The Monkey Cage

(Northwestern University grads, circa 1974)

From Inside Higher Ed:

Northwestern University just moves from one controversy to another with regard to this year’s commencement. Many law students are offended that Jerry Springer will be their speaker. And one of the university’s planned recipients for an honorary doctorate, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was hastily uninvited after he became famous as Sen. Barack Obama’s ex-pastor. As these incidents were debated, the university hinted that graduates would get a big name as the main speaker. Now that the name is out — Chicago Mayor Richard Daley — many students are unimpressed, and some are complaining. The Chicago Tribune reported that one student e-mailed the university’s president and received a testy response. The student, Matthew Braslow, wrote: “If your goal in the speaker selection process was to make graduating seniors happy about leaving this university, then mission accomplished.” President Henry Bienen replied: “”Matthew, grow up…. You also sound like a very unhappy person. I am sorry for that. Hopefully things will improve for you over the years.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I’ve received an email from the political science department at King Saud University about the detention and imprisonment without charge of one of their colleagues, Matrook Al-Faleh, asking “all political science departments and civil society organization to exert all their pressure upon the Saudi government to release” Al-Faleh and other prisoners. The likely reason for the arrest is that Al-Faleh (who has protested in the past against torture and prison conditions in Saudi Arabia) had written a general email criticizing conditions at Buraida General Prison. Human Rights Watch has more here. The letter itself is after the fold.

This is a human call from the King Saud University, Political Science Department to all Political Science departments and all civil society organizations in the United States.

Professor of political science at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, and human rights activist Matrook Al-Faleh was kidnapped on May 19, 2008. Dr. Matrook Al-Faleh is a member of the Arab Committee for Human Rights and an active advocate of civil society and constitutional reform in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Al-Faleh left his home to his office when his family lost contact with him. Al-Faleh’s family and the Arab Committee for Human Rights tried to locate him by calling his cell phone to no avail. When his family went to his office, he was not there although his car was at the University parking lot. It has then become clear to his family that Dr. Al-Faleh was kidnapped by the Saudi Secret Police.

Before his imprisonment, Dr. Matrook Al-Faleh had issued a statement on torture and prison conditions and other human right abuses practices in Buraidah regional prison. This statement came after his recent visit his jailed colleague and activist, Dr. Abdullah Al-Hamed.

It is worthy mentioning that in May, 5, 2005 a Saudi court sentenced Dr. Al-Faleh six years in prison along with Dr. Abdullah Al-Hamed, Abdul Rahman Al-laem and Al- Al Dumini. They were pardoned by the king after spending two years of their jail time. Although released, these advocate were banned from traveling abroad and their passports were revoked by the ministry of Interior, headed by the king’s brother, prince Naief bin Abdulaziz. Since their imprisonment three days ago, not one Saudi broadcast station mentioned the news.

Dr. Matrook Al-Faleh has published several works in civil society and constitutional reform in Saudi Arabia. He is an active member at the Board of Directors of the Arab Committee for Human Rights, the Board of Trustees of the Centre for Arab Unity Studies and a strong defender of political abuse victims in the Arab world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular. The Arab Committee for Human Rights is taking the lead in defending Dr. Al-Faleh, as is the case with more than 120 non-governmental organizations in the world.

The Arab Committee for Human Rights is calling upon the Saudi authorities to release Dr. Abdullah Al-Hamed, Dr. Matrook Al Falih, Dr. Issa Hamed, and other political conscious prisoners being held in Saudi jails without trials. We hope from all political science departments and civil society organization to exert all their pressure upon the Saudi government to release these prisoners.

For more information, please call the Political Science Department at King Saud University at phones

The director of department 00966 4674208

The Secretary of department 00966 4674209 or 00966 4674201

The Fax of department 00966 4674207

Posted by Henry at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Those of us who reside in the nation’s capital are reveling at the very idea of having “our” team, the Washington Nationals, playing in brand-new stadium (pictured above). The team is lousy and the fans are staying away in droves, but at least we can bask in the civic glory of having financed a dandy new playpen for the ballplayers. And now our mayor, who opposed that project while he was a member of the city council, has bought into the idea big-time, having signed onto a plan to spend $125 million or so to help build a new soccer stadium just across the Anacostia from the new ballpark. He’s also said to be flirting with the idea of erecting a new football stadium to try to lure the Washington [insert unmentionable profesional football team name here] back into the District from the crummy 91,000-or-so-seat house that Jack Kent Cooke built just a decade ago out in suburban Landover (nee Raljohn).

The local success story here that everyone is trying to repeat is the Verizon (nee MCI) Center, the basketball arena over on Seventh Street where the local Wizards and Mystics play. They, like the Nationals and the [insert unmentionable professional football team name here], aren’t very good, but the new downtown facility has sparked considerable redevelopment in a previously run-down part of town. That’s great, but what more generally can we learn from it?

Not much, it turns out.

There’s a fairly substantial research literature on this very question, and the results (though inevitably being somewhat mixed — this is social science, after all) give little aid and comfort to all the local developers and civic boosters whose idea of progress stems from an over-active Edifice Complex. Here is a nice piece by Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, that splashes cold water all over developers’ claims about the benefits of public financing of sports facilities.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

For those too young to remember him, Tom Lehrer, an MIT mathematician, wrote and recorded some wonderful songs in the 1950s and 1960s satirizing various aspects of life, politics, and society.

At MIT, Lehrer regularly taught a quantitative methods course for political scientists, and based on that experience he composed a song about political science. (Are there any other songs about political science?) Yes, yes, I know: the name of the song he bintroduces a half-minute or so into this YouTube clip is “Sociology,” not “Political Science,” but it’s really about political science, as he explains.

If this brings back old memories for you, good. If you’re hearing it for the first time, even better.

[Hat tip to Harvey Feigenbaum]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Words and phrases to avoid, courtesy of Andrew Gelman:

• Note that
• Interestingly
• Obviously
• It is clear that
• It is interesting to note that
• very
• quite
• of course
• Notice that

Let me add “We see that.”

Posted by John Sides at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

John Heilemann of the New York Magazine, makes an interesting case for Mayor Bloomberg for Veep - for either McCain or Obama. Heilemann notes that Bloomberg does nothing in the electoral math deparment for either candidate. NY is going Obama. However, if you’re willing to “stretch your mind a bit” and believe that the economy will be the central issue in the election, then Bloomberg has something to offer both candidates - his entrepreneurial background and “financial stewardship” of Gotham. Specifically, he could help McCain in FL, NJ and PA, and Obama in FL. There’s a host of reasons why McCain and Obama shouldn’t pick Bloomberg, and Heilemann goes through as well, but it is an interesting idea.

PS Of course the real reason for pushing Bloomberg as VEEP is that New Yorkers feel like they should have someone on the national stage since, for a fleeting moment, they thought they were going to have an all NY contest for the presidency - Giuliani vs Clinton.

Posted by David Park at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently went to my favorite restaurant in the States, Per Se, and as usual just had an exceptional experience. While very few restaurants are on par with Per Se, Manhattan offers an extraordinary range of culinary delights such as Nobu, WD-50, Bouley, etc. Other major cities, such as Chicago, San Francisco (even though some friends from the area lament the decline in SF dining), Los Angeles, and Boston, also offer a great number of fantastic culinary choices. Which brings me to DC. Besides a handful of exceptions, such as CityZen, DC just doesn’t have a restaurant scene comparable to other major cities. Why? Why don’t up and coming young chefs want to open up restaurants in DC like they do in Chicago? The potential client base in DC has to be comparable to Chicago, and the rents should be less in DC. So why the lack of exciting culinary choices in DC?

Posted by David Park at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Along the Potomac River, Georgetown, 1:45 pm.

Man on park bench: “Bro, can you spare any money?”

Me (declining): “I’m sorry, sir.”

Man: “I’m no ‘sir,’ and you’re definitely not sorry.”

Posted by John Sides at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In his influential Atlantic magazine article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” published after the 2000 election, David Brooks compared Montgomery County, Maryland, the liberal, upper-middle-class suburb where he lives, to rural, conservative Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a short drive away but distant in attitudes and values, with “no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble,” plenty of churches but not so many Thai restaurants, “a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.”

In Brooks’s home state of Maryland, there is no clear pattern of county income and Republican vote, and it was not difficult for him to go from Montgomery County, the prototypical wealthy slice of blue America, to a poorer, more Republican-supporting county nearby. Here are the data from 2000:

Brooks lives in a liberal, well-off part of the country. It is characteristic of the East and West Coasts that the richer areas tend to be more liberal, but in other parts of the country, notably the South, richer areas tend to be more conservative. A comparable journey in Texas would go from Collin County, a wealthy suburb of Dallas where George W. Bush received 71% of the vote, to rural Zavala County in the southwest, where Bush received only 25% of the vote:

When we showed our graph of Texas counties to another political scientist, he asked about the state capital, noted for its liberal attitudes, vibrant alternative rock scene, and the University of Texas: “What about Austin? It must be rich and liberal.” We looked it up. Austin is in Travis County and makes up almost all of its population. Travis County has a median household income of $45,000 and gave George W. Bush 53% of the vote in 2000, about midway between Collin and Zavala counties. (Austin has its own red-blue divide, with a highly Democratic university area and urban center, and strongly Republican suburbs.)

This is not to dismiss Brooks’s insights but rather to place them in the national context of income mattering more in poor states than in rich states, which is the subject of our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book (from which the above graphs were taken).

Posted by David Park at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

The first-ever, nationwide, random sample survey of Muslim Americans finds them to be largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.

This is the summary of a Pew Center poll of Muslim-Americans — the first of its kind. Some other interesting findings:

• 65% are foreign-born. Of the native-born, 3 in 5 are converts to Islam.
• Just over half of Muslim-Americans consider themselves “American” first. In Britain, Germany, and Spain, most Muslims consider themselves Muslim first.
• A plurality (43%) says that Muslims-Americans should adopt American customs, rather than trying to be distinct.
• Muslims-Americans are more critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the broader war on terrorism, than is the American general public.
• “…native-born African American Muslims are the most disillusioned segment of the U.S. Muslim population.”
• “…younger Muslim-Americans – those under age 30 – are both much more religiously observant and more accepting of Islamic extremism than are older Muslim Americans.” That said, the number of Muslim-Americans who accept extremism (e.g., endorse suicide bombing) is small in both groups.

And those come from just the first 6 pages of a 102-page report. The full report is here (pdf).

Posted by John Sides at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That’s Michael Avery, an eighth-grader from Lake Sherwood, California. Like many kids his age, Michael likes to play basketball.

After high school, Michael is going to play basketball in college. Not only that: He’s going to play at a perennial basketball powerhouse, the University of Kentucky.

Note that I didn’t just say that young Michael wants to play basketball in college, let alone at the University of Kentucky. I said he’s going to. In fact, he’s already accepted the scholarship offer that Kentucky coach Billy Gillespie extended to him earlier this month.

Now, I’m a close follower of college basketball. But this development — recruiting kids who are still in junior high — takes me completely off guard. I guess I just haven’t been paying attention, but I had no idea that it had come to this.

It shouldn’t have taken me off guard, because it turns out that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Within the last couple of years, Southern Cal’s coach, Tim Floyd, has inked two middle school students, and Arizona’s Lute Olson has offered schollies to two kids who hadn’t even started eighth grade yet. And the same week that Michael Avery accepted his offer, Gillespie got another commitment for Kentucky, albeit this time from a veritable grey-beard — ninth-grader Vinny Zollo from Greenfield, Ohio. A recruiting analyst is quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying “It’s like an arms race. You’ve got to offer first.” Apparently this is now becoming standard operating procedure in the cutthroat business of recruiting for big-time college sports.

With so many successful programs pursuing this strategy, it occurs to me that academic departments should consider following their lead. If it”s good enough for the athletics department, then why not for the political science department, too? In fact, in my department there’s a very productive married couple who have two young daughters. These girls obviously have the political science genes and they’re growing up in an academically-oriented home. So why wait? Let’s sign ‘em up as faculty members before Columbia or UCSD hears about ‘em!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Apparently, someone at the Los Angeles Times reads The Monkey Cage, because they asked me to write a short piece apropos of these two posts about the “divided” Democrats and the reinforcement effect in campaigns.

The op-ed is here. The gist of the argument is:

Despite ugly battles and policy differences that sometimes seem intractable, the reality is that presidential campaigns tend to unify each party behind its nominee. Political scientists call this phenomenon the “reinforcement effect.”

Some references for works and data cited in the piece:

• The Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet study.

• The National Annenberg Election Study.

• The Pew center poll.

• The piece by Ben Highton. Thanks to Ben for doing some additional data analysis for me.

• The National Election Study data showing that 90% of the public identifies with or leans toward one of the major parties.

• Gary Jacobson’s study of public opinion during the Bush administration.

Posted by John Sides at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

(Grandpa Sigelman could be in this picture, as it’s the right time and place, but I don’t recognize him.)

The Manhattan Institute recently released a report on the assimilation of immigrants to the U.S. over the course of the last century. The core of the analysis is a composite index of assimilation, which is based on census data and is decomposable by decade, by country of origin, and by dimension of assimilation (economic, cultural, and civic).

The report is jam-packed with findings. Some of these are unsurprising but others seem less consistent with what we thought we knew (or at least what I thought I knew) about these matters.

Some of the report’s main findings are as follows.

The degree of similarity between the native- and foreign-born, although low by historical standards, has held steady since 1990. Assimilation declined during the 1980s, remained stable through the 1990s, and has actually increased slightly over the past few years.

The relative stability of immigrant assimilation since 1990 masks two important and countervailing trends. Newly arrived immigrants of the early 21st century have assimilation index values lower than the newly arrived immigrants of the early 20th century. Growth in the immigrant population usually lowers the assimilation index because newly arrived immigrants drag down the average for the group as a whole. The stability of the assimilation index since 1990 is therefore remarkable in light of the rapid growth of the immigrant population, which doubled between 1990 and 2006. At the same time, the immigrants of the past quarter-century have assimilated more rapidly than their counterparts of a century ago, even though they are more distinct from the native population upon arrival. The increase in the rate of assimilation among recently arrived immigrants explains why the overall index has remained stable, even though the immigrant population has grown rapidly.

Yet the current level of assimilation remains lower than it was at any point during the early 20th century wave of immigration.

The three dimensions of assimilation do not increase in lockstep as immigrants spend more time in the United States. Economic and civic assimilation often occurs without significant cultural assimilation. It is common for immigrant cohorts to naturalize and enjoy integration into the economic mainstream without posting many gains along cultural dimensions.

There’s much more in the report itself. To see for yourself, click here

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That’s what Jodi Kantor says in the New York Times:

But in recent presidential elections, Jews have drifted somewhat to the right.

Really? I took the state-level exit polls for each presidential election from 1988-2004 and combined them into one big file for each election year. This produces relatively large samples of Jewish voters (~1,000 each year). Here is the percentage of Jewish voters choosing the Democratic candidate:

Looks like a leftward drift. In 1988, 71% of Jewish voters supported Dukakis. In 2004, 79% supported Kerry. And you don’t even have to crunch the data. I typed “jewish vote” into Google and the very first link told me the same thing.¹

Kantor is not wrong about her central thesis, although she fails to cite any systematic data to prove it: Obama’s current support among Jewish Americans is lower than that of these past Democratic candidates. Since Kantor doesn’t present any polling data about an Obama-McCain match-up, I went and found some. Just like before, it was hard: I typed “poll jew obama” into Google. Here was the first hit, a poll cited in the May 9th edition of the Jerusalem Post:

A new Gallup survey found that 61% of Jewish voters prefer Obama to McCain, who got 32% of the Jewish support.

That’s how you write a story about what voters think. Don’t make vague claims about recent history, such as the “rightward shift,” without backing it up. And then, if you really want to make the case, don’t only talk to a handful of people in Boynton Beach and Boca Raton. Find some hard evidence. Google will even do it for you.

ADDENDUM: See Andrew Gelman’s post with data from the National Election Study.

[1] This webpage’s data doesn’t precisely match mine, perhaps because they are using the (smaller) national exit poll file rather than the merged state-level files that I use. In fact, they find that the percent of Jews supporting Dukakis in 1988 is even lower (64%); the difference may arise because there wasn’t a separate exit poll in every state that year and so my combined state file is missing some data. In any case, the “rightward shift” is not plausible. In fact, if anything, the leftward shift is larger, especially if you compare 1988-2004 to earlier elections in the 1970 and 1980s.

Posted by John Sides at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

In this Pollster blogpost, Charles Franklin presents a wealth of data on public opinion about gay marriage, apropos of the recent ruling by the California Supreme Court. One interesting question is whether the California court’s decision will have the same effect that the Massachusetts court’s decision had. Franklin writes:

During the year from November 2003 to November 2004, opposition to same-sex marriage rose by five points, from 55% to just over 60%. Meanwhile support fell by about eight points, from 38% to 30%, then rebounded by a point or so by election day. (These shifts slightly predate the Massachusetts decision, probably reflecting the increased visibility of the issue prior to the Court’s ruling.)…

…The California ruling, and the likely campaign over a proposition there to modify the state constitution this fall, will test whether increasing the salience of the issue will result in a replay of the 2003-04 dynamics, with opponents stimulated and supporters in retreat, or if the 2006 experience means that the issue is no longer the motivator it was in 2004. The 2003-04 data clearly show the potential for sharp changes when the marriage issue becomes extremely salient. That the fight will take place in the most populous state in the Union also guarantees national exposure. However, the fact that most states have already settled this issue through law or amendment, and that only three states (so far) are on track to have proposals on the ballot, means that the issue is more localized than it was in 2004.

See also his discussion of polling that includes a “civil unions” option:

When the “civil unions” option is added, opposition to gay rights drops significantly from about 55% to 40%. Likewise, support for gay marriage drops from 40% to 29%. The “comfortable” middle ground is then some 26% who are willing to support civil unions so long as they fall short of “marriage.”

This “half a loaf” approach is acceptable to only some in the gay rights community, but it is precisely the politically acceptable position that Democratic politicians think can move them from the losing side of public opinion to the winning side.

Posted by John Sides at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Being of the early-to-bed, early-to-rise persuasion, I don’t stay up late enough to watch “Saturday Night Live.” Thus, over at Daniel Drezner’s blog, I happened upon what for me, but not for millions of other Americans, was brand-new material: a biting lampoon of Hillary Clinton explaining why she’s staying in the race and will be a stronger candidate than Barack Obama. Clinton supporters will probably hate this, but I assume that in short order SNL will come up with something equally biting about Barack Obama, and when that happens I’ll try to feature it here, too. Ditto for John McCain.

[Hat tip to Daniel Drezner]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A journalist queried me about whether anyone had studied efforts at voter suppression, such as “the distribution of flyers or use of robocalls in black neighborhoods with false information about election dates, polling locations,
eligibility requirements, and so on.”

Readers, is there any credible study that has actually sought to measure the effects of such tactics? Please leave any tips in the comments.

Posted by John Sides at 08:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Every year the NCAA publishes a financial analysis of intercollegiate sports programs. Every year there is much bad news. The newly released NCAA report contains even more bad news than usual. Unprecedentedly bad news, even.

Is this because 2006 (the year on which the new report focuses) was an unprecedentedly bad year for intercollegiate sports? Not really. What happened is that this time around the NCAA tightened up on the reporting criteria and definitions. For example, in reporting gross revenues, many programs had previously thrown in what they received from within the institution (aka “internal revenue”), in addition to the revenues they received from outside via ticket sales, TV contracts, etc. (aka “generated revenue”). Thus, if you were losing big bucks and the school had to bail you out, the bail-out funds would show up simply as revenue. Via such accounting legerdemain, many schools looked like they were balancing their books or even turning a profit, when in fact they were living on subventions from central administration.

Now, though, athletic programs have to distinguish between internal and generated revenue. And guess what? Yup: The dismal economics of big-time college sports just got even more dismal, which is very dismal indeed.

Here are the core findings of the report, as summarized in Inside Higher Ed:

Sports program budgets are growing quickly, as are institutional subsidies. For the 119 universities that compete in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A), total revenues grew by 25.5 percent from 2004 to 2006, slightly faster than the 23 percent growth in expenses. But in the more important category — generated revenues, those actually earned by athletics departments, excluding other institutional support — rose by only 16 percent over the two-year period.

In the 2006 fiscal year, the latest of three examined in the study, only 19 of the 119 Football Bowl Subdivision institutions had positive net revenue, while for the rest, expenses exceeded generated revenues. (For the entire three-year period, only 16 athletics department turned a net profit.)

The median net loss for all 119 I-A programs in 2006 was $7.265 million. But for the 16 programs that generated more than they spent, the average new revenue was $4.3 million, while the average loss of those with negative net revenue was $8.9 million. That $13 million difference suggests a widening gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” in big-time college football, as the equivalent gap in 2004 was about $11.3 million.

At this point, somebody’s going to pipe up and say, “Okay, but sports programs generate big bucks for their school because of all those alums who relate to the it by following their teams.” That sounds good, but I’ve been following (and occasionally contributing to) the research literature on such issues for many years, and there’s just not much evidence that it’s true and there’s lots of evidence that it’s not. Sports teams — almost invariably men’s teams, and almost invariably football and basketball teams, and especially the ones with the best records year in and year out — do generate big bucks, but the main recipient of those bucks isn’t the school’s general operating fund or the French club or (sigh) the political science department. Rather, it’s the intercollegiate athletics program itself. Which, in a perverse sort of way, is sort of okay, because it saves the school the trouble of sending even more bail-out money over to the athletics folks.

For the full Inside Higher Ed story, click here. If you’re really interested, you can link to the full NCAA report via that story.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Since I was recently complaining about the lack of political science in journalism, let me also give credit where credit is due. This piece, by John Judis in The New Republic, does a nice job surveying relevant literature about race from political science and psychology, including work by Tali Mendelberg, David Sears, Donald Kinder, Nicholas Valentino, Vincent Hutchings, and Ismail White. Judis’ piece is distinctive for treating social science as if it has some nuance — in particular, discussing existing debates rather than treating the debates as settled. There are, of course, further nuances and debates that he does not discuss, but, given the limits of magazine journalism, he still deserves kudos.

[Hat tip to Clyde Wilcox]

Posted by John Sides at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some assorted one-liners about the life of the graduate student that I found floating around the internet, unattributed…

The Top Ten Lies Told by Graduate Students

10. It doesn’t bother me at all that my college roommate is making $80,000 a year on Wall Street.
9. I’d be delighted to proofread your book/chapter/article.
8. My work has a lot of practical importance.
7. I would never date an undergraduate.
6. Your latest article was so inspiring.
5. I turned down a lot of great offers to come here.
4. I just have one more book to read and then I’ll start writing.
3. The department is giving me so much support.
2. My job prospects look really good.
1. No really, I’ll be out of here in only two more years.

Top Five Lies Told by Teaching Fellows

5. I’m not going to grant any extensions.
4. Call me any time. I’m always available.
3. It doesn’t matter what I think; write what you believe.
2. Think of the midterm as a diagnostic tool.
1. My other section is much better prepared than you guys.

You just might be a graduate student if…

…you are startled to meet people who neither need nor want to read.
…you have ever brought a scholarly article to a bar.
…you rate coffee shops by the availability of outlets for your laptop.
…everything reminds you of something in your discipline.
…you have ever discussed academic matters at a sporting event.
…you look forward to summers because you’re more productive without the distraction of classes.
…you consider all papers to be works in progress.
…professors don’t really care when you turn in work anymore.
…you find the bibliographies of books more interesting than the actual text.
…you have given up trying to keep your books organized and are now just trying to keep them all in the same general area.
…you have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
…you find yourself explaining to children that you are in “20th grade”.
…you start refering to stories like “Snow White et al.”
…you look forward to taking some time off to do laundry

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This is an amazing representation of world politics from the late 1930s through the present day as an interconnected series of food fights. I’m a little slow: For one thing, this has been around for a while but I hadn’t seen it ‘til now. For another, it took me several run-throughs to pick up on some of the references. A hint to get you started: The various countries are represented by a stereotypical food item — hamburgers, sausage, French fries, sushi, beef Stroganoff, and so on.

[Hat tip to Jacob Sohlberg]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I noted in an earlier post (here), I’m a biker. A serious one. A racer, even — a silly thing for a senior citizen to be, but so be it. Anyway, due to circumstances beyond my control I haven’t been on the bike since last August. But today, for the first time in longer than I care to remember, I rolled out my lovely Pinarello and went for a ride. Boy, am I out of shape.

In commemoration of this event I’m pleased to bring you Kraftwerk, my forever-favorite group (which, thanks to Henry Farrell, I had the pleasure of seeing live a couple of years ago), performing an abridged version of the grand anthem of cycling. Even if — perish the thought! — you’re not into techo-pop, the visuals are great.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Here is a clever piece by John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell analyzing some major schools of thought about American foreign policy — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism, and realism — through the lens of “The Godfather.” I wonder what my IR colleagues make of this.

[Hat tip to PolySigh]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The folks over at Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism have just completed a comprehensive analysis of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” starring the perpetually smirky Jon Stewart. The point of departure for their study was that Stewart recently tied with heavyweight teleprompter-readers Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Anderson Cooper in a nationwide survey as as America’s most admired journalist. (Of course, if you pay much attention to the network news shows these days, which seem to consist primarily of ads for drug companies, a headline and sound-bite or two, and lots of lifestyle fluff, you’ll realize that such recognition comes closer to guilt by association than to a true honor.)

Anyway, the Pew researchers decided to explore the extent to which what’s shown on the “Daily Show” accords with journalistic standards like comprehensive coverage of various types of news and equal time for representatives of various viewpoints. The results are contained in a lengthy report, HERE.

The main conclusions?

The results reveal a television program that draws on the news events of the day but picks selectively among them—heavily emphasizing national politics and ignoring other news events entirely. In that regard, The Daily Show closely resembles the news agenda of a number of cable news programs as well as talk radio.

The program also makes heavy use of news footage, often in a documentary way that employs archival video to show contrast and contradiction, even if the purpose is satirical rather than reportorial. At other times, the show also blends facts and fantasy in a way that no news program hopefully ever would.

In short, “The Daily Show” doesn’t pass muster as a news program. Despite the wealth of interesting detail presented in the Pew report, this is not exactly a “Stop the presses!” conclusion. After all, “The Daily Show” appears on Comedy Central and, as Jon Stewart himself has sometimes had to remind his critics, “We’re not a news show.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In the spirit of John Sides’s selfless offer of himself and David Park as regression-runners and findings-interpreters for New York Times columnist David Brooks (HERE), I hereby volunteer John and David’s services to ABC News political analyst George Stephanopoulos as well. (I myself am much too busy blogging about cats to become involved in such an undertaking.)

This offer is prompted by the following exchange between anchorman Charles Gibson and Stephanopoulos on May 6, 2008, the evening of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries:

GIBSON: And joining me now is our chief Washington correspondent, George Stephanopoulos, who is here in New York tonight. …

STEPHANOPOULOS: … Let’s look at those numbers. … We did ask a question I know in the exit polls about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and whether that was influencing voters. What did we find? Right down the middle. About half said it’s important, about half said it was unimportant. Of those who said it was important, look at this in Indiana, 70% went for Senator Clinton. Of those who thought it was unimportant, again right down the middle, 65% for Barack Obama. So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.

Now, George Stephanopoulos, who graduated summa cum laude from an Ivy League school (Columbia), is no dummy. The concluding sentence of his summary of the survey results is so fundamentally flawed, though, that one can only wonder what they were teaching in all those political science courses that he took (he was a political science major) or whether the time he spent in the Clinton White House so addled him that it’s all gotten jumbled in his head.

The most basic lesson one is supposed to learn in one’s very first research methods course is — repeat after me, everybody — “Correlation is not the same as causation.” Now, with that thought in mind, go back and re-read the offending sentence: “So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.” Do you begin to see the problem?

The causal spin that Stephanopoulos put on these survey results assumes, in effect, that heading into the Indiana and North Carolina primaries most voters weren’t committed to one candidate or the other. Then the Reverend Wright issue emerged, and — presto! — it split the Democratic electorate into two groups, Clinton voters and Obama voters.

Instead, let’s begin with a decidedly different, and altogether more plausible assumption. Let’s say that heading into these two primaries, which after all occurred very late in the primary season, most voters were already pretty well committed to one or the other of the two candidates. Then the Reverend Wright issue emerged. For many of those who were already intending to vote for Clinton, that issue reinforced their existing inclination; certainly it wouldn’t have transformed them from Clinton supporters into Obama supporters. For many (presumably most) of those who were already intending to vote for Obama, though, the Wright issue wasn’t sufficient to persuade them of the error of their ways and move them into the Clinton column.

Then on election day along came an exit poll interviewer asking them how important the issue had been to them. Naturally, many of the Clintonites cited it as a reason for voting for Clinton rather than Obama — because it had been consistent with that intention and also because it had also emerged late enough to still be retrievable from memory. But how many Obama supporters would cite it as a reason for having voted for Obama? As the issue played out, that simply wouldn’t make sense; it was a one-way or “valence” issue, and its valence was anti-Obama. So Clinton supporters were more likely to cite the Wright issue as underlying their vote choice than were Obama supporters — the same statistical finding that Stephanopoulos reported but with a very different interpretation.

The problem, stated more generally, is that when pollsters ask voters which issues were most important to them, what the voters tell them can’t be taken at anything approaching face value. People just aren’t reliable reporters of their own mental processes. (The classic statement of this point is Nisbett and Wilson’s “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (May 1977), pp. 231-259.) In the context under consideration here, this unreliability typically takes the form of ex post facto rationalizations: Those who were predisposed to vote for Candidate X cite the issues that X had raised as the decisive ones, and those who were predisposed to vote for Candidate Y cite Y’s issues as decisive. Look back over several decades of ANES post-election surveys and you’ll see this pattern time and time again. Or save yourself the trouble and hunt down a copy of Wendy Rahn, Jon Krosnick, and Marijke Breuning’s “Rationalization and Derivation Processes in Survey Studies of Political Candidate Evaluation” (American Journal of Political Science 38 (August 1994), pp. 582-600), the bottom line of which is that “Voters’ reports of the reasons for their preferences were principally rationalizations.”

My point isn’t that the Reverend Wright matter was wholly inconsequential. It may well have figured into the decision calculus of some late-deciders in Indiana and North Carolina. But that’s a world away from concluding based on the data that Stephanopoulos had in hand that “What you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.”

Columbia has an excellent political science department. Perhaps as a public service they should bring back their erstwhile star student for some refresher courses in research methods and electoral behavior. Or maybe Stephanopoulos will decide to take me up on my sincere offer of John and David’s assistance.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I’ll get back to serious — or at least semi-serious — posts soon, but having spent the last few days convalescing with the able assistance of my beloved 19-year-old orange stripey blind Gooseberry, I figure it’s time for another post about cats. This one has been around for a while, but perhaps you haven’t seen it.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is the percentage of Democrats voting for the Democratic nominee for President, drawing on National Election Studies data from 1952-2004.

This graph should be the starting point for any discussion of a “deeply divided” or “fractured” Democratic Party. The party loyalty of Democrats has been increasing over time and has essentially hovered at 90% since 1992. (And Republicans are similarly loyal to the Republican nominee.)

A central finding of political science research into campaign effects is this: during the general election, presidential campaigns tend to reinforce one’s preexisting partisan leaning. In other words, they tend to unify the party.

The tendency now, as in the NY Times and Washington Post pieces linked above, is to ponder, ominously, “divides” within the Democratic Party and, elsewhere, to quote meaningless exit poll data about how many Clinton voters say they will stay home or vote for McCain. Instead, journalists and commentators should be grappling with the reinforcement effect and party loyalty.

Early data from this election also portends a high degree of party loyalty. See this, from an April Pew poll. Already, large percentages of Democrats (77%) say they will vote for Obama against McCain. (Party loyalty among Democrats in the unlikely Clinton-McCain race is 81% — which, given sampling error, is indistinguishable from 77%.) Republicans are, right now, more unified (85% say they will vote for McCain), but this isn’t surprising, since the Republican race has been decided for much longer.¹

Thus, it’s not clear why Pew entitles the table “Obama’s Struggle within the Democratic Base.” Obama does just as well as Clinton among Democrats. Moreover, and most importantly, he will likely do better as soon as Clinton drops out and the general election campaign begins its inevitable reinforcement effect.

*****

Addendum: Below is a picture of what reinforcement looks like. The graph derives from National Anneberg Election Study data. It presents the percent of Democrats who said they would vote for Gore over Bush. The data derive from samples taken daily from December 14, 1999, until November 6, 2000. Early on, about 78% of Democrats said they would vote for Gore. That increased to 87% over the course of the campaign.

[1] Independents, by the way, favor Obama over McCain, 52-41. That difference should be close to statistical significance.

Posted by John Sides at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In response to my post below on David Brooks, Ian McDonald comments:

Your last paragraph (tongue in cheek, I guess) makes me wonder: what do you think is the right symbiosis between good journalism and good social science?

I ask because: I think good journalism needs to take risks. I am a big David Brooks fan and I will cut him a lot of slack on factual precision, because he asks good questions, and he always entertains me. While he writes about his social disparity ideas a lot, I don’t agree that he’s completely vested in one interpretation (see the last paragraph of this Atlantic piece). http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/brooks.htm

Sure, some pundits get it wrong, habitually, because of self-serving motives, and thus poison the conversation. I think you would agree: Brooks isn’t one of them.

At the same time, nobody wants to be flat out wrong (I think). Maybe social scientists and journalists really can help each other. Proactively and hate free. And still make deadlines and stay interesting.

Ian raises a very good question. I completely agree that social scientists and journalists can work together.

My further thoughts are these. First, I want to distinguish between David Brooks and journalism. Obviously, he writes columns, not news articles, and thus is in the business of commentary, not reporting. Brooks is also often an amateur social scientist, and, as such, I hold him to a weaker version of the standards to which academics are held. That is to say, I wasn’t at all joking when I said this:

If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word. (David Park is ready to run your regressions.) Give us a call.

I would not demand that David Brooks worry about all of the ideals of empirical social science: rigorous theories, careful conceptualization and measurement, appropriate evidence, caution in drawing inferences from inherently limited data. But what I am suggesting — simple analysis to confirm the most basic thrust of a hypothesis — is not asking too much. In fact, given the platform Brooks has at the Times, it is his responsibility not to present arguments without making more of an effort to confirm them with data, where appropriate. I think his bad arguments — e.g., red and blue states — actually do violence to our discourse about politics. (See also Barry’s comment on my original post.) If Brooks wants to take risks by proffering new ideas without digging up the necessary evidence, then he needs to moderate his tone to convey the appropriate uncertainty.

Yes, I realize that columnists have an incentive to be provocative. Yes, they write on deadline. And yes, most do not have the necessary skills to analyze large datasets. That is why my offer to help Brooks do analysis is not at all facetious or sarcastic. I really would do it. And for much less than the $4000 Bill Kristol is paid to write each column.

What about reporters and journalists?

Obviously, I do not expect reporters or journalists to do social science — e.g., to crunch data. However, it is reasonable to expect journalists not to misuse data. For example, at the Washington Post and ABC, their respective pollsters, Jon Cohen and Gary Langer, must vet any news article that uses polling data, to ensure that reporters are not drawing on bogus polls with convenience samples and not overstating a poll’s findings.

Beyond that, journalists should be familiar with the academic research that informs their beat. Familiarity could arise from their own reading and from their conversations with academics. As a political scientist, I find myself increasingly cranky that stories about the law or economics or medicine routinely cite lawyers or law professors, economists, and doctors, while stories about politics cite political scientists much less often.¹ The difference, I think, is that many reporters see politics as something that they “know” and not something that science can help illuminate. There is also a mass of political “experts” — campaign professionals, former elected officials, etc. — who can readily provide “analysis” that may reflect a real understanding but may also be intuition, rote repetition of the conventional wisdom, and pure making-it-up-as-you-go-along. Moreover, I certainly recognize that political science research is often a cold shower, as political scientists are much more cautious about trumpeting the importance of recent events whose impact is not yet clear, while journalists have incentives to generate “news” by inflating the importance of these events.

Nevertheless, I think political reporters should know the basic outlines of political science findings and debates about such questions as:

• Do campaigns matter?
• What is the role of momentum in primary elections?
• Does divided government make government less productive?
• Do campaign contributions influence how members of Congress votes?
• Are bureaucrats able to subvert presidential directives?
• Does a divided primary hurt the nominee in the general election?
• What is the relationship between income and voting? (Enter Gelman et al.)
• Does democracy promote economic development?
• What leads to interstate wars and civil wars?

That is a very non-exhaustive, top-of-my-head list.

It’s not important that every article ever written about politics quote political scientists or refer to political science. It’s important that political science research inform how political reporters think about politics. They would ask different questions. They would be better able to identify truly important events, thereby separating signal from noise. They would be better able to evaluate the claims of political leaders. Lots of political scientists would be willing to point journalists toward relevant studies and/or summarize the extant literature on any subject.²

Of course, reporters face constraints in terms of time, resources, etc. But I think knowing something about the academic study of their chosen field is important. The Columbia School of Journalism seems to agree, as their M.A. program now requires students to work not just with journalism professors but professors in a chosen area of concentration, such as politics, business, or science (see here).

I regularly teach the media and politics to undergraduates and I always emphasize that simply bashing the media isn’t fair. I certainly don’t want to engage in — nor do I want this blog to become — an ongoing critique of media coverage. But media coverage of politics can become much better, and attention to political science would help.

[1] When journalists do cite political science, it’s not always pretty, as John Harwood of the New York Times demonstrates when he misconstrues Daron Shaw’s quote about the general election campaign — “There has been a consensus that presidential campaigns are primarily the means by which we arrive at predictable outcomes” — as a statement about the primary campaign, which he then “rebuts” in the next paragraph by noting how “unpredictable” Obama’s rise was. A commonplace of political science is that campaigns matter much more in presidential primaries than in the general election.

[2] And political scientists must also promote their research. That is obviously a purpose of this blog.

Posted by John Sides at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In this recent piece, David Brooks sees a nation divided:

…some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner…

…The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics. We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.

In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.

What is wrong with this characterization? First, Brooks uses aggregate-level data (from counties) to infer the individual-level behavior of voters. This is the ecological fallacy. When you look at actual exit polls from some recent primaries, the results are far less stark. In Pennsylvania, voters without a college degree favored Clinton, 58-42. Voters with a college degree favored Clinton too, 51-49. (See also Ohio.) Somehow I don’t see the “deep cultural gap.”

Second, more systematic data show that the education “divide” within the Democratic party is at times non-existent and, when it exists, has not “widened” over time. Using the National Election Studies, I will compare the views of Democratic respondents with and without a college degree. Below is the percent among each group who voted for the Democratic nominee for president:

Democrats have grown more loyal over time (as discussed briefly in this post). Moreover, any education “gap” is miniscule as of 2004, and certainly hasn’t grown over time.

More data, and more on Brooks-as-hedgehog, are below the fold.

Below, in order, are graphs of Democratic opinion on whether to increase or decrease government services and spending, whether to give more or less government aid to blacks, and whether to have more or fewer restrictions on abortion. (Question wordings are here, here, and here.) These items tap the potential lines of cleavage (e.g., economic, racial, and social issues) and also allow over-time comparisons.

These graphs show that, while college-educated Democrats tend to be more liberal than other Democrats on two of these items, the gap between these two groups is not growing over time. There is no evidence whatsoever of a “widening” divide within the Democratic party based on education. Moreover, what divide does exist doesn’t really seem to matter much on Election Day: Democrats are highly loyal regardless of their level of formal education. Which is, by the way, why we should expect current divisions among Democrats to be pretty much mended by November.

Why does Brooks make mistakes like this? Hedgehogs, in Berlin’s famous characterization, know one big thing. Brooks knows one big thing: that the world can be easily divided into groups (preferably two) and these groups are really, really different from each other. That is, of course, the thrust of his original piece on “red” and “blue” states (despite some post-9/11 caveats at the end). Brooks also desperately wants to infer political divisions from sociological divisions. If divorce rates and obseity and child-rearing and smoking and mortality are associated with education then certainly some political outcome is too? Right? Right?

Unfortunately, Brooks’ mode of pop sociology obscures far more than it reveals, and forces him to bend the facts to suit this thesis. See also Sasha Issenberg’s famous take-down of the red/blue state piece.

The sad thing is, David Brooks actually appears to read and enjoy social science, and can even talk about it reasonably well (see this earlier post). But in columns like this, he seems content to ignore the data, or else fail to examine it closely.

If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word. (David Park is ready to run your regressions.) Give us a call.

Posted by John Sides at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

…Knoxville, TN. And the best is Colorado Springs, CO.

Those are the bipolar results of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America’s new rating of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. in terms of “the most challenging places to live w