New Pew Data on European Public Opinion: EU is Unpopular; the Germans and French are Arrogant, and No One is Paying Attention to the Reinhart-Rogoff Debate

by Joshua Tucker on May 14, 2013 · 2 comments

in Comparative Politics,Public opinion

Pew has a very interesting new survey out on attitudes towards the European Union among citizens of eight EU countries. Here are a just a few of the more interesting results.

First, attitudes towards the EU are getting worse. While there is always going to be some noise in these kind of data, the consistency of the negative changes is noticeable. What I think is potentially most important are the two countries (France and Spain) where we’ve gone from significant majorities with a favorable view of the EU to majorities without a favorable view. The stunningly low numbers of Czechs who now see EU membership as having harmed economic development is also worth noting.

EU_1

Second, contrary to popular wisdom, large numbers of people still seem to prefer cutting spending in order to reduce the debt as opposed to stimulus spending as a way out of the crisis, the Reinhart-Rogoff brouhaha not witstanding. The headline number here in France is really quite stunning, but given the recent tone of the political discussion in Italy I would not have predicted twice as many people supporting cuts to reduce the debt to stimulus there either. (Greece as the outlier here though makes sense.)

EU_2

Third, Pew probably even undersold this point – Germans appear to be living on a different planet, let along a different continent. (Although I wonder about the decision to compare Germany to the median, as opposed to mean, level of support on each of these different questions. Would make it irrelevant whether other countries above the median are closer to median or closer to German levels):

EU_3

Finally, some slightly more lighthearted data (although note the correlation between being trustworthy and arrogant!). Found it interesting that people apparently value seeing themselves as compassionate more than trustworthy or not arrogant. Also not sure what to make of the fact that French see themselves as most arrogant in Europe!

EU_4

Finally, as someone who studies post-communist countries, it was interesting for me to see that when Pew picked eight countries for the study, two of them were post-communist EU members (Poland and the Czech Republic). Not sure why they left out all of the post-communist Euro adaptors (Slovenia, Slovakia, and Estonia), but hey, it’s a start.

Full report is available here.

2 comments

Will the New Agreement Help Safety Standards in Bangladesh?

by Layna Mosley on May 13, 2013 · 0 comments

in International Political Economy

The collapse of the Rana Plaza complex, which included several garment manufacturers, is yet another reminder of the working conditions that too often prevail in the apparel sector. The collapse resulted in over 1,100 deaths, and the toll continues to rise.

The global apparel industry is characterized by a vast network of subcontracting relationships. Major brands rarely own the factories in which their products are made; most factories process orders for a variety of firms, and most brands rely on an array of subcontractors. These arm’s length relationships make it difficult for even well-intentioned global brands to monitor conditions in their supply chains (see here for my argument the effects of subcontracting versus directly owned production on workers’ rights). Additionally, with competition in the industry based on speed and price – the subcontractor who can deliver cheaply and quickly enough to satisfy fickle Western consumer markets tends to win business – local factories have incentives to ignore domestic laws and corporate codes of conduct related to working hours and health and safety. [click to continue…]

0 comments

What Makes People Flee Conflict?

by John Sides on May 13, 2013 · 2 comments

in Immigration,National Science Foundation,Violence,War

The fifth largest city in Jordan is the Zaatari refugee camp, where approximately 175,000 Syrians fleeing their country’s war now live.  This is but a fraction of the 500,000 Syrians who have fled to Jordan, and an even smaller fraction of Syrians who have fled their own homes and now live in other countries or elsewhere within Syria.  Obviously, the displacement of civilians depends in part on presence or threat of violence.  But what else may explain whether citizens flee conflict?

In his doctoral research—supported in part by the National Science Foundation—Prakash Adhikari studied the factors that led civilians to flee in a different conflict, the Nepalese Civil War, that displaced approximately 50,000 people from their homes.  A survey of both displaced and non-displaced Nepalese revealed not only the role of violence, but the importance of economic infrastructure (and its destruction).  People who lived in villages with an industry present—in this case, one that employed 10 or more people—were less likely to flee.  People who lost crops, animals, or land were more likely to flee.

None of these findings is surprising on its face.  But Adhikari’s work suggests that the logic of displacement is more than just about violence or physical threat.  And—though Nepal and Syria are in no way strictly analogous (the juxtaposition here is mine, not his)—Adhikari’s work suggests how the United States and the rest of the international community might be able to prevent large-scale forced migration: not only by working to reduce the threat of violence, but by supporting the economic and social infrastructure of affected communities.  Foreign governments and NGOs already do this, of course, but Adhikari’s work shows that such efforts can be consequential.

Moreover, given how displacement only adds to the human toll and political destabilization caused by civil war, and given that the United States frequently assists in ending civil wars or at least mitigating their effects, I think this research also happens to meet Senator Coburn’s stated criterion that federally funded research serve the national security of the United States.

The article is here.

[This post is part of this week’s presentation of NSF-funded political science research.]

2 comments

Kenneth Waltz Has Died

by Erik Voeten on May 13, 2013 · 2 comments

in International Relations

Kenneth Waltz passed away last night. Waltz was one of the most influential international relations scholars of his generation. I did not know him well, although I saw him not too long ago at a Georgetown event (he moved to the area recently). His influence was such that it is impossible not to know or teach his work if you are in international relations. My favorite book is Man, the State and War, which has withstood the test of time very well. I will post some more obituaries when they come in. Here are some thoughts by Dan Nexon at the Duck of Minerva.

Stephen Walt shares his memories here.

Updates:

  • Foreign Affairs has made available some of Waltz’s writings. If you don’t know it already, read his work on nuclear proliferation and you get a sense of his original, rigorous, and controversial thinking.

  • Waltz expresses his perspective on a broad range of issues in his usual concise and clear manner in this recent interview.

  • Steve Saideman offers thoughts here.

2 comments

Post-Election Report 2013 Malaysian Election: Part II

by Joshua Tucker on May 13, 2013 · 3 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Comparative Politics,Election Reports

We are pleased to continue our series of Election Reports with the second of two post-election reports on the Malaysian elections by Thomas Pepinsky, who teaches in the Government Department at Cornell University. His first post was presented last week on The Monkey Cage here. You can follow his series of Malaysian election previews at his blog Indolaysia. The following post builds on analyses which were previously posted at the Australian National University’s New Mandala and the University of Nottingham’s CPI blog.

*****

In my previous post, I discussed how ethnicity, region, and authoritarianism shape Malay politics. In this post, I dissect the results of Malaysia’s thirteenth general elections (GE13), illustrating these three fundamentals of Malaysian politics at work.

The Results: Region and Ethnicity


The electoral data that I was able to assemble from Malaysian internet sources should be seen as preliminary. Nevertheless, they help us to understand just how the ruling coalition fared. First, two-coalition vote shares by parliamentary district.

figure 1

We see very clearly that East Malaysia’s strong showing for the BN gave the government its majority of seats. This is not new—the 2008 elections also saw the BN depending on East Malaysia for its parliamentary majority—but there will now be unprecedented pressure on the BN to put East Malaysian issues front and center.

Also evident in the maps is a clear trend in the peninsula toward opposition victories in smaller electoral districts, which tend to be urban areas. It’s tempting to view this as an urban-rural divide. However, it is just as much an illustration of ethnic politics at work, for Malay districts tend to be large rural districts.

To show this, I draw on district level data on ethnicity that I gathered in 2008 (gated version; ungated PDF here). While updated data on ethnicity by electoral district has recently been made available, and I hope to use it in future analyses, these new data will almost certainly not change these conclusions in any appreciable way. First, we can examine the fraction of each district’s population that is bumiputera (in calculating these figures for the peninsula, this means Malay, and in East Malaysia this means non-Chinese) by the district’s total land area.

figure 2

We learn from this figure that there are many small districts with bumiputera majorities, but larger districts are almost exclusively bumiputera. Further evidence of the role of ethnicity can be seen in the following graph. It compares BN vote share in the peninsula to the percent Malay in each district, with each data point colored according to the BN party contesting in that race.

figure 3

The figure shows that the 2013 elections were a crushing defeat for all peninsular parties except for UMNO. And the relationship between ethnicity and two-coalition vote share is remarkably close, making it very easy to predict BN vote shares using just the percentage of the electoral district’s population which is Malay. First, a quadratic fit:

figure 4

[click to continue…]

3 comments

Free expression vs. not wanting to make anyone personally uncomfortable

by Andrew Gelman on May 13, 2013 · 5 comments

in Academia

cactus chair

From a video conversation between UC Berkeley’s next chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, and Dan Mogulof of Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs:

I don’t support divestment with respect to Israel. At the same time, many of my colleagues felt very strongly about this and many of them signed a petition, and it circulated widely at the time, which was 2002. There were, after that, all sorts of other controversies that developed about the climate for Jewish students on Columbia’s campus, about the nature of instruction and the department of Middle East studies, and indeed about the atmosphere at Columbia more generally, in which it seemed very difficult for some students to find safe spaces in which to talk about Israel where they didn’t feel that the basic context in which they found themselves wasn’t hugely not just anti-Israel, but by implication, anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic. The first thing that we needed to do, of course, was to ensure that no one was made personally uncomfortable on the basis of their religion, as I said, their ethnicity, their entity.

In 2002, Dirks was a tenured professor of anthropology at Columbia and later became Columbia’s vice president for arts and sciences.

From a letter signed by 14 faculty members of the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia, entitled “Former Vice-President Dirks defaming the department”:

While discussing the divestment petition at Columbia in 2002 . . . Chancellor Dirks referred to “all sorts of other controversies that developed about the climate for Jewish students on Columbia’s campus.” He described this climate as hugely not just anti-Israel, but by implication anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic, and connected this issue with “the nature of instruction in the department of Middle East studies.”

Our sense of outrage stems from Dirks’ denial of the fact that the very committee set up by then-Vice President Dirks found no evidence whatever for concerns about the climate for Jewish students let alone about the nature of instruction in our department. We feel affronted by the fact that the Chancellor’s defaming the department means that he now rejects the committee¹s finding and seems instead to accept as true the false accusations leveled against us by an external hate group that has since been exposed and discredited.

I don’t know anything about the details of this, but it does seem that Dirks’s statement, “The first thing that we needed to do, of course, was to ensure that no one was made personally uncomfortable,” is somewhat in conflict with goals of open expression.

We just don’t get this sort of excitement in the statistics department.

5 comments

Making Ballots Better

by John Sides on May 13, 2013 · 0 comments

in Campaigns and elections,National Science Foundation

This is the first article featured in this week’s series about NSF-funded political science research—and specifically research published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2012.  This is research by Paul Herrnson, Michael Hanmer, and Richard Niemi.  The article is here.  This is how they described it:

Something as simple as the design of a ballot can influence how citizens vote and especially how and how frequently voters make errors when choosing candidates.  We conducted an experiment in which voters’ intentions were known and these intentions were compared to the votes they cast using two different types of ballots.  Both ballots used the standard “office-bloc” format, but one ballot also included a straight-party option—where filling in one circle or arrow or touching one button automatically registers a vote for all of a party’s candidates.  Fifteen states currently provide a straight-party option.

Our central finding: voters make more errors when using the ballot with the straight-party option. Some of the experiment’s participants failed to vote for any candidate when they intended to support one.  Even more participants selected the wrong candidate—that is, the opponent of the candidate they actually supported.  These errors, while not common in absolute terms, were about 4-5 times more likely when participants made their choices using the ballot with the straight-ticket option.  This was true regardless of whether participants voted using a paper ballot or a touchscreen.  The elderly, African Americans, and those without a high school education were particularly likely to make errors using the straight-party ballot.

Voting is one of the most important rights of citizens.  It is a serious problem if citizens make the effort to vote and know who they intend to vote for, but then vote incorrectly because of ballot design. Ballots designed for the hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots introduced at the end of the nineteenth century lead to errors when used on modern voting systems.  Because most state legislatures have already purchased new voting systems, it will be more cost effective for legislators to focus on improving ballot designs. Given the centrality of elections to representative democracy, such efforts are warranted.

0 comments

IQ and the Nativist Movement

by Erik Voeten on May 13, 2013 · 31 comments

in Immigration

We welcome back Diego von Vacano for a guest post on the purported low IQ of immigrants.

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The academic and policy worlds have been roiled by last week’s announcement that a Heritage Foundation study on the cost of immigration reform was co-authored by Jason Richwine, who wrote a dissertation on the purported low IQ of immigrants. It beyond belief that, in the year 2013, there are still some that want to posit that there is a genetic basis for race. Even more surprisingly, these arguments come endorsed with a seal of approval by some of the nation’s top universities, like Harvard in this case. As an alumnus of the Kennedy School and a scholar of race and Hispanic identity, I feel obliged to provide a response.

Having spent last week with some of the world’s premier scholars of race at a workshop on “Reconsidering Race” at Texas A&M University, in which we examined the interface of social science and genetics/genomics and health (http://reconsideringrace.wordpress.com/), I am stunned by the lack of rigor and intellectual depth evinced by Richwine’s dissertation. The work makes extremely simplistic assumptions about “race,” immigration, and the link between IQ and genetics.  Even a neophyte in matters of genetics/genomics can see the gaping holes in Richwine’s logic. One would have expected his advisors, Professors George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jencks to have been more cognizant of the complex nature of terms such as “race”, “Hispanic,” and “white,” as well as their tenuous links to genetics (assuming they actually read the dissertation). Richwine claimed in his Harvard dissertation that “the material environment and genes probably make the greatest contributions to IQ differences” (p. 4) and that “today’s immigrants are not as intelligent on average as white natives” (p. 134). 

There are three basic points that have to be made to remind these scholars that such shoddy work should not easily pass at the doctoral level—or any level for that matter. One is the basic idea that “Hispanics” can be of any race (a concept that Richwine references in passing in his dissertation), so that it is not possible to simply oppose “Hispanic” and “white” as if they were mutually exclusive categories (a dichotomy that is crucial to his argument). In fact, Pope Francis is Hispanic; so is Rigoberta Menchu. The term is a politically- and socially-constructed category that has been shaped through historical ties between the US, Latin America, and the Iberian peninsula. There is nothing inherent, natural, or ‘genetic’ in the category of “Hispanic.” There are many people of European ancestry in Latin America, but there are also many of Amerindian origins, African descent, and a vast majority whose origins are a mix of ethnicities, including East Asian, Jewish, Arab, and practically every other group in the world (I myself, for example, am of Aymara, Spanish, German, and Portuguese origin).

[click to continue…]

31 comments

What Has the NSF Wrought, Part II

by John Sides on May 12, 2013 · 4 comments

in National Science Foundation,Political science

This week we will be featuring several posts on political science research projects funded by the National Science Foundation.  Each of these projects led to an article that was published in the American Journal of Political Science.  AJPS Editor Rick Wilson identified these projects and solicited a short description of the project’s findings and broader implications from the authors.  We’re glad to feature this research and thank Rick and the authors for their assistance.  Here, by way of introduction, is Rick’s prologue:

On April 17 I watched the U.S. House Subcommittee on Research hold hearings on the National Science Foundation.  The statements by members and the various witnesses were instructive.  Majority members pressed the case that in times of austerity difficult decisions will have to be made about what is relevant to the American taxpayers.  Minority members made their case for the importance of basic research and the difficulty in predicting what scientific research will have future payoffs.  Both sides are in agreement about the need for basic research, but in disagreement over the extent to which public funds should be extended to all of the sciences.

In opening statements, Cora Marrett, Acting Director of the NSF, presented an overview of the Budget and made the President’s case for the importance of science.  Dan Arvizu, Chair of the National Science Board which helps direct NSF’s long term goals, also made an eloquent plea for basic research.  Surprisingly, Arvizu spent a significant amount of his allotted five minutes to also defend the peer review system and political science in particular.  He argued that the Coburn Amendment, embedded in the Continuing Resolution for the U.S. budget (CR 933), shackled a particular scientific discipline, limiting what could be studied.  He went on to hold up Elinor Ostrom’s work as an example of basic research that demonstrates that devolved local groups often resolve common pool resource problems more effectively – a point that both sides of the aisle should appreciate. (You can read his statement here.)

In questions by the committee it was clear that some members were having a difficult time understanding what it is that the social, behavioral and economics sciences contribute.  After all we do not build huge telescopes, cure diseases or invent new widgets.  Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who is the Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, pressed for NSF to make clear what the social, behavioral and economic sciences do for American society.  He was searching for a broader statement of what it is that the social sciences contribute. Also see the broader discussion here.

I have no doubt that the social sciences are important.  Most of the problems confronting the US and the world are a result of human behavior.  This is true for global climate change, for pandemics and for wars.  Yet, as postings in many blogs have pointed out, we can do better communicating our basic findings to the mass public.  As with the natural and biological sciences, it is critical that we engage with the broader community.

A year ago I wrote a guest post here at The Monkey Cage concerning NSF-funded work that made its way into the journal that I edit, the American Journal of Political Science.  At that point I wrote a short blurb describing why the work was important.  I decided to do so again, looking at articles that have been published in the past year.  Instead of me writing about the articles, I asked each author to write a short blurb.  I was delighted by how quickly authors responded and how easy it was to make their findings clear to a general audience.  I was also impressed by how much of the research AJPS publishes is directly tied to NSF funding.  What I did not include is the huge number of studies that make use of NSF funded data collection efforts.

All of these articles have been made freely available for the next six months.

4 comments

OpenData Latinoamerica

by Andrew Gelman on May 12, 2013 · 0 comments

in Comparative Politics,Data

Miguel Paz writes:

Poderomedia Foundation and PinLatam are launching OpenDataLatinoamerica.org, a regional data repository to free data and use it on Hackathons and other activities by HacksHackers chapters and other organizations.

We are doing this because the road to the future of news has been littered with lost datasets. A day or so after every hackathon and meeting where a group has come together to analyze, compare and understand a particular set of data, someone tries to remember where the successful files were stored. Too often, no one is certain. Therefore with Mariano Blejman we realized that we need a central repository where you can share the data that you have proved to be reliable: OpenData Latinoamerica, which we are leading as ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellows.

If you work in Latin America or Central America your organization can take part in OpenDataLatinoamerica.org. To apply, go to the website and answer a simple form agreeing to meet the standard criteria for open data. Once the application is approved, you will receive an account to start running and managing open data, becoming part of the community.

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