform the gatekeeping role of peer review but may allow for more lively debate on published pieces.

Another thought is that web-based review may be particularly useful for shorter articles on policy questions. Policy pieces often have an urgency that makes the peer review process unattractive. There are, of course, outlets for publishing policy pieces but these tend not to be academic and count little towards tenure and so on. I could envision an on-line system where policy articles are published and commented on by senior scholars, thus giving the article academic credibility and stimulating debate among academics about policy issues. Economists have something like this with Vox (although the model is somewhat different). any other thoughts on how web-based systems may create alternatives to traditional peer review?

Posted by Erik Voeten at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)