The Monkey Cage

The Economist wrote recently that just as the 1900s were the century of the physical sciences, for better or worse, the 2000s will be the century of the biological sciences. Among the many questions suggested by that observation (such as, “how much do our institutions need to spend to ensure that every student has a course with a genuine laboratory component?”), I want to raise just one here: what will be the political or ideological valence of genomic research?

DNA tests are being used in the criminal justice system both to exonerate men falsely imprisoned for rape, and, at least potentially, to intrude on the privacy rights of the accused. They are providing much-wanted information to descendents of those with hereditary breast cancer or Huntington’s Chorea – and they have the potential to prevent some people from ever getting health insurance. Genomic tests can determine paternity, which is presumably in the interests of abandoned children, but they have also been used to deny a child of immigrants to Canada the right to join his adoptive parents there. So both the conventionally defined left and the conventionally defined right have good reasons to encourage — and to constrain — further developments in genomic research.

Given my own interests, I am especially interested in the role of DNA testing in American racial dynamics. Consider “vanity DNA testing” – swabbing one’s cheek with a Q-tip, and receiving soon thereafter information on one’s ancestry groups, down to the level of tribe or even family if one is willing to pay for it. DNA tests connect with race in two completely opposite ways, as shown in the recent PBS series, African American Lives 2. On the one hand, DNA tests frequently reveal that people’s ancestry is a mélange of what we conventionally define as races or ethnicities. (I was told, for example, that I am 6% Native American, 27% “Middle Eastern,” and 14% “South Asian” – none of which was expected in my very Northern European family.) Discovering that most of us are genomic mutts, that “they” are partly “us,” might encourage the reduction of racial animus and hierarchy. On the other hand, commercial firms are in the business of identifying precise tribal origins of African Americans, for many of whom ancestral knowledge is impossible due to the exigencies of the slave trade. Discovering what some think of as their long-lost “cousins” and heritage might encourage reification of race, ethnicity, or other forms of tribalism.

There are parallel developments in medicine. Some researchers are leaping right over the crude category of race or ethnicity to diagnoses and prescriptions based on patients’ unique genomic profile. Others are finding genomic regularities in what we conventionally define as races for everything from susceptibility to diabetes to a purported gene for intelligence. Race-based medical treatment and individualized medical treatment are both emerging from the study of DNA.

The science here is moving in leaps and bounds; “My young colleagues can’t wait to get to their lab benches every morning to see what’s been discovered overnight,” according to one leading researcher. I don’t fully understand the science – but more importantly, neither will our politicians, judges, regulators, police officers, doctors, and educators. How will the politics of DNA testing shake out? Will and should the proliferating firms that do vanity testing, medical testing, or work for police departments be regulated? Should federal and state governments encourage this innovative science (as leftists tend to think with regard to stem cell research), or should governments sharply regulate its use (as leftists also tend to think when they consider pharmaceutical and insurance companies), or both? Does political science have robust models for understanding how brand new issues develop an ideological valence and political constituency, especially if the issues are as technically complex and personally or socially fraught as DNA testing? If not, we had better get to work developing them.

Posted by Jennifer Hochschild at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We hereby initiate a new feature, in which some of the inhabitants of The Monkey Cage — in this case, Lee Sigelman and John Sides — exchange ideas (sometimes agreeing, sometimes not) on an issue we think can profit from extended consideration from more than a single viewpoint. There’ll be two rounds of chatter per discussant. Reader comments are strongly encouraged. Lee begins the discussion below. John’s comments are in the next post. Parts 3 and 4 will follow tomorrow.

We’re hearing a lot of criticism of Barack Obama these days for being “vague on the issues.” Is he really? And even if he is, so what?

Obama’s rhetorical style differs markedly from that of other leading presidential aspirants of recent years, except, I think, for the odd pairing of Jesse Jackson and Ronald Reagan. Both Jackson and Reagan, in their public addresses, concentrated on “the vision thing” rather than on laying out a litany of proposals for dealing with a wide array of problems, a la Bill Clinton.

Does that mean that Jesse Jackson and Ronald Reagan didn’t have any positions on pressing political issues, or that Obama doesn’t? I don’t think so. I’m betting that the Obama campaign’s issues briefing book and position white papers are about as thick as Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s. But detailed discussion of these issues doesn’t fit his rhetorical style, which focuses on trying to get people politically (re-)engaged rather than on reciting a platform.

What I think we’re really seeing here is a different style of leadership, and one that seems to be fitting quite comfortably into the changing context of American politics. More and more, the presidency seems to be seen as and to be evolving into a position for a role model people can admire, an articulate (or sometimes not!) spokesperson for the nation, and a general political direction-setter. Obama’s rhetorical strategy plays directly into that leadership style.

Every rhetorical style has both up sides and down sides. Let’s start with what I’ll call the “traditional” style of recent decades, personified in this discussion by Hillary Clinton. Its obvious up side is that the candidate gets to parade his or her specific expertise and experience for all to see, thereby projecting competence by demonstrating command of an A-Z list of policy issues.

That’s fine, but if you focus your campaign on presenting detailed policy briefs, you’re courting various types of trouble. First, you’re tying ourself down to positions that may trigger criticism and put you on the defensive; hence the virtues of a strategy of deliberate ambiguity, as discussed by, e.g., Ken Shepsle in “The Strategy of Ambiguity” and by Ben Page in Choices and Echoes. Second, by staking out a position this year, you subject yourself to attacks that you have “waffled” from a position you expressed earlier, under different conditions. Third, if you try to spread your electoral appeal by reaching for support on a wide array of issues, you leave yourself open to the charge that you lack an overarching vision — that you’re a Jimmy Carter-type details guy or a traditional Democrat who’s pandering to the wishes of every Democrat-leaning interest group under the sun.. And fourth and perhaps most importantly, you’re very quickly going to bore your audience, which invariably says it wants the campaign to focus on “the issues” but quickly loses interest when the issues discussion lasts longer than a six-second sound-bite. On this fourth point, go back and read Dana Milbank’s Washington Post piece from a couple of months ago, which I referenced in “The Monkey Cage,” here, about the audience response to Hillary Clinton’s policy-wonkish speeches. Or look at Tuesday’s “Doonesbury” cartoon:

On the other hand, the up side of the Jackson/Reagan/Obama rhetorical approach is that, if it’s well done, it can energize and expand one’s support coalition. The corresponding down side is that it invites suspicion that the candidate is an empty vessel, long on words and short on substance. This, of course, has been Hillary Cllinton’s implicit criticism of Obama all along, and in recent days it’s turned from implicit to explicit.

(For whatever it’s worth, my own sense is that Reagan and Jackson were both very long on substance, but they were “hedgehogs,” with just a few big ideas, rather than “foxes,” with a wide array of often-disconnected ones.)

So is Obama vague on issues? Yes, in his speeches, but that might simply reflect his preferred rhetorical strategy — one that seems to work very well for him. Giving speeches that are longer on platitudes than on specifics doesn’t necessarily mean that he and his advisers have no specific ideas. It could just mean that they’re courting public support via a different rhetorical strategy than most other recent presidential candidates have tried. It’s certainly a strategy that has served Obama well to this point.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A while back, I took on Frank Rich’s notion that Obama was a “post-polarization” candidate (see also this follow-up post). Survey data suggest that Democrats and Republicans are quite polarized in their evaluations of him. And the distance between the two groups of partisans is likely to grow in the months ahead. Such is the natural effect of campaigns.

My point now is of a piece with that previous post. In short, I will suggest that “post-partisanship” is much more easily said than done — and this, it seems to me, is a weakness of Obama’s message.

As we all know, this message is centered on the notions of “change” and transcending old debates and partisanship. For example, here is a quote from his speech after the “Potomac Primary”:

We know it takes more than one night – or even one election – to overcome decades of money and the influence; bitter partisanship and petty bickering that’s shut you out, let you down and told you to settle. We know our road will not be easy. But we also know that at this moment the cynics can no longer say our hope is false.

(The rest of the speech is more substantive, but obviously it is this broader message of change that has garnered more attention.)

It is easy to see why this message is appealing. Americans are not satisfied with the direction of the country. But more importantly, they dislike the process of politics. As John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse have argued, the American public thinks that politicians needlessly bicker. The public believes there is consensus about the important problems and there are tractable solutions to these problems, so why, then, are politicians arguing and not simply enacting these solutions? Obama promises to do better, and thereby to engender a new political process that transcends pointless conflict.

My question is whether this is remotely possible — a skepticism derived from essential lessons of political science. The central lesson is this: political institutions change slowly, when they change at all. And they tend to change via a “layering” of new on top of old, which produces an often unwieldy hybrid that serves to realize the goals of neither reformers nor defenders of the status quo. (This is, for example, a central contention of Eric Schickler’s book on institutional change in Congress.) Thus, one cannot simply clean house, a la Jesus and the money-changers in the temple. Instead, the various institutions of politics — Congressional committees and parties, interest groups, etc. — will remain much as they are.

In particular, the partisan polarization in Congress — see David’s earlier post for the graph — has its roots in the changing nature of the two parties and their respective coalitions, the kinds of rules and practices they employ in crafting and debating legislation, and perhaps even more fundamental trends regarding income inequality, as Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, and Nolan McCarty have argued in their book. While it is true, as Brendan Nyhan has pointed out, that presidents can choose more or less “partisan” courses — e.g., by eschewing or seeking coalitions with members of the opposite party — they cannot easily rise above existing partisan cleavages.

To put it bluntly: if Obama wants his policy agenda enacted, he is going to have to play “the same Washington game” that he decried in the speech cited earlier. This will, as it does to all presidents, lead him to compromise some of his policy goals — especially since his stated goals are as anathema to Republicans as are most any other Democrat’s. But more importantly, this will mean that he cannot change the political process, at least as much as he wants to.

My skepticism is not meant as an endorsement of the current system or as an exercise in worldly cynicism. The simple fact is: political institutions change much more slowly than Obama suggests. An Obama presidency will succeed or fail largely based on how well he succeeds as a partisan, not on how much he can transcend partisanship.

Posted by John Sides at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you enroll in a doctoral program in political science, what are the chances that you’re going to end up with your degree?

It depends, of course, on your background preparation, your determination, your “fit” with the program in which you enroll, and a host of other factors that may be impossible to foresee at the time you enter a program. A new study by the Council of Graduate Schools suggests that it also depends on how much of your life you’re willing to spend pursuing the degree. (Click here for a pre-publication presentation of some of the study’s main findings.)

Let’s begin with some trends for the social sciences in general, and then turn to political science in particular. Here is a chart showing the degree completion rates for doctoral students in various fields at the end of three years, four years, … ten years. What the chart reveals is that:

• After seven years, four out of every ten social science doctoral students (40.9%) had completed their degree work. That placed social science students on the low side — not as low as those in the humanities (29.3%), but well below those in engineering, the life sciences, and math and physical sciences.

• However, whereas the completion rates of students in the latter three fields more or less leveled off in years 8-10, the rates for students in the social sciences and humanities kept rising. The social science students ultimately caught up with the engineers but continued to lag well behind those in the life sciences or math and the physical sciences.

Now, what about political science in particular? The report indicates that:

• At every time point, students in political science, anthropology, and sociology had lower completion rates than their counterparts in psychology, economics, and communications. For example, by the end of Year 7 only about 27% of political science doctoral students had finished up.

• Political science students didn’t just throw in the towel after seven years. In fact, by the end of Year 10, their completion rate had risen to about 45% — still far below the 65 or 66% rate for students in psychology and communications but far above the seven-year cumulative completion rate of 27% in political science.

• On the other side of the coin, the cumulative attrition rate for political science doctoral students by Year 7 was approximately 35%. That was the highest within the social sciences.

• Some simple math establishes that about 38% of the political science doctoral who had entered seven years earlier were still in the program (the other 62% having completed their degree work or dropped out). And almost half of these 38% were still enrolled even after ten years.

These findings suggest some questions about which all of us probably some hunches but lack real evidence. For example, what is it about political science as a field of study that slows our students down relative to the performance of students in some other social science disciplines? (The fact that many of our students do extensive fieldwork obviously enters in, but there must be more to it than that.) What, for that matter, is there about the social sciences that slows our students down relative to the performance of students in most other fields (the obvious exception being the humanities)? And what can political science programs legitimately do to move our students along at a less glacial speed, especially given that most programs provide funding for no more than five or six years?

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Some Democratic elites fear that the answer is yes. For example, the head of the DNC, Howard Dean, has expressed such a concern:

The idea that we can afford to have a big fight at the convention and then win the race in the next eight weeks, I think, is not a good scenario.

Does a divisive primary hurt the general election chances of the nominee who emerges from that primary? In short, the answer is no. Perhaps the most relevant study is by Lonna Rae Atkeson (here, gated). She examines presidential elections from 1936-1996 and finds that the relative divisiveness of the two parties’ primaries is not related to the general election outcome, once other factors, namely the state of the economy and the popularity of the incumbent president, are taken into account. The logic is this: a divisive primary is more likely to arise if an incumbent is unpopular or presiding over a weak economy, simply because this incumbent will attract more challengers. Leaving the economy and presidential popularity out of the equation risks overestimating the effects of divisiveness.

This November’s outcome will depend more on fundamental conditions in the country, especially the economy, than on the tenor of the race between Senators Obama and Clinton.

[Addendum: See also more (and better) discussion of the issue by Josh Putnam over at Frontloading HQ.]

Posted by John Sides at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The principals in the Kenya electoral train wreck, President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, today signed a power-sharing agreement.

For those who haven’t been paying attention to the winding road that led to this agreement, here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here are some news clips from the past month that will catch you up.

Whether this arrangement will help resolve matters — not only the immediate problems sparked by the election itself, but also the deeper underlying issues of Kenyan politics— is of course another question altogether.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As usual, I’m a little late, but I’ll bet many “Monkey Cage” readers hadn’t seen this either.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ot the hundreds of articles I’ve written in my three and a half decades as a political scientist, some have been theoretically rigorous, some have been empirically rigorous, and a few have even been both. Some others have been quirky, cute, off-beat, funny, or even bizarre — lightweight but, well, fun. On those occasions when one of my articles has gotten much play in the media, it’s invariably been the latter, not the former, type of article — on the political implications of baldness, say, or the economics of big-time college football or the stupidity, ugliness, and immorality of Democrats — that’s made a splash. The media just love this kind of stuff, and the public seems to eat it up (at least by comparison with mainstream political science, which seems to get ignored by everyone except mainstream political scientists).

So I’m not at all surprised that, of all the articles and books that our colleagues in the dismal science of economics have produced in recent years, one above all others has commanded media and public attention. I’m speaking, of course, of the enormously popular Freakonomics (more than three million copies sold!).

If you’ve never gotten around to reading Freakonomics, you probably should — if for no other reason than to try to figure out for yourself what all the fuss is about. It won’t take you long to get a sense of the book; it’s not all that long, and its chapters, though pretty much self-contained, tell and re-tell the same story, which goes more or less like this: Here’s a topic that economists haven’t previously studied. Here’s a pinch of economic theory and a dash of data. Aha: truth is revealed — another victory for economics!

So what’s my point? It’s not to contribute yet another review to the long list that began to accumulate as soon as Freakonomics was published, in mainstream media outlets, here and here and here, and, more to my taste, in the blogosphere, e.g., a “seminar” (here) over at Crooked Timber and a long series of posts over at Marginal Revolution (here).

Rather, I simply want to call to your attention something I missed when it was published electronically a year and a half ago in The Economist’s Voice, here: Ariel Rubenstein’s hilarious send-up/critique of Freakonomics. If, like me, you missed the Rubenstein piece, be sure to take a look. I think it’ll both bring some smiles of recognition to your face and cause you to think about some issues that are well worth pondering. It may be review material for many of you, but I think you’ll find that it bears re-reading. Although Freakonomics contains some clever stuff, I’ve never really been a fan of it, and Rubenstein helped me understand why.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tracy Sulkin, assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote an interesting book, Issue Politics in Congress, a few years ago. In the book, she asks an interesting question, “Do representatives and senators respond to the critiques raised by their challengers?” The short answer, yes. She demonstrates that “winning legislators regularly take up their challengers’ priority issues from the last campaign and act on them.”

Sulkin extends her research in an article and explores,

[T]he extent to which the campaign appeals made by congressional candidates serve as credible signals about the issues they will pursue in office. [Her] analyses focus on the televised advertisements of 391 House candidates in the 1998, 2000, and 2002 elections and the content of their subsequent legislative activity in the 106th-108th Congresses. [She] track[s] candidates’ and legislators’ attention to a set of 18 different issues and show that legislators do indeed follow through on the appeals they make in campaigns. However, the strength of the linkages between campaign appeals and legislative activity varies in a systematic fashion with features of candidates’ rhetoric. These findings illustrate the value of extending the study of campaign effects to include phenomena that occur after Election Day and of conceiving of the linkages between electoral and legislative politics as a locus for representation.

Interesting stuff. Read the full paper here.

Posted by David Park at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tim Lambert points to (and excerpts) a recently published article suggesting that many social scientists (including a couple of well-known political scientists) did research on the social importance of smoking that was paid for by the tobacco industry.

ICOSI created a subcommittee, the Social Acceptability Working Party (SAWP), to develop measures to combat the social cost and passive smoking issues. SAWP’s initial chairman was RJR’s VP of Public Affairs, who also served on the TI Communications Committee. George Berman, a former PM employee who started a consulting firm, helped organize and direct SAWP (Senkus). …AWP members had already identified and approached social science academics (Berman) who were sympathetic to industry positions and agreed to participate (Pepples): Richard Wagner (professor of Economics at George Mason University), Robert Tollison (former economic consultant to the US Treasury Department and professor of Economics at Texas A&M and later George Mason University), Robert Nozick (professor of Philosophy at Harvard University), Sherwin Feinhandler (sociologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School specializing in cultural anthropology of tobacco, alcohol and drug research), Peter Berger (professor of Sociology at Rutgers and later at Boston College), Aaron Wildavsky (Chairman of Political Science Department and Dean of the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley), Edward Harris (a political scientist at South Connecticut State University), and Martin Gruber (finance expert at New York University). … A February 1980 SAWP progress report on the SC/SV project states that the academics would be commissioned to conduct “cross-cultural research” to “emphasize the social importance of smoking” (Goals of SC/SV), find ways to reverse the research describing the social costs of smoking, and “support the view that smoking is ‘normal’ behavior, a view that many social scientists would defend if given the information to do so”. Other activities included participating in academic conferences nominally sponsored by third (non-tobacco) parties and organized in ways that would minimize evidence of industry backing (Marcotullio). …

A preliminary promotion plan for Smoking and Society prepared by PM Management Corporation (Cory) kept tobacco companies out of sight: “Most of the PR [for the book] should come from the publisher (the most credible third party).” PM proposed especially promoting psychologist Hans Eysenck’s claim in the book that “Genetic factors, not smoking, may make smokers susceptible to smoking related diseases — a concrete alternative to the tired defense that the smoking-health link ‘isn’t proven’” (Cory, 1986a). PM also suggested emphasizing anthropologist Sherwin Feinhandler’s claim that “Smoking plays positive social roles in the normal give-and-take of getting along with others” because Feinhandler provided “something positive to say about smoking that doesn’t raise the health issue”.

… In 1988 Tollison and his George Mason University colleague, economist Richard Wagner, published Smoking and the State: Social Costs, Rent Seeking and Public Policy concluding that clean indoor air laws impose significant economic costs upon society and that government efforts to regulate public smoking were coercive, arbitrary intrusions into private life. The preface stated that there was a “continuing controversy within the scientific community about the effect of smoking on the health of smokers and nonsmokers,” even though the US Surgeon General had by then issued 19 reports linking smoking with disease. A single line in the preface says the book was produced under a grant from the TI.

I’ve been trying to think through the ethics of this, and I’m not convinced (with a couple of caveats - see below) that social scientists who do this sort of thing are culpable in the same way as actual scientists (or people like Steven Milloy) who generate arguments or data that they likely know to be false for the purposes of clouding debate. That is - I don’t think that it is intellectually dishonest for someone like Tollison who disagrees with a wide variety of social regulations to accept money for a project that seeks to target one subset of those regulations. To the extent that Tollison et al. were putting forward a specific version of the general public choice case against regulation, they were raising issues that may have some value. It’s perfectly legitimate to argue that anti-tobacco legislation harms individual choice etc. The correct response for people like me who might vigorously disagree with Tollison et al’s’ arguments is to do just that - vigorously disagree with them, and point out what we might think is wrong about them. They aren’t scientifically illegitimate arguments in the same way that deliberately bogus studies that suppress inconvenient statistical findings are. The same applies of course to studies funded by left wing crowds such as the Russell Sage Foundation, or Soros or whoever - provided that the researcher says who she got the money from, is honest in reporting her findings, and is prepared to change her mind if the actual data points in politically inconvenient directions, the source of the funding doesn’t matter very much. It may well be that the right wing or left wing researcher in question isn’t prepared to change their mind - but that’s not something that can be deduced from their willingness to accept the funding in the first place.

This said, there are two important caveats. First - Tollison and Wagner’s claim that there was “continuing controversy within the scientific community about the effect of smoking on the health of smokers and nonsmokers,” was a misleading statement on something that they didn’t have any relevant expertise on, and that furthered a quite deliberate aim of the tobacco lobby (to further the impression that there was scientific debate, doubt and uncertainty over this issue). Whether Tollison and Wagner were unwitting dupes or willing participants in spreading this nonsense, it would certainly give me pause regarding other pronouncements of a similar nature that they might make. Second, disclosure of the sources of funding is important. It sounds as though the Tollison/Wagner book had some disclosure; albeit one might have liked more. Other parts of this campaign seem to have involved more clandestine action, and to the extent that involved social scientists connived at this, I think they were at the least toying with behavior that was unethical and unprofessional.

Posted by Henry at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brian Arbour sends along some analysis of early voting in the Texas primary. The numbers come from the Texas Secretary of State, which is releasing data for the 15 largest counties in Texas. Brian writes:

I measured the turnout increase from 2004 against demographic characteristics that have differentiated the two Democratic candidates to this point—% Hispanic, Black, Bachelor Degree, and Median Income. The numbers below measure the number of voters through February 25, 2008 (7 days of early voting) to those of February 29, 2004 (also 7 days of early voting).

Early voting numbers show that turnout is up strongly in counties that have demographic characteristics that favor Barack Obama. Turnout is up only modestly in counties whose demographics favor Hillary Clinton.

Below the fold are the scatterplols of the percentage increase in turnout by the various demographic characteristics, as well as some necessary caveats.

Brian offers these four caveats:

There is no evidence yet that these “new early voters” are really “new voters.” They well could be those who usually vote on election day, who have decided this year to vote early.

Each of these three variables is correlated with each other. The three South Texas (and thus, most likely Clinton friendly) counties—Hidalgo, El Paso, and Nueces—are always at one end of the scale. These are the counties that have the smallest increases. The turnout measure could just be measuring something about political culture that makes voters willing to vote early rather on election day.

We don’t know who or where in each county people are voting early. While these data are consistent with an Obama surge, it could well be that turnout is high in areas in these counties where Clinton will do well. Or that demographic groups that favor Clinton—such as middle income women—are the ones creating the increase.

We have no data yet on who these people are voting for. Thus, I’m not measuring the really interesting question. We’ll still have to wait a week to get an answer.

Brian concludes:

These numbers don’t prove anything yet. But, they would like these numbers better at Obama headquarters than at Clinton headquarters.

Posted by John Sides at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rick Klau, Strategic Partner Development Manager and Elections Hipster at Google, put together this nice mashup of superdelegates. As Rick notes,

Over 60% of the delegates are now on the map and are associated with their endorsed candidate, with more info coming in every day. It’s tremendously gratifying to see a community grow around this timely subject- hope you find it useful!

Read more about the superdelegates at superdelegates.org.

Posted by David Park at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At the risk of appearing naïve, complacent, conservative, or old (are those the same thing?), I want to use this post to celebrate a few features of the American political system. We are in the middle of an engrossing presidential campaign which seems to be deeply important, genuinely democratic, and peaceful. The current president is not, so far as we know, secretly subverting the process of democratic decision-making; the military is staying out of the picture; citizens do not fear for their livelihoods or lives if they get involved in tense political contests; and we are all confident that after a (way too long) period of campaigning, we will have a new president. All of that in some sense self-evident and boring. But that is the point; in many countries, a hotly contested free and fair election is not to be taken for granted. Pakistan and Kenya are recent painful reminders of that fact.

This election cycle also offers more particular features to celebrate. The leading contenders for the presidency are a liberal Black (or multiracial, depending on your taste) man, a liberal White woman, and a conservative who resists bashing illegal immigrants, who as nonvoters are tempting targets. Despite the worries of, among others, my colleague Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, participation of young adults in the campaign is very high (for examples of evidence, click here and here). Despite continuing concerns about the disproportionate impact of the wealthy on campaigns and elections, Obama is raising tens of millions of dollars from small donations (click here for an example). Despite widespread evidence that politics is increasingly a matter of consultants and media buys rather than deliberation and passion, grassroots organizing appears to be making a difference (click here for an example).

Finally, we can celebrate this election cycle because it is a full employment policy for political scientists who study American politics. Which, if any, of the apparent trends in the newspaper articles cited above hold up under closer and more systematic scrutiny? What is the role of nationality, region, class, gender, campaign strategy, or immigration history in explaining Latinos’ votes? How do we explain Obama’s strange-bedfellows coalition of Blacks, nonpartisan Independents, and well-educated liberal Republicans – or Clinton’s equally surprising coalition of Latinos, working-class White men, and severely cross-pressured liberal feminists? Do voters think of Obama as Black, multiracial, an immigrant, or a secret Muslim – and does it matter? Why did illegal immigration suddenly emerge as a crucial problem last year and just as suddenly disappear from the Republican primaries? How did the religious right get largely shut out of the Republican primaries after playing such an important role for years in national elections? Why did the issue of class, at least as personified by John Edwards, have so little traction? How did the new timing of caucuses and primaries shape the momentum of this election? And what on earth are the candidates supposed to do between March and their summer convention? We can confidently anticipate many dissertations and journal articles on these and other deviations from the wisdom offered by conventional political science.

If Obama wins the nomination, or even the presidency or a second term, racism and racial hierarchy will not disappear from the United States. If Hillary Clinton wins, sexual hierarchy and exploitation will not disappear. No matter who wins, the United States remains an imperialist nation mired in a disastrous war; global warming still threatens polar bears and low-lying coastal communities; and girls are still being raped in Darfur. Nevertheless, when we quietly give our names and addresses to smiling blue-haired women or no-haired men, then vote in our primaries and go home to make supper, we should take just a moment to recognize how extraordinary is the event in which we are participating.

Posted by Jennifer Hochschild at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

With John McCain apparently having sewn up the Republican presidential nomination, attention is turning to his choice of a running mate. In previous posts, I’ve generated some way-too-early-to-take-literally projections of the probability of being selected, based on a statistical model that Paul Wahlbeck and I developed a decade ago to analyze vice presidential nominee selection, here, gated. A key to the procedure is the identification of a “pool” of “finalists” who are considered. As of now, we can’t know who McCain’s finalists may be, but speculation is rife. For present purposes, I’ll put those named in Chris Cilliza’s February 22 piece in the washingtonpost.com Politics Blog as the finalists. They are:

Charlie Crist, governor of Florida.
John Huntsman, Jr., governor or Utah.
Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota.
Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina.
John Thune, junior senator from South Dakota.

(Not exactly household names nationwide.)

This set of five is so homogeneous in terms of their age relative to McCain’s (everybody is at least ten years younger than he is) and campaign experience that the favor in that model that’s capable of distinguishing one from the other in terms of the chance that he’ll wind up on the ticket is the number of Electoral College votes in the potential running-mate’s state. On that scenario, here’s what the model generates as each candidate’s prospects:

55% Crist
10% Huntsman
15% Pawlenty
12% Sanford
08% Thune

Pawlenty, in second place but far behind Crist in my projections, seems to be the media pundits’ top choice for the second spot as of now. Let’s see how it plays out in the coming months. Who knows? Crist may not even end up on McCain’s shortlist, which will obviously be more authoritative than Chris Cillizza’s February guesses. And even if he is one of the finalists, the model, perish the thought, may simply be wrong in this instance. So don’t bet the mortage (if the bank hasn’t already foreclosed on it) on this result, but keep it in mind as an early baseline.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language […] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.

As expressed by Benjamin Whorf, that’s the essence of what has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf or “linguistic relativity” hypothesis. It’s what came to my mind recently when I read an ingenious new study by Thomas Hammond, Kyle Jen, and Ko Maeda in the latest issue of the Journal of Theoretical Politics (abstract here).

The basic idea underlying the study is that how an organization structures the information that it possesses is likely to affect what decision makers learn from this information. Lacking an ability to create experimental organizations that structure information in different ways, the researchers turned to the library catalogue — which, after all, is a hierarchical organizer of knowledge — as a testing site. The research question boiled down to whether users in a university library that uses the Library of Congress cataloguing system could be led by these two different information structures to behave differently than those in a Dewey Decimal-based university library. (The Northwestern and Michigan State libraries, where they conducted the study, contain virtually the same number of books overall — approximately 4,000,000 apiece.)

Hammond and his colleagues began by identifying 40 “classic” political science books (e.g., Essence of Decision, Who Governs?, Presidential Power, and The Politics of the Budgetary Process. They then identified the 50 books immediately surrounding each of the 40 “classics” in the two libraries’ catalogues. (This task required considerable cross-checking to ensure that both libraries contained all the surrounding books.)

The two sets of books in the vicinity of the target book turned out to be “almost completely disjoint, that is, the 50 books around the target book in the Library of Congress library were usually quite different from the 50 books around the same target book in the Dewey Decimal library.” Across the 40 “classics,” the mean number of surrounding books in common was just 3, the median was 2, and the mode was 0. Follow-up analyses of various sorts established the robustness of these results.

So what? Well, it may be a bit of a stretch, but consider the following scenario:

…let us interpret the target book and the 50 books surrounding the target book as 51 bits of data that are potentially relevant to the possibility of a surprise attack, and let us assume that these 51 bits of data, if analyzed together, would provide compelling evidence of an impending surprise attack. …But now assume that the intelligence community is reorganized so that its new structure is as different from the old structure as Northwestern’s Dewey Decimal catalogue is different from Michigan State’s Library of Congress catalogue. The critical organizational question is this: would any analysts in the second structure be likely to see these same 51 bits of data and thus be as likely to draw the same inference that an attack is imminent?

The answer, the authors conclude, is clearly no: “Analysts in the second structure who managed to identify one initial bit of critical data … might be expected to see, on average, only three additional bits of data that are also relevant; the other 47 relevant bits of data seen by the analysts in the first structure would be effectively invisible to the analysts in the second structure.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tom Holbrook has begun posting some data on the 2008 election, and will continue to do so. Below is a nice finding from his first post. It compares the percent of voters who were under 30 years old in selected 2008 and 2004 primaries.

In almost all of these states, young people constitute a larger fraction of voters in the 2008 primary, relative to 2004. Tom has similar data (though not necessarily similar findings) for women, African-Americans, and independents.

Check out his blog, and check back for more updates as the campaign unfolds.

Posted by John Sides at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeffry Frieden had a post a few days ago telling Dani Rodrik that he should go back to working on political economy. Now Rodrik reveals who put him off political science as a career. Yet another thing that Bill Kristol has to answer for …

I have waited a really long time to do this, and I am happy that Bill Kristol finally gave me an opportunity with his column in today’s New York Times. … he was my dreaded instructor long ago in two of the classes that I took as a Harvard undergraduate … In each course, we had to write short papers once every couple of weeks. I can say that my performance on these papers, which Kristol graded, was fairly consistent. The essay on Machiavelli? Here is a C-. The essay on the Federalist Papers? Here is a C. John Stuart Mill? Well, how about, yes you guessed it, another C. You can say that Kristol did his best to discourage me from pursuing a career in political science.

… He walked into the classroom and his first words were: “Hello, my name is Mr. Kristol.” To underscore the point that he was that, and not Bill or any other friendly appellations by which we students may have chosen to address him, he went to the board and wrote “Mr. Kristol.” I may have been a poorly adjusted Turk in my first year in the U.S., but this still struck me as odd. … Well, Mr. Kristol’s column today takes aim at Barack (and Michelle) Obama, and does so quite unfairly in my view. … What caught my attention was this passage: [where Kristol says that in almost every empirical respect, American lives have in fact gotten better over the last quarter-century.] … Really? … for a high-school graduate, the odds that his compensation would have fallen by more than 10% is 50-50. Note that even college graduates have not seen any income gains since around 2000. … some groups have definitely been left worse off—not just in relative but also in absolute terms. So statistics aside, who do you think has a better sense of what has happened to “regular folk” since 1980? Michelle Obama or Mr. Kristol?

Posted by Henry at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Surveys show that Americans do not know a lot of facts about politics (see, e.g., here). But why? A simple answer is that people do not know them.

But in a new paper (here or here, gated) Arthur Lupia and Markus Prior have a more complicated answer. They suggest that people may not give correct answers to knowledge questions because (1) they do not put forth much effort in answering the question or (2) cannot quickly recall the answer but perhaps could easily find it if given the chance. A short survey interview does not tend to encourage much effort; at the same time, it tests only immediate recall.

So Lupia and Prior designed an experiment. Each subject was asked to answer 14 knowledge questions. The experiment had four conditions:

1) A control group, which had 1 minute to answer each question.
2) The “money” group, which had 1 minute to answer each question and was paid $1 for each correct answer.
3) The “time” group, which was given 24 hours to answer these 14 questions.
4) The “money + time” group, which was given 24 hours and $1 per correct answer.

The results? Here is the mean number of correct answers in each group:

Control: 4.5 (out of 14)
Money: 5.0
Time: 5.4
Money + time: 5.6

The differences relative to the control group are statistically significant. Moreover, Lupia and Prior find that money and time are most effective upon those without a college degree and with only moderate interest in politics.

They conclude:

Our results provide a new and distinct reason for being skeptical when analysts use existing knowledge measures as the basis for sweeping generalizations about what citizens do not know…In particular, existing political knowledge measures, when used as measures of political competence, likely underestimate the public’s true abilities.

In thinking about this, it occurred to me that a skeptic (or, better put, a pessimist) might say: If the average respondent in every group answered about 5 or 6 out of 14 questions, is this “sweeping generalization” really that inaccurate? Is most of the variance in knowledge really explained by, well, knowledge, rather than by a lack of effort or ability to recall the answers correctly?

Those interested in this topic should also see this paper by Lupia, which questions the value of these knowledge questions in assessing the public’s competence as democratic citizens.

Posted by John Sides at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Titled “Wisconsin Avalanche,” by Steve Brodner in the current issue of the New Yorker:

Until somebody convinces me otherwise, I rank this as the best cartoon of the campaign season so far.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember, in Barry Levinson’s movie “Diner,” the part where the Steve Guttenberg character required his fiancee to pass an extremely difficult Baltimore Colts trivia test before the nuptials could proceed? I put my wife, Carol, through a similar ordeal during our long-ago courtship, drilling her relentlessly on college teams’ nicknames until I was sure she could tell a Duck from a Beaver, distinguish various Bulldogs from various Wildcats, and pull out an occasional oddity like the Thundering Herd and the Demon Deacons.

In the same spirit, Josh Pahigian recently posted to espn.com his personal list of the best team nicknames in college basketball, and as a team-names afficianado I must say that I’m impressed.

Right off the bat, though, I’ve got to disqualify his #1 choice on grounds that it’s so obvious that we shouldn’t even deign to list it. (There’s an old story that a reporter asked Leo Durocher whom he would consider the strongest man in the National League. “Gil Hodges,” Leo the Lip instantly replied. The reporter, obviously taken aback, said “How can you say that when Ted Kluszewski is in the league?” “Ah,” came the reply, “Big Klu’s so obvious that he doesn’t even count.”)

Applying the Big Klu Rule, I’m disqualifying the University of California - Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, who would be Every Thinking Person’s choice if eligible. Thus, with Pahigian’s remaining choices upgraded by one rank apiece, here’s the list, with a few visual aids thrown in gratis:

1. Concordia College Cobbers. The team mascot, the Cobber (shown below), is a snarling ear of corn, with green-husk trousers (Actually, I think several of the next eight nicknames are better than the Cobbers, but de gustibus non disputandum.)

2. Evergreen State College Geoducks. For those who don’t know, a geoduck (pronounced “gooey duck”) is a large burrowing clam. The school’s fight song begins: “Go, Geoducks, go/Through the mud and the sand/Let’s go/Siphon high, squirt it out,/Swivel all about/Let it all hang out.”

3. Washburn University Ichabods.

4. California Maritime Academy Keelhaulers.

5. Centenary College Ladies and Gents.

6. Rowan University Profs. Now there is a classy name! And Rowan’s msacot is an owl named “Whoo R U.”

7. Oglethorpe University Stormy Petrels.

8. Heidelberg College Student Princes.

9. Trinity Christian College Trolls. It’s an acronym for TRinity cOLLege.

Among Pahigian’s “best of the rest”:

Brooklyn College Bridges
Pittsburg State University Gorillas
Webster University Gorlocks
Bryant & Stratton College Lemmings
Mary Baldwin College Squirrels

Can’t you just hear yourself chanting “Go, Squirrels, Go!” (Though, now that I think of it, that’s pretty much the same situation that fans of the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers find themselves in. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

[Hat tip to Maurice East]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Here’s a great anecdote about discrimination on the basis of gender, followed by an even better punchline about Congress, from a brief “First Person Singular” interview with former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder in last Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine. Reminiscing about her first few days as a student in the Harvard Law School in the the early 1960s, Schroeder says:

I think it was not until I got to Harvard Law School where it suddenly hit me that not everybody was quite as open and supportive of women as my father. …[T]here were only 15 women in the class.

…All of a sudden, you had people saying things like ‘Do you realize you have taken this position from a man?’ And even the dean of Harvard Law School said the same thing, and he was then [a member of] the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. He had all the women over to his house the first week, and he put us in a circle and said, ‘I want to know why you came here.’ His spin was: We let you in equally, but I don’t think any of you are going to use this [law degree]. So, we count how many of you there are, and we let in that many more men.

I don’t know what they thought — that we were going to hang the degree over the changing table or something? … Here was this very bright man who understood racism, but did not understand at all that he was being very sexist saying such a thing. Well, he went around and asked each of us why we came [to Harvard]. Of course, everyone is shaking in their chair because this is the dean — except for this wonderful young woman from California. She looks him straight in the eye and says, ‘Well, I am only here because I could not get in at Yale.’ He went ballistic.

Harvard really prepared me for Congress.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Drezner writes in the Chronicle about political science methodology and Walt/Mearsheimer.

Does the public understand how political science works? Or are political scientists the ones who need re-educating? Those questions have been running through my mind in light of the drubbing that John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt received in the American news media for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy … From a political-science perspective, what’s interesting about those reviews is that they are largely grounded in methodological critiques — which rarely break into the public sphere. What’s disturbing is that the methodologies used in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are hardly unique to Mearsheimer and Walt. Are the indictments of their book overblown, or do they expose the methodological flaws of the discipline in general?

The most persistent public criticism of Mearsheimer and Walt has been their failure to empirically buttress their argument with interviews. … To the general reader, such critiques must sound damning. International-relations scholars know full well, however, that innumerable peer-reviewed articles and university-press books utilize the same kind of empirical sources that appear in The Israel Lobby. Most case studies in international relations rely on news-conference transcripts, official documents, newspaper reportage, think-tank analyses, other scholarly works, etc. It is not that political scientists never interview policy makers — they do (and Mearsheimer and Walt aver that they have as well). However, with a few splendid exceptions, interviews are not the bread and butter of most international-relations scholarship. (This kind of fieldwork is much more common in comparative politics.)

… the claim that political scientists can’t write about policy without talking to policy makers borders on the absurd. The first rule about policy makers is that they always have agendas — even in interviews with social scientists. … Further, most empirical work in political science is concerned with actions, not words … Other methodological critiques are more difficult to dismiss. … Mead enumerates several methodological sins, in particular the imprecise manner in which the “Israel Lobby” is defined in the book. … Many of the reviews of the book highlight two flaws that, disturbingly, are more pervasive in academic political science. The first is the failure to compare the case in question to other cases. …

Discussions of the substance of Walt/Mearsheimer often degenerate rapidly in quite unpleasant ways, so I’ll note my agreement with Scott McLemee’s statement that “[their] book has one thing in common with the state of Israel: Before any progress can be made, it is necessary to affirm its right to exist,” and move on to the methodological issues that Dan discusses. I’m less lenient than he is on the question of their lack of explicit interview data, perhaps because my initial training is as a comparativist rather than an international relations scholar. Interviewees surely lie or shade the truth, but when you are trying to get at something as difficult to measure as the influence of a body that putatively does most of its work behind closed doors, you need to get some sort of sense of the world of shared understandings that policy makers work within. Interview evidence or (even better) participant/observer analysis are usually the only real ways properly to get at these understandings.

More broadly though, it seems to me that there is a characteristic flaw of much international relations scholarship in particular that pervades their work, and that is identified in this post by Jacob Levy on their original paper. When they say in an aside that:

The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

they reveal themselves to be operating with a particular and systemic (in more than one sense) set of biases. As structural realists, neither Walt and Mearsheimer really believe domestic explanations for state behaviour. This means that they don’t understand very well how domestic politics operates, arguing in effect that national interests are somehow so self-evident that they don’t need to be defended, and that domestic interest politics are at the very best a source of distortion and error in state policy making. This, to put it mildly, jars with the kinds of assumptions and arguments that more domestically inclined political scientists (including, in fairness, some IR scholars) find necessary to a proper understanding of how politics works. Not all international relations scholars are systems theorists, let alone Waltzians, but the effect of systems theorists on the thought of IR scholars is pervasive. Even when, as in this case, it obscures far more than it reveals.

Posted by Henry at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lee Sigelman assured me when I took on this assignment that once one started blogging, everything would suddenly take on the character of a potential subject for a post. He was, as always, right; I have been ruminating about the masthead of this blog for several days. Mencken is one of my heroes, if only because he provides so many wonderful observations for use in undergraduate lectures or as epigraphs for articles (and blogs). I love his combination of cynicism and resonance with the aspirations of ordinary people. He is also laugh-out-loud funny.

But Mencken was anti-Semitic, viciously and consistently, even after World War II. I will spare us all any quotations, but Thomas Mallon is right to point out that “Mencken’s anti-Semitism, by any definition, and in any time or place, was spectacular—gaudy, energetic, and marked by, to use a Mencken term, salacity’.” (Click here to read his essay.). Should I stop reading, quoting, or teaching Mencken; should “The Monkey Cage” be christened with a new name? I don’t think so, but I have a hard time explaining why not.

Consider another example, also a hero whom I read, teach, and quote from a great deal: Benjamin Franklin. He was, by almost any account, a deep humanist and at the end of his life he took on the mission of seeking to abolish slavery. But he also wrote in his Autobiography about American Indians, “If it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means.”

How should we evaluate, teach, and write about people like Mencken and Franklin? Some of my students are prepared simply to condemn them as racists and therefore dismiss everything they wrote, or at least to interpret all of their writings through the lens of racism. But this seems to me too stringent, if only because I don’t want my own corpus of work to be interpreted through the stupidest sentences I ever write. Others are willing to excuse people like Mencken or Franklin on the grounds that they merely reflect the common discourse of their time. That seems too lenient, if only because by definition our heroes are not participants in common discourse; if they were, they would not have been identified as heroes. So they should be evaluated differently.

I continue to look for some middle interpretive ground that neither dismisses important political actors with a glaring flaw nor dismisses the flaw because the political actors are otherwise important. Exactly how to do that, however, remains a puzzle.

Posted by Jennifer Hochschild at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

If you’ve always wanted to express yourself by creating pictures of church signs (and I’m sure you have), then help is on the way: The other day I stumbled upon a website that enables you to do just what you’ve been dreaming about all these years. The sign pictured above is my creation; as far as I know, no real church has yet proclaimed the omniscience of “The Monkey Cage.” I’m sure you can do better. To try it out for yourself (and you can select any of four other Christian denominations if you wish — we are ecumenical here, within certain bounds), click here. If you decide to post your handiwork as a comment, please keep it clean, for this is a G-rated blog.

And — hat tip to John Sides, who knows all about such matters because he’s a minister’s son — to help get your creative juices flowing, check out this.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Several days ago I posted some very-early-in-the-game projections of the identity of the vice presidential candidate on the 2008 Democratic ticket; click here to see that post. Today, at no extra charge, I’m posting a new set of projections.

In making the earlier projections, I drew on the “pool” of possibilities named in the intrade onliine futures market. The probabilities, projected separately for tickets topped by Clinton and Obama, respectively, were:

.19 .xx Barack Obama
.xx .22 Hillary Clinton
.07 .03 Evan Bayh
.07 .07 Al Gore
.05 .05 Wesley Clark
.03 .03 Bill Richardson
.03 .02 John Edwards
.02 .02 Joe Biden
.05 .06 Tom Vilsack
.08 .09 Jim Webb
.08 .04 Mark Warner
.04 .04 Tom Daschle
.14 .15 Ted Strickland
.04 .05 Bob Kerrey
.10 .10 Sam Nunn
.03 .03 Christopher Dodd

I issued caveats of various types — that the model on which I based the projections leaves plenty of room for error, that such projections are premature this early in the year, and that some of those named as potential running mates seemed pretty far-fetched.

In Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray presented their take on “who will be on the short list” of vice-presidential possibilities. The model still leaves plenty of room for error and it’s still very early in the year, but Cillizza and Murray’s list gives me something a bit better to work with than the intrade one. So here, using the same base model and the same projection method, but the Cillizza-Murray short lists, is the new set of results.

First, assume that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic standard bearer and that the running mate she selects will be one of the following four. In that case, the projected probability for each is as follows.

.38 Barack Obama
.13 Evan Bayh
.28 Ted Strickland
.21 Tom Vilsack

Now assume that Barack Obama is the nominee. Assuming that the vice presidential candidate will be one of the following five, the projected probability for each is:

.14 Jack Reed
.28 Anthony Zinni
.16 Kathleen Sebelius
.13 Tim Kaine
.28 Jim Webb

Of course, the ultimate short list could end up including none of the above, so it would be prudent to interpret these projections simply as straws in the wind.