The Monkey Cage

Over at the Wall Street Journal website, videos of their choices as the best and worst ads of 2007. Kinda fun.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A week or so ago I posted about my cat, Gooseberry. Normally I wouldn’t post about him again, let alone so soon. However, in light of the events of the last few days it seems appropriate to update my earlier post.

A few days ago Goose was wandering aimlessly around the house, crying and bumping into things. We thought he was about to die. After we observed him closely for a while, it became obvious that he wasn’t seeing anything. An emergency trip to the veterinarian quickly confirmed that he was blind, having suffered detached retinas in both eyes. The vets attributed this to elevated blood pressure and told us that it’s fairly common for both retinas to detach more or less simultaneously.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, first, that it turns out that for an old cat (he’s 17) Goose actually is pretty healthy and he’s likely to be with us for a while. Of course, those assurances left quality-of-life considerations on the table, but the vets also predicted that he would adapt quickly to being blind. (Apparently cats are good at this sort of thing.) To our surprise, that prediction is being borne out. He’s navigating around the house on his own, moving freely from our bed on the second floor to his food dish and favorite chair on the first floor to his litter box in the basement and strolling around, guided by his memory, his sense of smell, his whiskers, and some sort of feline radar. In my earlier post, I described Goose as clumsy, and now he’s even clumsier, but he gets where he’s going. And blindness hasn’t stripped him of his alarm cat talent: He’s still getting us up at the same time, and now we know it’s not because he can read the clock on our headboard.

We’re not happy about this development, and neither is he. But we’re relieved that it has proved to be nothing fatal and we’re pleased by his resilience.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Charles Franklin has an excellent post reanalyzing the data in this New York Times graphic about how long each candidate spoke during the recent debates. He discusses both the surprising complications in measuring this quantity and the best way to present the data graphically.

Highly recommended.

Posted by John Sides at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Among sports fans, everyone seems to have an opinion about everything, including some of the more arcane strategic aspects of the game — whether the team should have punted on fourth and short or gone for it, whether it should have worked the ball into the post or sent up a barrage of three-pointers, whether it should have hit-and-run or gone for the long ball. Bill James makes a nice living doing the numbers on issues like these in baseball, and Jamesian modes of analysis have spread into other major sports as well.

In college football, a team’s chances for end-of-season glory raise another set of strategic issues about which conventional wisdom speaks confidently — so confidently, indeed, that it almost seems like a waste of time to check things out systematically. Sometimes, though, what is widely regarded as fact turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be true at all.

The pieces of conventional wisdom under consideration here arise because in big-time college football the final national standings are determined by poll rather than directly by on-field performance. That being the case, every year controversies flare about why certain teams end being ranked higher than other, ostensibly equally deserving teams. And every year, too, pundits and everyday fans trot out the same tired pieces of conventional wisdom.

In a recent paper, economist Trevon Logan (a faculty member at, appropriately, TOSUFF [The Ohio State University Football Factory]) puts this conventional wisdom to the test. His conclusions?

• Contrary to the conventional wisdom, a late-season loss is preferable to an early-season one. (Perhaps this is because early-season losses occur before impressions of a team have begun to solidify — so Michigan’s opening-game loss to Appalachian State could be interpreted as signifying that Michigan simply wasn’t very good, an impression that then became a hurdle to overcome. By contrast, late-season losses are easier to dismiss as aberrations, off-weeks by proven teams.)

• Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it’s no better, pollwise, for a team to have beaten good teams than bad ones. (That is, it’s whether you’ve won, not whom you’ve beaten.)

• Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it doesn’t help for a team to have run up gaudy scores. (That is, the bottom line is whether you’ve won, not how much you’ve won by.)

In short, the conventional wisdom is wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Notwithstanding Logan’s number-crunching, his findings will almost certainly be ignored by sportswriters, who will continue to purvey the conventional wisdom, and by fans, who will continue to parrot what they’ve been hearing on sports-talk radio and read on the sports pages. After all, everyone’s entitled to an opinion.

[Hat tip to Jim Lebovic]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Americans like to complain — with good cause — about the way we go about selecting a president: an interminable primary/caucus “season,” the Electoral College, hanging chads, etc. But if you want to feel good about the US of A, look at the political trainwreck that may be occurring today — December 27 — as Kenyans go to the polls to select their president.

I’m no expert on Kenyan politics, but you probably know even less than I do, so I’ll try to bring you up to speed. If any experts are lurking, please feel free to correct any misinformation I’m about to pass along.

Kenya has a multiparty system. That’s where the fun begins. Many candidates (I’m not sure of exactly how many, but it may well be that nobody is sure of exactly how many), representing the many parties, are running.

Call the incumbent president A. Call his main rival B. Call all the other candidates C through a large number.

According to national polls, B is leading, trailed by A. No one else, including C (the third-ranked candidate) is even close.

And now the rules. This is where all the fun associated with multiparty elections lurches out of control.

In order to be elected, a candidate:

• Must win a plurality of the votes cast nationwide.

• Must win at least 25% of the votes cast in five of Kenya’s eight provinces.

• Must win a seat in Parliament.

Here’s how it seems to be playing out.

B, in the lead nationally, seems a good bet to carry a plurality nationwide, and he should also be able to meet the 5/8 requirement. However, a challenger (call him D) has come out of nowhere, supported (of course), by the party of A, to challenge B for his seat in Parliament. According to a story by Jeffrey Gettleman in the December 25 New York Times, D has been “sprinkling around 500-shilling notes (the equivalent of about $8) and winning over converts.” Nationally, D is a nonentity, but by the rules of Kenyan electoral politics, if he manages to win the seat then B would be out of luck, even if he fulfilled the first two requirements for election.

What about A, the incumbent who’s currently in second place? It turns out that he’s popular in some provinces, but his support is geographically concentrated. Even if he were to win a plurality nationally and carry his home district, as he might be able to do, it seems doubtful that he could meet the 5/8 criterion with B in the race.

If this scenario plays out as it looks like it could, B would find himself on the outside looking in, while A would go into a runoff against C, the third-ranked candidate nationally, even though in the first round C presumably would have gotten just a small fraction of the votes nationally and, like A, would not have met the 5/8 criterion. So the second- and third-place candidates would end up contesting the office, while D took over B’s seat in Parliament and B wound up with nothing at all.

Today is Election Day, so we may know the outcome soon. Or maybe not, if it takes a long time to count the votes and/or if it goes into a runoff. And even if goes into a runoff, there would still be no guarantee of a winner, given the combination of rules that determine the outcome.

In a situation with which I know you’re familiar, the loser ended up with an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. So perhaps there’s light at the end of this particular tunnel for B.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ron Paul is changing the ideological landscape of American politics and the fabric of modern classical liberalism.

That is from Tyler Cowen’s post at Marginal Revolution, and he is not a Ron Paul supporter. I disagree. Here is why Ron Paul will have little lasting impact on American politics:

1) He is introducing few new ideas that are gaining any traction, which I will define as “earning the support of a substantial fraction of the American public.” His opposition to the Iraq War and immigration already tap into healthy veins of American public opinion and indeed the views of many Democrats (re: Iraq) and Republicans (re: immigration). So it is unclear that he is having any independent impact. His opposition to federal government programs is in line with Americans’ skepticism of government, but this general skepticism tends to give way to broad support for many specific programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and most forms of gun control. The American public is not consistently libertarian and Ron Paul’s doctrinaire species of libertarianism is unlikely to win favor.

As such, an independent Ron Paul candidacy is unlikely to attract much of the general election vote. The Democratic and Republican nominees will share some of his views on highly salient issues, thereby eroding his potential base of support. His unique views will attract few converts. I would predict a single-digit share of the popular vote, at best.

2) His ideas and electoral support are not causing the other Republican candidates to change their strategy. Independent candidates and third parties can sometimes force the two major parties to tack in their ideological direction. If so, even if they lose, as they almost always do in American politics, they can still have an effect. Paul is if anything, having the opposite effect. His opposition to the Iraq War and the Patriot Act only encourages his fellow Republican candidates to defend Iraq and the War on Terrorism by beating up on Paul. If Paul runs as an independent, this could change, but I suspect that either party’s nominee can respond effectively with cheap talk — i.e., they will minimize defections to Paul with rhetoric rather than with any substantive shift in their goals or issue positions.

3) Most importantly, he is not building any infrastructure that would ensure his impact can survive the 2008 campaign. By infrastructure, I mean a formal organization, and one that is committed to something other than Paul himself. Indeed, he is doing the opposite. His campaign is driven by grassroots supporters, who, taking advantage of the Internet’s ability to lower transaction costs, raise money and organize events. Such a “bottom-up” campaign is a noteworthy departure from traditional campaigns, but different does not mean better in this case. What will remain when his campaign folds? Little, it would appear, unless he is planning a new political organization or party. Will his supporters constitute a political force? If he is not going to lead an organization of some kind, then likely they will not, especially those of his supporters who are otherwise politically alienated or inactive.

The fate of the Reform Party is instructive here. Even though Perot did try to institutionalize his ideas, the Reform Party itself could not find an identity once Perot himself stepped off the stage. (To wit, they nominated Buchanan in 2000 and endorsed Nader in 2004.) Ultimately, the party succumbed to factional disputes and is no longer a credible electoral force.

Why will the Ron Paul Revolution be any different? I am not sure that it will.

Posted by John Sides at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Spending per month, in 2005 dollars:

Carter: 186,300
Reagan I: 249,900
Reagan II: 162,500
GHW Bush: 91,800
Clinton I: 269,000
Clinton II: 123,000

This is from a paper by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas and James McCann — see here (gated). These data come from (a seemingly quite tedious) page-by-page analysis of FEC records of RNC and DNC expenditures.

Tenpas and McCann emphasize not the differences among presidents but patterns over time within presidencies:

We find that presidents do not vary significantly in the average amount spent per month on polls. There are, however, two recurring patterns of variation within presidential administrations: Presidents tend to spend significantly more on internal polling during the most intense months of a presidential reelection campaign; and polling expenditures increase over the course of each presidential term. These findings suggest that there are common forces (e.g., elections, natural decline in support) that have driven all presidents since Ford to poll.

Their data on George W. Bush only cover the first two years of his first term. They do not report his total spending during this time, but over these 24 months, Bush also spent more on polling as time went on — a pattern similar to previous presidents.

Posted by John Sides at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The headline for this item may sound like a joke, but it’s not. It’s a fact.

In a December 24 article in the New York Times, Ian Urbina reports that Kentucky leads the nation in the percentage of residents who are missing all their teeth. The reasons?

The economy: “Everyday people … are too busy putting food on the table to worry about oral hygiene.”

The culture: “Many of them savor their sweets, drink well water without fluoride and long ago started ruining their teeth by chewing tobacco and smoking.” (Kentucky has the highest rate of cigarette smoking in the country and one of the highest proportions of chewing tobacco use.) Also operative is “a pervasive assumption that losing teeth is simply part of growing old.”

Politics: “Kentucky is among the worst states nationally in the proportion of low-income residents served by free or subsidized dental clinics, and less than a fourth of the state’s dentists regularly take Medicaid … Until August 2006, when the system was revamped, the state’s Medicaid reimbursement rate was also one of the lowest in the country. Experts say this contributed to the shortage of dentists in poorer and more rural areas.”

To read the full article, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In this Washington Post article, Robert Barnes writes:

Both sides cite studies that they believe show that the law has not resulted in lower turnouts for minorities and others or, alternately, show that minorities are most likely to be affected. There are numerous media accounts and other reports of fraudulent voting, as well as a corresponding study from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University law school titled “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” which attempts to knock down many of them.

This is classic “he said, she said” journalism. But is the perspective of both sides based on equally credible research? A few weeks ago, I posted on this topic and cited two studies that showed that voter identification laws are associated with slightly lower turnout and may adversely affect minorities.

Barnes suggests that there are studies that do not show this, or show the opposite. What are they? Can it really be that whites, not minorities, are less likely to have these forms of identification? That more-educated, not less-educated, people are the most likely to be adversely affected by these laws? Even a supporter of these laws, Richard Posner, acknowledges that these laws will adversely affect those least likely to vote. And doesn’t the Brennan Center’s systematic debunking of voter fraud complaints constitute better evidence than “media accounts and other reports of fraudulent voting”?

I am not filing an amicus brief on behalf of the opponents of these laws. I am merely suggesting that the studies cited in my original post constitute the best extant scholarship and shouldn’t be lumped with other studies in a “both sides cite studies” formulation. That the best social science supports one set of partisan views doesn’t mean it deserves to be downplayed so that news reports can seem “objective.”

[Addendum: A reader sends along this paper by Jason Mycoff, Michael W. Wagner, and David C. Wilson. They find:

Examining voting behavior data across four elections (2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006) at both the aggregate and individual levels, our results suggest that voter identification laws do not affect voting at either level.

Their findings about the effect on aggregate turnout conform to those of the Alvarez et al. paper I cited in my original post. Their findings about individual-level turnout are different in that Mycoff et al. find a non-significant effect and Alvarez et al. find a significant effect. There are differences in the details of their statistical analyses that may explain this, but even in the Alvarez et al. analysis, the effect of voter identification laws is substantively small, shifting the likelihood of turnout by 1%. Alvarez et al. also show that the effects of these laws are larger among those with less education and income; Mycoff et al. do not examine these kinds of interactive relationships.

These are working papers, and clearly they are not the final word. But early indications suggest that voter identification laws will disproportionately affect groups that typically turn out at lower rates.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

James Pethokoukis at the Capital Commerce column over at US News & World Report has a short article titled, “The Greatest Economics Film Ever.” Care to guess what it is? Being There. While I very much enjoyed Being There, I’m not sure I would call it the greatest economics film EVER! But I’ll leave that debate to the economists.

However, the article did get me thinking about the best political movies ever. Let me narrow the parameters a bit. The movie has to be about American politics (so no Gandhi) and no documentaries (so no Eyes on the Prize or The War Room). So, with those constraints, here’s my list by chronological order.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), State of the Union (1948), All the King’s Men (1949), Advise and Consent (1962), Manchurian Candidate (1962 and 2004), Dr. Strangelove (1962), The Best Man (1964), Fail Safe (1964), The Candidate (1972), All the President’s Men (1976), JFK (1991), Bob Roberts (1992), Nixon (1995), Wag the Dog (1997), Primary Colors (1998), Thirteen Days (2000), The Contender (2000), Good Night Good Luck (2005).

I’m sure that I’m missing some obvious movies, but there it is.

Posted by David Park at 08:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is a prelude to a longer post on the internet in campaigns. I was stimulated by the following passage in Garrett Graff’s Washingtonian magazine piece, which is derived from this book (reviewed here in the New York Times):

There’s an argument to be made that YouTube, the online video site now owned by Google, delivered the 2006 US Senate elections to the Democrats; two GOP incumbents, George Allen and Conrad Burns, went down to defeat after they came under the attack of embarrassing YouTube videos. While Virginia senator George Allen faced a particularly devastating situation with his “macaca” comment, none of the 2008 candidates will escape the wrath of YouTube.

This interpretation of the Virginia Senate race is nothing new, of course. But such interpretations are key to buttressing the notion of a “Youtube election,” which suggests that Youtube clips are consequential to election outcomes. But are they?

Here are the Virginia Senate polls, courtesy of Pollster.com:

Allen used the word “macaca” twice on August 11, with the media coverage beginning soon thereafter. From the graph, it is clear that Allen’s lead began to dwindle at this point. By the beginning of September, Allen and Webb were in a statistical tie.

But then, things changed. Allen came up with fresh attacks on Webb — e.g., on his view of women — and the gap widened again (perhaps because of these attacks, perhaps not). The gap closed to a statistical tie only at the very end, weeks after macaca.

Thus, the “Youtube cost Allen the election” story needs to be complicated.

(I am not even bothering to address Montana, where Burns was always behind Tester — see here — and so it is hard to claim that his moment of Youtube infamy changed the dynamics of the race.)

1) If we assume that it was “macaca” that caused Allen’s lead to dwindle, why should we credit this incident for his loss and not the other campaign stories and tactics that occurred in September and October? Why aren’t we asking why Webb closed so strongly? Is the temporary shift in the polls (perhaps) occasioned by “macaca” really responsible for Allen’s defeat? It’s not even clear, and we haven’t even talked about Youtube yet.

2) What about the role of more fundamental factors that influence election outcomes? Could Webb have won if President Bush’s approval rating had not been languishing at 35%? And what about Webb himself, his qualities, qualifications, etc.?

3) Was it the Youtube clip that caused the effect, or was it the mainstream media coverage of the incident itself? While the two versions of the clip on Youtube have been watched 650,000 times, that figure obviously doesn’t tell us how many unique Virginia voters saw the clip between August and November. Moreover, the number of people who consume traditional media sources — whether in print, on TV, or on the internet — is vastly larger than the number who watched the Youtbe clip. It’s much more likely that people were exposed to the macaca incident through such dinosaurs as the newspaper and the evening news than through a first-hand viewing of the clip itself.

A rejoinder: Yeah, but wouldn’t Allen have won if not for macaca? The answer: we don’t know. And we can’t know. My question is why we should privilege explanations centered on macaca or Youtube more than explanations centered on “fundamentals,” on Webb, or on later campaign dynamics.

Allen’s defeat was not solely, or even primarily, a Youtube phenomenon. The shorthand history, which elevates Youtube above all other things, is wrong.

More generally, it is important to qualify the claims being made about the Internet’s power to affect elections, a question that I will explore in a near-future post.

Posted by John Sides at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Among Russians, Putin’s crackdown on democratic freedoms is far outweighed by the gains that have been registered in stability and economic growth, and as a consequence “the new tsar” is extradorinarily popular.

However, attributing responsibility to public officials for what happens during their watch is a tricky business (and is thus the subject of a substantial research literature). In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss argue that in lionizing Putin the Russian public has got it all wrong. The idea that Putin “has forged a model of successful market authoritarianism

…is based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit). There is also very little evidence to suggest that Putin’s autocratic turn over the last several years has led to more effective governance than the fractious democracy of the 1990s. In fact, the reverse is much closer to the truth: to the extent that Putin’s centralization of power has had an influence on governance and economic growth at all, the effects have been negative. Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived.

Click here for the full article.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If, when I was a twelve-year-old growing up in a small midwestern town, you’d have told me that eventually I’d live within a few miles of two major league baseball teams, I would have been unimaginably happy. If you’d also told me that I would take no interest in these teams or, for that matter, in baseball itself, I wouldn’t have believed you. Baseball was that important to me. Now it’s not. Last season I watched, in person on on TV, a grand total of zero games, and this season I probably will do the same.

My current lack of interest in matters pertaining to the National Pastime explains why until yesterday I knew nothing about Bill James’s “Hall of Fame Monitor.” Bill James, for those who don’t already know, invented and is the foremost practicioner of sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball records. It turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal article by Allen St. John, that James has been ranking today’s major leaguers in terms of their prospects for being granted entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, where the sport’s greatest players are enshrined. I don’t know exactly how he does this, but in principle it sounds pretty straightforward. One could, for example, fit a logistic regression model for past players, using their single-season and/or lifetime records to predict whether they were subsequently granted admittance to the Hall; then one could substitute into the model the records of current players to determine the probability that they, too, would get in. Of course, in such an exercise certain assumptions come into play — perhaps most crucially, the assumptions that pertinent factors haven’t been left out of the model and that future selections will be based on the same considerations that have prevailed in the past. Those assumptions may prove to be inaccurate. For example, highest-ranked among today’s players is the embattled Barry Bonds, who would be a shoo-in based on his stats but could get blackballed based on his steroid-related misdeeds and, for that matter, his dour demeanor.

A player who scores at least 100 points on James’s scale has a 50-50 chance of making it into the Hall; those who score 130 or above are considered very serious contenders.

Here’s the list of leaders among position players:

Barry Bonds (352)
Alex Rodriguez (316)
Ken Griffey, Jr. (225)
Derek Jeter (221)
Ivan Rodriguez (217)
Mike Piazza (205)
Sammy Sosa (201)
Frank Thomas (194)
Manny Ramirez (187)
Vladimir Guerrero (174)
Ichiro Suzuki (170)
Albert Pujols (166)
Todd Helton (162)
Gary Sheffield (146)
Chipper Jones (141)

On the bubble are:

Jeff Kent (121)
Andruw Jones (101)
David Ortiz (86)

My comments:

The demographic composition/national origin of the game’s leading players certainly has changed over the years, hasn’t it?

Such is my estrangement from baseball that I don’t even know who Todd Helton is.

I’d vote for Frank Thomas based purely on his nickname (“The Big Hurt”), which entitles him to a place in the Hall of Fame.

I’d vote against Chipper Jones on the same basis. Rules of thumb: No crying in baseball, and no one named Chipper in the Hall of Fame.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Leaving aside for the moment Lee’s jingoism, his musical taste raises a more serious issue: is country music leading people to kill themselves?

This article assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates. Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is thought to reinforce the link between country music and suicide. Our model explains 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates.”

The article is here. Of course, the correlation vs. causation issue looms, but the article is worth reading if only because you can ponder the ominous undertones in such hits as “There’s Too Much Month at the End of the Money.”

[Hat tip to Sean Aday, via The Frontal Cortex.]

Posted by John Sides at 04:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

John’s compilation of “year-end” songs (immediately below) is, of course, doubly wrong. In the first place there’s his execrable taste in music. Just listen to his picks and, at least if you’re over 30, you’ll be on my side of the argument. (Although I’m sorry to hear myself sounding like my parents did when I was growing up in the early days of rock ‘n roll.) Second, most of his picks aren’t year-end songs at all; they’re just songs that he chose at the end of the year.

So here, to set things straight, is my own mini-compilation of year-end songs, all in the spirit of the season. From our house to your house, have a happy one of whatever you celebrate, or not, this time of the year.

A poignant retelling of a family Christmas gathering

Lamentations of Christmas tragedy

And for those who’ll be eating Chinese on Christmas…

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every year about this time I make a mix of songs and send it to a few friends. It is not a “best of the year” compilation, or a holiday-oriented compilation, or a themed compilation in general. It just includes songs I like. Here they are:

Christmas Is — Run-DMC
1 Thing — Amerie
The Underdog — Spoon
Freaks! Freaks! — Pigeon John
Sonido Total — The Pinker Tones
Digital Love — Daft Punk
Maybe You Can Owe Me — Architecture in Helsinki (no good clips on Youtube)
Brother — Annuals
Hot Soft Light — The Hold Steady
Napoleon Says — Phoenix
Keep the Car Running — Arcade Fire
Fake Empire — The National
Liza — Wrinkle Neck Mules (link is to an mp3)
The Opposite of Hallelujah — Jens Lekman
The National Side — Romantica
So Long, So Lonesome — Explosions in the Sky
Bird Never Flies — Ari Hest
Dopo la Vittoria — Arvo Pärt (translation here)

Posted by John Sides at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Graduate students in Harvard’s Department of Government made their own version of “The Office”:

[Hat tip to Henry Farrell, via Dan Drezner, via etc., etc.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At “The Monkey Cage,” we generally highlight new findings, issues, and trends, but on occasion it seems useful to go back to reintroduce some unduly neglected ideas from the past.

In a previous post, I included Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America on my short list of “must-read” treatments of media coverage of American politics. Boorstin’s central concept, the “pseudo-event,” seems to have passed largely unnoticed by the current generation of political scientists, which is too bad, because even though The Image isn’t “about” politics per se, there’s plenty about politics in it. You can find the term “pseudo-events” in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, but how often do you encounter it in a political science journal? (To answer my own question, at least insofar as one of the three major “mainstream” political science journals is concerned: Its last appearance was in1984.)

Let’s jump in the DeLorean, then, and do a little time traveling, back to 1961, when Boorstin introduced the concept. A pseudo-event, as he defined it, is a happening with the following characteristics:

• Rather than being spontaneous, it occurs because somebody “planned, planted, or incited it.”

• It is planned, planted, or incited primarily for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.

• It has an ambiguous relation to the underlying reality of the situation.

• It usually is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Boorstin’s example: “The hotel’s thirtieth anniversary celebration, by saying that the hotel is a distinguished institution, actually makes it one.”)

Boorstin’s core argument is straightforward: “In the last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo-events,” which, in a “Gresham’s law of American public life, …tend to drive spontaneous happenings out of circulation.”

As you watch TV coverage or read newspaper accounts of politics and public affairs in coming weeks, keep asking yourself whether what you’re seeing consists largely of pseudo-events, and, if it does, how that matters.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Enik Rising, Seth Masket posts a great video documenting the spatial location of California state legislators through the past century or so. If you’re not too distracted by the accompanying soundtrack, all kinds of interesting things are visible: the rise of the Progressives, the Democratic tide of 1932, and (to my eye at least) the growing polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the past 20 or so years.

(See also Seth’s post on whether the Democratic Party helps the poor.)

Posted by John Sides at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As a follow-up to my previous post on the controversy engendered by the promiscuous use of commas in the Second Amendment, here is a brief recent commentary by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker.

[Hat tip to Eric Saidel.]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently questioned the claim that “Republican voters have displayed a zeal for their candidates that Democrats could only envy.” I was going to pursue the claim further by breaking down presidential approval by partisanship, but my co-bloggers, Lee Sigelman and John Sides, as well as Thomas Holbrook and a comment on the original post, suggested using the National Election Studies data. Thomas Holbrook and John Sides were kind enough to do the analysis for me. Holbrook used the feeling thermometer and Sides used the affect (likes-dislikes) toward the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, but both show similar trends.

First, here is Holbrook’s graph:

Second, is Sides’ graph, but this goes back to 1952 (I’ve converted the table into a graph):

As we can see from both graphs (and as Holbrook noted in his email to me), based on the NES feeling thermometer and the affect scores “it does appear that Republicans are more positive (I don’t know if I’d call it ‘love’) about their presidential candidates than Democrats are about their candidates” but since 1976, the “zeal” gap has narrowed considerably.

Posted by David Park at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The obligatory week having passed since my last frivolous small-animal post, Gooseberry’s fifteen minutes of fame are now upon us.

Since becoming a cat person, I have considered it vital that our little family unit always include one orange stripey model, and Gooseberry has occupied that chair for the past seventeen years — a worthy successor to the long-gone but still much-lamented Tooth Fairy, the Greatest Cat in the History of the World. (The name “Gooseberry,” by the way, was chosen for its homophonic relationshp to “Tooth Fairy.” Goose, as we call often call him, is thus a living memorial to Tooth, as we often called him.)

Gooseberry has two main distinctions that set him arpart from other cats. First, he has no tail, which is not to say that he is a manx. No such fancy bloodlines for Goose — he is of humble, alley-variety origins. As a kitten he apparently was tortured, leading to the amputatation of his tail. This feature adds to his charm (for viewed from the rear, he is cute — rather like a Pembroke corgi), though it detracts from his agility; he has always been clumsy, but at age seventeen he is extremely so, when he deigns to move at all. Second, he is an alarm cat. Possessed of an acute sense of time, he awakens us, virtually without fail, within a few minutes of 6:03 a.m. on a daily basis, often hitting 6:03 on the dot. We have no idea how he does this, but he is extremely dedicated to the task and we rely on his stiff-legged footsteps to trample our vital parts each morning at the appointed time.

Here, then, in his feline glory, such as it is, is Gooseberry. (He’s the live one in the picture, not the stuffed look-alike directly behind him.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

To follow up on Lee’s post about the Milgram research:

In my political psychology class, the final exam includes a question about authority and its role in atrocities such as My Lai and the Holocaust. Two minor gems emerged. One student wrote her entire answer repeatedly referring to the seminal research of “Milgram Stanley.” Another (again, repeatedly) discusses the experiments of “Stanley Milligram.”

Neither approaches this (or, God knows, this), but I’ll blog what I’ve got.

[Addendum: “Milligram” is not induced by MS Word’s spell-check. MS Word would change “Milgram” to, interestingly, “Mailgram.”]

[Update: A student did refer to the “Mailgram” experiments.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Way back in the early days of social scientific research on voting behavior, Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, in Voting (1954), reported widespread public misunderstanding of where the presidential candidates actually stood on key issues, accompanied by a willingness to project onto oneself the issue positions of the candidate one favored or to distance oneself from the positions of the candidate one opposed. The strategic implication is obvious: If a candidate concentrates on projecting a pleasant persona for himself or herself and/or unpleasant ones for his or her opponents rather than staking out long-winded, detailed, and — for most voters, boring — positions on a wide array of issues, then good things are likely to happen on election day.

All of which provides useful background for a nice column by Dana Milbank in the December 19 Washington Post. Milbank’s topic is the fledgling — and apparently already sputtering — “The Hillary I Know” initiative that the Clinton campaign has just rolled out. The strategic problem that the Clinton campaign is trying to deal with is, as Milbank puts it, that “Voters like her brains and her experience, but they don’t necessarily like, well, her.” So, in an attempt to “humanize” the candidate, her campaign has begun to push a new slogan and a new website offering numerous testimonials from various friends and constituents.

This is where things get interesting. What happens when the candidate insists on talking about the issues and balks at getting personal?

“The get-to-know me campaign has hit a snag: Hillary. ‘I know that people have been saying, “Well, we got to know more about her. We want to know more about her personally.” I totally get that,” Hillary acknowledged. … ‘It’s a little hard for me. It’s not easy for me to talk about myself’ — especially, Milbank notes, when there are all those wonkish policy issues to talk about, with which the candidate herself is so enthralled.

As Milbank tells it, try as she might, Senator Clinton simply cannot stop herself from talking about policy issues. A case in point from a stump speech in Ottumwa, Iowa:

Early in her speech, she tried gamely to speak in the first person. ‘I was raised in a middle-class family,’ she said in a soft voice. ‘My father, who was a World War II Navy vet, came home from serving our country and wanted to start a family and start a small business and save enough money to buy a house.’

But after a minute of this, Clinton retreated to what for her is safer ground: the impersonal world of policy.

‘I figure that we can provide 50,000 Iowa families with at least $300 in additional emergency heating assistance, and I can help 80,000 Iowa familis reduce their energy bills by up to 20 percent through immediate weatherization plans,’ she vowed. Silence in the room.

‘My plan would provide 930,000 Iowa households with new matching tax cuts to save.’ …’I would also provide 774,000 Iowa workeres who currently have no employer-sponsored retirement accounts an opportunity to save in your own retirement account.’ Crowd noise at pin-drop decibels.

There is more. For the full Milbank column plus videos of testimonials from friends and constitutuents, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When most Americans discuss politics, their conversations are with those who share their own political perspectives. How, then, do they hear the “other side of the story,” and what happens when they do? Television is one of the primary conduits through which they are exposed to contrary views — and a study by Diana Mutz in the November 2007 issue of the American Political Science Review “suggests that television does, indeed, have the capacity to encourage greater awareness of oppositional perspectives.”

That isn’t necessarily good news, though, for under certain circumstances familiarity appears more likely to breed contempt than empathy. The uncivil, “in-your-face” character of much televised political discourse can, Mutz finds, “cause audiences to view oppositional perspectives as less legitimate than they would have otherwise.” People do learn from such exchanges, but “The ‘in-your-face’ intimacy of uncivil political discourse on television discourages the kind of mutual respect that might sustain perspections of a legitimate opposition. …Seeing politicians argue about their disagreeable policies up-close and personal rather than from a distance intensifies citizens’ negativity toward those people and ideas that they dislike.”

Click here for the full text of this article.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adam Nagourney wrote in the NY Times:

HERE’S another way Republican voters tend to be different from Democratic voters: They like — no, love — their presidential candidates. Not always, of course. But from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Dwight Eisenhower, Republicans voters have displayed a zeal for their candidates that Democrats could only envy.

Is this true? Do Republican voters have a greater “zeal” for their presidential candidates than Democrats? Let’s try to figure this out using some data.

Let’s use presidential approval ratings. Let’s assume there’s a constant 40-20-40 split among Democratic, Independent and Republican voters across time (a strong assumption)**. If Republican voters have a greater zeal, then we should see the lowest approval for a Republican president higher than the lowest approval rating for a Democratic president. So what do we see from Eisenhower onward? The lowest approval for a Republican was Nixon at around 24% (Gallup 8/2-5/74) and the lowest for a Democrat was Clinton at around 36% (Yank/TIME/CNN 5/26-27/93). But Nixon had Watergate! Okay, so let’s see who had the second lowest approval rating. That would be…another Republican…George Bush (the junior) at around 26% (Newsweek 6/18-19/07). But what we really want is presidential approval broken down by partisanship. That will be coming soon…

On a side note, I always wonder where a journalist comes up with a statement like this? I guess I’ll just send him an email and ask.

** For a great discussion on partisanship in polling, see Franklin’s blog post.

Posted by David Park at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A couple weeks ago, I posted on whether Obama is really a “post-polarization” candidate. This spawned a response from Ezra Klein, a response to Klein by Brendan Nyhan, an op-ed from Klein in the Los Angeles Times (possibly in the works before my post), and a subsequent response from Nyhan. (Got that?)

At this point, maybe only the three of us care about the subject, but nevertheless let me add my final thoughts:

1) My definition of “highly polarized” (following, inter alia, Fiorina and Jacobson): when two or more groups have very different opinions of a person, issue, etc. In my post, I compared Democrats and Republicans, who, as Jacobson shows, are more polarized in their attitudes toward Bush and toward the Iraq War than toward any president or war since public opinion polling began. Klein talks about polarization in terms of the overall percent favorable or unfavorable. That is different, since it doesn’t compare opinions among groups. He also notes that aggregate favorables can change, as they did for Bush or Clinton. That is true. You can see that just by looking at presidential approval over time. But shifts in aggregate opinion may not necessarily change the distance between Democrats and Republicans. Imagine if 70% of Democrats liked President Hillary Clinton, and 30% didn’t. Imagine Republicans are the opposite: 30-70. Her “polarization score,” as discussed in my original post, is 80. Now let’s say her approval goes up 10% in both groups, so Democrats are 80-20 and Republicans are 40-60. Her polarization score is still 80. Perhaps this is just an academic point, but it seems important to clarify what I mean by “polarization.”

2) Klein read my post as suggesting that “polarization” was a quality of persons, not an outcome of a political process. I did not intend that meaning, and was using “polarizing” as an adjective only as a shorthand. So I agree with him when he writes:

Still, it’s a bit misleading to say “she” is more polarizing. Polarization isn’t a character trait; it’s the outcome of a process. And that process is American politics…Fifteen years in the hothouse of national politics will leave you “polarizing” as surely as 15 minutes in a tanning bed will leave you bronzed.

But Nyhan is also right that political leaders can influence this process:

While any politician will of course become more polarizing as they rise in prominence, it doesn’t follow that all of them will converge to some equilibrium level of polarization. The good politicians who endure, survive, and win usually do so by retaining some appeal to independents and moderates in the other party.

That is an argument of both Fiorina and Jacobson. Jacobson describes the well-known strategy of the Bush administration to cobble together a narrow winning margin by appealing to the Republican base, thereby exacerbating polarization. Fiorina writes:

If, by some strange turn of events, Senator John McCain had been the Republican nominee and Senator Joseph Lieberman the Democrat in 2004, would we have seen 90 percent of each party opposing 90 percent of the other? We think not.

You don’t have to believe Fiorina’s specific hypothetical to acknowledge that leaders can affect how partisans of each stripe perceive them, and can work to build larger coalitions that include some members of the other party. (Of course, they will face opposing forces trying to break apart these coalitions — which is part of the political process Klein discusses.)

3) Klein and I agree that Democrats and Republicans are less polarized on the candidates other than Hillary because of her longer tenure in national politics. In my post, I wrote:

However, not even Huckabee [the least “polarizing” candidate] should start proclaiming himself a “uniter not a divider.” The candidates with the lowest polarization score were also the candidates with the highest percentage of respondents who couldn’t rate them. For example, compare Clinton to Huckabee: 4% did not evaluate Clinton, but 49% did not evaluate Huckabee. This suggests that as the campaign goes on and voters become more familiar with all of the candidates, the polarizing impact of even the lesser-knowns will increase.

Klein writes:

The first is that it’s probably a mistake to compare Hillary Clinton with the other presidential hopefuls. Her many years as one of the most recognizable players in national politics leave her more comparable to a president running for reelection than a newcomer scrapping for a shot at the crown. As pollster Scott Rasmussen tells me, all the other candidates are going to see their negatives go up during the course of the campaign — and if one of them ultimately wins the race, their negatives will go up even further. “The next president will get to where she is no matter who we elect,” he said. It’s not that the others are necessarily less polarizing than Clinton. It’s that they’re not as polarizing yet.

4) Klein and Nyhan seem to differ on the electoral implications of the polarization on Hillary.

[Klein:] After all, she starts with a high base of support (more registered voters say they will “definitely” support her in a general election than any other candidate, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll from November), and let’s face it, there’s really nothing left to throw at her. As her pollster, Mark Penn, said, “All her negatives are out.” She’s survived the process, is broadly known by voters and still wins most polled matchups against potential Republican challengers. So maybe she’s the safest bet.

[Nyhan:] Surely it’s harder to win a general election when your opponents start out energized against you and almost half the electorate starts out with an unfavorable impression of you. Why would we think otherwise?

I suspect, however, that neither of them is making a prognostication that Hillary Clinton will or will not win. I think she can win, but it will likely be a narrow victory for her or any other Democratic nominee. (My original post was not meant to imply that she could not win. I was addressing a different argument about Obama.)

I’ll make a broader point. A high degree of polarization surrounding a candidate may not prevent him or her from winning office, but it does have implications about how they can or must govern. This is especially true for Clinton (or any Democrat), given that the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress are unlikely to grow too much larger after 2008. Party-line votes won’t get a Democratic agenda very far, especially in the Senate.

Polarization is a hot topic in political science right now, and The Monkey Cage will have more to say on the subject in the coming months.

Posted by John Sides at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Could the classic Milgram obedience studies be redone today? Ask a hundred social scientists and I’ll bet you’ll get a hundred answers of “No!” In an age of heightened attention to issues of propriety in research and aggressive monitoring by institutional review boards, nobody could get away with bringing naive subjects into the lab and creating, via deception, a situation in which they end up administering electric shocks to another person (who, in reality, is a confederate of the researcher and is in on the joke). Or could they?

Jerry Burger, a psychology professor at Santa Clara, suspected that it could be done, and he set out to see whether he was right. To get approval for his project, he modified some of Milgram’s procedures (e.g., by stopping at 150 volts instead of going all the way up to Milgram’s limit of 450, by screening out “individuals who might have a negative reaction to the experience,” and by debriefing subjects immediately after the session).

The results? Burger “was constantly surprised by the participants’ enthusiasm for the research both during the debriefing and in subsequent communications.” That’s the good news. The bad news is that “today people obey the experimenter in this situation [that is, at the 150-watt level] at about the same rate they did 45 years ago.”

An overview of Burger’s project appears in the December issue of the Association for Psychological Science’s Observer, here. This project was the subject of an ABC “Primetime” program titled “The Science of Evil”; to watch the webcast version, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One argument advanced in favor of descriptive representation is that female politicians serve as role models, inspiring other women to political activity. While previous research finds female role models affect women’s psychological engagement, few studies report an impact on women’s active participation, and none have done so in cross-national research. Our work also is the first to consider whether the impact of female role models is, as the term implies, greater among the young. Using three cross-national datasets, we find that where there are more female members of parliament (MPs), adolescent girls are more likely to discuss politics with friends and to intend to participate in politics as adults, and adult women are more likely to discuss and participate in politics. The presence of female MPs registers the same effect on political discussion regardless of age, but the impact on women’s political activity is far greater among the young than the old.

This is from Christina Wolbrecht and David Campbell. The paper is here (gated) or here.

Other facts about gender, representation, and political participation:

1) A list of women currently serving in the U.S. Congress.

2) 18 countries have gender quotas for parties or reserved seats for women in their national legislatures, according to Mala Htun (paper here, gated).

3) In a large 2001-2002 survey of Americans with careers from which candidates often emerge (law, business, education, politics), 59% of men and 43% of women had considered running for higher office. This gap shrank, but did not disappear, among those who considered themselves qualified or highly qualified to run. This is from work by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox (a gated paper here; book here).

4) From the 2004 American National Election Study, here is the percentage of men and women who reported each of the following acts of political participation:

Posted by John Sides at 06:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the Language Log, Mark Liberman’s simultaneously pedantic and fascinating analysis (here) of how the promiscuous use of commas affects interpretations of the Second Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”).

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)