The Monkey Cage

Looking for funding for your favorite charity? Take a judge to lunch.

According to a recent New York Times story by Adam Liptak, judges have the power to direct left-over funds from class-action lawsuits to virtually any charitable organization they please — including (a popular choice) their own alma mater. And “judges all over the country have gotten into the business of doling out leftover class-action settlement money, sometimes to organizations only tangentially related to the subject of the lawsuit.” Liptak mentions, for example, that $6 million of leftovers from an anti-trust class-action suit involving fashion models was doled out to various charities, including $1 million to an eating disorder program and $500,000 to a substance abuse program. And, though I blush to mention it, the, ahem, George Washington University Law School was given more than $5 million from unclaimed funds in a suit involving chemical pricing.

So widespread has this practice become and so lucrative are its rewards that charitable organizations are now hiring lawyers to lobby judges for the leftovers. As Liptak concludes, “Judges are turning into grant administrators, and some of them are starting to enjoy it. Who wouldn’t?” See the full story here.

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

In a recent post, I raised the issue of Americans’ fixation with presidents, who are the subjects of intense public curiosity. Consistent with that theme, I recently happened upon a compilation of Presidential Trivia by Richard Lederer. Here, for those who enjoy demonstrating their mastery of the inconsequential, are a few choice items. (The answers appear beneath the fold.)

1. Who was the first president to attend a baseball game?
2. Who was the first president to refer officially to the Executive Mansion as the White House?
3. Who were the only two sitting senators to be elected president?
4. Who was the only president to serve in the House of Representatives after his presidency?
5. Who was the only president to serve in the Senate after his presidency?
6. Who was the only president to be named a sworn enemy of the United States?
7. Who was the only president who had a career in modeling?
8. To how many other presidents have genealogists determined that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was related?

1. Benjamin Harrison watched the Cincinnati Reds beat the Washington Senators, 7-4, on June 6, 1892.
2. Theodore Roosevelt declared by presidential proclamation that the Executive Mansion should henceforth be known as the White House.
3. Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy.
4. John Quincy Adams.
5. Andrew Johnson, who served only four months before dying of a stroke.
6. John Tyler joined the Confederacy 20 years after the completion of his term and was declared a sworn enemy of the United States. He was also the only president who wasn’t a U.S. citizen when he died; he died as a citizen of the Confederate States of America, and his coffin was draped with a Confederate flag.
7. Gerald Ford appeared in a Look magazine pictorial and on the cover of Cosmopolitan.
8. Eleven (George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Marvin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft).

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Would holding elections by mail increase voter turnout? Many electoral reform advocates predict that mail ballot elections will boost participation, basing their prediction on the high turnout rate among absentee voters and on the rise in voter turnout after Oregon switched to voting by mail. However, selection problems inherent to studies of absentee voters and Oregon give us important reasons to doubt whether their results would extend to more general applications of voting by mail. In this paper, we isolate the effects of voting in mail ballot elections by taking advantage of a natural experiment in which voters are assigned in a nearly random process to cast their ballots by mail. We use matching methods to ensure that, in our analysis, the demographic characteristics of these voters mirror those of polling-place voters who take part in the same elections. Drawing on data from a large sample of California counties in two general elections, we find that voting by mail does not deliver on the promise of greater participation in general elections. In fact, voters who are assigned to vote by mail turn out at lower rates than those who are sent to a polling place. Analysis of a sample of local special elections, by contrast, indicates that voting by mail can increase turnout in these otherwise low-participation contests.

That is a bit of cold water from Thad Kousser and Megan Mullin. The paper is here or here (gated). The natural near-experiment they analyze is quite neat.

Maybe California should have tried cotton candy instead.

Posted by John Sides at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Governments make concessions to terrorist organizations. This often leads to an increase in the militancy of the terrorist organizations. So why do governments make concessions to terrorist organizations if it’s going to make the terrorist organizations more militant? Ethan Bueno de Mesquita of The Harris School at the University of Chicago uses a formal (mathematical) model to shed some insight on this puzzle (article here):

The model developed in this study yields three key results. First, it suggests an explanation of the observation that government concessions often lead to an increase in the militancy of terrorist organizations. Namely, concessions draw moderate terrorists away from the terrorist movement, leaving the organization in the control of extremists. Second, it provides an answer to the question of why governments make concessions in light of the increased militancy they engender. The government’s probability of succeeding in counterterrorism improves following concessions because of the help of former terrorists that directly improves counterterror and leads the government to invest more resources in its counterterror efforts. Thus terrorist conflicts in which concessions have been made are more violent but shorter. Third, it demonstrates how the ability of former terrorists to provide counterterror aid to the government can solve the credible commitment problem that governments face when offering concessions.

Posted by David Park at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Following up on a previous post I’ve add the mean ideology for Red, Purple and Blue Americas. As a crude measure of Red, Purple and Blue, I used the percentage support for Bush in 2000 as follows: Red > 55%, 45% < Purple < 55%; and Blue < 45% (see below for a list of specific states). We can see that the mean ideology of Purple America is almost identical to the US and that Red and Blue Americas are equally distant (in the expected directions) from the US mean.

As Tom Holbrook noted in the original post, “Viewed from a different perspective (Rabinowitz et al.), though, the rural Texan is on the ‘same side’ as the median voter.” Holbrook raises a very good point about the difference between directional versus proximity models of voting. (I’ll have more to say about those models in a future post.)

Red states: AL, GA, ID, IN, KS, KY, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, OK, SC, SD, TX, UT, WY
Purple states: AR, AZ, CO, FL, IA, LA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NH, NM, NV, OH, OR, PA, TN, VA, WA, WI, WV
Blue states: CA, CT, DE, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, RI, VT

Source: 2000 National Annenberg Election Study
Sample Size:
US - 58,383
Red - 15,847
Purple - 25,789
Blue - 16,620
Dem Urban NY- 672
Rep Rural TX- 199

Posted by David Park at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I read a New York Times article (or any newspaper or magazine for that matter) based on a survey they conducted, I always lament the fact that they only offer simple crosstabulations in their analysis. For example, the article will discuss whether primary and caucus voters weigh issues versus electability more when selecting a candidate (see previous post), yet they only provide the percentage of voters who say issues and electability are important, respectively. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just put both (scaled) predictors in the same vote choice model to see which has a larger impact on vote choice? Since I’m sharing an office with Andrew Gelman, while working on our Red State Blue State Paradox book, I mentioned to him that we should offer our services, free of charge, to the New York Times to run regressions and write up a short article that a general NY Times reader (without any statistical knowledge) could understand. The short article could be available just online at the NYTimes.com. Bill Keller, any thoughts?

Posted by David Park at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Civil war settlements create institutional arrangements that in turn shape postsettlement politics among the parties to the previous conflict. Following civil wars that involve competing nation-state projects, partition is more likely than alternative institutional arrangements—specifically, unitarism, de facto separation, and autonomy arrangements—to preserve the peace and facilitate democratization. A theory of domestic political institutions as a constraint on reescalation of conflict explains this unexpected relationship through four intermediate effects—specifically, the likelihood that each institutional arrangement will reinforce incompatible national identities, focus the pursuit of greed and grievance on a single zero-sum conflict over the allocation of decision rights, empower the parties to the previous conflict with multiple escalatory options, and foster incompatible expectations of victory. The theory’s predictions stand up under statistical tests that use four alternative datasets.

That is from a new article by Thomas Chapman and Philip Roeder. (Can anyone find an ungated version?) Various people have advocated partition as the best answer to the ongoing civil strife in Iraq. While Chapman and Roeder are cautious in drawing implications for Iraq, their evidence of partition’s benefits deserves consideration. See, however, the differing perspective of Nicholas Sambanis.

Addendum: see also this paper by James Fearon. [Hat tip to Holger Schmidt]

Posted by John Sides at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

To follow up on Lee’s post, there is actually some interesting evidence that childrens’ attitudes toward the President have become much less idealized.

First, in 2000, Amy Carter and Ryan Teten interviewed about 450 children (4th-8th grade) in the Nashville area (article here, gated). Second, in 2004, I did a convenience sample of about 240 students aged 8-13, most of which lived in the Austin area (where I was teaching), with others living elsewhere in Texas and one group in Louisiana. (I had students who worked with kids administer the survey; other students sent the survey to a friend or relative who was a teacher, and he or she administered and sent back the surveys.) Taken together, we have data from both the Clinton and Bush administrations to compare with Greenstein’s 1958 data from the Eisenhower administration.

Each of these three studies asked children, “What kind of job has the president been doing?” The responses in 2000 and 2004 contrast sharply with Greenstein’s findings.

Both the 2000 and 2004 data show a much less idealized vision of the president. Neither Bush nor Clinton fares nearly as well as Eisenhower, a fact that seems to have little to do with presidential approval at the time. (According to the Roper Archive, at the time of these respective surveys, Eisenhower was in the 50s, Clinton in the 60s, and Bush just under 50.)

In the 2004 survey, I also included Greenstein’s open-ended question about “what kinds of things you think the president does.” Some answers reflected naïveté, as Greenstein also found:

- I think he do very important things. I think he does hard things too.
- He takes care of our country and jobs
- I think he has to make the laws and he does a lot of work.
- He is doing some papers.
- he talke to the people en the castle [This was my favorite.]

Some answers were astonishing in their anti-Bush fervor (which we could attribute to Austin’s liberal proclivities, perhaps?):
- He bombs Iraq for oil. He tries to take away women’s and gay rights. He uses the ‘trickle down’ system in the economy (he believes if you give more tax cuts to wealthy people, they will start more business for poorer people).
- He invaded Iraq for “weapons of mass destructions.” [quotes in the original] He was only interested in oil, while we (American soldiers) were attacking soldiers were order to guard the oil site instead of the manufacturing plants for weapons of mass destruction, and during this election, he has made himself look great which he is not. He says he doesn’t regret anything that he has done but he has killed innocent soldiers by snooping in other countries business and he has made the poor poorer by making the rich richer.

One waggish child, perhaps channeling this movie, wrote this about President Bush: “Rolls wads of paper & chunks them into the trashcan while watching T.V. & approving everything on his/her desk while drinking his juice in the South Central.”

I do not know what to make of “his/her.”

Posted by John Sides at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back in the late 1950s, 60% of the second-graders in a study by political scientist Fred Greenstein said that President Eisenhower was “the best person in the world” — even better, apparently, than Mom or Dad or that other venerated figure of the period, the police officer. That a U.S. president should occupy such a high place in the American pantheon, at least among impressionable young children, should have occasioned no great surprise in light of a Gallup Poll finding from the preceding decade: In that survey, 28% of those polled called Franklin Delano Roosevelt “the greatest person, living or dead, in world history.” Finishing second, with 15%, was Jesus.

When I began teaching American politics to college freshman several decades ago, I routinely cited poll results like these as evidence of the tendency of ordinary Americans to idealize their president. Now, many years later, I still cite these results, but no longer to make the same point.

Rather, I juxtapose these poll results with some others that, though obviously not based on anything remotely approaching acceptable survey research methodology, convey the point quite nicely.

• In 1975, visitors as Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London were asked to select, from all the characters depicted in the museum’s exhibits, the most loathsome person in the history of the world. Their choice: Richard Nixon, followed by Adolf Hitler, Jack and Ripper, and Attila the Hun.

• In November of 1999, the New York Post conducted an online poll that asked, among other things, about the most evil people of the last 1,000 years. Hitler did better this time around, taking top honors. But the major surprise was that second place went to a write-in candidate: Bill Clinton. Then, after Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Josef Mengele, came another write-in candidate: Hillary Clinton.

Now, I am not one to heap praise on Richard Nixon or, for that matter, Bill and Hillary Cllinton, but I do want to register my sense that none of them comes even close to being the most loathsome or evil person in the history of the world, or even in the last century. At the same time, I must also record my demurrer from the idea that either Dwight Eisenhower or Franklin Delano Roosevelt merited consideration, let alone selection, as the best or greatest person of the modern era, let alone in all of recorded history. And that, finally, is exactly the point.

Americans, for reasons that are too numerous and too complex to analyze here, often seem to have Larger than Life conceptions of their president, which leads them to vacillate between images of omnipotence and impotence — recall in the latter respect that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, at the nadir of their presidencies, felt compelled to assure nationwide audiences that they were “not irrelevant” — and between images of competence and incompetence and even good and evil. These exaggerated concepts are both boon and bane to those who occupy the White House, as the history of the presidency since the 1960s seems to me to demonstrate.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For several years, Ken Goldstein and his team at the Wisconsin Advertising Project have been compiling and analyzing data on televised campaign ads. The distinguishing characteristics of their work are their coding of the “tone” (positive, negative, or contrastive) of “virtually every political advertisement broadcast in the top 75 markets in 2000 and in the top 101 media markets from 2001 to 2004,” and their incorporation of data on the frequency with which each commercial was actually aired in each area. Fortunately for the rest of us, the Wisconsin team has made their data sets publicly available, so others can use them in their own research (as David Park and I are doing in a soon-to-be-completed paper about which we’ll be posting). Now, after completing many papers and articles, the Wisconsin team has brought out Campaign Advertising and American Democracy, a new book in which they present a wide array of results — some old and some new, some consistent with conventional wisdom about campaign advertising and some not. In coming posts, I’ll discuss key findings from this volume. For now, just a couple of nuggets from an early chapter:

• Ads sponsored by parties and interest groups are far more likely to be negative than are those sponsored by the candidates themselves.
• As campaigns have gotten underway longer and longer before election day, the common practice of using Labor Day as the opening bell in research on campaign advertisng has become increasingly problematic. In 2004, there were more than half a million airings of ads in the presidential race alone before Labor Day.

Stay tuned for more on this study.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What’s the effect of false political information? For example, if you knew a negative story about a candidate was completely fabricated, would that change your view of the candidate? John Bullock conducts some very interesting experiments and finds:

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters’ attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false. In a trio of experiments, I demonstrate that the effect is present in people’s thinking about politics and amplified by party identification. I conclude by elaborating the consequences for theories of belief updating and strategic political communication.

By “amplified by party identification,” Bullock means that whether your view is changed depends in part on your party identification as well as the candidates. For example, if a Republican were to hear a negative story about a Democratic candidate, his impression of the Democratic candidate becomes worse. However, when it is revealed that the information was false, his opinion of the Democratic candidate does not return to its initial state, instead his belief lies somewhere between the initial state and the false state (and the same is true for Democrats and Republican candidates). In contrast, if a Republican hears a negative story about a Republican candidate, his perception of the candidate goes down, but after learning that the information was false, his perception returns to his initial state (again, the same for Democrats and Democratic candidates).

Posted by David Park at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In my class called “The Political Psychology of Prejudice and Inter-Group Conflict,” we recently discussed the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, attempting to explain the guards’ behavior with reference to other famous experiments and studies of this subject. Two students recommended, and we subsequently watched, “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” a documentary of the prisoner abuse that first appeared on HBO.

The film interviews many of the guards, whose comments confirm numerous social psychological findings about what facilitates brutality.

The role of situational factors. Javal Davis says that the prison “turned me into a monster.” Spending time there, he says, would turn a “docile jolly guy” into a “robot.”

The role of authority. The guards recount pressure from military intelligence to “soften up” prisoners. MI would say things like “This guy needs to have a bad night.” Megan Ambuhl then says that it was “not my place to question anything.” Javal Davis recounts the statement of Charles Graner, who received the longest sentence of any of the guards: “I don’t have a choice.” In the Milgram experiments, the experimenter would prod subjects to continue by saying “You have no choice.”

The routinization of brutality. When behavior becomes routine, people cease to question it. The guards saw their behavior as “just business” (Israel Rivera). Roman Krol says “It was normal. It was just like a day at work.”

The dehumanization of the prisoners. They are referred to by number or by nicknames like “Taxi Driver.” They are kept in an animal state—naked, smelly, lying in their own feces and urine, bloody, sick.

Ambiguity leads to conformity. People are more likely to conform to others’ behavior ambiguous situations, which make us unsure how we ought to behave and attentive to others’ behavior for information and cues. Certain of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, such as stress positions, appear to reflect deliberate policy, and the film lays out the familiar evidence from various DOJ and DOD memoranda. But other kinds of abuses, such as the infamous pyramids, seem to have been innovations. Krol says that there were “so many changes in policy…It was kind of confusing.” Rivera asks, “At what point do you say it’s enough?” Ken Davis was told, “Use your imagination.” The guards did not know what they could and could not do, and their superiors did not say.

Situational causes of behavior do not exonerate the individuals involved—a point that is sometimes lost on people—but do help explain why individuals behave as they do and why an ordinary, apparently genial MP like Javal Davis would say that he “was a different person” once he walked through the prison doors.

I highly recommend “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.”

Posted by John Sides at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most occupations are numerically dominated by one sex or the other, and (at least in the U.S.) the higher-prestige, more remunerative ones tend to be male-dominated. It’s relatively easy to think of occupations that were once dominated by men but over the years have become dominated by women, e.g., elementary school teachers. The prevailing interpretation ofsuch displacement of men by women is that when certain occupations become less desirable, they become more accessible to women. But try to think of an occupation that was formerly dominated by women in which men now reign numerically supreme. You can’t, can you?

My long-time research collaborator Susan Welch could, and she and I have just published a study of this exceptional case: women’s intercollegiate sports coaches (which, in practice, means women coaches of women’s teams). Interestingly (or at least we think so!), it turns out that in Division I schools (those with “big-time” athletics programs), women coaches are more frequently found in more prestigious, resource-richer institutions and those that devote more resources to women’s sports. This, then, appears to be an exception to the general tendency, which has been amply documented in the research literature on occupational sex segregation, for women to fare better in the competion for less desirable positions.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

“Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns” in the NY Times notes that there are more adjunct than tenured professors in U.S. universities and colleges. Universities are hiring adjunct faculty due to financial pressures and their desire for more flexibility in hiring (and of course firing). Adjunct faculty are usually hired without health benefits and only with a semester or year contract. Universities are thought of as liberal bastions yet when they are asked to apply those principles to their own institutions they seem to be acting more like conservative business owners.

[I]t is liberals rather than conservatives who are most beset by value conflict over social welfare because they are the ones who must somehow reconcile activist government with traditional principles of economic individualism and laissez-faire.

Posted by David Park at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A title like that can only derive from an August 2007 poll conducted for Radar Magazine (N=603). Among the findings:

- 54% of respondents said that they "hated" Bush, but 67% said they "hated" Paris Hilton. Democratic respondents were more likely to hate Bush (80%) than Hilton (54%).

- 55% of respondents think that Dick Cheney is going to hell. 38% said heaven. 4% said purgatory.

- 36% said "yes" when asked "Did the U.S. government know about the 9/11 attacks before they happened?" It is unclear how much of that 36% is composed of hardcore conspiracy theorists as opposed to those who are merely thinking about early warnings like the famous PDB.

Posted by John Sides at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Umberto Eco, 2007: “Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.”

Samuel Kernell, 1986: “I call the approach to presidential leadership that has come into vogue at the White House ‘going public.’ It is a strategy whereby a president promotes himself and his policies in Washington by appealing to the American public for support.”

More on Samuel Kernell.

Posted by John Sides at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was late getting started this morning because the Post contained such a bonanza of bloggables:

• College students consume more alcohol on football game days than on such well-known drinking days as New Year’s Eve and Halloween, according to a study published in the November issue of Addictive Behaviors. See the abstract here.

• “It’s an immutable law of political physics that those who prevail in Iowa will hurtle toward New Hampshire with bulked-up poll numbers, gathering blinding momentum on the path to nomination.” Keep reading Howard Kurtz’s column here.

• The Democratic presidential candidates can’t agree about where “upper-middle class” stops and “rich” starts. See Joel Achenbach’s piece here.

• Even if John Wilkes Booth hadn’t killed him, Abraham Lincoln may have died of cancer within a year.

And my favorite, because it features such a weird way of testing a new social psychological theory:

• Using magic markers, leaders are more likely to draw the letter “E” in the opposite direction (inside-out) on their foreheads from the way that followers do it (outside-in). See Shankar Vedantam’s write-up here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We have resolved some initial difficulties and our comments sections should now be open. Apologies to anyone whose attempts to comment ran aground.

Posted by John Sides at 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the years, I’ve written numerous papers about how candidates’ looks affect their chances of being elected. Here’s a New York Times article that caught my eye about the challenges this year’s crop of presidential aspirants are facing in maintaining their boyish or girlish figures — not that Barack Obama, who was a fat kid, or Mike Huckabee or Bill Richardson, who have both been fat adults, would want to turn the clock back on what they used to look like. Out on the campaign trail, appearances at state fairs or drop-ins at the local diner obligate a candidate to partake of the indigenous fare, including Philly cheese steaks, fried Snickers bars, and other waist-expanding comestibles.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A much-discussed study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that adolescents were reading fewer literary works, which may lead to a lower capacity for reading comprehension as well as writing ability.

These days I am particularly sensitized to the consequences of reading for writing ability because I am teaching a small writing-intensive seminar for graduating seniors. Some of the problems with students’ writing are grammatical, problems which could, in theory, be fixed with instruction in grammatical principles.

But other problems, in particular deviations from idiomatic usage, have no ready fix because they depend not on principles but on looser notions of what kinds of words “go together.” For example, a very smart student, who actually writes quite well, included this phrase in a recent paper: “quell the exaggeration.” I told him that exaggerations are not “quelled,” at least given how the word “quell” is typically used. This choice is not egregiously wrong — one definition of quell is “put an end to” — but it sounds off somehow.

It’s this kind of writing mistake that can only be minimized by reading. Over a period of time, reading will familiarize readers with the meanings of words, common usage, and thus how to put words together effectively in their own writing.

This is yet more reason to praise those who are trying to motivate reading.

Posted by John Sides at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

How polarized is the American electorate? According to Fiorina et al’s “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America” not very. Fiorina et al. do a wonderful job of laying out the claim that it is the elites that are polarized, not the electorate. So how ideologically different is a Republican rur’l Texan from an urban Democratic New Yawker? Here I plot the mean ideology (measured on a -1 to 1 scale with -1 being extremely liberal and 1 extremely conservative) for the US, rural Republican Texans and urban Democratic New Yorkers.

My co-blogger John Sides noted that “the liberal fair-trade coffee-drinking Per Se-dining New Yorker is closer to the US median than the conservative truck-drivin’ Toby Keith-lovin’ Texan.” This simple analysis does seem to call into question the perceived notion that red America is more authentically “American” than blue America, but we’ll explore this in more detail in some further posts.

Posted by David Park at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

In the New York Times last week, Michael Powell looked at the value of endorsements in presidential nominations and came up with little: “A majority of endorsements are political popcorn, signifying nothing.”

This misses the big picture. Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller have just finished a new work on the role of political parties in the nominations process, which is forthcoming from Chicago University Press. Hans presented an overview of the book at GW last month.

A very interesting finding: the best predictor of how many delegates a candidate wins is not money raised, the amount of media coverage, or support in the polls. It’s the number of endorsements the candidate has received from party elites. As Powell himself notes, endorsements can serve as cues to the endorser’s followers and to donors. They may also signal the willingness of the endorser’s political “machine” to work on the endorsee’s behalf—precisely the kind of benefit that would not be picked up by polls or FEC reports.

Cohen et al.’s work suggests that party leaders play an important role in presidential nominations, even after reforms (e.g., the McGovern-Fraser Commission) that empowered rank-and-file partisans at the expense of leaders. To be sure, we are a long way from the proverbial smoke-filled backrooms of yore. But party leaders ain’t popcorn.

Find a copy of the book manuscript here.

P.S. Who is leading in endorsements in 2008? According to some data Hans presented, it is Romney and Clinton. Stay tuned.

Posted by John Sides at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I love dogs, and my “frivolity”-category posts will probably reflect that fact. Here, for starters, is an irresistible (at least to me) up-close-and-personal photo of my late brother and sister-in-law’s beautiful boxer, Frida, who is now the housemate of my niece Kathi. Frida (named for Frida Kahlo because of the dark circles around her eyes) was bred for show but became a house pet after she was diagnosed as having a heart murmur that turned out to be a false alarm. Frida especially enjoys lap-sitting, leash-pulling, beach-walking, and bird-chasing. Intending no offense to my other family members (human, canine, or feline), I nominate Frida as our entrant in the best-looking family member competition.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recent days have brought a shower of media attention to the long-term economic cost of the war in Iraq. This sent me back to my stereotypically yellowed course notes and materials, to an article by James L. Clayton, titled “Vietnam: The 200 Year Mortgage,” which appeared in The Nation on May 26, 1969 — an old article, to be sure, but one from which much can still be learned.

According to Clayton, the pattern of long-term costs associated with American wars indicates that “the bulk of the money is spent long after the fighting stops” — and when Clayton said “long after,” he meant it. The primary reason: veterans benefits, which for the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War averaged 1.8 times the original cost of the wars themselves. For example, veterans benefits from the War of 1812 didn’t peak until 1880 and continued to be paid until 1946, 131 years after the war ended. More generally, veterans benefits don’t peak until at least two generations after a war has ended, and don’t stop until well over a century later.

Clayton offered the following hypothetical example from the Civil War:

Suppose a drummer boy, age 14, became a soldier in 1861 and was disabled in that war. Suppose also that he married, had children, his wife died, and he remarried late in late, at say age 60 in 1907. Suppose further that his second wife was 25 years old at marriage and that at age 30 she bore him a child who was mentally or physically incapable of supporting himself. That child would be 57 years old today [that is, in 1969] and still drawing benefits — more than a century after the war ended.

Of course, that’s an absurd hypothetical — a great soap opera but hardly the stuff of serious analysis. Or is it? As Clayton noted, as of 1967, 1,353 dependents of Civil War veterans were still drawing benefits.

Intrigued by Clayton’s analysis, for many years I scanned newspaper obituaries, looking for notices of the deaths of dependents of Civil War veterans. On January 20, 2003, I happened upon the following item in the Washington Post:

BLAINE, Tenn. Gertrude Janeway, the last widow of a Union veteran from the Civil War, has died in the three-room log cabin where she lived most of her life. She was 93.

Bedridden for years, she died Friday, more than six decades after the passing of the man she called the love of her life, John Janeway, who married her in 1927, when he was 81 and she was barely 18.

…An honorary member of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Gertrude Janeway was the last recognized Union widow. She received a $70 check each month from the Veterans Administration.

Continuing his analysis, Clayton indicated that up to 1967, veterans benefits for the Spanish-American War had amounted to twelve times the original cost of that war, and didn’t peak until 51 years after the war ended; that World War II veterans benefits would probably peak around 2000, and that dependents of Vietnam War veterans would be drawing benefits until the 22nd century.

Of course, veterans benefits are only one part of the broader picture, of which another major component is interest on debt accrued to finance the fighting of the war. In any event, Clayton’s conclusion seems no less applicable today than it was when he wrote it:

If this trend continues, wars may soon be simply too expensive to contemplate, and governments too cumbersome to endure.

P.S. Some of the long-term human (as distinguished from more narrowly economic) costs of war — diseases, disabilities, and deaths — are analyzed by Ghobarah, Huth, and Russett in this piece (gated).

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gregory Huber and Kevin Arceneaux figured out a better way to measure whether people are affected by political advertising:

Do presidential campaign advertisements mobilize, inform, or persuade citizens? To answer this question we exploit a natural experiment, the accidental treatment of some individuals living in nonbattleground states during the 2000 presidential election to either high levels or one-sided barrages of campaign advertisements simply because they resided in a media market adjoining a competitive state. We isolate the effects of advertising by matching records of locally broadcast presidential advertising with the opinions of National Annenberg Election Survey respondents living in these uncontested states. This approach remedies the observed correlation between advertising and both other campaign activities and previous election outcomes. In contrast to previous research, we find little evidence that citizens are mobilized by or learn from presidential advertisements, but strong evidence that they are persuaded by them. We also consider the causal mechanisms that facilitate persuasion and investigate whether some individuals are more susceptible to persuasion than others.

This piece contradicts the conventional wisdom that voters are simply turned off by political advertising. In fact, political ads do what candidates want them to do: persuade, not necessarily inform or educate.

Find it here (gated) or here.

Posted by John Sides at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When voters in a primary (or caucus) cast their votes, what do they weigh more, the candidates’ stances on issues or their electability? CBS/NY Times conducted a poll asking asking Iowa and New Hampshire voters that question. They find differences in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Two-thirds of New Hampshire Republicans and one-half of Iowa Republicans said they were open to voting for candidates who did not share their view on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage…By contrast, 50 percent of New Hampshire Democrats said they would not be prepared to vote for a candidate who wanted to keep troops in Iraq “longer than you would like,” even if they thought the Democrat had a good chance of victory in November (the article didn’t give a comparable number for Iowa Democrats).

That got me thinking, what have political scientists found? Alan Abramowitz examined this exact question in 1989 in his article, Viability, Electability, and Candidate Choice in Primary Presidential Elections: A Test of Competing Models (restricted access). Alan controls for three predictors in his model: (1) Candidate Evaluation - overall evaluation of the candidate; (2) Viability - chances of receiving the party’s nomination; and (3) Electability - chances of winning the general election. He finds that voters weigh electability more than the other predictors.

However, with Alan’s limited dataset he was unable to uncover the variation within and across states. I suspect that in early primaries (and caucuses) candidate evaluations may play a larger roll, but in later primaries (and caucuses) electability maybe more important. Why? In the early stages of the primary season, there is a lot of uncertainty regarding who is electable — recall Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — so voters rely on candidate evaluations.

Posted by David Park at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Responding to a question posed in an ABC News survey in February 2002, a random sample of 1,025 American adults named Abraham Lincoln as the greatest American president ever. Several other luminaries — including the other three faces on Mount Rushmore (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt) — received only a smattering of mentions. Franklin Roosevelt finished third, tied — weirdly, in my view — with Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But what really stands out in the present-day context is that tied with John F. Kennedy for second place as the greatest American president was … George W. Bush.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Three comments about our comments policy are in order. First, we’ll try to read all comments, but we won’t always want to get involved in the back-and-forth of debate within the comments section. This is solely because we have competing pressures on our time, and in no way reflects on the quality of the comments, the pressing nature of questions raised about our posts, etc.

Second, the comments section is currently open to everyone. Our moderation will have a light touch. Again, we don’t have enough time to engage in micro-management, even if we were of a mind to. However, we will step in if we feel that comments are off-topic, unnecessarily offensive, or involve too high a degree of personal vitriol. Please be civil.

Third, we strongly prefer that all comments have the author’s actual first and last names attached. We believe that this will significantly enhance any exchange of knowledge or ideas. We acknowledge that there may be strategic reasons for anonymity in certain circumstances, but we urge authors to identify themselves

Posted by John Sides at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why are we writing this blog? Here is a probably-not-exhaustive set of reasons, in rough order of importance.

1) To publicize political science research. Political scientists have been relatively slow in progressing to the blogosphere. Within our general area of the academy, the prevalence of economists is perhaps most noteworthy—among others, Gary Becker, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Dani Rodrik, and Mark Thoma. The folks at Crooked Timber, including our colleague Henry Farrell, span various disciplines, including philosophy, economics, political science, and sociology. (Henry is also owed a significant debt of gratitude for his advice and guidance to us as we began to conceive and then establish this blog.)

Among political scientists in particular, there are the aforementioned Henry Farrell, Daniel Drezner, Jim Johnson, Simon Jackman, Marc Lynch, and the folks at Polysigh. Several blogs oriented around statistical methods (including Andrew Gelman’s and the Social Science Statistics Blog) and law (Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog and the Empirical Legal Studies Blog) also deal with topics within political science.

Of course, there are others we have not listed, but even if all of these blogs were itemized, political scientists would be under-represented. This is particularly true in our areas of study, which focus on public opinion and mass political behavior, both in American politics and in comparative perspective.

The consequence, as Henry Farrell has written in response to a comment by Ezra Klein, is that political science research gets short shrift from the media, the policy community, and the types of people who read academically-oriented blogs. We want to extend what Henry does at his Political Science Weblog, which is post abstracts to interesting papers. Our model is Marginal Revolution, which is perhaps the most important inspiration for this blog. We will post abstracts and links to articles, papers, and books, along with comments that summarize our own reactions and/or discuss the work's importance. We will occasionally highlight our own work, but will try to steer clear of wanton self-promotion. We will occasionally invite guest bloggers for temporary residence. Readers are always welcome to suggest new work that we might highlight. Ultimately, we hope that this blog will gain political science research greater attention and currency.

2) To provide informed commentary on political events and issues. Don’t read anything too self-important in the word “informed.” All we mean by that is that we will draw upon extant research, as well as our own data analyses, to speak to contemporary politics. Here, we are inspired in part by Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin’s work at Pollster.com. The main difference is that whereas Pollster.com serves mainly to collect and aggregate polls of Americans and to comment on issues within the domain of polling, we intend a broader scope, including topics unrelated to polling or elections or American politics. We will also try to be more directly engaged in testing and perhaps contesting propositions from journalists or commentators, much as Morris Fiorina has done in his book-length take-down of the red-blue state notion and the “culture war.” Ultimately, we want contemporary discourse about politics centered as much as possible on the best kinds of evidence.

3) To think aloud. Seth Roberts, another source of inspiration for this blog, has written “Because I blog about my thoughts, I have more of them. I blog, therefore I think.” Thus, we envision short posts about items we have read or less than fully baked ideas that have occurred to us. Perhaps these posts will ultimately illuminate only our own intellectual shortcomings. But even if no one leaves comments or provides feedback or explains why we’re wrong, it will be useful just to write.

4) To indulge our non-academic interests. We don’t presume that everyone will be fascinated by our idiosyncratic pursuits. But we want the blog to have a "personality" that extends beyond political science.

Of course, as the blog develops, its purposes may change somewhat in response to both our own interests and those of our readers. At any point in time, we certainly welcome feedback that anyone may offer. Thanks for reading, and please come back soon.

Posted by John Sides at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)