The Monkey Cage

Just when I think I’ve gotten caught up, along comes something new.

Or, in this case, something derivative and not nearly as good as the original. But something inevitable. We should have seen it coming.

Click here to find out for yourself.

Could “McCain Mama” be next? Nope, not next — it’s already been done.

And here, as a Hit Parade Extra, is yet another “Obama Girl” wanna-be video, this one (“You’re So Lame”) focusing on George W. Bush.

[Hat tip to Paul Gronke for Hillary Boy; I found the others by myself, though I’m not sure why I bothered]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the run-up to every recent presidential election, we’ve been told that this time young voters are really going to make a difference. I’m not sure they ever do, but I confess that I haven’t followed the research on this issue closely at all. Maybe lots of convincing evidence has piled up that I just don’t know about. If so, I’m hoping that some well informed readers of “The Monkey Cage” will give the rest of us a sense of what it says.

In the meantime, here is something to jump-start a conversation about the youth vote this time around.

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Those of us who detest professional football nonethless have a vested interest in the outcome of the upcoming Super Bowl. A victory for the New York Giants should line our pockets with money — or at least help keep our TIAA-CREF accounts solvent.

That, at least, is the implication of the Super Bowl Predictor of Stocks, which has correctly called the direction — up or down — of the following year’s Dow Jones Industrial Average 33 of 41 times, an 81% success rate.

The logic of the predictor is simple: If a team from the original NFL wins, the market is destined to go up; if one of the old AFL teams wins, the Dow is about to sink.

The Patriots of New England, one of the old AFL teams, are heavily favored. Even though I’m a devout non-fan of the sport, I’ll be pocketbook-cheering for an upset.

[Via William Power, “Win for the Patriots Is Win for ‘Da Bears,’” Wall Street Journal, 29 January, p. C2]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Center for Public Integrity has issued a new report in which it presents the results of what it describes as a painstaking process of documenting and fact-checking statements about the security threat posed by Iraq by eight key Bush administration officials (Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan) between October 2001 and August 2003 — the two-year period immediately following the September 11 attacks. The result is a catalogue of what the Center researchers claim to be 935 explicit or implicit falsehoods, featuring a crescendo of misstatements leading up to the onset of coalition airstrikes on Baghdad in mid-March, 2003, and winding down thereafter. Here’s a time line:

The premise guiding the identification of falsehoods was straightforward: “It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda.” Thus, any statement indicating otherwise was regarded as a misstatement of fact.

Below the fold are some particulars about the study. For a fuller description, click here.

[Hat tip to via Jim Johnson’s blog]

The statements that served as the focus of the analysis pertained either to Iraq’s purported possession of weapons of mass destruction or to Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda — two of the most frequently cited rationales for the war.

All public statements on these two topics by the eight administration officials identified above were collected from the the White House, State Department, and Defense Department websites and from transcripts of interviews and briefings, texts of speeches and testimony, prepared statements, and the like. Also included were statements that appeared in major newspapers or on television programs, that were part of public statements by other officials, or that were contained in government studies or reports, books, and the like.

In press briefings, interviews, and other question-and-answer venues, each answer was categorized as a distinct statement. In speeches or briefings, only when one statement clearly ended was the next statement considered, and then only if a “buffer” of at least 50 words separated them.

False statements were classified as “direct” when they specifically linked Iraq to Al Qaeda or referenced Iraq’s possession, possible possession, or efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. In addition, any use of the verb “disarm” was categorized as a direct statement because of the literal meaning of the word.

Statements were classified as “indirect” if they did not specifically link Iraq to Al Qaeda but alleged, for example, that Iraq supported or sponsored terrorism or terrorist organizations, or if they referred to Iraq’s former possession of weapons of mass destruction or used such general phrases, for example, as “dangerous weapons.” These statements were not included in the total count of 935.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Yahoo! Research (including Duncan Watts, Sharad Goel, and others) has just launched an interesting Facebook App that measures how much people know about their friends’ attitudes and beliefs. It’s really fun to play! Check it out here.

Posted by David Park at 01:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two studies in Legislative Studies Quarterly recently caught my eye.

The first (gated) cby Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen, sexplores the impact of war casualties on the vote shares of Republican Senate candidates in 2006. Controlling for the range of economic, political, and demographic forces that typically shape congressional election outcomes, Kriner and Shen show that the number of war casualties negatively affected the change in Republican candidates vote shares between 2000 and 2006 at the state level. Even with historically low numbers of war deaths, Senate candidates from the president’s party appear to pay a price for war. Granted, the price for incumbent GOP senators running in the hardest hit states was between two and four percentage points. But in closely contested races like those in Missouri and Virginia, the authors argue that the human cost of war may have been decisive in Democratic wins.

In a second piece, (gated) or (ungated), Christian Grose and Bruce Oppenheimer ask a similar question about the impact of war deaths on House elections in 2006. Capitalizing on the uneven distribution of war deaths across congressional districts, Grose and Oppenheimer show that voters punished Republicans, contingent on the number of war deaths in the district. Interestingly, the authors show that Democrats escaped blame for war; voters held only the in-party accountable for the administration’s conduct of the war.

As Republicans attempt this November to regain House seats lost in 2006, expect Democrats to keep hammering home the local human costs of war. National forces— as experienced at the local level— do seem to matter in contemporary congressional elections.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From Virgil Griffith, a graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems at Caltech, comes this really cool graphic.

The graph plots the mean college entrance score of the schools at which a given book is on the “Top Ten” list. Hence the light-hearted title, “Books that make you dumb,” which reverses the presumed causal flow from “smartness” to reading better books.

To construct this figure, Griffith followed these steps:

1. Download from Facebook the ten most popular books at every college. These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.

2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.

3. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few entries to have a reliable average.

Read from left to right to see the mean SAT/ACT score for each book; the width of an entry indicates the standard deviation. (The vertical dimension doesn’t mean anything.)

For more information and other visualizations of these data, click here.

Forthcoming from Griffith is this graph’s musical counterpart, titled, inevitably, “Music that makes you dumb.” Stay tuned for that.

[Via Scott McLemee at my favorite (except, of course, for “The Monkey Cage”) blog, Crooked Timber]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On this blog (here, here) there has been a great deal of attention to the use of political markets as a vehicle for predicting electoral outcomes. But are political markets also useful for understanding electoral consequences?

Intrade has a number of contracts that are either explicitly or implicitly related to the winner of the presidential election in 2008. For example, there are conditional contracts that explicitly link the winner of the presidential election and the predicted level of U.S. economic growth. Although the contracts are new and there has been light volume, there are contracts that pay off if Hillary Clinton is elected president and economic growth is at least 2.5% over the next three years. Likewise, there are contracts that pay off if John McCain is elected president and growth is at least 2.5%. Similar contracts exist for all of the major candidates and for other important outcomes (e.g. crime rates).

By comparing these contracts, we might be able to discern why voters vote the way they do. Even more important, if the contracts had the volume to produce reliable predictors, voters could employ this information as a short-cut for making electoral decisions. Who needs parties?

If one reads the language associated with the contracts, Intrade makes clear that the contracts were suggested by Politimetrics. Politimetrics is run by a research group at the University of Westminister’s business school. So my hunch is that more information will be coming soon to a journal near you.

Posted by Forrest Maltzman at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the current issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, Sherri L. Wallace and Marcus D. Allen analyze the portrayal of African Americans in 27 current introductory American government and politics textbooks.

Among the major points to emerge from their analysis:

• These texts treat “the African American political experience as separate from mainstream politics,” “relegating its discussions to a separate chapter on ‘civil rights’ or ‘equal rights.’”

• “Textbooks do not discuss African Americans as active agents [in the making of American democracy], if at all, until the civil rights movement when they are discussed as collective ‘recipients’ of government acton as opposed to collective ‘agents.’”

• “The African American struggle is still treated as separate from American government/politics. In our view, this sends the message to the reader than African Americans are not an integral parr of the American political experience. Such an ad hoc, selective, and fragmentary treatment of the African American political experience, in conjunction with overall minimal coverage in one chapter, tends to downplay their importance to the growth of democracy.”

For the full text of Wallace and Allen’s article, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I promise that I will not upload any more baby pictures for a while.

But I could not resist one more dose of adorable.

Posted by John Sides at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The current administration has come in for a great deal of criticism about its assertions of state secrets privilege to block requests for disclosure of classified information. In a recent article in the George Washington Law Review, Robert Chesney runs some numbers that put these criticisms in a rather different light. (By the way, if you’re unaccustomed to reading law review articles, settle in for a long night.) Chesney shows that since the seminal Supreme Court decision (U.S. v. Reynolds in 1953), there has been a sharp rise in invocations of the privilege, but most of that upward trend occurred during the 1980s, not since 2001. From 2001 through 2006, the Bush administration invoked the privilege a total of 20 times — an average of about 3.3 times per year. By comparison, between 1991 and 2000, Bush’s immediate predecessors, the senior Bush and the putatively first Clinton, tallied an average of 2.6 such assertions per year, up from Reagan and Bush’s average of 2.3 per year between 1981 and 1990. Thus, an upward trend in recent years, but in Chesney’s judgment (and, for that matter, according to by conventional statistical criteria) not a significant one.

Cheney also emphasizes that the increase since 2001 reflects the fact that the nation has been at war for virtually all of that period, in contrast to the great majority of the previous two decades.

Critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (quoted in the Washington Post article where I spotted Cheney’s figures — an article whose headline doesn’t accurately reflect its contents) contend that irrespective of how often the Bush Administration has asserted the privilege, it has abused it. Others, like the former asssociate attorney general who is also quoted in the Post story, disagree with that assessment, arguing that “The privilege exists to protect national security information, and they’re using it to do that.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Margaret Truman died today.

For those of you who are too young to know of Margaret Truman as anything other than the writer of a long list of mediocre mysteries set in Washington DC, here’s an obit that provides a lot of interesting background information. As arguably the first White House offspring beset by an overabundance of media coverage, she came in for considerable criticism for reasons that by today’s standards would be considered totally inconsequential (e.g., wearing a scarf rather than a hat in public, and subsequently for donning a chapeau rather than showing off her hairdo), and thus blazed a trail later reluctantly followed by Amy Carter, Chelsea Clinton, and the Bush twins, among others.

[Hat tip to Jim Lebovic]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

With increasing frequency, congressional observers refer to the “sixty-vote” Senate. Lacking a rule that would allow a simple majority to vote to end debate and bring the chamber to a vote, the Senate instead relies on its Rule 22 — otherwise known as the cloture rule — to end debate. If 60 senators — three-fifths of the chamber — vote to invoke cloture, the chamber moves to a vote on the underlying amendment, motion, or bill.

I’ve been curious about reports that cloture voting is at an all-time high in the Senate. So I ginned up the simple graph below that shows the average number of cloture motions filed per month, reaching back to 1973. Not only did Senate leaders rely more often on cloture last year than ever before, the chamber’s reliance on cloture increased exponentially. No wonder a House member joked last year (was it really a joke?) that it takes 60 senators to vote to order pizza. (Because I grew up in New Haven, the home of truly awe-inspring pizza, I do not take pizza jokes lightly.)

Why the surge in cloture motions? Senate Democrats blame Republican filibusters, and argue that GOP obstruction aims to derail the Democrats’ agenda. Republicans accuse Democrats of jumping the gun on cloture before measures have been fully debated. The truth likely falls somewhere in between. Still, roughly half of the cloture motions were filed on measures related to Iraq or other Democratic priorities. It seems quite plausible that Republicans would prefer to block, rather than vote on, a wide range of Democratic initiatives. Of course, as the chart shows, Democrats did their fair share of filibustering when Republicans controlled the Senate in recent years. A recent Brookings report provides a fuller assessment of the arguments and evidence here.

Posted by Sarah Binder at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Born January 28, 5:32 pm. 21 inches. 7 pounds, 12 ounces. Our first.
Mother and baby are well.

Posted by John Sides at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are cosponsoring a bill to bring cameras to the Supreme Court. The bill would require the Supreme Court to televise all of its open sessions, unless the Court decides by majority vote that allowing such coverage in a particular case would violate the due process rights of any of the parties involved. The bill was recently approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Given that the bill attracts sponsors from left, center, and right of the ideological spectrum, it is likely that Congress will eventually attempt to mandate cameras in the Court.

During his confirmation hearings, John Roberts committed to exploring this issue more thoroughly and Samuel Alito reminded the Senate Judiciary committee during his confirmation hearings that he had voted to allow televised coverage when he served on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Allowing cameras in the courtroom would be consistent with recent steps towards opening up the Court. It would also be consistent with the pleas of political scientists (here), journalists (here), and lawyers (here) for greater transparency. If the court has warts, it has been argued, the public should see them.

Recently, Chief Justice Roberts expressed a reluctance to allow cameras in the courtroom. He explained at a conference for the Ninth Circuit, “we don’t have oral arguments to show the public how we function. We have them to learn about a particular case in a particular way.” While Roberts has become skeptical of the televising of the Court, Justices David Souter, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonio Scalia and Clarence Thomas have publicly opposed televised coverage of court proceedings. Although I am skeptical that the television of oral arguments will deprive justices of necessary information, it is conceivable that the televising of oral arguments could create warts, rather than simply showcasing, existing ones.

In her path-breaking experiments comparing televised “civilized” and “uncivilized” exchange of views that were discussed previously on this blog, Diana Mutz demonstrates that uncivil exchanges generate more attention from viewers, stronger emotional reactions, and less legitimacy for oppositional views. Similarly, studies have found that public exposure to the messiness of the legislative process undermines public confidence in Congress. We like sausage, but we don’t like to see it made.
It seems likely that televising proceedings of the Supreme Court could entice lawyers to make less civilized arguments for the sake of securing the attention and sympathy of the public. Televising the Court could undermine the Court’s legitimacy and damage the democratic process.

Of course, there would be a silver lining if Court opened its oral arguments to T.V. Televised oral arguments would inevitably improve my judicial process lectures. However, even if Congress were to mandate television cameras, it seems unlikely that the justices would let the new law stand. Most likely, they would declare such a bill unconstitutional, and keep the cameras at a safe distance out on Capitol Hill.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the debate over the bill stems from Senator Specter’s reaction to the Court’s resistance to having Congress interfere with its own procedures. During hearings on the bill, Justice Kennedy told the panel that televised proceedings would “change our collegial dynamic. And we hope that this respect that separation of powers and checks and balances implies would persuade you to accept our judgment in this regard.”

A December 6th story in CQ Today noted that Senator Specter responded by noting “we have substantial authority. . . . Congress decides how many justices there will be on the Supreme Court. Congress has also established time limits that the Supreme Court and the other federal courts have to observe.”

In short, the debate over the bill is as much about the authority of Congress as it is about the wisdom of allowing television in the Court room. Specter rejected the separation-of-powers argument by noting that he majority opinion in United States v. Morrison critiqued Congress’ “method of reasoning.”

What does a 2000 case about the Violence Against Women have to do with the televising of Supreme Court hearings? Specter summarized it all when he noted: “I can’t imagine a higher insult than questioning our ‘method of reasoning’ as if theirs is higher,” Specter said. In other words, we should mandate television because you think you are better.

It makes perfect sense to me. Not.

Posted by Forrest Maltzman at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

… if you can answer the following question from faithful “Monkey Cage” reader Bob Stein (aka “Confused in Houston):

Are pollsters in Florida and elsewhere accounting for the early vote cast before election day in their exit polls and pre-election day surveys?

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Until a few days ago I had never heard of “Obama Girl.” I knew that Barack Obama has a wife and a couple of daughters, and if you’d have asked me, I would have guessed that one of them must be “Obama Girl.” Wrong again. This momentous political-cultural phenomenon had completely passed me by.

This video debuted on YouTube back in June, and I recently became the 5,333,341st person to watch it, which tells you how oblivious I’ve gotten in terms of what’s happening in popular culture. If you’re as out of it as I seem to be, as a public service here and here and here and here and here and here are some catch-up materials.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

“Once Mighty, Slightly Used.”

“At Least We’re Not French.”

“We Apologise for the Inconvenience.”

“No Motto Please, We’re British.”

These were some of the suggested national mottoes submitted to a “cynical” content sponsored by the Times of London. The contest was provoked by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposal for “pride-bolstering measures”:

The government’s plans also include coming up with a definition of British citizenship; formulating a “bill of rights and duties” for citizens; and even considering writing down a constitution (it is currently unwritten, an accrual of precedents). There is also talk of a “British Day,” similar to Independence Day; a “museum of Britishness”; and a revisiting of the national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” one of whose later verses advocates annihilating the “rebellious Scots,” which is not very nice to the Scottish.

The story is here.

These cheeky mottoes were, in my estimation, better than some bandied about in the House of the Lords. They ranged from the puerile to the pompous:

Play up, and play the game.

Keep right on ‘til the end of the road. (From the Birminghan City Football Club.)

Nemo me impune lacessit. (“No one attacks me with impunity”)

Dieu et mon droit. (“God and my right”)

Brown has apparently been influenced by the “strong sense of national identity” in the United States. By contrast, in Britain, people are proud to be British, but do not know what it means to be British.

Interestingly, some survey data suggests differences between the US and Britain in their levels of national pride. In the World Values Survey, people were asked “How proud are you to be [American/British]: very proud, somewhat proud, not very proud, or not at all proud?” In the US in 1999, 72% said “very proud” and 23% said “somewhat proud.” In Britain in 1999, 49% said “very proud” and 41% said “somewhat proud.”

But the question of what it means to be American or British is, of course, more complex. Indeed, some research in the US suggests that Americans hold no straightforward view:

A complex and contradictory set of norms exist, and it is difficult to reduce them into a single measure of “Americanism.”

This is from a very interesting article by Deborah Schildkraut (here, gated). If her conclusions are any indication, the content of British national identity may be similarly difficult to pin down.

Posted by John Sides at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An interesting New York Times article about politics among our furry, feathered, and finny friends.

[Hat tip to Darren Schreiber]

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

In addition to the stimulus checks that received a great deal of attention, the economic stimulus package proposed last week by President Bush and House leaders contains a provision to allow Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for one year to purchase home loans up to $729,000 in high-priced housing markets. Currently, the limit for so-called conforming loans is $417,000. Because the alternative “jumbo” loans tend to cost about ¾ of a point more than conforming loans, this change has significant implications in areas in which the average home loan is non-conforming.

For example, according to Money Magazine, the average home price in San Francisco—the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi— is $656,000. Thus, if the stimulus package were to be enacted into law, a San Francisco homeowner with a mortgage equal to the value of the average home could refinance and save $410 a month on their mortgage. Calculate this over a 30-year mortgage, and we are talking about a golden state.

If you don’t think elections have consequences, the average home price in Dixon, Illinois—in the district of the previous House speaker, Dennis Hastert— is $107,000.

Posted by Forrest Maltzman at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A journalist called me this week asking if I could go on camera to explain the delegate system. This was for an international broadcast. Apparently people in other countries are following the U.S. presidential campaign and trying to figure out how it all works. Which is no surprise, since it’s complicated. Here are two resources:

1) A brief article in The American Prospect.

2) An NPR interview with political scientist Burdett Loomis.

[Hat tip to Scott McClurg for #2]

Posted by John Sides at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Not many university presidents get publicly involved in political campaigns. To be sure, there’s no strict doctrine of the separation of school and state — indeed, in the last century, the U.S. had two presidents (Wilson and Eisenhower) who had themselves been university presidents (and of Ivy League schools, no less). But it’s generally been considered inappropriate for sitting university presidents — especially, the presidents of public universities — to take an active role in political campaigns.

Now that seems to be changing, as detailed in this item from insidehighered.com. I don’t know quite what to make of it, in terms of its implications, if any, for a school whose president is thus engaged, or what it says about the role of celebrity endorsements in American politics. Nor, for that matter, do I understand why a university president’s candidate preferences are considered newsworthy in the first place. Why should anybody care which candidate the President of State U is supporting? Am I missing something here?

[Tip of the hat to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Beginning next week, The Monkey Cage will feature posts by occasional guest bloggers, who will join us for a week or two before returning to their normal earthly pursuits. We’re doing this because we recognize that lots of other people have interesting things to say and because we’re eager to broaden our scope beyond the interrelated set of topics that the three of us know best — political behavior, political psychology, campaigns and elections, public opinion, and, more broadly, American politics. So we’ll be inviting folks from comparative or international politics and political theory, or even sociology, psychology, media studies, or (perish the thought!) economics to sit in with us for a while.

We’ll start out small next week (a play on words for those who know our first guest bloggers) with contributions by two specialists in American political institutions, our GW political science colleagues Forrest Maltzman and Sarah Binder. Stay tuned for what we expect to be some interesting posts.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Several years ago, I experienced fifteen minutes of fame as a consequence of writing a series of tongue-in-cheek papers that purported to provide scientific evidence that Democrats are stupid, ugly, and morally defective. Some Democrats weren’t at all amused, and some Republicans took it all quite seriously. (In fact, one day a long-lost cousin who is a rabid Republican called, absolutely thrilled, to tell me that Rush Limbaugh had just quoted me on the air.)

Several years later, as editor of the American Political Science Review, I stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest when I accepted for publication a paper on the genetic bases of political orientations. (Click here for a copy.)

So I should know better, but here I go again.

In a study (abstract here) reported in the latest issue of Psychological Science, Ian J. Deary, G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale begin by reviewing previous research on the link between intelligence and sociopolitical orientations. The balance of existing evidence, they note, “shows that people with higher cognitive ability tend to hold less authoritarian attitudes.” They immediately add, though, that most of this research has generated more heat than light, because it is based on research designs that leave that old bugaboo, the issue of causality, under a cloud. Are intelligence and sociopolitical attitudes components of a bundle of traits that vary together without being related to one another in any direct, cause-and-effect manner, or is there really a causal connection?

To date, studies of this issue have tended to be based on small, unrepresentative samples of respondents in cross-section surveys rather than panel studies, and haven’t always dealt adequately with the need to hold constant other factors, such as education and socioeconomic status. To try to overcome these problems, Deary, Batty, and Gale analyzed data from the British Cohort Study, a very large-scale panel study of individuals born in Britain during one particular week in April, 1970. Data on the personal and family characteristics of about half of these individuals, including their mental ability, were recorded at age 10, and at age 30 reinterviews were held that focused on the political and social attitudes of more than 7,000 members of this cohort, via questions pertaining to social liberalism, racism, political trust, and support for working women.

The study’s key finding is what Deary and his associates characterize as a “strong association between higher [mental ability] at age 10 and generally more liberal, nontraditional social attitudes at age 30,” even controlling for the effects of the other factors that they considered. This early intelligence-later attitudes connection could mean, as others have argued, that “those with greater cognitive skill are able to form more individualistic and open-minded attitudes than those of lesser cognitive ability,” or that people of higher ability read more and are therefore more likely to encounter and adopt anti-traditional views, or that smarter people are simply more likely to recognize what they shouldn’t tell a researcher. Whatever the exact cause of the effect, Deary et al. conclude, brighter 10-year-olds are, at age 30, more likely to articulate “a philosophy emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition, which is how The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines enlightenment.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this study, subjects were randomly assigned to view a picture of a woman or a picture of this same woman wearing a headscarf in the style of some Islamic women. Here are the two pictures:

The headscarf had some dramatic effects:

1) The covered woman was perceived as more “traditional” and, in personality terms, less “warm.” She is also described as living a more insular life. Here are the percentages describing the two women in a variety of ways. (First percentage: uncovered; second percentage: covered.)

Age 36 or older: 15% vs. 30%
Marital status is single: 59% vs. 25%
Assuming woman is married, she is not working outside the home: 12% vs. 47%
A good mother: 33% vs. 45%
A devoted wife: 26% vs. 51%
Lively: 60% vs. 40%
Has a sense of humor: 61% vs. 37%
Always looks on the bright side: 60% vs. 43%
Might be the life of the party: 26% vs. 6%
Sticks to a tight circle of people: 24% vs. 43%
Keeps to herself: 8% vs. 22%
Strict: 2% vs. 23%

2) The covered woman was perceived as wealthier. (People imagine a wife of the “rich sheikh” stereotype, perhaps.) An equal number of subjects considered the two women “stylish.” Slightly more considered the covered woman “beautiful” (27%) than did the uncovered woman (16%).

3) The vast majority of respondents thought the uncovered woman was “an American” (82%). The vast majority of subjects thought the covered woman was “a Middle-Eastern person” (78%) and also Muslim (87%).

4) Subjects displayed considerably more aversion to the covered woman. Specifically, they were less likely to want to live near her. While 89% said that they would like the uncovered woman as their next-door neighbor or in their neighborhood, only 62% said that about the covered woman. One-fifth (19%) actually said they wanted her to live “outside of the US.”

What is the meaning of this hypothetical exercise? These pictures of unfamiliar people encourage subjects to engage in a common cognitive process: categorization. They subconsciously place the woman in a group and then impute to this woman the perceived characteristics of that group. These group characteristics are also known as stereotypes. Obviously, the sense that this woman lives a traditional life, is not lively or warm, and keeps to herself is quite in line with common stereotypes of Muslims.

This kind of experiment, despite its artificiality, actually has a great deal to tell us about the real world. Many Americans will see a woman wearing a headscarf only in passing, without any substantive interaction. Given only a brief “snapshot” of the person, people will probably then engage in the same kind of categorization process that these experimental subjects engaged in.

[Hat tip to a GW student, Joseph Essex.]

Posted by John Sides at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

No, I’m not talking about football. (Well, Louisiana is #1 on the gridiron, too, its Bayou Bengals having humiliated TOSUFF in the national championship game). This is about a great American participant sport, not our favorite spectator sport.

I’m speaking, of course, of corruption in public office.

The new ratings are out, and once again the Pelican State has done itself proud, as have several of its Dixie neighbors. Here are ratings for the 26 most populous states, and here, in case you want to examine the data in their unadorned splendor, is the original source material.

There may be some good stuff here for specialists in comparative state politics, especially those who, in the Elazar tradition, have an interest in the impress of political culture.

[Hat tip to our GW English Department colleague Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries blog]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This Washington Post piece delves into the perennial question of why so few Senators have been elected President:

Of the 100 sitting senators, 16 have run for president. Since John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, becoming only the second person elected from the Senate to the White House, 47 senators have unsuccessfully sought residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(Click here for a list of the 16.)

The Post piece puts forth these explanations: citizens prefer “executives” (namely, governors); Senators are too often “bogged down in legislative complexities that confused voters”; and Senators, especially committee chairs, “have been showered with attention by lobbyists and corporate executives seeking legislative fixes,” which presumably (although the article does not say) means that voters perceive Senators as having been corrupted.

A very relevant piece of research on this question is this 2002 piece by Barry Burden (see also his updated data through 2004). Here are some of Burden’s key points:

1) It is rare for sitting Senators to be elected President. But other Senators have been elected, after serving in other offices, in particular vice-president, prior to their election — e.g., Van Buren and Truman. So clearly Senate service — with its attendant legislative complexities and associations with special interests — imparts no permanent taint. As Burden writes, “It does not seem that legislators necessarily have a more difficult time than other contenders because of the positions they take on roll calls, the negotiating and compromising they do with other members, or the lack of credit they can take for government accomplishments.”

2) The story is not just about why sitting Senators fail, it’s about why governors succeed at higher rates. So a comparison between the two is helpful. Burden discusses a series of factors that could explain the differences in success for Senators and governors. I will highlight a couple that are less often discussed in the media and casual commentary. One is about the nature of the investment that each candidate can make:

Only one-third of senators’ terms end when any given president’s does, and there are no legal limits on how long they may serve. As a result, senators whose terms are not up may casually pursue a presidential bid without jeopardizing their status as elected officials. If the campaign does not succeed in the early prenomination period, one may simply abandon it and return to life in Washington. The experience might even be helpful in testing the presidential waters again in the future. Many governors do not have this low-investment luxury. When their terms end, most have to pursue another office or return to private life. They must be serious about their presidential campaigns because it is generally all-or-nothing. The degree of investment should be deeper and more uniform for governors than senators, because they have less to lose.

Another factor is the differences in the “candidate pool” of Senators and governors:

Because of greater turnover among governors than senators and differences among the people who serve as governors than senators, the heterogeneity of governors is greater. Part of this comes from the fact that the path to the governor’s mansion is less orderly than the path to the Senate. The natural variance in governors’ capabilities as politicians means that many of them at the low end of the “quality” distribution are unfit for a presidential campaign but that those at the high end of the distribution are well suited to the task. The distribution of senators’ fitnesses is tighter, resulting in fewer who are complete failures and fewer who are natural presidential nominees.

4) Some interesting evidence emerges from a quantitative analysis of presidential contenders. Governors who run tend to hail from larger states than senators who run, suggesting that the governors who run are more strategic: “only the best [governors] will make serious runs for the presidency, and they tend to be from the largest states with the most professional governments.” Notably, former Senators who run are no different from governors in this respect. It is sitting Senators who tend to hail from smaller states than governors.

Here is the take-away lesson, I think:

Though senators are probably at least as likely as governors to harbor progressive ambition for the presidency, I argue that their differing success rates are due in part to deeper campaign investment by the typical governor. Governors also benefit from more careful self-selection, with those from larger states, especially in the South, more likely to run.

The whole paper is worth reading.

Posted by John Sides at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“The Monkey Cage” certainly isn’t your standard medium for late-breaking news, but today’s dramatic developments in Kenya (click here for the New York Times coverage) provide a good opportunity for some catch-up reading for those who haven’t been paying close attention. Here and here and here and here are news reports that caught my eye over the last few weeks and help provide context for today’s developments.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We midwesterners seem to be an unusually taciturn lot in terms of both verbiage and body language. That is, we don’t have much to say and we don’t gesture much, either. By contrast, the East Coasters with whom I interact on a daily basis are veritable chatterboxes and wave their hands around so much while they’re talking (which is usually) that it’s dangerous to get within a couple feet of them.

If I’m reading new research from the emerging field of “embodied cognition” correctly, the East Coasters must therefore be better learners than we buttoned-up midwesterners are — not because they talk so much, but because of all that gesturing.

A good non-technical introduction to embodied cognition appeared recently in this Boston Globe feature story. After reading that piece, I followed up by delving into the work of Arthur Glenberg, who in this paper cites a study in which the authors provided a methodology for shifting the body into happy or unhappy states:

Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) … noted that holding a pen in one’s mouth using only the teeth (and not the lips) forces a partial smile. In contrast, holding the pen using only the lips (and not the teeth) forces a partial frown. Note that having the face in a particular configuration is part of the bodily state corresponding to a particular emotion. Furthermore, Strack et al. demonstrated that these facial configurations differentially affected people’s felt emotions as well as their emotional assessment of stimuli. That is, participants rated cartoons as funnier when holding the pen in their teeth (and smiling) than when holding the pen in their lips (and frowning).

Now, that’s really pretty interesting. Intrigued, I followed the trail further, to work being done by Susan Goldin-Meadow and the members of her lab at the University of Chicago. And that in turn led me to this article, which was briefly mentioned in the Boston Globe piece, that demonstrates that forcing children to gesture while explaining the solutions to math problems actually enhanced their mathematical understanding. (Maybe that’s why I, as a non-gesturing midwesterner, was always so terrible in math.)

This is very cool stuff, indeed. A small but growing number of political scientists, such as Darren Schreiber at UCSD, are studying the brain in an attempt to achieve new understandings of the neural bases of political thinking. If the embodied cognition researchers are right, then we may well need to begin looking at body parts like the lips and hands as well as the brain.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the Washington Post, Shankar Vedantam writes about the “attraction effect”:

Political pundits often argue that when two candidates share an interest in an issue, they hurt each other because they are competing for the same voters. This is partly true, but it ignores the fact that having multiple candidates interested in an issue increases the weight that voters attach to that issue at the expense of others. An increased focus on one issue can help all the candidates who are strong on that issue. You can see why researchers dub this phenomenon “the attraction effect” — candidates inadvertently help other candidates with similar views.

An implication for the 2008 Republican race:

Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa and his strong showing among social conservatives in other states, for example, may have helped Mitt Romney defeat Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in Michigan and Nevada because Huckabee’s win raises the weight that voters attach to social conservatism. Huckabee is stronger than Romney on that issue, but a greater weight on social conservatism helps Romney because he is stronger on that issue than McCain — and because many Republicans prefer Romney to Huckabee on other issues.

This is an interesting and counterintuitive way to think about this race. Shankar cites a study by Diane Lowenthal. Another demonstration within the academic literature, with campaigns as its focus, is here (gated).

[Hat tip to Scott Adler.]

Posted by John Sides at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I posted about a study of the growth of “image bites” and the decline of “sound bites” on network television news. After reading that post, my colleague Gina Lambright asked whether any other research has been done on the political impact of video versus audio; this was a natural question for her to ask, for her spouse is a news photographer. Anyway, the answer is yes. As Exhibit A (other exhibits will follow in due course), let me point to a nice piece of work that Jamie Druckman completed a few years ago.

The first Kennedy-Nixon debate in the 1960 presidential campaign has lived on in memory as a turning point not so much because of what the candidates said but rather because of how they looked. Kennedy looked like … well, Kennedy, and Nixon looked like an especially unflattering caricature of himself. Everyone “knows” that Nixon’s unattractive appearance led him to be perceived as the loser of the debate. However, the evidence that supports that conclusion turns out upon inspection, to be somewhere in the range of weak to nonexistent. Until Druckman’s study, the only reasonably credible evidence came from a post-debate survey that indicated that those who had listened to the debate on the radio were more likely to think Nixon had won, but those who watched it on television were more likely to see Kennedy as the winner. That’s a nifty result, if valid, but Druckman questions its validity for a host of methodological reasons that I won’t go into here except to say that they’re pretty compelling.

In an attempt to clear things up, Druckman ran an experiment, the participants in which (mostly undergraduate students) had no prior knowledge of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. These participants were either shown the debate on television or had the audio played for them. Druckman suspected that watching the debate would lead them to base their assessments of the candidates more on personality traits, and that proved to be the case; at the same time, agreeing with a candidate on the issues significantly affected the audio-only participants’ assessments of the candidates, but the same didn’t hold true for those who had had the video as wel as the audio input. Druckman also expected viewers to learn more factual content than listeners, largely because television is more likely to hold people’s attention than audio-only input is. That, too, proved to be the case. As for “bottom-line” evaluations of the two candidates, viewers did turn out to be more likely to see Kennedy as the winner of the debate. As Druckman concluded:

This is compelling evidence that television – by enhancing the impact of image – can make a difference in overall candidate (debater) evaluations. It also is the first clear empirical evidence consistent with the widespread assertion of viewer-listener disagreement in the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. In sum, television images have an independent effect on individuals’ political judgments: they elevate the importance of perceived personality factors, which can in turn alter overall evaluations.”

Here, then, we have an instance in which rigorous social science research supports the conventional wisdom. What everybody “knew” turned out to be right after all. (Click here for an abstract of Druckman’s study.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In reference to the Red State Blue State project that Andrew Gelman and I are working on, he writes,

As we’ve discussed before, the Republican party gets more support from the rich than from the poor, especially in poor states. (In poor states such as Mississipi, rich people are much more Republican than poor people; in rich states such as Connecticut, rich people are only slightly more Republican than the poor.)

Rich voter, poor voter

The next step is to look at time trends. Here we use the National Election Studies pooled into 20-year intervals. First, the difference between rich and poor voters in rich, middle-income, and poor states. As you can see, the gap in voting between rich and poor voters has increased, but especially in the poor states:

Continue reading on Andrew’s Blog

Posted by David Park at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last summer PBS ran a series of four films by Mark Lewis on the theme of “Passion, Ambition and the Pursuit of Excellence in Unique Fields” (click here for an overview). That probably sounds like something that you’d prefer to miss, and that’s exactly what I did until my wife cajoled me into watching one episode in particular. It took more than the usual amount of cajoling, for the show in question was titled, incongruously, “Ferrets: The Pursuit of Excellence.”

Now, as my ever-popular canine and feline posts have indicated, I am an unabashed lover of furry animals. Not ferrets, though, which I’ve always thought of, on those rare occasions when I’ve thought of them at all, as nasty, dirty little rat-like creatures.

That said, I consider “Ferrets: The Pursuit of Excellence” to be easily the most enjoyable TV offering I’ve seen in years and years. It is to show-ferrets (I know, I know — the whole idea of a “show-ferret” is bizarre) and their people what Christopher Guest’s mockumentary, “Best in Show,” was to show-dogs and their people. Only much better, because these are real people.

A DVD version is available for purchase. As a prudent consumer, you may prefer to try it before you buy it. Here and here and here and here, then, are some snippets for your consideration. Try this movie and you’ll be charmed by the sheer looniness of it all. So will your kids, if you have any, except they may end up whining for a ferret. If they do, bear in mind that acceding to their wishes would put you in the same category as the ferret people in the program.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In a previous post (here and here) I discussed the ideological differences between a Rural Republican Texan and an Urban New Yorker. But what are the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic and social issues in different states? Here’s a graph from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Studies. Each state represents the mean economic and social estimates (red states indicate self-reported Republicans and blue self-reported Democrats). Positive is more Conservative and Negative more Liberal.

There is no overlap between Democrats and Republicans on the economic dimension but some overlap on the social dimension. Democrats appear to be more economically cohesive than Republicans. Socially, WV Democrats are more conservative than Republican VT, NY, MA, CT and RI.

• Details
  Economic scale averages across 10 economic questions
  Social scale averages across 13 social questions
  We can improve upon these measures by running an item response model

Posted by David Park at 08:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)