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The Monkey CageDemocracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. - H.L. Mencken |
Over at the Political Theory Rumor Mill, there’s a heated exchange around the change of editor at Political Theory with allegations of undue interference, editorial coups etc swirling around. Me - I know nothing beyond what I’ve seen on the Internets. Anyone out there with better info?
I have two questions:
1) Are politicians more likely to have extramarital affairs than the population at large, controlling for relevant demographic factors (notably sex)?
2) If the answer to the first question is “yes,” then why?
I do not know the answer to the first question. Thinking about recent presidents, my categories are: definitely yes (FDR, JFK, WJC), there-are-rumors-but-just-rumors (LBJ, GHWB), I-have-no-idea (RWR, HST, DDE, RMN), and almost-certainly-not (JEC, GWB, BHO). So I wouldn’t hazard any definite answers based on this list. This article suggests some sort of systematic family dysfunction among the GOP’s class of 1994, although the stories there don’t necessarily involve affairs.
But for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that politicians are more likely to have an affair. Why? A typical class of explanations revolves around personality, such as arrogance, hubris, neediness, or a desire for attention. Politicians are presumed to be “higher” in these qualities, and this leads them to have affairs. The counterfactual: take these same individuals out of political life — say, into the corporate world or some other occupational sphere — and they would be equally likely to have affairs.
A second class of explanations revolves around circumstance or situation. I can think of two dimensions that matter here. The first is separation from family. Here’s a quote from one of the GOP ‘94:
Mark Neumann, a Wisconsin Republican who was elected to the first of two House terms in 1994, said that when he came to Washington, he initially had trouble balancing congressional duties with his responsibilities as a husband and father.
“It was extremely intense and there was a lot of pressure,” said Neumann, who announced Wednesday he’s running for governor in 2010. “The whole concept of being away from home and family was certainly difficult to adjust to. I’d never been away from my wife for more than a day at a time until then.”
(To be clear: Neumann is not cited as having an affair. He’s just articulating the problems created by separation.) Separation from family may weaken bonds with spouse and children, at least to some extent. And that increases the likelihood of finding another person attractive, etc., etc. Of course, some politicians do live at home (e.g., governors). But even they travel quite a bit.
A second circumstantial factor is just opportunity. Here’s a passage from this NY Times piece:
But perhaps the strongest risk factor for infidelity, researchers have found, exists not inside the marriage but outside: opportunity.
“People tend to assume that bad people have affairs, and good people don’t, or that affairs only happen in bad marriages,” said Peggy Vaughan, a San Diego-based researcher who runs the Web site dearpeggy.com, and author of a forthcoming book on infidelity and marriage, “To Have and to Hold.” “These assumptions are just not based in reality.”
To me, “opportunity” means various things. Irrespective of one’s relationship with spouse or family, being separated from them simply makes it logistically easier to cheat. It’s easier to keep things from your spouse. It’s easier to sneak around without their knowing.
Opportunity also gets at how many more people politicians typically meet as compared to others. And somewhere in that large group is someone that politicians will find attractive. Other things equal, the larger your sphere of friends and acquaintances, the greater the chance of an affair. So, in a sense, all the pressing of flesh just leads to, well, some pressing of flesh.
The counterfactual is this: if we took a random sample of the population and installed them in political office, would it increase the chance that they would have affairs? My guess is that it would.
There is perhaps an interaction here as well. Aspects of politicians’ personalities make them more attractive — e.g., self-confidence — and that, combined with opportunity, increases the likelihood of affairs. In other words, it’s the combination of personality and circumstance that is particularly potent.
What am I missing?
In earlier post, I passed along this query from a friend and asked for data:
It seems to have become much more common in the post-1989 period for coupsters to hand over at least the nominal reins to some sort of civilian entity as quickly as possible — to pose as a democratic coup, if you will, recognizing the pro-democracy ethos that is pressed by the OAS, AU, UN, etc after coups. This has happened quite frequently in Africa in recent years; see also Thailand and Bangladesh. But do the numbers bear me out?
John Carey kindly sends along the following. (Thanks, John!)
Tom Schaller says no:
Is Sanford a cad for bolting his family on Father’s Day weekend? Of course, but that is a private, moral failing, rather than a failure of public duty. . . .I [Schaller] oppose most of what Mr. Sanford stands for politically. His showy rejection of federal stimulus money targeted for his state was a crass publicity stunt designed to garner national attention for Mr. Sanford at the expense of his constituents, many of whom are struggling economically. . . . Should Mr. Sanford’s ambitions founder on the shoals of a personal scandal, however, yet another opportunity will be lost to establish the long-overdue separation between private comportment and public service. So here’s hoping he doesn’t resign or, if he does, it is a matter of personal choice rather than him bowing to political pressure.
I see where Schaller is coming from. Lots of people have complicated personal lives, and it’s not clear at all that these difficulties have much if anything to do with governing. But I don’t know if I agree with him on the wall of separation between private comportment and public service.
Consider the Sanford case. Schaller’s a Democrat, so he can evaluate Sanford on his policies. But if Schaller were a Republican, he might very well want Sanford out of there because he tarnishes the brand, makes the party a laughingstock, etc. Also makes it harder for Sanford to convincingly follow a “family values” agenda which Schaller (if he were a Republican) might want. These are legitimate concerns for a Republican to have. Even if you don’t think Sanford’s personal indiscretions are important, you might want him gone and replaced by a more effective Republican. Just as, from the other direction, a Democrat would’ve preferred a zipped-fly version of Bill Clinton.
Drawing from more than 25 hours of oral history interviews, Dr. Glenda Balas of the University of New Mexico has written and produced “The Long Road to Decatur: A History of Personal Influence.”
The video documentary chronicles the development of the classic (and controversial) book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, first published in 1955.
The webpage of the documentary, with a video file to download, is here. I haven’t yet watched the video. The book is still in print. Here is a critique of how the book’s findings have been interpreted.
[Hat tip to Doug Hess.]
UPDATE: Here is a summary of a 2008 lecture by Katz. Thanks to Francisco Pérez.
What looks to me like one of the most important articles in political science over the last several years is out in the new American Political Science Review under the rather unprepossessing title, “A Model of Social Identity with an Application to Political Economy: Nation, Class and Redistribution” (available here for APSA members; ungated earlier version available here). Moses Shayo briefly lays out a model of identity that borrows insights from both economics and social psychology. What is interesting is that the model’s predictions are (a) starkly counter-intuitive about the relationship between national identity and preferences over redistribution, and (b) appear to be born out by the data.
The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.
Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life.
From a 1966 article in Time. I’ll pair this with a graph from the General Social Survey. The question wording is “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex—do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”
Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.
The Bulwer-Lytton contest is to write the worst first line of a novel. The runner-up is equally awful:
The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor—the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.
Many more are here.
The removal of an elected president by the military, and the installation of a civilian as the new president, leads a friend to ask:
It seems to have become much more common in the post-1989 period for coupsters to hand over at least the nominal reins to some sort of civilian entity as quickly as possible — to pose as a democratic coup, if you will, recognizing the pro-democracy ethos that is pressed by the OAS, AU, UN, etc after coups. This has happened quite frequently in Africa in recent years; see also Thailand and Bangladesh. But do the numbers bear me out?
Does anyone have a sense of systematic data on this subject?
John’s excellent post, just below, on the differential morality of Democrats and Republicans brought back memories of a piece I wrote long ago, around the time when John (who is a few years my junior) was focusing more on picking up some new Michael Jackson dance moves to show off at the junior high sock hop than on political science.
I wrote the following in, I think, 1994, and Richard Morin, who was then doing a column for Washington Post on offbeat research findings, picked it up and ran it there. It’s good to know, based on John’s post, that my argument is as true today as it was then.
(By the way [shameless self-promotion], the following will be reprinted in a forthcoming volume titled The Wit and Humor of Political Science (please hold your sarcasm), edited by Sigelman, Newton, Grofman, and Meier, to be published jointly by APSA and ECPR.)
The Hobbesian World of Democrats
Democrats are stupid (Sigelman 1988) and ugly (Sigelman 1990). This much is certain. From these hard but uncontestable truths it is but a small step to an image of Democrats as bottom feeders in a dismal swamp, relegated by the flatulence of their intellects and the unsightliness of their visages to the bottom rungs of a societal pecking order in which looks and smarts are what count.
Until now, there has been no hard evidence — merely logic and common sense — to indicate that Democrats are miserable failures in life. In the grand tradition of social science, my purpose here is to confirm what everyone already knows, or at least should know. However, because social scientists are themselves notorious Democrats (Ladd and Lipset 1975), it is never safe to assume that they know what they should.
My argument is simple: Compared to respectable Americans, i.e., Republicans, Democrats can be expected to inhabit a Hobbesian state of nature, a world in which life is poor, short, solitary, brutish, and nasty (Hobbes 1968). My method is equally simple: I compare Democrats’ and Republicans’ answers to questions about their lives that have been asked in the ongoing NORC General Social Survey, 1972-1993 (Davis and Smith 1993).<1>
Charles Blow revisits familiar findings: “red” states have higher divorce rates as well as higher rates of teen pregnancy and higher rates of on-line pornography consumption. He writes:
While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.
Welcome to another episode of “The Ecological Fallacy”! Once again: you cannot infer the behavior of individuals — Democrats and Republicans — from data at an aggregate level, such as states.
What happens when we look at individual-level data? Blow’s story falls apart. Using the General Social Survey, I first created a relevant measure of marital status: whether the respondent was divorced or separated at the time of the interview, or had ever been divorced or separated. So you are coded 1 in those cases, and 0 otherwise (i.e., if you had never been married or if you were married or widowed but never divorced or separated). The GSS included marital status in 27 surveys between 1972-2008. These surveys contain about 50,000 respondents.
I also created a measure of whether the respondent admitted to having an affair (leaving aside the issue of how many survey respondents answer this question honestly). For this measure you are coded 1 if you admitted to having an extramarital affair and 0 if you had not. I excluded respondents who had never been married. So this measure includes only those who are married or were married at some point. The GSS included the affair question (charmingly labeled “evstray” in the dataset) in 10 surveys between 1991-2008. These surveys contain about 16,000 respondents.
What do we find? Simple descriptive statistics suggest only small differences between Democrats, Republicans, and independents (here, independents who “lean” toward a party are counted as partisans):
About 29% of Democrats, 30% of independents, and 26% of Republicans are or have been divorced or separated.
About 19% of Democrats, 19% of independents, and 15% of Republicans admit to having an extramarital affair.
If anything, Republicans are slightly less likely than both Democrats and independents to get divorced or mess around. This is the opposite of what Blow suggests — which, yet again, reveals the problems of using aggregate data to make individual-level inferences.
To see if additional factors could explain even these small differences among groups of partisans, I then estimated two logit models. Here, the probability of being divorced or having had an affair is a function of a binary measure of partisanship (coded 1 if Republican and 0 otherwise, since there appears to be little difference between Democrats and independents), as well as controls for these factors: age, sex, race, educational attainment, and year of survey.
There are statistically significant, but small, differences between Republicans and Democrats/independents: other things equal, Republicans are 2 percentage points less likely to be or have been divorced. They are 4 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair. To put that latter effect in some context, men are about 9 points more likely than women to admit to an extramarital affair.
These effects are slightly larger if we focus only on the 2008 data: Republicans are 4 points less likely than Democrats or independents to be or have been divorced, and 5 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair.
This is a very simple analysis. Perhaps there are other factors one should control for, and perhaps there are interactions between party identification and the partisanship of states — a la Andy et al.’s research.
But I think the basic finding is likely robust: partisanship has a very weak relationship with either divorce or infidelity, and the relationships that do exist suggest that Republicans are less, not more, likely to get divorced or be unfaithful. Those, like Blow, who want to decry Republican “hypocrisy” on issues of family and sexuality may want to focus their ire on Sanford, Ensign, et al., and not on Republicans in the mass public.
“Baseball is so much harder to televise than the other sports because it is a game of angles.” — Tim McCarver.
Tim McCarver was a major league catcher for many years and he’s been a major league announcer for just short of forever. He never shuts up, and some of the things he says even make sense.
If baseball is a game of angles, as he says, then the folks who sign Tim McCarver’s paycheck have been getting it all wrong. Here’s the story, as told by Slate’s Greg Hanlon.
Some of this consists of inside jokes for those of us who live in the DC area and who— as all right-thinking people do — despise the Northern Virginia suburbs. But lots of it is about generic suburbia and should be recognizable no matter what part of the country you live in, because suburbia is so … well, generic.
Here’s something to spark discussion over the weekend. Is it time to say that the window of opportunity for an Iranian “colored” Revolution - e.g., a massive protest following electoral fraud that succeeds in overturning the results of that election and/or changing the leadership of the country as a result - is coming to a close? It now looks likely that these election results are going to hold - in part for some of the reasons I suggested in a previous post - and Ahmadinejad is going to get inaugurated for a second term later this summer. If this the case, then the potential for an Iranian colored revolution is over.
This is not, however, meant to sound the death knell for protest in Iran, or even for the possibility of some sort of regime change in Iran in the future because of these events. But I think now the model becomes the Iranian Revolution of 1979 itself. While I am far from an expert on these events, the general story is that protest built up gradually from late 1977 through 1978 and then culminated in regime change only in 1979. Given the memory of these events in the minds of many Iranians - and probably passed along to younger generations by parents and grandparents as well - it strikes me that we at least need to consider the possibility that this will become the new model for the many Iranians that the past weeks revealed are so clearly dissatisfied with the current regime. And to the extent that the events of the last two weeks may have revealed the Iranian regime to be more of your typical petro-dictatorship propped up by security forces (here and here) than its citizens may have believed previously, then perhaps this sort of scenario is slightly more likely than it might have seemed in previous years.
Thoughts?
Turn your sound down and enjoy.
[Hat tip to Phil Young]
John has had at least fifteen hours to comment on this story and hasn’t, so I’m going to steal it from under him.
In a surprise announcement the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Wednesday that it would double the number of nominees for the best-picture Academy Award to 10 from 5, returning to a practice it used more than a half-century ago when the number of films released was larger. … In a question-and-answer session that followed the announcement Mr. Ganis said, “I would not be telling you the truth if I said the words ‘Dark Knight’ did not come up.” This year “The Dark Knight,” a critically acclaimed blockbuster fantasy, did not make the final list of nominees that included “Frost/Nixon,” “Milk,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Reader” and the eventual winner, “Slumdog Millionaire.” None of those films were as widely seen as “The Dark Knight” or the animated “Wall-E,” another favorite that was snubbed by the best-picture category, adding heat to a debate about whether the Oscar voters had drifted too far from the moviegoing public.
As I read it, there is a three way distributional fight between (a) the producers of ‘Oscar’ type movies with limited commercial audience, (b) the makers of popular movies, and (c ) the producers of the Oscars (nb - I have no specialist knowledge about Hollywood worth talking about and am chancing my arm on a lot of the claims below). Under the status quo ante, people who make ‘serious’ movies try to hype them up through campaigning for Oscar nominations (and wins) - while these publicity efforts are expensive, they are cheaper than conventional advertising aimed at a mass audience, and can pay off very well if the movie wins a major award allowing the movie to go into re-runs etc. People who make more traditional mass audience movies have less to gain from Oscar nominations (their movies will succeed or fail based on box office receipts in a compressed time period), and hence less incentive to push their movies. The producers of the Oscar ceremonies have a difficult balancing act between credibility (the awards have to have some relationship to some notion of artistic merit that is not dependent on commercial success if they are to carry cultural cachet) and mass appeal (if the slate of contenders is limited to subtitled five hour movies about the politics of cultural despair among Ukrainian tractor mechanics and the like, few people are going to want to tune in).
Clearly, the producers of the Oscars have decided to change the balance towards commercial production. This may in part be an over-reaction to an unusually weak set of Oscar contenders last year, with a heavy preponderance of non-commercial movies. How are the various sets of actors likely to behave under the new status quo? My first prediction is that we will see significantly fewer ‘serious’ movies being produced - one major channel of promotion for such movies is now less viable (assuming that these movies need a win more than they do a mere nomination).
My second prediction is that the new system may not favor commercial movies much more than the old system did - they are obviously more likely to become nominees, but I am not convinced that their chances of winning the prize will go up significantly. This is, frankly, a hunch as much as anything else - one would like to have access to voting data from previous years to figure out exactly what has happened - but I don’t see that there will be much more incentive to run expensive Oscar campaigns for commercial movies under the new system.
My third prediction is that we will see more variation in the genre of winners of the Best Movie award than previously - films like Wall-E will have a significantly better chance of being nominated, and hence of winning. I can see how the typical Oscar voter last year might have had qualms about nominating a movie like Wall-E given historical precedent - but I can also see how she might have ended up voting for Wall-E if it had been nominated, given some of the other dog’s dinners that were up for the award. Choices at the nomination stage are (I suspect) going to depend more on perceived credibility than choices at the voting stage (where voters are more likely to vote their sincere preferences) - if my suspicions are correct, this may lead to a mild improvement, overall in the quality of the final winner. As long as it stays light on the Ukrainian_tractor_mechanic_angst factor.
It’s on, according to Colin Scott at Paul Krugman-cited blog, The Irish Economy.
There is a consensus that the practitioners and discipline of economics have been key beneficiaries of the financial and fiscal crises. The views of leading economists as to where we are and what we should do are widely sought across the media and within government. A conference organised at TCD earlier this week on the issue of political reform was part of a deliberate effort by political scientists to demonstrate the relevance of their discipline and the Irish Times has been publishing opinion pieces and articles drawing on the conference.
University College Dublin political scientist, John Coakley (UCD is my alma mater, but he arrived after I left).
ECONOMIC CRISES rightly push economists to the forefront when it comes to seeking to devise solutions. But the roots of such crises are often political, so it is not surprising that we also find calls for political reform matching demands for corrective action in the economy. … One of the most significant constraints is the nature of Irish political culture. After generations of familiarity with the operation of Irish-style democracy, Irish people have developed particular expectations of what is possible and appropriate.
University College Cork political scientist, Neil Collins:
THERE IS a truism in political science that power is inversely related to noise [HF - never heard of this truism meself, and it would seem to go against the findings of a large literature on social movements etc]. If you are in the streets, behind the banner or peering down from a poster, you have probably already lost. Important decisions affecting our everyday life are usually made by those we are least likely to be able to name. … The irony is that political institutions have ceded power to regulatory systems on foot of economic arguments, while the mechanism of accountability from those systems has been shown to be inadequate. Political parties, pluralism, ministerial accountability, elections and parliamentary scrutiny have failed to guarantee democratic control and popular trust in political institutions, and the economic levers are proving inadequate for the purpose. [HF - Collins seems on safer ground here]
It is interesting to me that there isn’t even the hint of political science involvement in the general public debates over the economic meltdown - the only political scientist I can think of who has been at all prominent is Barry Eichengreen, who holds a joint appointment in economics. Nor can I imagine US political scientists engaging in collective action to try to change this. Why the differences with Ireland?
Millions of young Americans pay little attention to politics. They don’t follow the news, they lack even the most basic knowledge about political institutions, they don’t vote, and they don’t care. Identifying these behaviors as problems for the future of American democracy and recognizing that many of them are products of early-life socialization processes, numerous organizations are now pushing “civic education” efforts of various sorts, many of them targeted at elementary, middle school, high school, and college students.
In a new study, Timothy Vercellotti and Elizabeth Matto probe the impact of political participation in the school and at home on knowledge about politics and the sense of political efficacy. The design of the study is unusual – more innovative and ambitious than appears to be the norm in this research area. The participants were 361 high school students from four high schools who were assigned to either a treatment group that read newsmagazine articles weekly for eight weeks and discussed them in class, a treatment group that read the same articles and discussed them in class and with their parents, and a no-treatment control group. Each group was surveyed three times – first at the very start of the study, again after the eight-week treatment period, and once more six weeks later.
Political knowledge, as gauged by familiarity with various public figures, increased in all three groups, presumably because the study was conducted during the presidential caucus and primary period. Even so, the greatest increase occurred for the second treatment group – the one that discussed the articles both in class and at home. And knowledge remained at its second survey level six weeks later.
Internal efficacy, as measured by the National Election Study items that will be familiar to many “Monkey Cage” readers. Once again, the largest effects were for the second treatment group.
I have some methodological qualms. For one thing, intact classes, not individual students, were randomly assigned to the treatment groups, a feature that introduces uncertainty about what the treatment really is (the treatment itself, or something about the class, e.g., the quality of the instructor). Moreover, as Vercellotti and Matto recognize, using the same knowledge items in all three surveys could have produced a wave-to-wave learning effect. The timing of the survey, coming as it did in the middle of a high-visibility campaign, is also unfortunate. And I wish the design could have been expanded to include more groups: another control group that was surveyed only during the third wave; yet another control group that received a placebo of some sort like reading stories from, say, Sports Illustrated; and a third treatment group that discussed the articles at home but not at school.
Notwithstanding these qualms, there’s a lot to like about this study. Its subject matter is important; its application of a large-scale field experiment to address these issues is a definite step forward; and its findings, while hardly the last word on the subject, strike me as warranting greater confidence than those reported in many previous political socialization studies by political scientists and others.
Following on John’s post on how Republicans have taken a dimmer view of the Supreme Court since losing control of the White House and my earlier post noting the same trend with Ben Bernanke, it is heartening to note that Fox News has apparently turned Gov. Mark Sanford into a Democrat:
[Hat Tip to Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, who also notes that Fox News did the same thing to Mark Foley as well!]
About a month ago, I posted a query on the Monkey Cage about whether we had systematic evidence that Supreme Court nomination battles affected the public opinion of presidents and parties. William Wilkerson sent in this response to the post:
One of the commenters noted that they figured that nominations were an elite game. This made sense at the time. A small piece of evidence in support is the NYTimes poll out today which showed that 58% had no opinion or were undecided on her nomination and 56% had no opinion on what the Senate should do. (Those that did have an opinion were 3.5 to 1 in favor of her.) An idea for a post: is this notably high undecided segment typical of supreme court nominations? Is there another area of political life where so much coverage produces this level of undecideds?
I asked both Adam Berinsky and Pat Egan this question. Adam responded that you can get similar responses when asking people about particular programs and giving them a don’t know options, and also speculated that the respondents in the NY Times poll probably didn’t push people to give an answer (e.g., accepted their initial don’t know response). Pat didn’t recall any examples of such high non-response rates on big public opinion questions, but also suggested paying attention to exactly how the questions were phrased. So I’m throwing the question out to the readers of the Monkey Cage: any other examples of such high non-response rates in US public opinion on issues on which the media is intensely focused? How about in other countries?
I was moved to post this today in particular while watching Gov. Sanford explain his recent decision to hike the Appalachian Trail, and was wondering whether this would lead to big shifts in popular support for the Governor. A quick look on Google Scholar didn’t seem to reveal much systematic political science research on the effect of extra-marital affairs on public support for politicians beyond some papers on the Lewinsky saga. Anyone out there working on this topic?
Gallup has released data showing that partisan evaluations of the Supreme Court “flip flop” after a presidential election. Essentially, partisans like the Court better when their president is in control. Now, in 2000-2001, one might attribute these trends to the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. But the same is true in 2008-2009, and no such event has happened. I don’t think that the Sotomayor nomination matters much.
This is reminiscent of how Democrats and Republicans changed their evaluations of Bernanke after the November election.
But at High Point University, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina, spoiling the students may be exactly the point of valet. The campus, in addition to boasting a valet service, is home to a free ice cream truck, a concierge desk, and a giant hot tub in the middle of campus. Since the beginning of the administration of High Point President Nido Qubein, the noted businessman and motivational speaker has sought to “wow” students in order to encourage their learning.
Well, as someone who grew up 30 minutes from High Point University, consider me “wowed.” As in, “Wow, that’s absurd.”
The whole article, which also discusses valet service at schools like Florida Atlantic and USC, is here. I was sort of appalled when I found out that some GW students were sending out their laundry to a company called “Soapy Joe’s.” But by the standards of High Point University, GW students are practically roughing it.
Okay, it hasn’t been that long since Susan Boyle. But the lone copy of a new CD by a former world leader has fetched $165,000 for a charity named after the singer’s spouse. Who might the singer be? Tony Blair? Margaret Thatcher? Bill Clinton? Boris Yeltsin? Alberto Fujimori?
Well, no.
Continue reading "The Most Unlikely Crooner Since Susan Boyle" »
A few years ago, the National Basketball Association instituted a rule that prohibits its teams from drafting high school kids (as it had been doing with potential superstars like LeBron James). Under the new rule, draftees must be at least one year out of high school and at least 19 years of age. This has produced a “one-and-done” situation for college teams, which now are left to serve as proving grounds for top high school players during the year before they abscond to the NBA.
The NBA’s contract with the players will soon be up for renegotiation, and this rule will get a close look from both sides. Here are a couple of very different perspectives on it:
From Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy:
I don’t like the ‘one and done.’ First of all, I don’t really understand how we get away with that as a league, that we tell a guy out of high school he can’t come and play in our league. The guy should have the right to make a living and to come into our league. And what I really don’t like is the way our system is set up. To me, and I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous, but kids should be going to college if at least part of what they want to do is get an education. To me, it’s sham.
From NBA commissioner David Stern:
I think there is a mixed view about what it does for the NCAA, but that wasn’t why we did it. This is not about the NCAA, this is not an enforcement of some social program, this is a business decision by the NBA, which is: We like to see our players in competition after high school.
Here’s more.
The Politico has a peculiar article which sort of hints at something funny between U.Va political scientist and frequent media commenter Larry Sabato, and former Congressman Virgil Goode and the guy who beat him, Tom Periello:
The race that took Sabato by surprise was close to home: In Virginia’s 5th Congressional District — which includes Sabato’s University of Virginia Center for Politics, in Charlottesville — a young, long-shot Thomas Perriello defeated the courtly, six-term Virgil Goode by the slimmest of margins.
Goode had been more than just a congressman to Sabato. The men are friends dating back to their college days, and Goode was also a benefactor, sending earmarks of up to $1.4 million per year to an educational program run out of the Center for Politics. With Goode’s defeat, that funding abruptly dried up. This year, Perriello rejected the center’s application for $1 million, and Sabato’s aides are scrambling to find an alternate source of money.
Sabato said he doesn’t know why he lost his funding and says he’s never let a personal or financial relationship get in the way of calling them as he sees them. Perriello spokeswoman Jessica Barba said the funding denial had nothing to do with Sabato’s skepticism of Perriello’s prospects, or Sabato’s friendship with Goode, or even the fact that Sabato’s current spokesman, Cordel Faulk, is considering a challenge to Perriello in 2010.
Now, there are many odd things about the article, including the description of Goode as “courtly” given his notoriously robust opinions on such topics as Muslim members of Congress (is the adjective some sort of roundabout way of describing him as a Southern gentleman?), but the strangest is that I am simply not sure what the article is trying to suggest. The article never lays out a clear case, but sort of hints in the direction of three forms of unseemliness, not all of which are compatible with each other:
(1) That Larry Sabato possibly cooked the books in favor of his friend when he predicted that Goode was a shoo-in to retain his seat.
(2) That the funding relationship between Congress and Sabato’s center was in some respects unorthodox.
(3) That Tom Perriello’s decision not to renew the earmark for Sabato’s center might have been retaliation for Sabato’s prediction (and for the fact that a key figure in the center may challenge him next time around).
Of these, there seems to be no evidence supporting (1). I am acquainted with a significant number of people whose attitude to former Congressman Goode ranges the somewhat limited gamut between strong detestation and violent loathing. None of them, as best as I can recall, estimated Periello’s chances as greater than ‘he seems like a great guy, and you never know, he might just make it.’ If Sabato was wrong on this, he was wrong together with a lot of other people.
In contrast, there may be a bit more to (2), but I would like to see a lot more evidence. As best as I read the article, Goode wasn’t the only Congressman handing out earmarks in an idiosyncratic fashion. And that the earmark went to Sabato’s center directly rather than U.Va is not astounding - in my admittedly limited understanding, university funding people act like starved, feral weasels when large amounts of federal money are on the table, and are often willing to tolerate unusual institutional arrangements if it helps expedite the money flow. At most, this seems to me to be a ‘bears further investigation’ or a ‘the system of earmarks is generally rather dubious’ story rather than smoking gun evidence of anything funny going on.
And the suggestion that Perriello might be somehow retaliating against Sabato or others in the center by not renewing the grant seems to me to be downright absurd. If this earmark was channelled to help out one of Goode’s mates, there is no reason why Perriello should have renewed it, challenger or no challenger. Indeed, it would have been quite surprising if he had renewed it.
I understand that the pressures at Politico to write, write, write and get your stuff into the pipeline are intense. But usually, when I read a story, I want there to be a story to the story. I’m not sure what it is here. And this is not because I’m especially fond of Larry Sabato (whom I don’t know), or keen on protecting my discipline (I am not a great fan of the particular ways in which Sabato engages in the public sphere - but then, I am sure that there are other political scientists who don’t like my blogging much either). And it could be that there is some deeper set of irregularities happening here - but this story simply doesn’t give me a clue as to what they might be.
Two decades have now passed since John Petrocik introduced the concept of “issue ownership” into the lexicon of students of political campaigns. The basic idea of issue ownership is that voters associate certain issues with certain parties. In the U.S., for example, tax cuts would generally be considered a Republican issue, and environmental protection a Democratic one. The strategic implication is that parties should emphasize the issues that they “own” and should avoid playing on their opponents’ turf.
But how stable or enduring is a party’s ownership of an issue? That question is at the heart of Stefaan Walgrave, Jonas Lefevere, and Michiel Nuytemans’s experimental study (abstract here) of the ability of parties to use media appearances to create new issue turf for themselves and to protect the turf they have already staked out.
Rather than describing the entire study, I’m going to concentrate on the portion that I consider most interesting. This is the idea that parties can gain most by focusing on issues that no other party owns, can gain less by focusing on other parties’ issues, and can gain least by focusing on issues they already own; that last part may seem counterintuitive, but the idea is simply that when people already agree with you, there’s little to be gained by trying to persuade them.
Walgrave and his colleagues embedded an experimental component within a very large (n=more than 11,000) but nonrandom panel survey of Belgian voters. The experimental stimulus was a phony news item inserted into a real excerpt of the most popular television news program in Belgium. Almost 5,000 respondents were exposed to the fake story. These were respondents who volunteered to watch the news program; they weren’t randomly assigned to the treatment condition. In the excerpt, the news anchor introduced a party leader whose statement started with “The point of view of [the party] on [some issue] is that…” The five party leaders who were shown were real; they had agreed to participate in the study, and the positions they described for their party were real, too. In all, each party leader recorded separate 30-second statements on six different issues.
Respondents rated parties on 0-10 scales according to their competence to determine policy on the issue about which the party leader had spoken. When the leaders discussed an issue that no party owned, their party registered a significant credibility gain. When they addressed an issue owned by another party, they also profited, but not by as much. And when they talked about issues their party owned, they made no progress, though the results contained some evidence that they may have limited the losses that their party would otherwise have suffered. In sum, the results, though containing considerable noise (welcome to social science), were basically consistent with the idea that the researchers set out to test.
Along with recent non-experimental research, these results and others reported by Walgrave et al. on which I haven’t focused have some striking strategic implications. Most importantly, perhaps, “trespassing” on other parties’ issues not only does happen, but can be successful – especially for parties that receive a good deal of play in the media; for parties that have difficulty commanding attention, though, the superior strategy may be to stick to their own issues lest another party make off with them. It’s also known that much issue trespassing occurs toward the end of a campaign; early in a campaign, parties tend to concentrate on solidifying their base, but later on they try to reach out to supporters of other parties. But the authors are skeptical of the merits of this strategy; it’s fairly easy, they argue, to move up in the rankings on an issue, but it’s very difficult to dethrone the issue owner.
All in all, a pretty cool study – not a perfect research design by any means, especially in its heavy reliance on nonrandom assignment to the various experimental conditions, to the experimental component of the study, and to the study itself. But cleverly executed (wouldn’t the rest of us love to be able to use real-life party leaders in our experimental research?) and centered on issues that are important theoretically and have some important real-world implications.
Tyler Cowen writes:
Median voter theorem. It’s my [Cowen’s] first-cut account of a lot of what is going on in the newspaper headlines. Yet somehow I rarely see it mentioned, even when I read very prominent social scientists commenting on current policy.
I can see how an economist would think of the median voter theorem as central, as it’s the most economics-like of political laws. That and campaign contributions are the two explanations that best align with economic models.
The median voter theorem has limitations, though, which are essentially quantitative rather than quantitative. I’ll give the story, but first the graph:
Here’s the positive statement of the median voter theorem. A politician is trying to get elected will probably get more votes (all else equal) if he or she is a centrist rather than far to the left or the right of the majority of the voters. Similarly, if you’re trying to push a bill through Congress, to first approximation you can think of the legislators as aligned on a left-right axis, in which case if you can get the median congressmember (and everyone to the left or right of him or her) on your side, you’re golden.
Certainly the median congressmember is important: by definition, it’s that marginal vote you need to get a majority. But where do the median congressmember’s positions come from? Not necessarily from the median voter in his or her district. My research with Jonathan Katz (see the graph above), suggests that being a moderate is worth about 2% of the vote in a congressional election: it ain’t nuthin, but it certainly is not a paramount concern for most representatives. (The graph appears in chapter 9 of Red State, Blue State. If you’re interested in the median voter theorem and U.S. politics, I recommend that whole chapter, actually.)
I am sympathetic to Cowen’s larger point (also made by Matthew Yglesias), however, which is that it might be a mistake to assume that politicians of your political party agree with you, deep down, on the issues, and that they’re only voting differently because of expedience, craven political calculation, or whatever. It’s worth considering the hypothesis that lots of Democratic politicians do not share the values and policy preferences of lots of Democratic voters, and similarly for the Republicans. Given the diversity of public opinion, this really has to be true on some issues, and it very well might be true all over the place.
This last point, of course, is completely consistent with the idea that the median voter theorem is a “weak force” with much less importance than might be assumed from a casual examination of the political system.
Physics envy should now, I hope, lead us to discover political forces of gravitation, electromagnetism, and the rest. Only the political equivalent of string theory can unify all this. I’m sure it will turn up on the Arxiv soon.
Open-access scholarly journals may well be the wave of the future. For now, though, many researchers are reluctant to submit their work to open-access journals because they think of them as dumping grounds for papers that wouldn’t stand a chance of being published in a “real” journal. Indeed, many critics wonder whether the rush to get findings into circulation and/or to fill up empty spaces on one’s c.v. are leading to a short-circuiting of established peer-review practices or even an abandonment of peer review altogether.
Now comes news of a development that seems guaranted to fan these flames.
Do you remember the “Sokal hoax”? In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal wrote and submitted to Social Text, a post-modernist cultural studies journal, a paper that Sokal himself deemed nonsensical but in which he employed terminology in vogue in the journal and made an argument that he suspected the editor would find congenial. He was right. The paper was accepted for publication and on the day it was published Sokal trumpeted the fact that it was all a hoax intended to establish that insofar as cultural studies was concerned, the emperor had been shown to have no clothes.
Well, something like the Sokal hoax has happened again.
Using pseudonyms, Philip Davis and Kent Anderson, claiming to be researchers at the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology (in case you don’t recall what phrenology is, it’s the study of personality through analysis of bumps on the head — and check out the initials of the ostensible center), submitted a paper to The Open Information Science Journal . Note that I didn’t say that Davis and Anderson wrote the article. In fact, the article was written by a computer program, which cobbled together words and phrases that Davis and Anderson provided to form complex, and often bizarre, sentences. The results reported in the paper were phonies, too.
What happened? Davis and Anderson were contacted by the publisher and informed that their paper had withstood its peer review process and was therefore eligible for publication, pending receipt of $800 in fees.
Here is the whole story, which isn’t going to do much to enhance the image of open-access journals.
[Hat tip to Eric Lawrence]
