The Monkey Cage

“Not really” is not what you’d expect to hear, if you are reading about:

• the “problem” that Wright poses (according to this New York Times piece)
• the “threat to Obama’s ability to show that he could unify the Democratic Party” (again, the New York Times)
• the “damage to his presidential candidacy” (the Washington Post)
• the “troubling trends” (this post at the Washington Post’s Behind the Numbers blog)
• the “diminished aura of inevitability” inferred from this CBS/New York Times poll

Let’s leave aside the easiest rebuttals — namely that Behind the Numbers is cherry-picking recent polls and relying on the always-dubious “does X make you more or less favorable” question (they, of all people, should know better), and that the CBS/NYT poll’s real main finding is that Obama’s lead over Hillary has actually grown since the last CBS/NYT poll.

Instead, let’s take a more systematic look at the available data. First is this bravura graph from Seth Masket over at Enik Rising, comparing Obama’s performance in the OH and PA primaries among various demographic groups:

Even among those groups who should perhaps be most bitter over being called “bitter” — weekly church-attenders, union members, white Catholics — Obama loses only a few percentage points in PA relative to OH. Among every other group, he does better.

More importantly, look at the two graphs below: the national Obama-Clinton split and the Obama-McCain trial heat (both courtesy of pollster.com).

Obama’s lead over Clinton has actually gotten slightly larger in the last several weeks. Obama has also improved viz. McCain.

I assume a few other voices are shouting in the wilderness on this issue (Seth writes that Bill Schneider of CNN noted the lack of movement in the polls). But clearly the Gang of 500 hasn’t gotten the message. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of a real drop in the polls for Obama; if so, all the above quotes from our leading journalistic lights would be justified. But until then, the “problem” is in their eyes only.

Posted by John Sides at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Two relevant recent posts are at Crooked Timber: this earlier one by Henry and today’s post by Kieran Healy. See in particular the quote from Tilly’s CV that Kiearan includes.

Posted by John Sides at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Statistical evidence from Sierra Leone’s civil war offers support to three major literatures that seek to account for revolutionary mobilization…[P]articipation in a military faction does depend on an individual’s relative social and economic position, the costs and benefits of joining, and the social pressures that emanate from friends and community members. While these arguments are often presented as rival, multiple logics of participation do coexist within the same conflict.

That is from a recently published paper by Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein (gated, ungated).

The data come from a survey of demobilized combatants and non-combatants in Sierra Leone. This work, along with recent work by Stathis Kalyvas and Ana Arjona, is pushing the frontiers of both international relations research, in which civil wars figure prominently but individual-level actions are rarely investigated, and political behavior research, in which individual-level actions are the focus but civil war is rarely investigated.

Some other noteworthy findings concern the meaning of grievances:

At the same time, our empirical results challenge conventional accounts of participation that emphasize grievances. While proxies for standard grievance explanations receive support in our study of those who rebel, we find that the same indicators—poverty, a lack of access to education, and political alienation—also predict the decision to defend the status quo.Moreover, these factors also distinguish those who are abducted into a fighting force from those who remain on the sidelines. Conventional interpretations of welfare measures which emphasize the individual and group frustrations that drive participation in violence are thus called into question. Individual characteristics that observers may readily take to be indicators of frustration with the state may instead proxy for features such as a greater vulnerability to political manipulation by political and military elites, a greater frustration with more peaceful forms of protest, or most simply, a lack of other options.

As well as the importance of social pressure:

Our work suggests as well that involuntary participation is a fundamental part of revolutionary mobilization and political violence. Although this fact is already well appreciated by scholars of the Sierra Leone conflict, traditional theories of mobilization within political science make little mention of coerced participation.

I would add that studies of participation in genocide also emphasize the importance of coercion. See in particular Scott Straus’ work on the Rwandan genocide.

For a sort of postlude to this work, see Humphreys and Weinstein’s investigation of how to demobilize and reintegrate civil war participants (e.g., here and here).

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Hat tip to Bob Goldfarb]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The American Association of Public Opinion Research has just released a task force report on cell phones and polling. The report is here (pdf). Here are their recommendations:

As can be seen in this report, a great deal of important new research remains to be conducted in the U.S. before telephone survey researchers can conduct RDD surveys of persons reached on their cell phones with the confidence in the findings that is expected by the users of those data. In light of this, there are few recommendations this Task Force believes can be made with confidence at this time. However, as a result of the developments discussed in this report and as an interim step in applying survey methods to cell phones in the U.S., the AAPOR Cell Phone Task Force recommends the following disclosure-related considerations:

All telephone surveys should disclose whether or not the sample includes only landline numbers, only cell phone numbers, or both, and how the numbers were selected from their respective frames.

All RDD telephone surveys with samples that contain cell phone numbers should fully disclose how any weights have been constructed and what population estimates have been used to post-stratify, recognizing that many such parameters are not available at sub-national levels.

RDD telephone surveys targeting subgroups in the U.S. with substantial percentages of adults who live in cell phone only households (e.g., 18 – 29 year olds; renters; and those below the poverty threshold) should sample cell phone numbers or, if this is not feasible, discuss how excluding cell phone numbers may affect the results.

With regard to political polling, two Pew Center studies are key (see here and here). They find little evidence that excluding those who have only a cell phone affects the results of the poll. For an example of how pollsters can screen for cell phone-only households, see here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other day I noted the contributions that the Brennan Center at NYU and the Political Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin have made to our understanding of how often campaign ads are shown, at what cost, to how many people, and with what effects (click HERE). Now, though, comes word that one component of these data — the cost estimates — may be less reliable than had previously been supposed.

Let’s begin with a brief review of where these cost estimates come from in the first place. (The source of the following is Michael G. Hagen and Robin Kolodny’s article, “Finding the Cost of Campaign Advertising,” in the latest issue of The Forum, published by the Berkeley Electronic Press. For an abstract and directions about downloading the article itself, click HERE.)

For the last decade, the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), which is a division of TNS Media Intelligence, has been monitoring political, public affairs, and issue advocacy advertising on seven TV broadcast networks, 44 national cable networks, two Spanish-language networks, more than 200 syndicated programs, and broadcast stations in the 100 largest TV markets in the country. CMAG catalogues an array of information about each airing (date, time, length, sponsor, and so on). It also estimates, for each airing of an ad, the cost of the airtime. As Hagen and Kolodny outline the cost estimation process:

The estimates are based initially on a monthly survey of television station executives, advertising agents, and time buyers, who report the average price in their market of a thirty-second spot to be aired during the month ahead at a particular time of day. CMAG uses this “daypart” information about advertising rates in general to approximate the cost of particuilar spots on particular stations purchased by particular political sponsors. The process for constructing these specific estimates is proprietary, but it is grounded in ‘specialized research on advertising trends for political and issue advocacy advertising,” and includes adjustments for the fact that “rates for political advertising often can deviate from the standard rates used for non-political advertising.”

That’s obviously an extremely comprehensive data gathering process. Even so, CMAG misses some expenditures because it monitors “only” the major stations in the major markets and because it doesn’t monitor local cable networks. Moreover, campaigns often have to pay premium rates to secure particular non-preemptible time slots, and TV stations often raise their prices as the end of the campaign nears. These considerations imply that, if anything, the CMAG expenditure figures should underestimate the total that is spent on campaign ads — a claim that is routinely made when these expenditure figures are presented.

This is where things get interesting.

Although Hagen and Kolodny are from Pennsylvania, not Missouri, they are of a “Show Me” cast of mind. To assess the accuracy of the CMAG estimates of airings and expenditures, they scoured the records of TV stations in Philadelphia and matched this information against the CMAG estimates. Two results stood out:

In terms of airings, the CMAG data and their own compilations matched almost perfectly, “confirm[ing] that CMAG provides an extraordinarily accurate record of when and where campaign advertising airs.”

However, “CMAG does not underestimate the cost of advertising at all. Instead, CMAG overestimates the cost, by 19 percent — nearly $7 million.” No less problematically, the magnitude of the overestimate varies greatly across stations and sponsors, so the CMAG estimates “cannot be treated as if they are all simiply inflated by a constant, either in dollar or percentage terms.”

And bear in mind that Hagen and Kolodny’s $7 million figure is for Philadelphia only; if it is indicative of a nationwide gap, it will obviously come to a great deal more than that.

The availability of the CMAG data has been a true boon to research on political advertising, but these results suggest the need for caution in using their expenditure estimates and for skepticism about whether these estimates truly understate the actual amounts being spent on campaign ads.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photo by Chip Somodevilla

Posted by John Sides at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Did you like that little ditty? Well, it’s become a cause celebre in France. Turns out that it’s that nation’s entry in this year’s Eurovision song contest. But — zut alors! — its lyrics are … are you ready for this? is the whole world about to come crashing down upon our heads? … in English. This, of course, is a crime against humanity and cannot be tolerated.

For the rest of the story, click here.

[Hat tip to Zsuzsa Csergo]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Televised campaign ads live two lives. First, there are the paid-for showings of the ads themselves. An ad may get shown just once in a single media market or dozens of times in hundreds of markets. In recent years, thanks to data made available by the Brennan Center at NYU and the Political Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin, we’ve learned a great deal about how often these ads are shown, at what cost (though I’ll have more on that in an upcoming post), to how many people, and with what effects.

Second and, increasingly, there is free media coverage of the ads. Campaign ads, in a weird sort of “pseudo-events create new political reality” way, have transmogrified into one of the major media stories of modern gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential campaigns. To some extent, such media coverage may blunt the force of a particular ad by exposing misstatements or half-truths therein. Offsetting this blunting effect or perhaps, in many instances, overwhelming it, though, are the time-honored ideas that “There is no such thing as bad publicity” and “If you tell the Big Lie often enough, people will start to believe it.” That is, the charges and countercharges in a campaign ad may, thanks to the attendant publicity, take on a life of their own. And the ultimate test for a candidate may not prove to be whether those charges and countercharges are “right” or “wrong” (and few these days seem to be all of one or all of the other), but rather how the candidates react to them. If they do so slowly and haltingly (e.g., Kerry in 2004) or virtually not at all (e.g. Dukakis in 1988), then the attacks, having been aired by the parties and their allies and then given further prominence by media coverage, may sound a death knell for their candidacy. Letting oneself get put on the defensive seems increasingly to be taken as bona fide evidence that one is unqualified to serve in high political office.

In a forthcoming article in the Political Research Quarterly (“Free Advertising: How the Media Amplify Campaign Messages”), Travis Ridout and Glen R. Smith of Washington State University turn the spotlight on the second life of campaign ads by intensively exploring media coverage of commercials in ten of the 2004 Senate campaigns. Ridout and Smith report two basic results:

• “Ad amplification” via media coverage of paid commercials is indeed widespread. I think it’s fair to say that we already “knew” this, but having our impressions and intuitions validated via careful analysis is valuable nonetheless.

• The most media-amplified ads are the comparative and negative ones. Positive ads capture less media attention.

It’s the second result, of course, that’s really interesting. Media definitions of what is “news” encompass dimensions like conflict, drama, corruption, and malfeasance. By these and related standards, an ad proclaiming that Senator X has been voting against the public interest because of financial contributions from malevolent lobbying groups — well, that’s likely to bear looking into as a good news story. Meanwhile, an ad proclaiming that Governor Y has done an effective job of introducing some new programs and administering some existing ones — that’s no story at all. (Until, that is, Governor Y’s opponent calls those claims into question. Now, that’s news. And so it goes.)

Even if media coverage of a particular ad is critical, identifying distortions or counterpoints, it keeps the ad alive by exposing those who missed it when it aired on TV to what the candidates are saying about one another – adding fuel to the fire sparked by the ad itself and, given the media’s disproportionate focus on negative and comparative ads, thereby adding to the viciousness of this particular vicious cycle.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been many criticisms and self-criticisms of media coverage in the months before the Iraq War began (see, e.g., here and here). But systematic data is only starting to emerge.

Matt Guardino and Danny Hayes have examined every story about Iraq that appeared on ABC and CBS between August 1, 2002, and the beginning of the war, March 19, 2003 — 908 stories in all.

Their main conclusion is:

Bush administration officials were the most frequently quoted sources, the voices of anti-war groups and opposition Democrats were barely audible, and the overall thrust of coverage favored a pro-war perspective.

Dissenting views did appear, but, notably, they came not from domestic sources, such as Democrats and others opposed to the war:

Instead of emanating from Democratic elites, leaders of the anti-war movement within the United States, or other sources of domestic dissent, however, the campaign against a war—at least according to network TV news—was spearheaded by Saddam Hussein and other foreign leaders.

Guardino and Hayes note that perhaps relying on Hussein and, say, Jacques Chirac doesn’t put the anti-war case in the best possible light:

But by going overseas for that perspective—to France, Germany, Iraq, and elsewhere—the anti-war view was accorded a difficult position, from the perspective of domestic public opinion. It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration’s motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans’ perceptions of Saddam Hussein’s arguments about why war was a bad idea.

That is putting it mildly, needless to say. The paper is here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brian Knight and Nathan Shiff have an interesting new NBER paper on momentum and voter choice.

This paper provides an investigation of the role of momentum and social learning in sequential voting systems. In the econometric model, voters are uncertain over candidate quality, and voters in late states attempt to infer the information held by those in early states from voting returns. Candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application focuses on the responses of daily polling data to the release of voting returns in the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean, who held a strong lead prior to the beginning of the primary season. The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of “one person, one vote.” We then address several alternative, non-learning explanations for our results. Finally, we run simulations under different electoral structures and find that a simultaneous election would have been more competitive due to the absence of herding and that alternative sequential structures would have yielded different outcomes.

This brings the US primary system, which I’d never really thought about in this way before, under the rubric of things that I find deeply weird as a foreigner about the US political system. I won’t pretend to comment on the modeling strategies or econometrics in the Knight and Shiff piece - but if the estimate that they provide (or even the estimate under an alternative specification that Iowa voters were six times as influential as Super Tuesday voters) is at all ballpark, isn’t there something problematic about a system in which the disparities in influence are as gross as this? And yes: the same point does apply to Senate voting too - but that’s impossible to change without changing the constitution, while a simultaneous election would only require calling Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s bluff (this is one situation where the one-shot game prediction that all states would converge on the earliest possible date would be superior to the current arrangement).

Posted by Henry at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, I wrote that Obama was incorrect to imply that large numbers of poor rural voters do not vote for Democrats. Larry Bartels does a more thorough analysis critiquing Obama’s (updated and clarified) remarks in the op-ed section of the NY Times. Bartels writes,

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

While Bartels is right, “social issues are the opiate of the elites,” Obama does (implicitly) raise a good point about the differences between poor rural and urban voters. Obama working assumption is that poor rural voters vote more Republican than their urban counterparts. Using the American National Election study, I plot Republican vote share by income for poor rural and urban voters.

We see quite a gap between poor voters in rural and urban areas, for example, the gap in 1980 was over 30%. So if economic issues are driving vote choice among the poor, why do we see this difference between rural and urban voters? Before we answer this question, we should probably factor out African Americans, and compare just poor White rural and urban voters. If we do that, here’s what we get

The gap narrows considerably, except we see the divergent trend in 2000. What do we make of this divergent trend? I’ll follow up using the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg election studies with much larger sample sizes. Stay tuned.

Posted by David Park at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Courtesy of a student who is interning in Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) office:

Wyden is not up for re-election for 4 more years. The ad is meant to advertise his bill, The Healthy Americans Act.

The ad itself is not particularly clever — see, inter alia, the “photocopying your butt” routine — but it strikes me that this is an interesting new (?) tactic: make relatively cheap on-line videos, presumably using campaign funds, to promote your legislation. Will more bills end up advertised in this fashion? Are there other similar ads out there?

[Addendum: See this Roll Call article (gated).]

Posted by John Sides at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Dan Nexon, I see that Daniel Little has a blog, Understanding Society with lots of interesting stuff. Little’s book Varieties of Social Explanation is my favourite introduction to the philosophy of social science, and his blog is very good too. It’s part of a larger project, which includes interviews with Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and other pol-sci luminaries. Recommended.

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

Dozens – hundreds? – of research studies have explored one particular aspect of the economic basis of electoral behavior: the issue of whether “pocketbook” considerations (one’s personal financial situation) or “sociotropic” ones (one’s assessment of the state of the broader economy) are more important. The standard modus operandi in such research is to pit these two possibilities against one another in horse-race fashion and determining which comes out ahead. Or, in more comprehensive treatments, the two possibilities might be included additively in models of voting, to try to assess the overall impact of economic conditions on voting behavior.

Mitchell Killian, Ryan Schoen, and Aaron Dusso (political science graduate students at, ahem, George Washington University) have a somewhat different take on this issue. In a piece that will appear in an upcoming issue of Political Behavior, they examine the possibility that “pocketbook and sociotropic economic assessments are not independent and alternative sources of voter turnout, but operate in tandem to shape electoral behavior.” Their basic argument is as follows:

For any individual, the “Joneses” – the reference point – are represented by images of how the nation’s economy has been performing. If the economy is thought to have been doing well, then the “Joneses” must collectively be doing well; if the economy is seen as lagging, then “the Joneses” are laggards. Images of national economic performance, then, give citizens a rough gauge with which to access their own financial situation, the key question being whether they are getting ahead, keeping up, or falling behind.

…The key to our hypothesis is not that personal economic considerations matter more than collective ones, or vice versa, but that the two sets of considerations matter in combination with one another. Therefore, we expect those who perceive that their personal financial situation has been outpaced by the performance of the national economy – that is, those who perceive that they have not kept up with the Joneses – be to be more likely to vote than others.

Tested against data from an array of American National Election Studies, this interpretation stands up reasonably well. I think this paper could lead many electoral behavior specialists to rethink their treatments of a very high-profile issue in their field.

(This paper is forthcoming in Political Behavior. For a slightly earlier version of it, click HERE.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click HERE for a “Rocky”-inspired video of the Democratic campaign.

[Hat tip to Matthew Yglesias]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first justification is that the deduction is necessary in order to account for the proper base of taxable income; the deduction, in other words, is no subsidy at all. The second justification is that the deduction efficiently stimulates the production of public goods and services that would otherwise be undersupplied by the state. The third justification links the incentive to the desirable effort to support a pluralistic civil society in a flourishing democracy. I believe that only a version of this third argument stands up to scrutiny.

That is from this paper by Rob Reich, a political theorist at Stanford. The puzzle arises in part because the deduction costs the U.S. government a substantial amount of tax revenue:

Because the tax deduction constitutes a subsidy – the loss of federal tax revenue – it is no exaggeration to say that the United States currently subsidizes the liberty of people to give money away, foregoing tax revenue for an activity that for millennia has gone unsubsidized by the state. Charitable giving in 2006 was just shy of $300 billion, costing the U.S. Treasury roughly $50 billion in lost tax revenue.

In a recent talk at GW, Reich also discussed notable flaws in the current implementation of this deduction. For example, it can be claimed only by those who itemize deductions (a minority of taxpayers). So if Reich and I each give $100 to Oxfam, but only he itemizes, only he gets a deduction. Reich says:

Thus the subsidy is capricious, for its availability depends on a characteristic, one’s status as an itemizer, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the value of giving.

Reich also raises questions about the ways in which this deduction can encourage inequality. See his discussion of charitable foundations for public schools in this New York Times article. In essence, parents can set up these foundations and claim their donations as tax deductions. The state subsidizes a means by which schools whose students come from wealthier families can improve even more.

This is not a thorough summary of Reich’s argument, of course. See the paper for more.

Posted by John Sides at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, okay, this paper, which Christian Grose (an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt) and Jason Husser (a Vanderbilt graduate student) presented a couple of weeks ago at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, really isn’t about Barack Obama at all, but it does provide helpful context for understanding Obama’s electoral appeal.

Gross and Husser use some off-the-shelf measures of the content and style of text passages to score campaign speeches by the major-party presidential candidates, 1976-2004. (Included among these indicators were the oft-employed Flesch score of the grade level in school for which a given passage was pitched and several content scores calculated by Roderick Hart’s “Diction” program. )

The two major results:

• We find that more sophisticated campaign speech by a candidate results in a higher likelihood that a citizen will vote for that candidate, though this effect of linguistic sophistication is conditioned by voter cognition. The most highly educated voters are most likely to use the non-policy dimension of complex rhetoric in casting their vote.

• We also find that candidates who present themselves using language that draws on themes of commonality, activity, and realism are more likely to win a citizen’s vote in the election.

I don’t necessarily buy Grose and Husser’s argument that the first result flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that more educated voters are more likely to vote “rationally.” Nor does their second result fit Obama perfectly: Although the themes of commonality and activity are Obamanian (“Yes we can!”), many question the realism of Obama’s vision.

That said, Grose and Husser’s analysis does help us understand the upper- and upper-middle class configuration of Obama’s support coalition, as well as the electoral appeal of his inclusivist, activist rhetoric. Of course, “rhetorically disadvantaged” candidates, for whom George W. Bush is the obvious poster boy of recent years, can still prevail if the issues in the campaign align favorably for them, but this study helps clarify how, and how much, rhetoric matters.

For a copy of this paper, click HERE.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Barack Obama’s speech at a fundraiser in San Francisco caused a lot of controversy for portraying rural Americans as “bitter” and “clinging” to guns and religion. However, the implicit argument that rural American are favoring their social interests over their economic interests, and subsequently voting for Republican presidential candidates seems to be taken as factually correct.

Let’s look at the data. Using the American National Election study, I plot Republican vote share by presidential election year from 1952 to 2000 for poor and rich rural voters.

We can see a steady decline of Republican support among rural poor voters starting in 1972. Even with a big jump in 2000, support for the Republican presidential candidate was less than 50 percent. So, Obama, it looks like poor rural Americans have no problem voting for Democrats.

Posted by David Park at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Click HERE for a Passover song guaranteed to delight Jew and Gentile alike.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The 2004 U.S. presidential election was a wartime contest that entailed a great deal of discussion about the role that previous military service plays in elections for both candidates and the electorate. Using polling data throughout 2004, this article examines party identification, candidate affect, and vote choice preferences among veterans and nonveterans in the electorate. Despite widespread assumptions depicting the veteran population as deeply Republican, those with military experience in 2004 largely mirrored their nonveteran peers in terms of partisan identification, warmth toward candidates, ballot intentions, and vote choice. One important exception manifested after the “Swift Boat” advertisement in September, which impelled significant numbers of veterans who identify with the Democratic Party to express the intention to vote for George W. Bush.

That is from this paper by Jeremy Teigen. There will be much speculative discussion of the veteran vote during this campaign; this piece (and this one) provide some welcome data.

Teigen does find that, in 2004, McCain was perceived more positively by veterans (as was Colin Powell) than by non-veterans, but it’s an open question whether that will remain true in 2008. Teigen suggested to me:

Perhaps veterans respect or admire political elites who share their military experience, but inside the pressure cooker of a presidential election, partisan affinities, issues, and electioneering outweigh the biographical effects. At the same time, John McCain’s military service as a Navy pilot and POW is much more well-known and less likely to be disparaged.

Ultimately, beware of bivariate relationships expressed as fact. Teigen notes:

Republican tendencies among veterans disappear once one controls for the fact that veterans are overwhelmingly a group of older males.

For more on attitudinal variation among veterans, see this post by the artist formerly known as Mystery Pollster.

[Addendum: See also this paper by Ben Bishin and Matt Incantalupo, in which they find that veterans are no more likely to vote for either Republicans or veteran candidates, once other factors are taken into account.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The American Academy of Political and Social Science has a blog. It appears to be updated only occasionally, but there is some interesting stuff. See, for example, this piece by John Hibbing and Kevin Smith outlining the role of genetics in political behavior.

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

The concept of “BIFFO,” long known to those of us from a small island on the western periphery of Europe, hits the political science blogosphere. As Matthew Shugart notes:

Ireland’s new Taoiseach will be a “Big ignorant fellow from Offaly.”

This explanation of the acronym very nearly accords with the more usual explanation that I’ve heard back home, with the prominent exception of the third word. More usually “fellow” is replaced by another word beginning with ‘f.’ Matthew fails to mention that the new Taoiseach, Brian Cowen¹ is also a BUFFALO, or Big Ugly [Fellow] From Around Laois-Offaly. Important to know should you ever meet him and wish to preserve the diplomatic niceties of appropriate nomenclature &c.

¹ No relation to Tyler, who was bemused when I told him a few years back that an Irish politician shared his surname; apparently it is a quite unusual name when it is spelled with an ‘en’ at the end rather than an ‘an.’

Posted by Henry at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anybody got a problem with the idea that military service — from boot camp through combat — breeds hyper-aggressive behavior?

Well, yes. Regina Titunik does.

In an article titled “The Myth of the Macho Military” that appears in the latest issue of Polity, Titunik, an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, writes:

The public debate about the incorporation of women in the U.S. Armed Forces has primarily included feminist-insipired critics, who denounce the hostility toward women they perceive is promoted by the military’s masculinist culture, and, alternatively, opponents of the greater inclusion of women in the military, who valorize the exclusivist masculine qualities that many feminists criticize. Although these ideological adversaries differ in their estimation of military culture, they both share — and have reciprocally reinforced — a view of the military as steeped in the traditions and practices of aggressive masculinity. This article shows that the prevailing view of the military as hyper-masculine is misguided. Not unhindered aggressiveness, but camaraderie, discipline, and service are the qualties instilled in soldiers. These qualities foster military effectiveness and counterbalance sexist tendencies producing a complex institutional culture congenial to women in significant respects.

In other words (mine), Rambo is a rogue, not a good soldier, and the military virtues are feminine in nature. An interesting twist that I hadn’t encountered previously.

ADDENDUM: Clyde Wilcox forwarded the following to me — living proof of a turn away from macho in the Spanish military. Click HERE to see for yourself..

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For Spain, the EU adopted full economic integration as the preferred goal, and substantial resources — equivalent to tens of billions of U.S. dollars — were made available to modernize Spanish institutions and infrastructure so they would harmonize with conditions in the north. As these investments were made, Spanish out-migration to the rest of Europe not only did not increase; it stopped, despite a continuing income gap between Spain and the rest of the EU.

In the U.S., in contrast, authorities chose not to pursue full economic integration, instead negotiating terms that were exploitive of Mexico and protective of the U.S. And since the signing of NAFTA, migration from Mexico to its northern neighbor has continued unabated as efforts to increase border enforcement have backfired, encouraging Mexican migrants in the U.S. to remain and actually increasing net undocumented migration.

That is Douglas Massey, writing in the new magazine, Miller-McCune. Here is the article. Here is an overview of the magazine’s mission. Here is the Miller-McCune Foundation’s website. I look forward to more from them.

Posted by John Sides at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In the week after a large-prize winning ticket has been purchased at a given store, that store experiences a 12 to 28% relative sales increase in lottery ticket sales. This increase fades over time, but the store’s lottery ticket sales remain elevated for up to 40 weeks. This effect increases with the size of the jackpot and with the economically disadvantaged proportion of the population.

These are among the results that Jonathan Guryan (Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago) and Melissa S. Kearney (Department of Economics, University of Maryland, and NBER) report in the March 2008 issue of the American Economic Review.

To try to explain this phenomenon, Guryan and Kearney consider two possibilities. The “response to advertising” explanation holds that the sale of a winning ticket merely advertises the lottery in the local market. This explanation falls by the wayside because stores located close to the winning store don’t experience the same bump. The “lucky store” explanation, by contrast, holds that consumers erroneously increase their estimate of winning with a ticket from the store that has already produced a big winner.

By contrast, earlier studies have indicated tha tthe amount of money people bet on a particular lottery number falls sharply after the number is drawn and only gradually returns to its former level — the opposite of the effect that Guryan and Kearney observe for store sales. Thus, these two results play off two “well-documented but seemingly contradictory misperceptions of randomness,” the hot hand fallacy and the gambler’s fallacy, against one another. Guryan and Kearney begin to reconcile these differences by referring to a belief in “representativeness”:

Individuals expect random series to demonstrate self-correction, or negative serial correlation, per the gambler’s fallacy. The explanation posits that individuals reject randomness in a particular way: they rationalize the streaks they observe by inferring heterogeneity in the underlying rate of success (e.g., the probability that a basketball player successfully makes a shot).

They conclude, though, that:

…The perception of heterogeneity … necessary for a belief in the hot hand comes not from the signals produced by the data-generating process — as the representativeness explanation would require — but rather from the characteristics of the data-generating process itself, namely, whether the data-generating process is perceived as having an imate or an intentional element.

Yet another example of the increasing tendency of economists to formulate and test models of types of behavior that largely escaped the notice of previous generations of economists. Perhaps soon freakonomics will constitute the core of economics?

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I blogged Jason Lyall’s paper on the political consequences of artillery shelling back when I was doing my political science papers weblog. But I never said anything about his intriguing partial justification for thinking that Russian artillery shelling might be natural quasi-experiment:

At Khankala, Russia’s main base in Chechnya, the remaining shelling (29%) was due to soldier inebriation. Russia’s military forces in Chechnya are notorious for indiscipline, with drunk (or high) soldiers often participating in combat operations. Khankala itself is distinguished by its possession of Chechnya’s worst traffic safety record due to soldiers driving their armored vehicles while inebriated (e.g., “Bronirovannye ubiitsy,” Chechenskoe Obshchestvo, 22 February 2006).

We can deduce that Khankala’s artillery fire is due to random indiscipline in part because of legal prosecution of drunk soldiers under Chapter 33, Section 349 (Part 1) of the Russian Criminal Code (“Violation of the Rules for Handling Arms and Hazardous Materials”). This chapter punishes soldiers for “weapons abuse followed by infliction of grave bodily harm.” Though enforcement is weak, we have recorded prosecutions of soldiers for the “mistaken” discharge of artillery while inebriated (e.g., “Six Civilians Die,” Reliefweb.org, 17 July 2000; “Chechen prosecutor’s office opens criminal case,” RFE/RL, 16 August 2002; “Aiming Error May Cost Officer,” ITAR-TASS Weekly, 11 November 2005). Soldiers have even shelled themselves accidentally (“Zdes’ zhivut liudi,” Memorial, July 2000).

We also have eyewitness testimony from both Russian officers and residents of the shelled villages. As Aslan, a company commander, put it, soldiers “get drunk as pigs, lob out a few shells, claim combat pay and get drunk again” (Time, 24 October 2000). One village leader noted after a strike that “I’m sure there was no necessity in this shelling. As a rule, they fire every time they get drunk” (“Settlement was shelled,” Memorial, November 2005). Villagers often petition Russian authorities to cease fire, citing drunkenness as the motive behind the wanton violence (e.g., “Otkrytoe Pis’mo,” Groznenskii Rabochii, 19 July 2001).

Posted by Henry at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism — notably, this book — has attracted a lot of attention (e.g., here). He was also — and here is a fact I did not know until today — an advisor on Ron Paul’s campaign team.

Pape analyzes data on all 188 suicide terror attacks between 1980 and 2001. He concludes that almost all of these attacks shared one common feature: they targeted a country believed to be a foreign occupier. This, not religious extremism, was the motivation of those who committed these suicide attacks.

Now a soon-to-be-published paper argues that Pape’s data cannot support that conclusion. The paper is here, authored by Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay. In short, they argue, the problem is this. To know whether X causes suicide terrorism, we need to know how the propensity to use suicide terrorism varies with X. That is, we not only need data on when suicide terrorism occurs, we need data on when suicide terrorism does not occur — i.e., when groups choose other tactics besides suicide terrorism. Analyzing only instances when suicide terrorism occurred is not sufficient.

Ashworth et al. conclude:

The data Pape collects do not speak to the correlates of suicide terror, and the policy conclusions he advocates cannot be justified by appealing to the data he collects.

Posted by John Sides at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Public opinion polls show consistently that a substantial portion of the American public would vote for a qualified female presidential candidate. Because of the controversial nature of such questions, however, the responses may suffer from social desirability effects. In other words, respondents may be purposely giving false answers as not to violate societal norms. Using an unobtrusive measure called the “list experiment,” we find that public opinion polls are indeed exaggerating support for a female president. Roughly 26 percent of the public is “angry or upset” about the prospect of a female president. Moreover, this level of dissatisfaction is constant across several demographic groups.

That is from an interesting new paper by Matthew Streb, Barbara Burrell, Brian Frederick, and Michael Genovese (gated here, ungated here).

Here’s the experiment, which was conducted in a March 2006 poll. One half of the sample is asked how many of the following things make them angry or upset.

• The way gasoline prices keep going up.
• Professional athletes getting million dollar-plus salaries.
• Requiring seat belts to be used when driving.
• Large corporations polluting the environment.

Then the second half of the sample is asked the same question, with one additional item on the list:

• A woman serving as president.

The difference across the two groups in the mean number of “things that make you upset” gives us the percent of the public that is upset about a woman president. That fraction — 26% — is much larger than extant polling would lead you to believe.

Notably, the percent who are upset does not vary much based on respondents’ gender, level of education or income, age, or region. The only remaining question is whether it varies by party identification, to see whether people who read “A woman serving as president” are really thinking “Hillary Clinton serving as president.” Unfortunately, the survey did not include a measure of party identification. However, it’s worth noting, as Sreb et al. do, that generic polling questions have not revealed any recent decline in the fraction who would vote for a woman president, despite Clinton’s candidacy.

There is more interesting discussion in the paper. See also here for a list experiment that reveals substantial racial prejudice.

Posted by John Sides at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

As a quick follow-up to Henry’s post, here is some polling data on whether various nations should boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Denmark: 50% favor the boycott, 39% oppose it, 11% don’t know

France: 41% favor; 55% oppose; 4% don’t know. (53% would favor a Sarkozy boycott of the opening ceremony.)

Canada: 37% favor; 56% oppose; 7% don’t know.

United States: 31% favor a boycott; 48% favor a boycott of the opening ceremonies by elected officials. [NB: Zogby on-line poll]

Posted by John Sides at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Drezner and Steve Clemons argue it out over whether or not the US should boycott the Beijing Olympics (Steve says no, Dan says that it would be no harm if the West uses the threat of non-attendance to squeeze some concessions from the Chinese). For me, the interesting question is why the Olympics are so politically important, and how their importance seems to be changing. International relations scholars don’t have much to say about the politics of the modern Olympics (there’s a book by Christopher Hill, but that’s about it), but it’s surely an important international institution; as we can see from recent events, states pay a lot of attention to it. This was true of the original Olympic festival in Greece too; Martin Wight identifies the festival as one of the key institutions binding together the Greek city-state system (although the original Olympics had a military truce attached to it, so it was obviously more important in the ways that IR scholars usually measure importance.

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have concerned inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies - the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want very much to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.

Posted by Henry at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Mark Penn’s departure from the Clinton campaign — after a friendly meeting with Colombian representatives to discuss promoting a trade agreement that Clinton opposes — provides a motivation to examine American opinion about trade. Doing so reveals the barriers that trade agreements face.

Public skepticism about free trade is rampant and hardly new. In his book on American attitudes toward foreign policy, Ole Holsti notes that in a series of Gallup polls in 1993, an average of only 38% of respondents favored NAFTA. More recently, Bryan Caplan finds that the public is, on average, likely to believe that trade agreements cost jobs or, at best, make no difference in job creation or loss. Many similar findings are here. The public’s attitude contrasts sharply with those of economists and other elites, who tend to support trade agreements (see again Holsti and Caplan, as well as the piece by Daniel Drezner that I discussed last week).

The contours of mass attitudes are even more interesting. In the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, respondents were asked this question:

This year Congress also debated a new free trade agreement that reduces barriers to trade between the U.S. and countries in Central America. Some politicians argue that the agreement allows America to better compete in the global economy and would create more stable democracies in Central America. Other politicians argue that it helps businesses to move jobs abroad where labor is cheaper and does not protect American producers. What do you think? If you were faced with this decision, would you vote for or against the trade agreement?

Only 27% supported the agreement, 46% were opposed, and 27% did not know.

Notably, this is one of the few issues in American politics where you will not find a significant partisan cleavage. 51% of Democrats opposed CAFTA (vs. 22% support), as did 41% of Republicans (vs. 36% support). Independents mirrored Democrats.

Better predictors of attitudes are education and income. Those with less than a 4-year degree tended to oppose CAFTA (50% vs. 24%), but those with at least a 4-year degree were evenly split (39% vs. 39%). Support also increases with income, although only among the wealthiest respondents (those making $150K or more) was there even bare majority s