With this as a background, we welcome back Lucan Way to provide guest commentary on the second round of the Ukrainian presidential elections:

The Ukrainian Election: Tymoshenko’s Strong Showing

At first glance, the victory of Victor Yanukovych in the second round of the Ukrainian Presidential election on Sunday marked a stunning rebuke of Yulia Tymoshenko and a remarkable comeback for the much vilified Yanukovych whose efforts to steal the Presidential election in 2004 sparked the Orange Revolution. Yet a closer examination of the results suggests while Tymoshenko failed to mobilize as much support as Yushchenko did in 2004, she did remarkably well for an incumbent given the state of the economy.

In one sense, this election was a remarkable victory for Yanukovych, who gained 49 percent of the vote — 4 points more than in 2004. Yanukovych attracted 25 and 50 percent more votes in central and western Ukraine – the base of support for the orange revolution – than he did in 2004. At the same time, Tymoshenko mobilized just 72% and 79% of the support Yushchenko had attracted in central and Western Ukraine in 2004. Her failure to mobilize this support cost her the election. Had she mobilized 10% more in either Central or Western Ukraine, she would have won the election.

Above all, this election was marked by remarkable cynicism and apathy on both sides. One Ukrainian commentary compared the election to a “choice between rape and robbery”. Combined, Yanukovych and Tymoshenko obtained just over half of all votes in the first round last month– as compared to 80 percent that supported Yushchenko and Yanukovych in the first round in 2004. In the second round this year, turnout – 69 percent – was lower than in the final rounds of Presidential elections in 2004 (77 percent) and 1999 (75 percent). Finally, a larger share of voters (4.4 percent) voted “against all candidates” than in any Presidential election since Ukrainian independence. Support for “against all” was about equal in Yanukovych’s eastern Ukraine (4.2 percent) as in Tymoshenko’s western Ukraine (3.6 percent). In fact, Yanukovych, like Tymoshenko, had trouble mobilizing his base. Thus, he garnered just 86 percent of the votes in he had collected in Eastern Ukraine in 2004 when he lost.

At the same time, Tymoshenko did far better than any incumbent could reasonably expect given the fact that the Ukrainian economy shrank by 15 percent in 2009 (the largest single year decline since 1994). With declining government revenues, Ukraine currently faces imminent bankruptcy. In the face of such a record, Tymoshenko garnered 46 percent of the vote and came 715,000 votes (3 percent) shy of a victory. Few expected her to do so well.

The primary reason for Tymoshenko’s surprisingly strong performance is the persistence of a strong regional divide between a “pro European” western and a “pro Russian” eastern Ukraine. While there are today few substantively important policy differences between the two sides , the country continues to witness some of the most severe electoral polarization in the world. Thus, despite some inroads made by Yanukovych into Western Ukraine, Tymoshenko still captured an overwhelming 79 percent of the vote there – compared to 18 percent in the East. Such regional polarization virtually guarantees that no matter the circumstances, elections in Ukraine will continue to be highly competitive for the foreseeable future.

Gallup released findings today on economic confidence by state, and it appears anxiety doesn’t give a clear partisan edge one way or the other.

Conventional wisdom says that an improved, or improving, economy is good for President Obama and Democrats, while economic anxiety is bad for the president’s party. Of the 10 states with the highest confidence ratings, five voted for Obama in ‘08 and five voted for John McCain; of the 10 states with the least confidence in the economy, six voted for Obama and four for McCain.

Five minutes later, the commenter “jennis psycho” said:

Your thesis does not follow from the data you cite.

And jennis psycho is correct. Good falls prey to our old friend, the ecological fallacy.

Better data is actually sitting immediately to the right of Good’s blog post: the ABC/WP consumer confidence index. You click on that link, then you click on the pdf in the ABC story.

Here is the consumer confidence rating of the three partisan groups (no word on how independent leaners were classified, but I am guessing they were classified as independents):

Republicans: -46
Democrats: -51
Independents: -49

So the difference here are small — especially compared to the differences across income groups, where consumer confidence ranges from -75 among those making $15,000 or less to -6 among those making $100,000 or more. It appears that a lack of consumer confidence is bipartisan.

But the most recent numbers obscure an important trend that indicates partisanship is at work. If you compare Democrats now to one year ago, their consumer confidence has improved by 10 points. But Republicans’ confidence has declined by 12 points. A year ago, Democrats were 27 points “less confident” than Republicans. Now they are 5 points less confident. Independents, meanwhile, are virtually unchanged.

A while back, Andy and I wrote up this basic finding and a number of others under the heading “Red and Blue Economies. The broader point is this. Even if Republican and Democrats currently have similar views of the economy — “bipartisanship,” in Good’s terminology — partisan bias may still be at work.

As Henry mentioned, Lee’s memorial service was on Friday. I thought I would share a few stories about Lee that I had not heard.

• When Lee was 9 years old — this was 1954 — he set about collecting autographs. He wrote letters to famous people asking for their autograph and included a self-addressed stamped envelope. So he got autographs. Joe DiMaggio. Dwight Eisenhower. Richard Nixon. And a letter, although not an autograph (as I understand it), from the Queen of England. He apparently got H.L. Mencken’s as well (see the epigraph for the blog). All 300 or so autographs are in a scrapbook that Lee kept his entire life.

• Lee was not one to put on airs, and his manner of dress reflected this. It was never inappropriate or sloppy, but certainly nothing you’d mistake for a page from GQ. There was one exception to this, however: Lee’s attire as a cyclist. I’ve already noted his hot pink spandex ensemble. But at the service, one of Lee’s cycling friends described how much further his sartorial persnickitiness went. Lee was a veritable dandy. His love of appearances began with the bicycles themselves. Lee was described as regularly trolling e-Bay, buying bikes that simply looked good, even if they weren’t always the best bike for his frame. And then there were the clothes one wore when riding. Lee believed that cyclists’ shoes, gloves, and helmet must match. See the photo above. Finally, there was his bike pump. He found a bump in the same shade of blue as his favorite Bianchi. All this from a guy that I never saw in a sportcoat or suit — not once. But put him on a bicycle, and he’s suddenly Liberace.

• Eric Lawrence and I previously discussed Lee’s finicky editing. I suppose, then, that I should have been prepared for stories about how Lee’s specific preferences and tastes extended into other domains. I will share this one story, from a former colleague at Texas Tech. In those days, the paperboy delivered the paper to your house and then stopped by every so often to collect money. One day he came to Lee’s house. Lee told him that he could find his money under the car in the driveway. The paperboy asked him why the money was there. Lee said that as soon as the paperboy would stop throwing the paper under his car, he would stop putting the money there.

And there was this rueful bit of self-deprecation from my GW colleague Chris Deering. In his eulogy, Chris talked about interviewing Lee as an outside candidate for the chair of our department:

In 1990, Jeff Henig and I were part of a committee to find a new chair for the political science department. During the interview, someone asked Lee why he wanted to walk away from his position as Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Arizona.

His response was telling, and it wasn’t about basketball: “I have to make a choice between moving up and moving down the administrative ladder,” he said. To Lee the answer was obvious: more time for political science, more time for recruiting and mentoring, more time to do the things he loved.

Jeff and I were brilliant of course; we knew right away that Lee was our guy. He had the disciplinary knowledge to lead recruitment, the personality to foster collegiality, and the kindness to mentor new and existing colleagues. Alas, our brilliance wasn’t completely unalloyed. We actually offered the job to someone else first.

Thankfully this person declined. And speaking of what Lee loved, Chris also offered this moving conclusion:

Lee often said that he loved three things. He loved Carol. He loved his cats. And he loved political science. He was fond of a quip about the South Dakota farmer, emblematic of the reserved and modest Midwesterner, who loved his wife so much he almost told her.

As a good South Dakotan, Lee didn’t cotton much to sentimentality, self-aggrandizement, or over seriousness. All this left a lot of us in the position of loving him so much…we almost told him.

Oh, and one other vaguely related point. I watched the Super Bowl (very late at night…) in Madrid, Spain, where we had the UK feed of the game. The commentator they had for expert studio analysis: the Southern Methodist University wide receivers’ coach. Despite the fact that we got a good laugh out of this when he was first announced, I have to admit he actually provided pretty good commentary.

[Hat Tip to Pollster.]

Dippel’s paper has at least three interesting findings. The first is simply that the U.S. is not the only country in the world that uses foreign aid for strategic purposes. This may sound self-evident but so many of these studies are targeted at strategic uses of U.S. aid that it is quite refreshing (or depressing) to be reminded that this is not a U.S. specific issue. Second, countries that pledge allegiance to the whaling cause do not get net aid gains. The West (especially the UK) cuts aid following votes in favor of whaling causes. The difference is that the Western aid cut is mostly in the form of loans whereas the Japanese aid comes in no-strings-attached grants. Third, there is very little chance that Japan can buy its way into lifting the moratorium. There are too few small developing states in the world to make this feasible. The fact that Japan keeps spending just to get a larger minority and the minor economic significance of commercial whaling suggest that domestic political reasons drive Japan’s behavior. So perhaps they are buying votes for votes rather than whales. Go check out the full paper.

There’s a new poll out from Daily Kos, conducted by Research 2000 (story, crosstabs), that’s getting a lot of attention this week (see discussion at FiveThirtyEight and Politico, for example). In brief, it claims that an alarming number of Republicans believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win, believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election, and hold other similarly-extreme beliefs and opinions. While the findings are pretty striking at first glance, there are a number of potential problems with the poll that should throw a little cold water on anyone getting too hysterical about the results:

Sample selection
The poll asked these questions of “2003 self identified Republicans”, but no details are provided about the screening process—-what the specific eligibility criteria were, what the response rate was, what percentage of respondents fit the eligibility screen, and so forth. I would wager that Republican leaners are not included, but that’s only part of the issue. The poll measures the opinions of people who (a) answered the phone and were willing to be polled far from election day, (b) identified as Republican without any follow-up prompts, c) were interested and patient enough to sit through a moderately-lengthy survey, and (d) did this despite a list of questions which sounds awfully like a push poll. Each of these factors could be reasonably expected to favor respondents who are highly engaged with politics and predisposed toward a particularly conservative viewpoint. As such, it is highly unlikely that the sample of respondents who sat through the full survey is even close to representative of the typical Republican electorate.

Opinion strength
Every opinion question is binary (yes/no, favor/oppose, etc.) with an option for “not sure”. Looking at the percentage of “not sure” responses, almost every question has double-digits in this category, and many have 20-30% or more. This is a much greater incidence than for most survey questions (though data is scarce when it comes to questions comparable to these in tone), and suggests that there is a wide range when it comes to the strength and certainty of respondents’ opinions. So of the 63% who think Obama is a socialist, for example, it’s unlikely that all of those respondents think he’s the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin. More likely, a handful really believe that, some more think he’s socialist in the European, democratic-socialist sense, others have heard their friends say it and think it might be true, a few more don’t really know but are guessing (not wanting to admit to the interviewer that they don’t know), and a bunch have no idea what a socialist is in the first place but know that it’s evil and so Obama must be one. By only allowing for binary answers, this poll ignores the complexities and uncertainties of public opinion, and force responses into categories which sound much more extreme than they might otherwise be.

House effects
Finally, note that Daily Kos commissioned this poll from Research 2000 in order to provide material for his upcoming book on the extreme beliefs of the far-right. Daily Kos and Research 2000 have a long partnership, and their results have shown a fairly serious house effect; in 2008, for example, Pollster rated their presidential tracking poll as having the largest house effects of all the major tracking polls. Perhaps not surprisingly, this effect is generally in the liberal direction. This is not to in any way imply that Research 2000 is cooking the numbers—-each polling organization uses its own unique methods for collecting and analyzing data, so results will vary accordingly—-but we should remember that there is a business side of this and be realistic about the incentives in play. In this case, Kos’s interest is in data which shows the far-right to be really far-right, and Research 2000 likely wants to keep one of its biggest clients happy. It’s not hard to see, then, how the methodological choices made (consciously or unconsciously) when designing this poll could make extreme results more likely.

Many of these concerns could be alleviated (or substantiated) if more data (information on the screening process, response/completion rates, and individual-level responses) were made available. In the meantime, however, I think we need to be sober and skeptical about the results of this poll. There are without a doubt a lot of crazies on the right (as there are on the left), but whether they make up the majority of the Republican party is another question altogether. These results are certainly interesting and perhaps alarming, but they are far from conclusive.

It is striking [says David Runciman, speaking on the BBC] that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.

B-b-b-but . . . what about this?

The people who dislike healthcare are primarily those over 65 (who already have free medical care in America) and people with above-average income. No, these are not really the ones the new bill is most designed to help.

To be fair, though, my maps are based on survey data from 2004. I haven’t been able to grab more recent individual-level data to replicate our analysis with current public opinion. Still, my guess is that it is the older and richer who most strongly oppose changing the health-care system.

Next:

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best. There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

Hey, I didn’t know that! Maybe it’s true. I thought that in a relatively peaceful and prosperous country such as the United States, there’s nothing voters hate more than an economic downturn.

Beyond this, there’s little evidence that people vote based on their individual interest or even that they should vote based on their interest; rather, survey data and theory both suggest that people vote based on what they think is best for the country. (See here and here.) This is not to say that the psychological models of Drew Westen, which are touched upon in this article, are wrong or irrelevant, but merely to point out that “people voting against their interests” is not such a surprise or paradox.

And then there’s this:

Huh? From the 2008 election:

Republicans did better among upper-income voters—except possibly for the over-200,000’s. (The highest income category from the Pew surveys is “$150,000+”, so we can’t do a direct comparison at the top.)

Damn! Another beautiful theory crushed by the facts.

The counterargument, I suppose, is that the curve should be steeper—that the lowest-income voters should be voting even more for the Democrats, but, y’know, some low-income voters have conservative views on economic issues. More to the point, perhaps, upper-income Americans vote 10-20% more Republican than lower-income Americans, and this difference has been pretty stable since 1940 (with a brief interlude during the moderate presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy):

Also, as John Huber and Piero Stanig have discussed, rich and poor vote more differently in the United States than in most European countries. So, either on an absolute or a relative level, I don’t see how the argument in this BBC article stands up.

How did this happen?

As an American, I have what is I’m sure a naive view of the BBC as the ultimate in quality broadcasting, so I’m more disturbed by the above-linked article than I would be by a comparable think-piece on a U.S. media outlet.

There’s still something that’s buggin me here, though, beyond the whole BBC thing.

I can see how a reporter could get confused about this whole rich-voter, poor voter thing—in fact, we devoted chapter 3 of Red State, Blue State to an exploration of how this could happen. And I could see how the author of this article, David Runciman, could have a view of U.S. politics that differs from mine. After all, What’s the Matter with Kansas (which in its British edition was called What’s the Matter with America, to really drive the point home) has probably outsold Red State, Blue State by a factor of 200 or so.

B-b-b-but . . . David Runciman is not just some TV talking head. He teaches political science at Cambridge University! I’m sure he’s too busy to read up on the American Politics literature, but doesn’t he have some colleagues down the hall whom he could talk with about this stuff?

P.S. We last encountered Runciman when he described a primary election campaign with the unforgettable phrase, “But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable.” He also described a survey of 283 people as “throwing darts at a board.” Which of course made me wonder (along the lines of “Why don’t the just sell hotcakes?”) why they don’t just throw darts at a board, then? This would save them lots of money!

P.P.S. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Runciman is a bad guy. My guess is that he just didn’t know any better. He read Thomas Frank’s book and it seemed convincing, he doesn’t keep up with scholarly debates on U.S. political science, so he didn’t know where to look. As Mark Twain said, it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

P.P.P.S. No, I don’t think that Thomas Franks’ work is empty of content. Yes, I do think that the differences between right-wing and left-wing populism are worthy of study. Yes, I do think it’s a good idea to try to understand what happened so that health care reform, which was formerly supported by a solid majority of Americans, is no longer so popular. But I don’t think this discussion is well served by sloppy statements that are contradicted by the data. As I wrote immediately above, I’m sure Runciman and the BBC would be more accurate, if only they knew that more accurate knowledge was out there. That’s one reason we wrote Red State, Blue State: in addition to presenting new research and (our idea of) a synthesis, we wanted to communicate to journalists and even English political theorists that U.S. politics isn’t quite as they might suppose.

P.P.P.P.S. I apologize for using the expression “B-b-b-but” twice in one blog entry. Usually I try to space out my sputterings a bit more, but it just seemed appropriate here. When ya gotta sputter, ya gotta sputter.

In an editorial published on its website yesterday, The Lancet said the situation in Haiti remained “chaotic, devastating, and anything but co-ordinated”. It accused agencies of needless competition for funds. “Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts,” The Lancet wrote. Aid workers in Haiti deny any suggestion of rivalry. “To say that there is something of a bad feeling amongst us is totally false, period,” said Louis Belanger, a spokesman for Oxfam. “This is a massive disaster and it takes time.”

This speaks to a broader debate about the motivations of aid NGOs, where (perhaps surprisingly) political scientists have played a prominent role. Much recent work has suggested that aid NGOs are as motivated by the need to maintain their own revenue flows as by broad humanitarian aims. For example, James Ron and Alex Cooley argue that “principal-agent problems, competitive contract tenders, and the presence of multiple principals exacerbate INGO insecurity and create organizational imperatives that promote self-interested action, inter-INGO competition, and poor project implementation.” In a vignette reminiscent of the Lancet criticisms, Ron and Cooley write about how in Goma:

The combination of vast sums of donor money, short-term contracts, and an overabundance of NGOs created an unstable and competitive environment for Refugee Help and others. NGOs constantly renegotiated old contracts whose due dates were fast approaching, while competitors kept lobbying the UNHCR for new contracts. “It’s perhaps embarrassing to admit,” one midlevel Refugee Help manager recalled, “but much of the discussion between headquarters and the field focused on contracts: securing them, maintaining them, and increasing them. The pressure was on: ‘Get more contracts!’” … Goma had become a “three-ring circus of financial self-interest, political abuse and incompetence” where aid had become “big, big money,” and any NGO “worth its salt . . . recognized that it had to be in Rwanda.” … Another Western reporter described Goma as an “aid agency supermarket” in which aid groups “blare[d] out their names and logos like soft drink manufacturers,” plastering everything from water pumps to T-shirts with advertisements.aid groups were desperate to be involved in the Goma relief effort so that they could bolster their fund-raising capacities back home.

While Ron and Cooley acknowledge that the NGOs were also motivated by normative concerns, their explanation highlights organizational survival as the key motivating factor. Susan Sell and Aseem Prakash argue too NGOs are driven by material interest as well as normative principle.

However, there is a recent very interesting paper by Tim Büthe, Solomon Major and André de Mello e Souza that comes to quite different conclusions. It looks at where major US aid organizations decide to allocate aid and its arguments, if not entirely at odds with those of Ron and Cooley and Sell and Prakash, at least suggest that cynicism doesn’t explain everything by a long shot.

In sum, we estimate a statistically and substantively significant effect for every one of the seven measures of objective recipient need, which provides strong support for the “altruistic” hypothesis that NGO allocation of private-source development aid is indeed very importantly driven by variation in the need of recipient countries. By contrast, we fail to find any statistically significant support for the “cynical” hypothesis, and in many of these models, the estimated standard error for MEDIA COVERAGE is so large that, more likely than not, the “real” effect of media coverage is indistinguishable from zero.

It’s important to note that there are limits to this set of findings. It only tells us about decisions over where to allocate aid; not the processes through which this aid is allocated once workers get there. It is also possible that smaller fly-by-night charities and subcontractors are more vulnerable to the dynamics Ron and Cooley discuss than bigger and better respected organizations. Still, it’s the first serious effort at data collection in this field that I know of, and a pretty serious and interesting contribution to debate.

So are gays “politically powerless?” Hardly. Gay people’s votes (and their campaign contributions) are courted about as avidly by the Democrats as are those of another “captured” group in American politics—evangelical Christians—by the Republicans. (Exhibits A and B: would-be Democratic Senators, and recent converts to the cause of same-sex marriage, Harold Ford and Joe Sestak.) More important, acceptance of gay people and the notion of gay rights is now de rigeur among our nation’s elites. Nearly two-thirds of those with a graduate degree (64%) told the GSS in 2008 that they agreed with the statement that sexual relations between two men or two women is “not wrong at all.” No leading U.S. university worth its salt discriminates against gay people or denies them domestic partnership benefits (with the notable exception of religious-affilated institutions, and even they are changing). Almost all—85 percent—of the Fortune 500 have policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

So gay political power lies somewhere between absolute “powerlessness” and the political power (or at least the legal protections) accorded to other groups designated as suspect classes by equal-protection jurisprudence. Where the courts come down on this question is beyond my purview. But a question raised by the facts presented here is the following: courts have continued to consider race and gender worthy of some protections despite the successes of racial minorities and women in the political process. How can they not do the same with regard to gay people?