A question from a Monkey Cage reader:
Is there any research that looks at how the length of an electoral campaign (particularly presidential campaigns) is correlated with whether the incumbent wins or loses? I’m curious mostly because it seems that Obama has had a lot of time to reposition himself for the upcoming election in response to his prospective opponents ideas/views/etc., more time probably than incumbent candidates did mid-20th century or even in the last few decades, though the benefits of incumbency in all elections going back I don’t know how far is more than apparent.
In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.
If readers know of other relevant studies on campaign length, please suggest them.
A forthcoming article (non-gated version here) by Lars Berger shows that contributions from defense interests correlate strongly and significantly with the willingness of Congressmen to defeat attempts to reduce military aid to Egypt during the Mubarak era. Here is the abstract:
In February 2011, the dramatic ouster of Hosni Mubarak threw into the spotlight the U.S. policy of granting generous and unconditional aid to the Egyptian regime at a time when the strategic rationale for such aid had become less obvious and calls for inserting human rights considerations into foreign aid allocations more prominent. Focusing on an unprecedented set of roll call votes taken in the U.S. House of Representatives during the years 2004 to 2007, this article offers the first quantitative assessment of the determinants of Congressional support for U.S. economic and military aid for Egypt. It challenges conventional wisdom on the limited role of campaign contributions in Congressional decision making by highlighting the central role of defense lobby contributions in maintaining the Congressional coalition that shielded Egypt’s prerevolutionary regime from increased U.S. pressure in the years leading up to its eventual demise.
h/t Kevin Lewis
Over at Model Politics, Lynn Vavreck, Josh, and I have a new post on Mitt Romney’s tax problem. The problem for Romney, we argue, is that many Americans think he doesn’t pay his fair share. And when we actually told respondents Romney’s tax rate, those who thought he doesn’t pay his fair share became more likely to say that he doesn’t care about “people like me.” See the post for more explanation and several other findings.
The following is a guest post from Scott Gehlbach, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
In a recent post on the Monkey Cage, Andrew Gelman writes that he was “not convinced” by a recent attempt to debunk evidence of fraud in Russia’s recent parliamentary elections, though he asserts that he knows “nothing about Russian elections” and suggests that “others can feel free to clarify.” There is, in fact, quite a bit of information floating around the blogosphere on December’s Duma elections, though most of it is in Russian and not accessible to the typical reader of the Monkey Cage. Here is my attempt at translation.Some necessary context: The statistical analysis of electoral fraud in Russian elections dates to the pioneering work of Alexander Sobyanin, a Russian physicist who examined voting and turnout in the 1993 constitutional referendum. There is superb academic work on the topic by Mikhail Myagkov, Peter Ordeshook, and Dimitri Shakin, who built on and extended Sobyanin’s insights in a number of important publications, culminating in The Forensics of Electoral Fraud (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Finally, the bloggers Alexander Kireev and Sergei Shpilkin have provided some of the best real-time analysis of the recent elections.
The basic idea in all of this work is that electoral fraud should be evident in election data sufficiently disaggregated. In fact, certain anomalies are visible in the Russian elections using region-level data alone. Exhibit A is Chechnya, where both turnout and vote for United Russia were in excess of 99%. But we can do better, thanks to the generosity – or foolishness – of the Russian Electoral Commission, which makes precinct-level data freely available for download.
In practice, most analysis has focused on three indicators: the distribution of vote shares across precincts, the distribution of turnout across precincts, and the relationship between vote shares and turnout. Starting from the top, here is the distribution of precinct-level vote shares for United Russia:
Wednesday was a big day for the Federal Reserve and its chair, Ben Bernanke, as the Fed took new steps to better communicate its thinking about the future path of monetary policy. While most analysts are focused appropriately on the implications of communications as a policy tool for the Fed, I’m more interested in its implications for Congress’s relationship with the Federal Reserve. From this vantage point, Bernanke’s most important accomplishment this week is likely to be the Fed’s adoption of a formal long-run inflation target of two percent. Given that the Fed has a statutory “dual mandate” from Congress to achieve full employment in the context of price stability, the adoption of an explicit inflation target will no doubt pique the interest of lawmakers. The parties, not surprisingly, tend to have different views about the dual mandate. Many Republicans, seeking to limit the Fed’s policy discretion, favor limiting the Fed to a single mandate of price stability; the Fed’s unilateral move this week to designate an explicit inflation target might be welcomed by the GOP. Democrats, however, will likely be wary of any signals from the Fed that it prioritizes fighting inflation over reducing unemployment—even if Bernanke went to lengths yesterday to argue that the Fed remains committed to securing both the employment and inflation sides of its dual mandate.
I’ll return to this issue in a later post. For now, I want to highlight a smaller tool in the Fed’s new bag of transparency tricks. As shown above, the Fed’s innovations this week include the release of (anonymous) interest rate projections by the seventeen members of the Fed’s open market committee (FOMC). (“Transparency” only goes so far amongst central bankers.) The projections indicate FOMC members’ views of the appropriate timing of “policy firming”—that is, how long its members think that the Fed’s lending rate should be kept near zero. FOMC hawks, who fear a takeoff in inflation and thus favor an early increase in the federal funds rate, appear on the left; FOMC doves, who want to give the economy more time to recover and thus prefer to delay the increase in interest rates, appear on the right.
The Fed’s decision to reveal the rate projections of both the voting and non-voting members of the FOMC is novel. In the past, the public had to rely on the language in the policy statement issued after each FOMC meeting, a statement that reflects only the views of the voting members of the FOMC (which by statute excludes a rotating set of the twelve reserve bank presidents). Remarkably, in comparison to the Fed’s last meeting statement, yesterday’s statement was decidedly dovish: Approved by a vote of 9-1, the committee’s statement extended its commitment to keeping the federal funds rate near zero through “at least late 2014,” eighteen months longer than last year’s projection. Meanwhile, the rate projections themselves suggest a more diverse set of views across the FOMC membership: eleven doves prefer to stall tightening until 2014 or later while six hawks want to tighten before 2014. The dovish voting members are unrepresentative of the broader array of views across the FOMC.
Yesterday’s events suggest that the voting rules of the FOMC may be consequential for the shape of monetary policy. Those voting rules of course are set by Congress, which created the FOMC in 1933 and has subsequently amended its governance on a handful of occasions. Legislators continue to express frustration with the FOMC. Some House Republicans favor broadening the voting rights of the committee, allowing all of the bank presidents to vote at each meeting. (Bank presidents are said to be more hawkish than governors, though the evidence is mixed.) Had each of the FOMC members been eligible to vote this week, it would have been tougher for Bernanke to secure agreement on such a dovish policy outlook. No doubt, congressional Republicans will continue to push for the expansion of voting rights on the FOMC. In contrast, House liberals prefer stripping the bank presidents of their voting rights altogether. The array of rate projections amongst the members of the FOMC, however, should signal to liberals that the power of the doves can be augmented considerably by retaining voting rights for a rotating group of bank presidents. Granted, voting rotation will not always favor easing, as it does this year. Next year, the three FOMC uber-hawk bank presidents from Philadelphia, Dallas, and Minneapolis will rotate back into voting seats, no doubt pushing for earlier tightening of lending rates.
All that said, the current split party control of Congress and divided control of the branches limit the chances that Congress and the president will agree to any revisions to the Federal Reserve Act. Should Republicans win the White House and both chambers in November, however, the internal governance of the Fed—as well as its statutory mandate—might come into focus more sharply in Congress’s crosshairs.
Fred Bergsten and Jacob Kierkegaard argue that there is nothing to worry about in the eurozone crisis.
The economic and financial problems in the Eurozone are clearly serious and plentiful. The area is in the midst of multiple, frequently overlapping and mutually reinforcing crises. … We have complete confidence that, in the crunch, both Germany and the ECB will pay whatever is necessary to avert disaster. The ultimate political goals of each assure this result. … As the Greek government (with the rest of the Eurozone and the IMF looking over their shoulders) haggles with private creditors, and non-Eurozone members of the G20 consider whether to provide more resources to the IMF, the key actors in the crisis are still positioning themselves to force others to pick up as much of the crisis costs as possible. In the meantime, the crisis continues and may superficially appear to be insoluble. Yet, there are in fact several possible solutions to stave off a near-term meltdown when Italy and Spain begin their large bond rollovers in early 2012 … It remains to be seen which solution will be chosen. It is possible, indeed likely, that the ultimate package will combine parts of each of the above. …
But it is obvious that none of these solutions are even remotely as costly for any of the main actors involved, inside or outside the Eurozone, as a sovereign default in Italy and/or collapse of the euro. That is why, once the political pre-positioning is over and the alternatives are exhausted, the games of chicken will end and the political decision on how to split the bill for securing the euro’s survival will be taken. Every policymaker in Europe knows that the collapse of the euro would be a political and economic disaster for all and thus totally unacceptable. Fortunately, Europe is an affluent region with ample resources to solve its crisis – it is a matter of establishing the political will to pay rather than the economic ability to pay.
This seems, on the surface, like a plausible argument – if everyone in a crisis bargaining situation recognizes that they face disaster in the case of breakdown then they will never get to the point of breakdown. But it isn’t actually all that plausible, for reasons that Thomas Schelling discussed in his classic book on nuclear deterrence, Arms and Influence. In the early 1960s, both the US and the Soviet Union faced obvious disaster if they actually got embroiled in an all-out nuclear war. But this didn’t stop them from engaging in brinkmanship – taking actions which went went right up to the edge of courting disaster in order to make gains. The problem is that one side’s just-on-the-boundaries-of-tolerable brinkmanship may be another’s over-the-edge-into-provocation-that-we-cannot-tolerate. As Schelling puts it in his analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis:
There is just no foreseeable route by which the United States and Soviet Union could become engaged in a major nuclear war. This does not mean that a nuclear war cannot occur. It only means that if it occurs it will result from a process that is not entirely foreseen, from reactions that are not fully predictable, from decisions that are not wholly deliberate, from events that are not fully under control. … There was nothing about the blockade of Cuba by American vessels that could have led straightforwardly into general war. Any foreseeable course of events would have involved steps that the Soviets or the Americans – realizing that they would lead straightforwardly to general war – would not have taken. But the Soviets could be expected to take steps that, though not leading directly to war, could further compound risk … The Cuban crisis was a competition in risk taking, involving steps that would have made no sense if they led predictably and ineluctably to a major war, yet would also have made no sense if they were completely without danger … in such a crisis, the danger of inadvertent war goes up. This is why they are called “crises.” The essence of a crisis is its unpredictability.
Even if one accepts Bergsten and Kierkegaard’s claim that everyone genuinely realizes the risks of breakdown (I am not so sanguine myself), Schelling’s logic seems to me to capture the Eurozone crisis far better than their arguments. If all actors are willing to play chicken, risking irresolvable breakdown of the system, in order to get their way, then that poses an obvious risk of instability – an actor may go too far, and precipitate breakdown by accident. This risk is all the higher given the importance of market reactions in determining success or failure, and the inability to predict with even the faintest degree of confidence how markets might react to this or that move (it is clear from previous iterations of this game that the key political actors’ ability to model market reactions to their proposals is … limited). Given that Schelling was originally an economist (and eventually won the Nobel Prize for same), it is a bit surprising that his arguments about crisis bargaining are not better known among economists like Bergsten and Kierkegaard. Surely, they are difficult to formalize. But they provide a better, and unfortunately more unforgiving, lens on the current situation than overly optimistic assumptions about availability of information, ability of actors to recognize the risks of collapse and revise their strategies accordingly etc.
The way it works now is you write a paper then you send it to a journal and they review it and decide whether to publish it. The basic unit is the paper. What if we made the author the basic unit? Instead of inviting submissions, Econometrica invites applications for the position of author. Some number of authors are accepted and they can write whatever they want and have it published in Econometrica. The term would be temporary, maybe 1 year.Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just write the paper you want to write, not the paper that the referees want you to write? The quality of papers would unambiguously increase. After all, your acceptance is a done deal, anything you write will be published, why bother writing anything less than the most interesting idea that is currently on your mind.
Quality control is achieved by rotating in the authors currently writing the most interesting stuff. Once the current slate of authors is chosen, there is no need anymore for referees or editors. But if you want peer review, you can have that too. Anyone wishing to prepare a referee report is invited to do so, they can even do it anonymously if they want and even make it open to the public. The journal might even want to append the reports onto the published paper.
Come to think of it, these journals already exist: blogs.
We are currently in the process of formalizing a relationship with Electoral Studies, an academic journal, to have authors who write for the very useful “Notes on Recent Elections” section of the journal also contribute pre-election and/or post-election reports to the Monkey Cage’s Election Reports feature. I’ll have more on this as it develops, and readers (and potential writers!) should be clear that you can still contribute to the Election Reports feature here even if you are not doing anything for Electoral Studies. However, it should help bring us additional content at the Monkey Cage. With that in mind, the following post-election report on the historic Egyptian Parliamentary Elections was written by Mazen Hassan, who is a lecturer of Comparative Politics at Cairo University, where he specializes elections, party systems and institutional design in new democracies. Hassan will be writing the Electoral Studies Note for this election, but for now here are his initial thoughts:
Egypt has just concluded its first post-Mubarak parliamentary election. After a lengthy process that stretched over 7 weeks, involved three stages and 12 polling days in total, the official results were finally announced on January the 22nd. As expected, no party came out with an outright majority. The party with the plurality of seats however – also not surprisingly – was the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The electoral alliance it led won 47% of seats (235 out of the 498 contested seats – with only 22 seats of those won by the other parties in the alliance).The surprise, however, has been the party that came second. With 24.3% of seats, a newly founded party – called Al-Nour – representing the Salafi movement and commonly characterized as an even more conservative Islamist party than the Muslim Brotherhood, managed to push liberal parties to the third and fourth places and possibly preventing FJP from gaining a majority by splitting the Islamist votes. Two liberal parties came third and fourth; Wafd and Free Egyptians, obtaining 7.8% and 7% respectively. Their performance has been largely disappointing to liberal voters.
The electoral system applied represented a strong break with the past. Egyptian elections have typically been governed by a majoritarian system in two-member constituencies (222 in total). The newly adopted electoral system is a mixed parallel one, which reserves one third of the lower house’s 498 seats to be contested by a majoritarian two-round system in 83 two-member constituencies (166 such seats in total). The remaining two thirds (332 seats) are contested by a PR formula, using largest remainder with Hare quota. District magnitude ranged between 4 and 12 seats and a national threshold of 0.5% of nationwide votes was applied.
The majoritarian seats have been more or less a two-horse race between the two big Islamist parties. Of those 166 seats, FJP got 108 seats, Al-Nour got 27 – together gaining 81% of such seats. The fact that independent won 23 such seats means that the share of other parties of those seats was less than 5%.
Turnout has been around 60%, dropping significantly however where a run-off was held for majoritarian seats. Different and sometimes contradicting turnout figures have been published by the Electoral Commission. The reason is that the whole country did not vote on one day, but rather each one-third had its own ‘voting stage’ to allow for complete judicial supervision over the voting process. Moreover, the fact that each ‘voting stage’ had two polling days and also possibly a run-off for the majoritarian seats where no candidate got 50%+1 in the first round (also held over 2 polling days), complicated the announcement of figures even further.
