The Monkey Cage

Matthew Shugart gets credit for this (if ‘credit’ is the right word).

CAROLINE RIGHTON, the Conservative prospective MP for St Austell & Newquay, has welcomed the decision by Cornwall Council to remove the pissoirs in central Newquay and re- open public toilets. Speaking on the decision, Caroline said: “Thank goodness! I’ve always thought these pissoirs were disgusting and have always been against them. They hardly sent out the right message to the families and visitors the town wants to attract. “Their very absence might help discourage the sort of anti-social behaviour we have seen this summer. I’m glad the new regime at County Hall has made this decision and is going to re-open public lavatories. “I appreciate the costs of cleaning and repairing these facilities may increase but I feel this is surely a price worth paying in a civilised society.”

Posted by Henry at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There is rightly much to do about comments made by retired General John J. Sheehan to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the presence of openly gay soldiers contributed to the Dutch military’s failure to protect the Srebrenica safe area and thus the murder of over 9,000 muslim men. There are many reasons why this claim is unsubstantiated such as that the Dutch had no mandate, equipment, command structure or air support to mount a serious fight and that the integrated Dutch military has done extremely well in Afghanistan. Sheehan claimed that Dutch leaders had told him about the “gay issue” and mentioned a name: Henk van den Breemen (a retired former general). This morning Van den Breemen told NRC that this was “complete nonsense.” The same article also records the response by the Dutch defense minister Van Middelkoop, who represents a small conservative Christian party that can hardly be viewed as enthusiastic about gay rights issues:

“It’s a disgrace and unworthy of a military officer. I don’t want to say another word about it.”

I feel the same way.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 06:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Henry’s reference to advice for graduate students reminded me of a discussion from a couple years ago.

Dan Goldstein broadcast some advice on interviewing for academic jobs in marketing. My question was, how much are these pieces of advice are zero-sum and how much of them would create overall improvements.

Just for analogy, if I give people advice about how to make cleaner powerpoint presentations, that’s positive-sum (better communication for all); if I tell people a secret way to put their proposals at the top of the pile for a granting agency, that’s zero-sum; if I give people the advice of not posting preliminary results so they don’t get scooped, that’s negative-sum.

Now let me play this game with Dan’s advice:

Continue reading "Positive-sum, zero-sum, and negative-sum advice" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Tyler Cowen picks up on the ‘technical note’ in Andrew’s zombie paper.

We originally wrote this article in Word, but then we converted it to Latex to make it look more like science.

This is, of course, strongly reminiscent of the advice that Andrew’s sometime co-author, Gary King, gives to graduate students

Prepare this paper as if it were to be submitted for formal review at a professional journal. Go to the reading room in the library or JStor and have a look for examples. (Why? Quality may be everything, but it is hard to measure and so style provides important signals. For example, as a purely predictive matter, papers formatted with LATEX are much less likely to contain egregious methodological flaws. Use this to your advantage.)

The problem being, of course that if King’s advice becomes generally well known, it is likely to undermine itself. From personal experience, I can testify that it is a lot easier to learn LaTeX than serious quantitative techniques. Hence LaTeX may be an “important signal” but it is one that is relatively cheap and only weakly correlated with technical ability. Those of you who have to write game theoretic questions for comprehensive exams may possibly find it entertaining to turn King’s piece of advice into a signalling game and get students to figure out the separating and pooling equilibria under different sets of plausible parameters. It would surely get the point across to students in a more amusing way than all of those nuclear crisis scenarios from Schelling.

And while we are on the topic of sometime co-authors - is Andrew’s ‘claim’ to have written this with George A. Romero a bid to become the person who has the highest combination Erdos-Kevin Bacon number? Or are there people out there with higher (I don’t know what Andrew’s Erdos number is, but I am presuming it is decent-high)? It would be even better, of course, iif Romero somehow came across this paper and agreed to actually become a co-author …

Posted by Henry at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Congressional resolutions praising college sports teams aren’t always easy.

Last year, OC Republican Rep. John Campbell offered a resolution congratulating UC Irvine’s men’s volleyball team for winning the national championships. Seems simple enough. Not quite. Bay Area Congressman George Miller asked House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland to stop Campbell’s measure from reaching the floor for a vote…

…So, naturally, Campbell did what any snubbed Anteaters-loving politician would do: He got even. On Tuesday, Hoyer proposed a resolution congratulating the University of Maryland’s Terps for making the NCAA tourney. Campbell opposed it and delayed the vote by asking for a roll call.

More is here.

[Via Insider Higher Ed.]

Posted by John Sides at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

These are the occupations on the opposite extremes of the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their campaign contributions according to research by Adam Bonica. As Andy put it: the conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, even after using sophisticated statistical methods and hard data. See here for more on what campaign contributions can tell us about the ideology of PACs and candidates.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

John Judis says yes:

[A] president’s political acumen—his ability to put the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments—can mitigate the effects of rising unemployment. That’s what Ronald Reagan and the Republicans achieved in the 1982 midterm elections…

Using economic models, some political scientists predicted that Democrats would pick up as many as 50 House seats. The Democrats also hoped to win back the Senate, which they had lost in 1980. But when the votes were tallied, the Republicans lost 26 House seats and kept their 54 seats in the Senate.

And Brendan Nyhan plows this argument under. The problems are many. Judis picks one forecasting model but ignores others that got the seat loss almost correct. And, even troublesome for Judis’s thesis, Reagan’s approval actually declined during 1982 — precisely the time when he was “putting the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments.”

The lesson has nothing to do with Reagan per se. It’s simply that presidents are far less powerful as communicators than Judis and others seem to believe.

Posted by John Sides at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

U.S. members of Congress tend to “die in their ideological boots” as Keith Poole puts it. This is probably true for most legislators around the world. Yet, there are some contexts in which legislators shift positions and even parties with great frequency. Howard Rosenthal and I wrote a paper (ungated) a while back about one such context: The French Fourth Republic. There were frequent changes in government coalitions and about one-fifth of legislators switched parties at some point. Adam Bonica, a very bright PhD student at NYU, has created a cool animation of the movements by legislators through a two-dimensional ideological space based on this data. The animations are based on this paper in which he advances the methodology of estimating dynamic ideal points in a non-parametic framework. It’s fun to watch, especially for people who have seen similar types of animations from other legislative settings: it really drives home just how unstable the Fourth Republic was and why it is often used as an example of how one should not design legislative institutions (although the institutions were only partially responsible for this).

The animations work best if you enlarge the screen. Btw, Adam’s site is a great example of how to use ones blog to publicize ones research.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A while ago I recommended Dmitry Gorenburg’s blog on Russian military reform. Since that time, Dmitry has moved into providing interesting analysis of Russian foreign policy more generally. In his most recent post, Dmitry takes on Stratfor’s current series on Expanding Russian Influence. Stratfor’s core argument, according to Dmitry, is that there:

are four countries where Russia feels it must fully reconsolidate its influence: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Georgia. These countries protect Russia from Asia and Europe and give Moscow access to the Black and Caspian seas. They are also the key points integrated with Russia’s industrial and agricultural heartland. Without all four of them, Russia is essentially impotent. So far, Russia has reconsolidated power in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, and part of Georgia is militarily occupied. In 2010, Russia will focus on strengthening its grasp on these countries.

Dmitry’s response:

This analysis is so wrong as to be funny. To say that Russia has reconsolidated its influence in those three countries is to be completely ignorant of current events. Belarus has recently turned away from Russia and is trying to get closer to the EU. Kazakhstan is primarily focused on developing its economy and is turning more and more to China in the economic and even inthe security sphere. And anyone who thinks that Yanukovich will do whatever Russia wants will be sorely disappointed. All signs in Ukraine point to him driving a hard bargain and making Russia pay for what it wants — it won’t be the knee-jerk anti-Russianism of Yushchenko, but he won’t meekly submit either.

I actually very much agree with Dmitry in term of his take on Yanukovich (although see the interesting discussion in the comments section of his post as to whether ijt will be Yanukovich or his advisers calling the shots) and Ukraine, but this does raise a larger point worth discussing. By definition, these “intelligence companies” produce proprietary information that is usually sold at a very high price and, consequently, out of the view of academics and other country experts not associated with corporation that can pay for these sorts of reports. Indeed, the Expanding Russian Influence series is only available to subscribers, and Dmitry was only able to quote from it because it is being reprinted in Johnson’s Russia List.

Now of course these reports are written in many cases by academics or other country experts hired as consultants. I’m not sure how Stratfor produces these reports, but I’m guessing that this is decidedly not a peer review process. And once the reports are written, they are often out of view of the people who study these countries for a living.

I want to set aside the question of whether companies like Stratfor have the right to sell proprietary analysis - of course they do. But much like my earlier criticism of polling companies that don’t release cross-tabs, I think serious questions need to be asked about the quality of these reports. Do they merely reflect one person’s opinion? Would they be more insightful is they were subjected to a wider degree of scrutiny? Perhaps Stratfor could provide a better product of they released their reports to a subset of country experts (like Dmitry) and allowed them to add commentary and assessment of the analysis. Maybe this would even produce a product more valuable to their clients.

Moreover, if Dmitry is correct and the content of this series is laughable, ought we as academics to be concerned about this? As someone who studies Russia for a living, should I be concerned that commercial organizations are releasing poor analyses of Russian foreign policy that will be read by people paying big bucks to see these analyses? I’m not really sure - perhaps it is just none of my business. But if so, is there anything we can do about it? In a sense, this is exactly what led me to write this post: I wanted to give a broader airing to Dmitry’s critique of the series. Whether there is much overlap between people who read Stratfor’s reports and The Monkey Cage, I suppose, is another matter.

Click here to read Dmitry’s full post, which is well worth reading.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

“Nothing is so boring to the layman as a litany of complaints over the more obscure provisions of House procedures. It is all “inside baseball”….We Republicans are all too aware that when we laboriously compile data to demonstrate the abuse of legislative power by the Democrats, we are met by reporters and the public with that familiar symptom best summarized in the acronym “MEGO” — my eyes glaze over.”

So bemoaned then Minority Leader Bob Michel in this Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post in 1987. Well, the ballgame’s gone outside. Just when you thought reporters had tired of refereeing reconciliation, the Byrd Rule, and filibusters, everyone’s trekked over to the House ballfield for a game with self-executing rules. (Like CalvinBall, but different.)

I can’t do justice to the entire body of legislative scholarship on House restrictive rules in a short blog post, but the place to start would be Stan Bach and Steve Smith’s classic work, Managing Uncertainty in the House of Representatives, which can be found here. Others, including Barbara Sinclair, and Keith Krehbiel, offer competing perspectives on House majority party use of restrictive rules.

Here, I want to offer a brief perspective on the use of self-executing rules, given the many claims made in recent days about these rules, as House Democrats have debated how to structure the upcoming votes on the Senate-passed health care bill and the reconciliation “fix.”

Continue reading "To self-execute or not to self-execute, that is the ...." »

Posted by Sarah Binder at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

The anti-immigrant Front National did much better than pollsters expected in recent French regional elections. Arthur Goldhammer reports that the French newspaper Le Monde suggests that this may be due to a Bradley effect: the idea that voters are reluctant to admit that they are voting against a popular black candidate or (by extension) for a party widely deemed to be racist. The Monkey Cage featured a lot of discussion on this issue during the 2008 Presidential election. The general consensus appeared to be that there was no evidence for a Bradley effect during the 2008 election and that the effect in general had been waning in recent years. My colleague Dan Hopkins concluded (non-gated, gated) in his brilliant study into the Bradley (or Wilder) effect that it is “the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to under-represented groups.” It seems like France represents another potential political context to study this effect. Indeed if, and I think Dan is right, political context conditions attitudes on racial and ethnic issues, then this should be a very fruitful area for comparative research.

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Posted by Erik Voeten at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Monkey Cage has gone on record recently arguing that process in the health care reform debate is ultimately not going to matter that much (see Henry and John) in terms of driving support for the bill. Well, now we can quantify “not much”.

This graph appeared last month in a Gallup report. As a political scientist, I was less interested in the overall support levels (which apparently have already shifted a bit in favor of passing reforms since these polls were taken), but rather in the difference between the two graphs.* According to Gallup, respondents were first asked if they favored passing the health care bill, and then asked if they favored passing it using reconcilliation. The “process” in this case apparently cost about 3% points of support. So it is not irrelevant, but hardly a game changer in terms of public opinion.

********

*Slightly more wonkish technical discussion: It should be noted that Gallup did not use a true experimental design here, with half of the respondents being randomly assigned to receive one version of the question and the other half the other. So it is possible that a desire to remain consistent might bias respondents towards giving the same answer to both questions. On the other hand, it may also be possible that the fact that the question about reconciliation was asked second may have been cuing respondents that there was something “different” about reconciliation, and, given the media’s fascination with the issue, that perhaps this was supposed to change their opinion. Personally, I find in interesting that the number of “don’t knows” didn’t change. This suggests that reconciliation is not really having any affect on people who don’t already have an opinion on health care, although of course it is possible that reconciliation pushed some supporters into don’t knows and don’t knows into opposing, although my gut instinct is that this is not likely to be the case. For those interested in Don’t Know responses, see Adam Berinsky’s Silent Voices.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clive Crook resurrects the canard.

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, the public and their concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … Recovering voters’ respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how the public will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to prove an electoral tonic.

John, of course, has been all over this. However, he merely has ‘data’ and ‘analysis’ on his side. Clive Crook, in contrast, has the punditocracy’s trump card - confidently-worded assertions. Less sarcastically (OK - only slightly less sarcastically), when I become world dictator, my first act will be to decree that pundits who promiscuously write about how “the public” thinks this or that, without any reference to data on what the ‘public’ (a dubious concept in most of these debates anyway) actually thinks will be required, under pain of death, to rewrite their columns so as to substitute the word “I” and related personal pronouns/possessive adjectives for the word “the public” throughout. In the interim, readers are invited to make the necessary substitutions themselves. As illustrated by the following

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, me and my concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … My respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how I will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to win my vote.

which happily has the dual advantage of being punchier and more accurate than the original.

Posted by Henry at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Instead, the Greek crisis turned into a three-part opportunity for Germany: The country has dramatically boosted its exports thanks to a weak euro, a German is now the front-runner to head the European Central Bank, and it can now justify cracking the whip on the rest of the Eurozone — the group of nations that use the euro.

So conclude Thomas Meaney and my GW colleague Harris Mylonas, writing in the Los Angeles Times. They are a bit bullish on the long-term consequences of the Greek crisis:

What hasn’t yet shattered the EU just might make it stronger.

Find their piece here.

Posted by John Sides at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was motivated to write this post by an interesting comment from Andy Rudalevige in response to my earlier post on whether the Democrats were better off passing health care without the support of the majority of the country or looking incompetent for failing to move their most important domestic policy agenda. Andy suggested looking at the Republican motivation: if, as many Republicans have claimed, successful passage of health care reform will lead to a Republican House and Senate, then why are Republicans being so vehement in trying to prevent its passage?

Political science suggests two basic motivations for legislative behavior: ensuring their own reelection and pursuing changes in policy that move that policy closer to their own preferred policy. So let’s posit a world where Republicans believe that the current version of health care reform will in fact move policy farther from their preferred policy in terms of health care. The behavior we observe is vehement opposition to this bill, but going beyond simply voting against it to measures that seem genuinely targeted at try to ensure its defeat, such as trying to persuade individual Democrats to defect, threatening all sorts of procedural maneuvers to defeat the bill, etc. What can we conclude then about the beliefs of Republicans about the likely electoral effect of health care reform passing and/or their relative weighting of electoral vs. policy concerns?

It seems to me that we have to be living in one of these three versions of the world:

Republicans don’t really believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, and therefore there is no trade-off between opposing health care reform and seeking re-election (ie., they buy the point I made in my previous post).

Republicans do believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, but dislike it so much that we have a real example of policy concerns trumping electoral concerns in their attempts to defeat the bill.

Republicans do believe that if health care reform passes it will help their electoral prospects, but feel that in order to maintain credibility with the voters they need to appear to be trying to defeat it in every way possible. So electoral concerns still trump policy concerns (ie., privately Republicans want it to pass so they will do better in the coming elections), but politics dictate that the party keep up the appearance of opposing the bill.

Any thoughts on which of these scenarios are in play? I guess a final option is that the Republicans believe it is inevitable that health care reform will indeed pass, but they think if they repeat “health care reform will cost the Democrats the House and the Senate” enough times, it will become a dominant narrative heading into the campaign and help with the 2010 elections. So in this case it wouldn’t be a trade-off so much, but just making the best of a bad situation.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome Tyson Roberts, a Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Political Science Department with the following report on the 2010 Togo Presidential Elections:

On Saturday, March 6, Togo’s election commission declared President Faure Gnassingbe the winner of the March 4 presidential election with 1.2 million votes out of 2.1 million cast (60.9% of the total) for his second term in office, following nearly 40 years of rule by his father. Turnout was 64% of registered voters. The primary opposition candidate, Jean-Pierre Fabre of the Union of Forces for Change (UFC), received 34% of the vote (detailed results are available at the commission’s website).

President Gnassingbe is the son of the late Gnassingbe Eyadema, who took the presidency in 1967 in a coup and ruled until his death in 2005, after which the constitution was suspended and Gnassingbe declared president by the army and the ruling party, the Rally for the Togolese People (RPT). In response to domestic and international pressure, Gnassingbe stood for his first election later that year, which he won (amid violence and alleged fraud) with 60.2% of the vote, according to the official numbers. Turnout in 2005 was also the same as it was last week, 64%.

As has been the case in previous elections, the opposition accused the ruling party of fixing the election. One complaint was that military personnel were allowed to vote early. The government responded that the early voting was necessary to enable the armed forces to maintain peace and order during the elections. Furthermore, they claimed that they were successful in doing this without the violence that has marred previous elections, including hundreds killed in the 2005 presidential election, when results were protested by the opposition as fraudulent. Most of the election this year was peaceful, and what conflict did occur was of a decidedly lower magnitude. The day before the election, a throng of RPT supporters met a parade of UFC supporters, “each side claimed victory and heckled one another, all in good spirit and without animosity” (ibid). After the election, protests were small: “Police spokesman Abalo Assih says officers in the capital earlier fired tear gas on some 200 protesters angry that the opposition party was trailing”. International observers said they saw no overt signs of fraud, only some vote-buying.

The opposition has repeatedly suffered (with few exceptions) from an inability to unify behind a single opposition candidate, and the same was true last week. In addition to Fabre for the UFC, Yawovi Agboyibo of the Action Committee for Renewal (CAR) and four minor party candidates contested the election. Perhaps the UFC and CAR, who won 45% versus the RPT’s 39% in the 2007 legislative elections, could have won the presidency if they had agreed to a single candidate. The opposition would have had a chance to unite after an initial round if they had succeeded in convincing the RPT to return to a two-round election system, but the RPT refused, meaning only a plurality remained necessary for victory. The two opposition parties attempted for months to agree on a single candidate, but neither would agree to the other party’s choice. Although the electoral code was amended in 2009 to eliminate the residency requirements that disqualified Olympio in previous contests, he withdrew his candidacy because of health problems, and former party secretary-general Jean-Pierre Fabre stood for the UFC. The CAR’s Agboyibo came in third with 3% of the vote (slightly worse than his 5% third place finish in 2005). In addition to a lack of unity, the opposition parties suffered from inferior resources. For example, “the incumbent toured the country by helicopter, while the other seven candidates had to use modest modes of transport to canvas for votes”.

Continue reading "2010 Togo Presidential Elections" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Friday I blogged about two Dutch male politicians who announced that they were leaving politics to spend more time with their families. Both of these men were relatively young and both were credible candidates to become the next prime-minister. The immediate response to such an announcement in the U.S. is to ask what scandal they are fleeing. Did it involve sex, corruption, or drugs? Or even better: all three?

In the Netherlands, however, the debate has mostly been about the extent to which these choices for family over high-profile public careers reflect a turning point in the struggle to make men equal caretakers. Some use national statistics to show that there is still an enormous gap in caretaking responsibilities while others argue that a similar choice by a female politician would lead to quite different reactions (“she’s giving up!” as opposed to “what an enlightened man we have here!”). Yet, most people do not question that these men are indeed sincere in their desires to forego a realistic opportunity to become the most powerful man in the Netherlands in exchange for more time with their families. (This discussion at Crooked Timber is revealing of the different responses by people from different political cultures).

Continue reading "The Dutch Family Men and Trust in Politicians" »

Posted by Erik Voeten at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthew Yglesias points to an interview in which O.G. blogger Mickey Kaus says that, until recently Slate magazine paid him “in the mid-90s.” As Yglesias points out even $80,000 a year is a lot to be paid to write 3-4 blog entries per week. I’m torn between two possibilities:

1. It’s the old-boy’s network. Kaus is friends with Michael Kinsley etc. and they hired him on at a big salary because that’s what friends are for.

2. Kaus really is worth it: some analysis of hits reveals that he’s actually bringing in $80,000 worth of readers each year.

I guess #2 is probably correct—Slate is a web-business, after all. I’m reminded of the dictum that the most effective strategy for being a successful blogger is to have started blogging before the end of 2003. (Before that point, the blogosphere was small enough that everybody linked to everybody else.)

The other thing that Yglesias’s note made me realize was how much of a bubble I live in. $80,000 sounds like so little that I wondered where Kaus gets the rest of his income. Really, though, lots of people are doing just fine on less than $80/year. Kaus actually wrote a book many years ago arguing that, rather than aiming for equality of incomes, we should aim for a society in which you can live comfortably without a lot of money.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Last year, we heard about “maths expert” and Oxford University prof who could predict divorces “with 94 per cent accuracy. . . His calculations were based on 15-minute conversations between couples.”

At the time, I expressed some skepticism because, amid all the news reports, I couldn’t find any description of exactly what they did. Also, as a statistician, I have some sense of the limitations of so-called “mathematical models” (or, worse, “computer models”).

Then today I ran across this article from Laurie Abraham shooting down this research in more details, so I’d share it with you.

First, she reviews the hype:

He and his colleagues at the University of Washington had videotaped newlywed couples discussing a contentious topic for 15 minutes to measure precisely how they fought over it: Did they criticize? Were they defensive? Did either spouse curl his or her lip in contempt? Then, three to six years later, Gottman’s team checked on the same couples’ marital status and announced that based on the coding of the tapes, they could predict with 83 percent accuracy which ones were divorced. . . .

“He’s gotten so good at thin-slicing marriages,” Malcolm Gladwell enthused in Blink, “that he says he can be at a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children.”

In a 2007 survey asking psychotherapists to elect the 10 most influential members of their profession over the last quarter-century, Gottman was only one of four who made the cut who wasn’t deceased.

Then the good news:

Continue reading "Shooting down B.S. claims about divorce predictions, part 2 (Somewhere, Karl Popper is smiling ruefully)" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sanjay Srivastava writes:

Below are the names of some psychological disorders. For each one, choose one of the following:

A. This is under formal consideration to be included as a new disorder in the DSM-5.

B. Somebody out there has suggested that this should be a disorder, but it is not part of the current proposal.

C. I [Srivastava] made it up.

Answers will be posted in the comments section [of Srivastava’s blog, linked above].

Continue reading "Of psychiatrists and statisticians" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Sides asked me to comment on Harry Reid’s recent announcement that, at the beginning of the 112th Congress in January 2011, he will attempt to revise the Senate’s rules and practices to reduce the impact of obstruction. I assume that Monkey Cage readers are well aware of the Democrats’ frustration with the pace and politics of the Senate over the last 14 months, contributing to inaction on climate change, student loan reform, banking reform, highway spending, nominations, and forcing excruciating delay and costly bargains to pass health care reform. The question is, what are the Democrats going to do about it? This post reviews and evaluates existing proposals for reforming the Senate’s floor procedures. In later posts I plan to discuss the process by which reform proposals can be debated and adopted and appraise the likelihood of reform actually happening.

Continue reading "Reforming the Senate 1: Reviewing the Options" »

Posted by Greg Koger at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

I know all of you have been eagerly awaiting updates about the Dutch cabinet crisis I blogged about earlier. Well, here are some interesting recent developments. First, the most recent polls show that the PvdA (the red line in the graph below) continues to gain from resisting troop renewals in Afghanistan and forcing the cabinet crisis. The party has won nearly 10 seats in the pollls since the crisis.

Second, and more puzzling, two of the politicians who stood to gain most from these developments have decided in the last two days that they need to spend more time with their families (see also here). PvdA leader Wouter Bos, who was much beleaguered before the crisis but came out of it the undisputable leader of his party, made the announcement today. This follows a similar announcement by Camiel Eurlings, who was seen as the crown prince for current prime minister Balkenende.

Third, the recent polls and local election results imply that the prospect of Geert Wilders’ PVV becoming the largest party is a realistic one. In the Netherlands, the largest party almost always delivers the prime-minister. Speculation on what this would mean will have to wait until another blog post. In the mean time, go read why Daniel Pipes is enthusiastic about it and even calls him “the most important European alive today” while Ian Buruma is a little less impressed with Wilders.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to welcome this guest contribution by Silja Haeusermann of the University of Zurich. Silja is also a contributor to the new Poli Sci Zurich blog, where this election report is cross posted. Very dedicated readers of the Monkey Cage may also note that this is our first election report on a referendum. I have not been listing referenda in my call for guest posts on elections, but anyone interested in writing on a referenda should feel free to get in touch with me as well.

Learning the hard way?

It is well known that there are people who actually like getting slapped – but it is puzzling to discover such a penchant with the right-wing parties and business organizations in Switzerland. Or then it must be some mixture of naïveté and stubbornness that makes them impermeable to learning any lesson from past failures. The latest slap is the massive (almost 73% of the votes) rejection of occupational pension cutbacks at the polls, in a direct democratic referendum that took place this Sunday March 7th. The result is a downright triumph for the left and trade unions – especially in a country where the combined Left (Social Democrats and Greens) gained less than 30% of the votes in the last national parliamentary elections .

However, the result of the referendum is not at all surprising to anyone familiar with welfare politics in Switzerland (and – for that matter – OECD democracies in general). And it is not – contrary to what the conservative newspaper NZZ, business leaders and right-wing politicians try to argue – the result of a confusing campaign, a “momentary state of uncertainty” among voters or their “denial of reality”. A denial of reality seems rather to be prevailing among the right, which pushed this proposal through parliament and into to direct democratic circus maximus. Indeed, the result of the referendum is exactly what we would expect in the light of the past 15 years of research on welfare politics in the age of austerity. Here’s why.

In the 1990s, Paul Pierson made a huge impact in the field when he explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate. On this basis, he predicted policy stability. More recent research, spearheaded by Swiss political scientist Giuliano Bonoli , proved him wrong by demonstrating that reforms could be achieved, under the condition that governments combine cutbacks with elements that benefit the most precarious social groups, mostly low-skilled, young and female voters. In a book that will be out with CUP this month, I have shown that this kind of “package deals” has become a necessary condition for successful pension reforms over the last 20 years, not only in Switzerland, but also in Germany, France and other European countries. The 2003 reform of the pension scheme in Switzerland, for example, did combine the same kind of occupational pension cutbacks that were rejected on Sunday with more generous protection of low-income earners. This combination led to a two-dimensional reform space that allowed for a very broad support coalition among parties and interest organizations of both the left and right (all actors in the green ellipse). The Swiss Union of Trade Unions SGB (the only actor consistently critical of the reform package) had learnt in earlier campaigns that it would be hardly possible to win a popular referendum all on their own, with part of the left supporting the reform. Hence, it refrained from challenging the 2003 proposal in a referendum and the reform could be enacted.

Continue reading "Learning the Hard Way? The March 2010 Swiss Pension Referendum" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now this is how how voting is done:

So instead of being recorded as absent, the council members have a technological fix: The chamber’s voting software is set to automatically register each of the 15 lawmakers as a “yes” unless members deliberately press a button to vote “no.”

The “yes” votes then flash on video screens throughout the chamber — and are placed in the clerk’s official record — even when members have left to grab a snack in the hall or hold a meeting.

It gets better.

Last year, for example, Alarcon made concurrent meetings so routine that he scheduled them on his official appointment calendar to coincide with the council’s regular 10 a.m. public sessions. The calendar showed he had appointments planned during 57 council meetings last year.

And better!

The rules of the council state that members must activate their own voting machines and must be within the council chamber to be counted as present. But the city attorney who advises the council said his office has defined the “chamber” to include the back rooms, bathrooms and news conference area, all of which are out of public view.

More is here.

[Hat tip to John Balz.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Short answer: they self-segregate. Or such is the finding of a newly published paper by Henry, Eric Lawrence, and myself. Find it here (gated) or here(ungated pdf). (See also these earlier posts). Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers.We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Posted by John Sides at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times had an interesting story a few days back on the improvements Google has made on its translation tools. The triggering event was a message by a Korean fan who wrote that Google was his favorite search engine, which the translate engine transformed into: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!” Since then, the improvements have been vast and so are the potential implications:

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

This made me wonder whether the translate engine has already become a useful research tool for scholars of comparative and international politics. I don’t think an automatic translation tool can ever fully replace knowledge of languages but perhaps it is able to provide a quick sense of what’s going on in a foreign place. As the article puts it:

Google’s service is good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a quick source for translations for millions of people. “If you need a rough-and-ready translation, it’s the place to go,” said Philip Resnik, a machine translation expert and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My first experiment was not very encouraging. I was curious about the response to Real Madrid’s elimination from the Champions League last night after spending record amounts on high profile players. According to Google Translate, the Madrid coach Pellegrini said he will quit his job (see also here), whereas the Spanish version says the opposite “No voy a renunciar a mi puesto.”

I would love to hear some experiences of researchers with more political texts. My first thought is that it might be a useful way to take a first cut at documents in languages one reads slowly but that it is not (yet) a tool that is ready to be applied to languages one doesn’t understand at all.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In my intro class yesterday, we began a discussion of presidency and I noted that presidents face the challenge of leadership: they confront high expectations even as the Constitution affords them little formal power. (How they have accumulated power in other ways comes later.) As evidence for high expectations, I noted how much the media focus on the president and, in doing so, perhaps exaggerate the extent of presidential power — a point I’ve discussed before. To illustrate, I put together this montage of Time covers from the 2008 campaign and the Obama presidency.

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