The Monkey Cage

Jonathan Mirsky writes,

When the Dalai Lama visited Oxford, the head of one of the institutions where he spoke, who has connections with China, stipulated that the name of the place must not be used in news reports; nor could a picture be taken of the outside of the building while the Dalai Lama was there.

He seems to be deliberately avoiding stating the name of the Oxford institution. But they can’t really stop him from revealing it, right? I mean, what authority does “the head of one of the institutions” at Oxford have to “stipulate” what will be stated in news reports? Is there something I’m missing here???

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Today’s Washington Post article about anti-Obama rumors has the blogosphere buzzing. Over at TNR’s Plank, Jason Zengerle suggests that Republicans are more likely to believe such rumors because they are primed to believe all sorts of terrible things about Democrats.

But are Republicans more likely to believe such rumors? An April Newsweek poll indicated that only a bare majority (52 percent) of respondents believed that Barack Obama was a Christian. Thirteen percent said he was a Muslim, 9 percent said he was something else, and 26 percent said they didn’t know of refused to answer. Here’s how the numbers broke down by party:

As you can see, Democrats were somewhat more likely to identify Obama as a Christian and similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans identified him as a Muslim. On the other hand, the differences are much greater between different levels of education.

Those without a high school diploma were half as likely to identify Obama as a Christian and twice as likely to identify him as a Muslim. Those in the lower education categories also seem much more likely to say that Obama is of a different religion or to claim that they don’t know or refuse to answer. This makes sense since those with less education are probably less able to sort out the difference between fact and rumor. The real break point seems to be between those with at least some college education and those without. These numbers strongly suggest that rumors about Obama’s religion are most likely to influence those with less education, regardless of their partisanship.

Posted by Phil Klinkner at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here’s a graph of the 50 states (actually, I think Alaska and Hawaii are missing), showing the average economic and social ideology of adults within each state. Each of these is scaled so that negative numbers are liberal and positive are conservative; thus, people in Massachusetts are the most liberal on economic issues and people in Idaho are the most conservative:

West Virginians are on the liberal side economically but are extremely socially conservative, whereas Vermont is about the same as West Virginian on the economic dimension but is the most socially liberal of all the states. Coloradans are economically conservative (on average) but socially moderate (or, perhaps, socially divided; these are averages only).

How do these rankings fit with our usual rankings of states? Here’s a plot showing average economic and social ideology for each state, plotted vs. George W. Bush’s vote share in 2000:

Democrats and Republicans separately

The next step is to break these voters down into Democrats and Republicans (based on self-reported party identification and following the usual practice among political scientists of throwing the “leaners” into the regular party categories). In the graph below, each state is shown twice: the avg social and economic ideologies of Democrats in the state are shown in blue, the avgs for Republicans in red.

We made these graphs during the primary election season, and one thing we noticed was that South Carolina (“SC”) is in the middle of the pack among Democrats and among Republicans, but it’s one of the most conservative states overall. My take on this: South Carolina is a strongly Republican state, and the moderates in South Carolina are likely to identify as Republican. This pulls the Republican average to the left (as they includes the moderates) and also pulls the Democratic average to the left (as they are not including so many moderates).

But the big thing we see from the graph immediately above is that Democrats are much more liberal than Republicans on the economic dimension: Democrats in the most conservative states are still much more liberal than Republicans in even the most liberal states. On social issues there is more overlap (although in any given state, the average Republican is more conservative than the average Democrat).

Details on data

David Park and I made these graphs from the Annenberg pre-election survey from 2000 (with its huge sample size), creating indexes based on issue opinions, giving each respondent an economic and social ideology score. We scaled these so that each had a national average of 0 and standard deviation of 0.5. (We used these scales in our Red State, Blue State book, but these particular graphs never made it into the book.)

P.S.

Yes, I know the graphs could be better. We made them a few months ago and haven’t organized them into any final form.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The current issue of Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the current brouhaha over whether the American Political Science Association’s 2012 meeting should be moved out of its designated site, New Orleans, due to Louisiana’s anti-gay and lesbian policies. APSA President Dianne Pinderhughes, speaking for the APSA Council, recently reaffirmed the Association’s intention to meet in New Orleans, pointing to local conditions and policies rather than state-level ones, the role that holding meetings in New Orleans can play in restoring the city, and APSA’s self-imposed prohibition against taking stands on policy issues. This reaffirmation has distressed many gay and lesbian activists, who are concerned not only about the hostile atmosphere for them in Louisiana but also about potential health risks of being in a place where the health care benefits that are available to family members would not be available to them or their partners. Talk of a boycott of the meeting is in the air.

For the Inside Higher Ed coverage, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga VI (Uga for University of Georgia, VI because he was sixth in the line of Ugas) has died of congestive heart failure at age ten. Uga VI, extremely handsome (a veritable matinee idol by bulldog standards), was the son of Uga V, the only college mascot to have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. I don’t care about Georgia’s basketball or football teams, but I used to look in on their games in hopes of catching a glimps of Uga. While I was growing up, my family had two bulldogs, and they were “really” mine and, of course, my mother’s. Bulldogs are a noble breed, and although their looks scare off some people they’re wonderful companions if you can put up with all their snorting, drooling, and gas-passing, which I could. But they do tend to die young.

Long live Uga VII!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rice, in Sweden for a conference on Iraq, ended up in the Sheraton hotel where the band Kiss was staying the night before a concert. Negotiations between State Department aides and Kiss’s manager resulted in a rendezvous between the two.

During the gathering, Kiss leaders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley tried to recruit Rice, a talented classical pianist, to join the band.

“I don’t rock,” she told them.

“I’m sure you can rock,” Simmons replied.

[From the Washingtonian magazine. See also here, which has a picture. I could have used it, but who wants to see Kiss without their make-up on?]

[P.S. Detroit Rock City.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This photo is the document most requested from the National Archives, topping requests for copies of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And rightly so, of course.

Following up on my earlier post that featured this photo, reader John Shelton Lawrence has kindly forwarded this link to the correspondence between The King and All the President’s Men, from both before the historic December 21, 1970 meeting and after Elvis had left the building. Included are Elvis’s handwritten note requesting a get-together, several internal White House memos, and numerous photos memorializing the occasion..

Teaser: In a memo to the guardian of Nixon’s door, H.R. Haldeman, recommending that Presley’s request for a meeting be granted, White House aide Dwight Chapin writes:

…if the President wants to meet with some bright young people outside the government, Presley might be a perfect one to start with.

Haldeman’s scrawled response:

You must be kidding.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh’s hilarious first-hand account of the meeting. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

And now you know … the rest of the story.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This New York Times article discusses the current politics of immigration in Italy — in particular, new measures to crack down on illegal immigrants, who are believed to increase the crime rate. In a 2002 survey, respondents in Italy and 19 other European nations were asked whether immigration tended to improve or worsen crime. In a 2005 survey, this same item was asked of an American sample. Respondents gave their answers along a 0-10 scale. Here are the percent who gave an answer on the “worsen crime” side of the scale:

In almost every country, a majority of respondents believed that immigrants worsened crime. Interestingly, both Americans and Italians were less likely to say this than were respondents in most other nations. Forty-eight percent of Americans said that immigration worsened crime, as did 61% of Italians. These surveys also asked about the consequences of immigration for the government revenue and services and for national culture. On average, respondents were more concerned about the consequences for crime than for these other areas. Jack Citrin and I discuss these and other results in this paper.

The measures recently proposed in Italy have garnered the support of a majority of Italians:

Do you support or oppose each of these measures?

Allowing citizens from other EU countries to stay in Italy for more than three months only if they have enough income and inform the authorities of their whereabouts, and provide their name and address: 63% support.

Expropriating the houses that are rented to illegal immigrants: 58% support.

Allowing immigrants to reunite with their relatives only after a DNA test has been performed: 56% support.

More survey data are here (US only) and here (US and abroad).

Here is a study by Rubén G. Rumbaut and colleagues about crime among immigrants in the United States. One of its findings is this:

The finding that incarceration rates are much lower among immigrant men than the national norm, despite their lower levels of education and greater poverty, but increase significantly over time in the United States for those who arrived as children and especially among the second generation, suggests that the process of “Americanization” can lead to downward mobility and greater risk of involvement with the criminal justice system for a significant minority of this population.

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Bob Sommer, who teaches public policy communications and is president of Observer Media, publisher of The New York Observer, and John R. Maycroft, a graduate student in public policy, (both at Rutgers University, or as I like to call it, the University of New Jersey) went through 366 op-eds written by academics in three major (or more accurately, 2 major and one not so major) newspapers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Star Ledger. They find that (1) 90 to 95 percent of the op-eds agree with the editorial page stance on the issue, (2) most of the academics come from high-prestige universities, and (3) men wrote 78 percent of the op-eds in The Star-Ledger, 82 percent in The Times, and 97 percent in The Journal.

According to the New York Times article that discusses Sommer and Maycrott’s research, the authors find their latter discovery (men writing most of the op-eds) to be “the most astonishing.” I haven’t read their article, but I find it curious that they would say this is their most astonishing discovery. I’m assuming that most of the op-eds in the Wall Street Journal are economic or policy oriented. Therefore, as a baseline, they should see what percentage of academics in those fields are men. I haven’t looked at the latest numbers, but I think they are above 75 percent. Therefore, are 78 percent of the op-eds in The Star-Ledger, 82 percent in The Times, and 97 percent in The Journal such “astonishing” numbers?

Posted by David Park at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back in February, I posted on the left-handedness of recent presidents, here. That posting captured the fancy of the entire nation — well, maybe not, but it did spark an unusually high number of responses (some speculative, some research-based, some confessional, as in “I’m left-handed”).

Now that both the Democrats and the Republicans have done the right thing (er, the left thing) by naming portsiders Obama and McCain as their presidential candidates, the media are beginning to catch up to “The Monkey Cage,” as evidenced by this newspaper story.

The story quotes Daniel Geschwind, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at UCLA, to the effect that left-handers’ tendency toward bilateral brain function could enable them to visualize problems more broadly and with more complexity and could relate to the social and interactive skills needed to be successful in politics.

That’s pretty speculative, but the story goes on to note one well-established difference between left-handers and right-handers. According to Amar Klar, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute, “Handedness is related to the way the hair spins on the back of your head.” The whorl for right-handers curls clockwise in 92% of cases. In left-handers, the distribution is random, with half exhibiting a clockwise whorl and the other half spinning counterclockwise. (Sort of like toilets flushing counterclockwise in Australia, I guess.) The relevance of the whorl phenomenon to presidential politics is not immediately apparent, but perhaps one of the new generation of political scientists studying the physiological bases of political behavior can forge the link.

P.S. I know of no evidence that Bob Barr is left-handed, but it really doesn’t matter.

UPDATE: In response to popular demand (see the comments below), I launched an extensive research effort to find an answer to the vital question of “Is Ralph Nader left-handed?” Here’s what I found in my landmark three-second Google search:

[Hat tip to Erik Voeten]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via an email from Chris Albon, I see that Nicole Suveges, who did an MA at GWU, and a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, was killed in Iraq while working there for a contractor. She appears to have been in GWU before my time, so I didn’t know her; my deepest sympathies go out to her friends and family and those who did know her.

Posted by Henry at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Political scientists frequently moan about the reluctance of political journalists to read their work and use it when making horse-race prognostications. So it’s nice to see Tom Edsall (previously at the Washington Post, now at HuffPo) do a long piece on the implications of recent work on political cycles for the upcoming election. As a non-Americanist, I’m not very well grounded in this literature (my broad impression is that it’s a bit skimpy on the causal mechanisms), but even so.

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

Over at PolySigh, I started the Charles Whittaker Watch to keep track of the increasingly wacky statements of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The watch is named for Justice Charles Whittaker who resigned from the Court after suffering a nervous breakdown. You can check out other watch entries here, here, here, here, and here.

In our latest update, Justice Scalia claimed in his dissenting opinion in Boumediene v. Bush, “At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.” It turns out that the battlefield now includes appearing in documentaries.

Posted by Phil Klinkner at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Boris forwarded to me this passage from The Audacity of Hope which was noted by Jim Geraghty:

Increasingly, I [Obama] found myself spending time with people of means - law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart,interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment… I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population - that is, the people I’d entered public life to serve.

Geraghty follows up with:

Amen, senator! I think the donors Obama describes are a bunch of arrogant snobs. But what does that make Obama, who listens to them offer their opinion and concludes they have a hard time imaging “that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score”? With Obama, it seems a $2,000 donation will get you his ear, but not his respect.

I don’t quite agree with Geraghty here: It seems like he’s putting Obama in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If Obama says he agrees with his donors, he’s a liberal elitist. If he disagrees with them, then he’s being disrespectful to these innocent donors.

I think Geraghty would be on stronger ground to just take Obama at his word that he “became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray . . .” and make the point that this is an inherent contradiction within liberal politics, that there are templates for failure but not template for success (i.e., “selling out”). Or maybe not; I’m not familiar enough with Geraghty to really know where he’s coming from.

Perceptions of red and blue voters

More to the point, as Boris notes, “Obama’s quote directly relates to the themes of our Red State, Blue State book: the contradiction between economic and social views at the very top, the blue state lens he sees rich people through, etc. etc.” To spell this out in a bit more detail: in rich, Democratic-leaning states such as Illinois, upper-income voters tend to be more economically conservative but more socially liberal than lower-income voters. (In poor, Republican-leaning states, upper-income voters are much more economically conservative than lower-income voters but about the same, on average, on social issues.) So Obama was observing a tension that’s particularly relevant in rich, “blue” states.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Madonna G. Constantine, a professor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, gained national attention when a noose was found hanging on her door. Little did I know that while this incident was going on, she was being investigated for plagiarism! After 18 months of investigation she was found to have plagiarized the works of two former students and a colleague. Not good. Read the details here in the NY Times.

Posted by David Park at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Vomiting
2. Microphone feedback
3. Babies crying

That is according to the research of Trevor Cox of Salford University. discussed here in the New York Times. More info is at the project’s website. You can also listen to and rate the sounds. I didn’t, but I get to hear #3 often enough.

Posted by John Sides at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Eric Rauchway has an interesting post on the reasons why the Democrats lost the South.

ever since Nixon’s “southern strategy”—it’s been commonplace to assume that the Republicans picked up where the Democrats left off in courting bigoted whites, in the South and elsewhere. … Along come some political scientists to tell us this Republican racism is a bit of a side show, that the real story of the GOP’s new southern eminence has to do with the emergence, at long last, of a New South, ushered (ironically) into being by Democratic programs of New Deal and wartime mobilization. … One of the best-known works in this line was co-written by a friend and former colleague of mine, Byron E. Shafer, together with Richard Johnston, titled The End of Southern Exceptionalism. They argue that more, richer white southerners means more Republican white southerners.

Shafer and Johnston sometimes contribute to this confusion themselves, nowhere more than in the short section they devote to the influence of George Wallace on southern politics. Now, we think we know this story, too: Wallace helped loosen the loyalty of southern whites to the Democratic Party in 1964 and in 1968; the sort of person who voted for Wallace in 1968 was the sort of person who’d voted for Goldwater in 1964 and if he couldn’t have Wallace in 1968, he’d rather have had Nixon than Humphrey … But—say Shafer and Johnston—not so fast. … in the South the Democrats ultimately kept the Wallace voters, while the Republicans picked up the Johnson voters. It’s provocative, all right. Is it true?

Eric argues (using graphs of county level data and the aptly named ICPSR variable #666, George Wallace’s share of the presidential vote in 1968), that Shafer and Johnson may be missing part of the picture.

I don’t see what Shafer and Johnston see—I’d bet from looking at this that Nixon got the Wallace vote in ’72, when probably not so much had changed demographically since ’68. But in later elections, people have moved around a lot and just looking at race and income, the constituencies for the same counties look pretty different. Which isn’t to say Shafer and Johnston are wrong, per se—(1) I’m looking at counties, not districts; (2) I spent all of a couple of afternoons on this; (3) I may well be missing something incredibly obvious, such that it’s better to look at districts than counties, or something. Political scientists in the readership who want to look at this and tell me how I got it all wrong are welcome. It’s just to say, I don’t see what Shafer and Johnston see.

Any political scientists out there who’d like to comment?

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

The recent Washington Post poll I mentioned earlier raises some interesting questions about the role of racial attitudes in an Obama-McCain election. The Post’s description of the poll results suggests that for whites, racial attitudes have an independent impact on vote choice, even when controlling for party identification. John presented some recent findings suggesting that whites’ racial attitudes, at least in recent elections, aren’t particularly influential.

In order to shed a bit more light on this issue, I looked around for recent polling data that included questions on racial attitudes in addition to the usual horse race questions. Fortunately, the Roper Center has a Newsweek poll from April that includes some of these questions. In particular, it asks respondents the following:

If Barack Obama were to become president, do you think his administration’s policies would favor African-Americans and other minorities, would favor whites, or would NOT favor any group in particular?

This question gets at the most common and most critical stereotype facing black candidates, that they are defined by their race, that they are motivated to advance black interests over those of whites in a zero-sum racial spoils system, and that they are thus unable to represent the interests of whites. Such stereotypes have been common to white racist concerns about black political power since Reconstruction and are far more prevalent than stereotypes about black intellectual or moral inferiority. Overall, about 20 percent of respondents and 22 percent of whites thought that a President Obama would favor African-Americans. In contrast, only about 4 percent of African-Americans thought so.

To see the possible impact of such attitudes, I ran a model to predict respondents’ preference for Obama over McCain in a hypothetical election contest. In addition to the variable mentioned above, I also included the usual controls for age, sex, education, religion, economic class, and partisanship. Furthermore, I included three variables about Obama that might reflect some plausibly non-racial reasons for voting against him. The first is whether or not respondents believe he has the experience to be President; the second is whether or not they think he’s an elitist; and the third is whether they know that Obama is a Christian. (Each of these variables—especially the question about Obama’s religion, may, of course, touch upon issues of race and prejudice, but not as obviously as the question about Obama’s favoritism to African Americans.) Finally, since the poll was conducted before Obama wrapped up the nomination, I included a variable for Hillary Clinton supporters in order to control for what might be enthusiasm for her rather than antipathy toward Obama.

The results of this model (see graph below) indicate that even when controlling for these other factors, attitudes about whether Obama would favor African Americans have a statistically significant impact (p<0.005) on vote choice. The model indicates believing that Obama would favor African Americans drops his support among whites by 20 points (50 percent to 30 percent). The impact of this variable is critical to the election outcome: the overall model predicts McCain beating Obama 54-46, but among those who think Obama would treat all races fairly, he ties McCain 50-50.

(Symbols indicate the probit coefficients for each variable listed. The the length of the bars represent the 95% confidence interval.)

Of course, all of the usual caveats apply here, most notably that this is just one measure of racial attitudes and the poll is two months old. Now that Obama is now the presumed Democratic nominee, perhaps he has been able to lessen the extent and impact of white racist attitudes. Still, my guess is that, ceteris paribus, Obama’s race is probably costing him about 4 to 5 points in the polls.

Posted by Phil Klinkner at 01:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool McLuhanite to recognize that media coverage is instrumental in setting the political agenda. If the media ignore an issue, then for large segments of the American it simply doesn’t exist. If the media play it up, public consciousness rises. This isn’t inevitable, but it’s a common enough phenomenon to register as a reliable generalization.

In that context, a story in this morning’s New York Times warrants serious notice. It turns out that ABC, NBC, and CBS have cut back — way back — on their coverage of Iraq. In 2007, the three networks jointly devoted 1,157 minutes of airtime to Iraq. So far this year, which is almost half over, the counterpart figure is 181 minutes. Oh, and what was that other place? I’d almost forgotten: Afghanistan. So far this year, 46 minutes of network coverage.

For the full story, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Following up on Lee’s post on the passing of George Carlin, here he is on politicians, voting, and elections. Think of it as a NSFW take of the irrationality of voting.

Posted by Phil Klinkner at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Appropos of Phil’s post on this Washington Post piece, as well as this Newsweek piece cited by Brendan Nyhan, here are three studies — two published, one informal — that speak to this question.

First, see Zoltan Hajnal’s book on white attitudes toward black mayors. He concludes:

[U]nder most black mayors there is real, positive change in the white vote and in the racial attitudes of white residents. This change occurs because black incumbency provides concrete information that disproves the fears and expectations of many white residents. These findings not only highlight the importance of black representation; they also demonstrate the critical role that information can play in racial politics and point to the ability of at least some whites to change their minds about blacks and black leadership.

Second, as I’ve noted before, Ben Highton looked at a large sample of House races and found that white voters were no more or less likely to vote for black candidates. He writes:

To conclude, although African American “victories [in majority-white areas] attract attention precisely because of their exceptional nature” (Lublin, 1995, p. 112), one should not automatically assume that their rarity results from discrimination by white voters. Given the evidence presented here, the barrier presented by white voters in general elections does not appear especially daunting, especially in relation to the barrier it is often perceived to be.

His paper is here.

Finally, Seth Masket recently undertook a quick study of black candidates in Senate and gubernatorial races in 2002-2006. As he notes, the important caveat is that there have been few such candidates — 10 altogether, and 2 of those (Obama and Alan Keyes) actually ran against each other — and so that data are thin. Nevertheless, Seth also finds that race did not have a significant impact on the candidate’s vote share.

He then did a second analysis, focusing on black Democratic candidates. He computed the “expected” vote share of these candidates, based on several factors, such as the state’s partisan leaning and incumbency status. He then compared these candidates’ expected vote to their actual vote. He found, at best, a small discrepancy:

In each of the four contests, the African American Democrat ran behind the expected vote, although not by much…In only one of these cases (Ford) did the African American candidate lose where he “should” have won.

Incidentally, the story is much less consistent for the black Republican candidates. In two cases, they ran ahead of the expected vote, and in two they ran behind. None got within 10 points of winning, though.

Of course, there are ways in which this year’s presidential race may not be comparable to Senate, House, gubernatorial, and mayoral races. Perhaps presidential races are just different. Perhaps Obama is different. But these studies are worth taking into account going forward.

Posted by John Sides at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The comedian/social commentator/linguist extraordinaire has passed away.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Washington Post has a new poll out that probes the impact of racial attitudes in the presidential race. The key, but altogether unsurprising, finding is that racial attitudes have a big impact on whites’ candidate preferences, even when you control for partisanship:

Putting several measures together into a “racial sensitivity index” reveals that these attitudes have a significant impact on vote preferences, independent of partisan identification. Combining answers to questions about racist feelings, perceptions of discrimination and whether the respondent has a close personal friend of another race into a three-part scale shows the importance of underlying racial attitudes.

Whites in the top sensitivity group broke for Obama by nearly 20 percentage points, while those in the lowest of the three categories went for McCain by almost 2 to 1.

A similar pattern holds among Democrats. Obama scores more than 20 points better among nonblack Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in the “high” group than he does among those in the “low” group.

Obama has some convincing to do among the 29 percent of whites who fall into the scale’s lowest category. (Twenty-one percent were in the top grouping, 50 percent in the middle.) Almost six in 10 whites in the low-sensitivity group see him as a risky choice, and a similar percentage said they know little or nothing about where he stands on specific issues. Nearly half do not think his candidacy will alter race relations in the country; 20 percent think it will probably make race relations worse.

Kudos to the Post for shining some light on this issue. Perhaps they might want to go the extra step and make the data available to researchers in a timely fashion.

Posted by Phil Klinkner at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From the obituary page of Saturday’s Washington Post comes the sad news of the passing of Charger, age six, distinguished member of the Fairfax County Police Department:

Beloved Bloodhound Charger Dies of Cancer

By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 21, 2008; Page B04

Charger could be bumbling.

When Fairfax County Police Lt. Patrick Ronan first brought him home, they’d take walks with his German shepherds. After their walk, the others would file straight into the house. Charger would run smack into the half-open screen door.

“Bloodhounds are dumb as a box of rocks unless they’re sniffin’,” Ronan said. But give Charger a whiff of human scent from a holdup note or from the hat of an Alzheimer’s patient and he’d wend a sniffing, drooling path in the right direction. “Their ears, when you look at them, are actually longer than their nose,” he said. “The ears are kicking up scent.”

When a woman who lived in an apartment building off Richmond Highway was raped, Ronan gave Charger a whiff of the attacker’s knife. Charger led Ronan to an apartment on the third floor.

There was no way the suspect would be dumb enough to attack someone in his own building, Ronan thought. So he led Charger back down for another go-round.

“We went right up to the third floor again, and he jumped up on the door,” Ronan said. The apartment’s resident was later arrested.

But being a bloodhound in a 399-square-mile county with a million people was sometimes frustrating. Trails go cold when criminals jump in cars, and that means many fizzled endings.

Other times, Charger would head off excitedly after a scent. Taking the cue, cruisers would rush ahead of him in the same direction — and find the target first.

Ronan and his wife and kids spent many hours setting off for hikes miles ahead of Charger, then hiding and waiting, to keep up his searching spirit.

“The last thing you want them to do is say, ‘This isn’t fun anymore,’ ” Ronan said. “The whole family’s got to be in there with you helping out, or it doesn’t work.”

Two weeks ago, Charger’s leg swelled, and Ronan thought it might be a snakebite from a copperhead in his Springfield yard. Charger was given antibiotics but was still lethargic and wouldn’t come out of his kennel. That’s when the cancer was discovered. He was dead in days.

Charger and his sister, Molly, were the county’s first bloodhounds. Molly is still at work. Two puppies, Cody and Shnoz, are in training.

The police department sent out a press release that was a departure from the typically sparse prose describing suspects and victims.

“For all of the great things he did, he was still a dog and chewed everything in sight. Somehow, that was OK with Lieutenant Ronan,” the release said.

“Charger was a very special friend, companion and dedicated police K9, he will be missed.”

Charger was 6.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Syracuse University political scientist Jeff Stonecash has been doing public opinion research for the last quarter-century, using university facilities and paying Syracuse students to serve as interviewers. He has conducted surveys for non-profit organizations and the local newspaper, among other sponsors, and for numerous candidates for public office — Republicans and Democrats alike. Now Stonecash is being told by Syracuse University authorities to cease and desist — this following complaints from a Democratic candidate about a survey that Stonecash recently conducted for his Republican opponent. The complainant alleges that Stonecash is a partisan Republican whose survey results are biased. (Actually, Stonecash is a registered Democrat.) When informed of these concerns, Stonecash indicated that he “would have done the same thing for [the Democratic candidate], but they never asked. I’m not a partisan pollster.”

This episode raises all sorts of questions about “applied” research in academic settings, especially in politically charged circumstances. For details, click here.

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m generally a little leery of “how-to” books, perhaps because I’m lousy at following directions and have managed to do pretty well by making it up as I go, flying by the seat of my pants, ad-hocking, etc.

However, in several years of service as an NSF program director and later as the APSR editor and as a senior member of a department full of publication-conscious colleagues, I’ve repeatedly found myself being called on to answer questions ranging from the rudimentary to the sophisticated about the way that peer review processes work; and I’ve found that many scholars — especially but by no means exclusively the younger ones — are grateful for specific, concrete advice about how to proceed.

All this by way of introduction to a just-released and extremely useful “how to” collection for political scientists, focused specifically on publication-related issues, titled Publishing Political Science: APSA Guide to Writing and Publishing (Stephen Yoder, editor). I was asked to provide a back-cover blurb for this volume, but because I was skeptical I decided that I’d better read the book before saying yes or no. After reading just a few chapters, I quickly said yes. Here’s the blurb I wrote after reading the rest of the chapters:

Publishing Political Science is a wonderful resource that should be read thoroughly and consulted frequently by scholars at all stages of their careers, ranging from college students writing an honors paper through graduate students confronting for the first time the manifold mysteries of their intended craft and junior faculty members trying to negotiate their way through the strange and sometimes forbidding world of academic publishing, and yes, extending even to senior faculty members who think they already have a good grasp of the way things work (but probably don’t). The beauty of this volume is that it conveys so much useable information about the structure of the publishing industry or the nature of the review process, for example, along with how-to hints about writing not only article and book manuscripts, but also reference works, textbooks, and blog items, among others. If every aspiring or practicing political scientist would read this book and take its lessons seriously, our discpline would be enormously improved.

And I meant every word of it. If you’re a political scientist (or, for that matter, a social scientist of a different stripe), this is a volume that should be on your bookshelf. Even if you think you already know everything you need to know, you’re going to find this a very handy book to have on hand.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Many thanks to the founders of Monkey Cage for inviting me to join them.

Obama’s decision to opt out of public funding for the general election is today’s big story. According to the Washington Post:

Given his groundbreaking success in raising money in the Democratic primaries, estimates of how much he could collect for the general-election run to $300 million or more, a sum that would allow the senator from Illinois to compete even in traditionally Republican states.

This got me wondering whether some of the current geographic polarization in American politics (the Red-Blue divide) might be due to the current campaign finance regime. Since the 1970s (when geographic polarization began to tick up), presidential campaigns have been able to opt in to public financing, but this has put strict limits on how much they could spend. As a result, presidential campaigns have become ruthlessly efficient in targeting resources into a handful of swing states, rather than running more costly national campaigns or even risking a few resources on medium to long shot states. Less competitive states, on the other hand, see no campaign activity and perhaps drift into a maximally partisan result.

Posted by Phil Klinkner at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Via The Little Professor this Choice editorial on overdue reviews.

Reviewers frequently need more time with assignments—and that’s usually fine with us (see FAQ, above)—and in requesting extensions (or explaining tardy submissions) they sometimes offer “excuses.” For several years we have been collecting the best of them … Excuses fall into several large categories, pathos being always a fine choice: “Sorry this is late. The spirit was willing, but the flesh had a bad cold and was wallowing in Kleenex and self-pity.” And there’s passing the buck (to your children): “We are in the adoption process and have just been notified we are receiving three children ages four, two, and one. Our world is a bit upside down at the moment.” And too busy: “Before I get to the review, I need to finish a book manuscript, move out of my house, respond to a divorce settlement, go out of town (twice), and file my taxes.” The overworked/wild beast combo—always a winner: “I have become an accidental library director at a time when we are doubling the size of the library and I am up to my neck in alligators.”

Posted by Henry at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Omar at Orgtheory.net

An interesting message from Christopher Zorn to the POLMETH listserve showed up at my desktop this morning. It appears that the 2007 impact factor of the methodology-heavy journal Political Analysis, “rose from 0.917 to 2.535, an increase of 176 percent.” That makes Political Analysis the top journal in Political Science, by-passing APSR. Now I understand-before you get all perklempt-that JCR impact factors are a problematic measure of “impact”, have criterion validity problems, not all of the relevant jourmals are included (and there seems to be no rhyme or reason for which journals get included) and are probably not even reproducible by third parties (we’ve covered some of this ground before; here, here, and here), and all the rest, but I still wonder whether this signals some permanent substantive change in the nature of the field (i.e. the Cambridge-led “political methodology” movement has finally made-over the discipline), or whether it is just another random JCR fluctuation (and yes, AJS and ASR are still the top impact journals in the 2007 rankings for sociology).

Posted by Henry at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We are pleased to announce that Andrew Gelman and Philip Klinkner will be joining The Monkey Cage as regular contributors.

Andrew is a Professor of Political Science and Statistics at Columbia. He has maintained his own blog for some time, posting about topics in both statistics and political science. His posts here will focus on the latter. Those of you interested in the finer points of Bayesian hierarchical modeling can continue to read his blog. With David and several others, Andrew’s latest book is Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

Philip is a Professor of Government at Hamilton College. He has been blogging at Polysigh, where, to my knowledge, he was the first to note Obama’s careful courting of 1970s music fans. His work focuses on political parties, American political history, and race. His most recent book is The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America.

We are glad to have Andrew and Philip aboard!

Posted by John Sides at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Richard Nixon was, among other things, not a people person. Because he was often ill at ease with others, his staff contrived to put him in positions that would have the effect of humanizing him — attempts that typically backfired because he was so obviously uncomfortable or out of character. For example, trying to come across as one of the boys with the young male members of his staff, he once asked them, on a Monday morning, whether they had “done any fornicating over the weekend.”

The pictorial record is full of evidence of this side of Nixon’s multi-sided personality. For example, there’s the famous photo of Nixon out for a casual stroll at the beach — wearing a suit and tie:

Or Nixon, in obvious discomfort, feigning delight while being hugged by Sammy Davis, Jr.:

Or, most famously, Nixon solemnly posing with The King, looking like “How soon can I get out of this?” was foremost on his mind:

But now, from the unlikely venue of Lisbon, Portugal, comes evidence of a wild and crazy, fun-loving Nixon previously unknown on this side of the Atlantic.

While we were vacationing in Lisbon last week with friends, a member of our party espied the following in a restaurant review in Frommer’s Portugal, 19th edition. I faithfully record it here to provide future Nixon biographers a glimpse into a previously unrecognized dimension of Nixonian behavior:

A Severa. *. Good food and the careful selection of fadistas make this a perennial favorite. Every night, top male and female singers appear … As difficult or unsettling as it might be to imagine, before Richard Nixon became U.S. president, he came here with his wife, Patricia, and led a congalike line between tables while warbling the refrain, “Severa … Severa … Severa.” After midnight, tourists seem to recede a bit in favor of loyal habitues, who request and sometimes join in on their favorite fado number (though not usually forming Nixonian congo lines).

This changes everything.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Most Americans oppose last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba should be able to challenge their incarcerations in the civilian court system.

In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 61 percent said non-citizens suspected of terrorism should not have these rights under the U.S. Constitution; 34 percent said they should. The view that these suspects do not share these privileges cuts across party lines, with majorities of Democrats (53 percent), independents (56 percent) and Republicans (77 percent) taking that position.

From the Washington Post’s Behind the Numbers blog. More information is here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Tony Schwartz has died. He was the creator of the “Daisy” ad. The New York Times obituary is here. The Washington Post obituary is here. The Daisy ad is here. Schwartz’s own website is here.

Interesting tidbits from his life:

• Schwartz was agoraphobic and rarely left his home. Political clients traveled to him.

• Schwartz also made field recordings of folk music and ambient noise in New York City. See here.

• Schwartz said, “The best political commercials are Rorschach patterns. They do not tell the viewer anything. They surface his feelings and provide a context for him to express these feelings.” That statement echoes a scholarly literature demonstrating that political ads “prime” or make salient certain considerations in the viewer’s mind.

• Schwartz also said that the Daisy ad was “the most positive commercial ever made.” That, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder.

Both the Times and Post obituaries speak of the Daisy ad’s effectiveness without citing any particular source or evidence — e.g., “was credited with contributing to Johnson’s landslide victory at the polls in November” in the Times. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that the Daisy ad — which aired but once, albeit with news coverage thereafter — had any effect on the 1964 election. In fact, I have open Jim Stimson’s book Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics. In his chapter on campaigns, he presents LBJ’s percent of the vote throughout 1964. The Daisy ad aired on September 7, but LBJ’s share of the vote did not change at all from essentially the beginning of August until just before Election Day.

It is difficult to show that individual ads affect candidate fortunes or election outcomes, and the conventional wisdom that certain ads mattered in particular elections is typically based on conjecture and lore. The Daisy ad likely constitutes such a case.

Addendum: Here is Stimson’s graph:

Posted by John Sides at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Recent discussion about the “Reagan Democrats” and their role in the 2008 election begs the question of who these voters were. The standard story is that these voters were blue-collar whites, conservative on social issues, and disenchanted with the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, in many respects, this characterization is inaccurate.

The “New Republicans” were not drawn disproportionately from the middle to lower strata of the population; their conservatism was not more marked on social issues than on economic issues; they were neither more religiously oriented nor more alienated from government than other voters; finally, they bore little similarity to the constituency that provided the core support for Wallace in 1968.