The Monkey Cage

What's Happening with Political Theory?

2009-07-02T17:17:40Z

Over at the Political Theory Rumor Mill, there’s a heated exchange around the change of editor at Political Theory with allegations of undue interference, editorial coups etc swirling around. Me - I know nothing beyond what I’ve seen on the Internets. Anyone out there with better info?

A General Theory of Politicians' Infidelity

2009-07-02T14:35:26Z

I have two questions:

1) Are politicians more likely to have extramarital affairs than the population at large, controlling for relevant demographic factors (notably sex)?

2) If the answer to the first question is “yes,” then why?

I do not know the answer to the first question. Thinking about recent presidents, my categories are: definitely yes (FDR, JFK, WJC), there-are-rumors-but-just-rumors (LBJ, GHWB), I-have-no-idea (RWR, HST, DDE, RMN), and almost-certainly-not (JEC, GWB, BHO). So I wouldn’t hazard any definite answers based on this list. This article suggests some sort of systematic family dysfunction among the GOP’s class of 1994, although the stories there don’t necessarily involve affairs.

But for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that politicians are more likely to have an affair. Why? A typical class of explanations revolves around personality, such as arrogance, hubris, neediness, or a desire for attention. Politicians are presumed to be “higher” in these qualities, and this leads them to have affairs. The counterfactual: take these same individuals out of political life — say, into the corporate world or some other occupational sphere — and they would be equally likely to have affairs.

A second class of explanations revolves around circumstance or situation. I can think of two dimensions that matter here. The first is separation from family. Here’s a quote from one of the GOP ‘94:

Mark Neumann, a Wisconsin Republican who was elected to the first of two House terms in 1994, said that when he came to Washington, he initially had trouble balancing congressional duties with his responsibilities as a husband and father.

“It was extremely intense and there was a lot of pressure,” said Neumann, who announced Wednesday he’s running for governor in 2010. “The whole concept of being away from home and family was certainly difficult to adjust to. I’d never been away from my wife for more than a day at a time until then.”

(To be clear: Neumann is not cited as having an affair. He’s just articulating the problems created by separation.) Separation from family may weaken bonds with spouse and children, at least to some extent. And that increases the likelihood of finding another person attractive, etc., etc. Of course, some politicians do live at home (e.g., governors). But even they travel quite a bit.

A second circumstantial factor is just opportunity. Here’s a passage from this NY Times piece:

But perhaps the strongest risk factor for infidelity, researchers have found, exists not inside the marriage but outside: opportunity.

“People tend to assume that bad people have affairs, and good people don’t, or that affairs only happen in bad marriages,” said Peggy Vaughan, a San Diego-based researcher who runs the Web site dearpeggy.com, and author of a forthcoming book on infidelity and marriage, “To Have and to Hold.” “These assumptions are just not based in reality.”

To me, “opportunity” means various things. Irrespective of one’s relationship with spouse or family, being separated from them simply makes it logistically easier to cheat. It’s easier to keep things from your spouse. It’s easier to sneak around without their knowing.

Opportunity also gets at how many more people politicians typically meet as compared to others. And somewhere in that large group is someone that politicians will find attractive. Other things equal, the larger your sphere of friends and acquaintances, the greater the chance of an affair. So, in a sense, all the pressing of flesh just leads to, well, some pressing of flesh.

The counterfactual is this: if we took a random sample of the population and installed them in political office, would it increase the chance that they would have affairs? My guess is that it would.

There is perhaps an interaction here as well. Aspects of politicians’ personalities make them more attractive — e.g., self-confidence — and that, combined with opportunity, increases the likelihood of affairs. In other words, it’s the combination of personality and circumstance that is particularly potent.

What am I missing?

Some Data on Latin American Coups

2009-07-01T19:19:14Z

In earlier post, I passed along this query from a friend and asked for data:

It seems to have become much more common in the post-1989 period for coupsters to hand over at least the nominal reins to some sort of civilian entity as quickly as possible — to pose as a democratic coup, if you will, recognizing the pro-democracy ethos that is pressed by the OAS, AU, UN, etc after coups. This has happened quite frequently in Africa in recent years; see also Thailand and Bangladesh. But do the numbers bear me out?

John Carey kindly sends along the following. (Thanks, John!)

]]> Latin American presidential replacements during post-Cold War era

List of coups and self-coups, attempted and successful (from Marsteintredet & Berntzen 2008, see below):

Haiti 1991: Aristide (elected 1990) deposed, replaced by military junta.
Venezuela 1992: Coup attempt led by Hugo Chavez against President Carlos Andres Perez (elected 1989) fails.
Peru 1992: Fujimori (elected 1990) summons military to shut down Congress. Fujimori remains president; new Constitution ratified and Congress elected in 1993.
Guatemala 1993: President Jorge Serrano (elected 1991) attempts self-coup against Congress, but military balks; Serrano replaced by congressional appointee Ramiro de Leon Carpio.
Paraguay 1996: Coup attempt by Gen. Lino Oviedo against President Carlos Wasmosy (elected 1993) fails.
Ecuador 2000: Jamil Mahuad (elected 1998) deposed by military coup led by Lucio Gutierrez. Gutierrez initially declares himself president, but reverses next day, and VP sworn in.
Venezuela 2002: Chavez (elected 1998, again 2000) deposed by military coup that declares Chamber of Commerce head Pedro Carmona president. Coup fails 2 days later; Chavez reinstated.
Haiti 2004: Aristide (elected 2000) deposed by military and replaced with Supreme Court chief justice as interim.

Note that this list is just those events that involved the military. In the last couple of decades, Latin America has seen an even larger number of presidential replacements before the end of the constitutionally prescribed periods, that have not involved military intervention. Some of these were conducted within the bounds of the constitutions (e.g. impeachments, resignations), but most were triggered by extra-constitutional factors (e.g. protests that were violent or heading that way) and many were resolved by constitutional improvisation that has often verged toward parliamentarism, whereby legislatures declare incumbent presidents not to be president anymore and name a replacement. Here is a list of premature presidential replacements in what many would call the post-coup era in Latin America, which essentially corresponds to the post-Cold War era:

Argentina 1989: Raul Alfonsin resigned 6 months early to allow elected successor Carlos Menem to take office early.
Brazil 1992: Fernando Collor de Melo (impeached)
Venezuela 1993: Carlos Andres Perez (impeached)
Ecuador 1996: Abdala Bucaram voted out by Congress for ‘mental incapacity’
Dominican Republic 1996: Facing charges of fraud in 1994 election, Joaquin Balaguer agrees to shorten his presidential term, hold new elections, and leave office.
Paraguay 1999: Raul Cubas resigned (facing impeachment)
Argentina 1999: Fernando de la Rua resigned facing protests
Argentina 1999: Alfonso Rodriguez Saa (de la Rua’s congressionally designated successor) resigned facing protests.
Peru 2000: Alberto Fujimori resigns facing corruption revelations.
Peru 2001: Valentin Paniagua, Fujimori’s congressionally-designated replacement, holds early elections (originally scheduled for 2005).
Bolivia 2002: Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigns facing protests.
Ecuador 2005: Lucio Gutierrez (elected 2002) voted by Congress to have ‘abandoned office;’ replaced.
Bolivia 2005: Carlos Mesa (Sanchez de Lozada’s VP, now president) resigns facing protests.
Bolivia 2005: Mesa’s replacement, Supreme Court Chief Justice Eduardo Rodriguez, agrees to hold office only until early elections (originally scheduled for 2006) can be held.

For more on premature presidential replacements, here are some sources:

Carey, John M. “Presidential Versus Parliamentary Government.” 2005. Handbook of New Institutional Economics. Claude Menard and Mary Shirley, eds. Boston: Kluwer Academic Press.

Marsteintredet, Leiv and Einar Berntzen. 2008. “Reducing the perils of presidentialism in Latin America through presidential interruptions.” Comparative Politics 41(1):83-105.

Pérez-Liñán, Anibal S. 2007. Presidential impeachment and the new political instability in Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press:

A Few Honduras Links

2009-07-01T19:05:18Z

Some 2008 polling data on Zelaya.

Greg Weeks’ blog on Latin American politics.

These three posts by Matthew Shugart.

Should Mark Sanford resign?

2009-07-01T04:39:28Z

Tom Schaller says no:

Is Sanford a cad for bolting his family on Father’s Day weekend? Of course, but that is a private, moral failing, rather than a failure of public duty. . . .
I [Schaller] oppose most of what Mr. Sanford stands for politically. His showy rejection of federal stimulus money targeted for his state was a crass publicity stunt designed to garner national attention for Mr. Sanford at the expense of his constituents, many of whom are struggling economically. . . . Should Mr. Sanford’s ambitions founder on the shoals of a personal scandal, however, yet another opportunity will be lost to establish the long-overdue separation between private comportment and public service. So here’s hoping he doesn’t resign or, if he does, it is a matter of personal choice rather than him bowing to political pressure.

I see where Schaller is coming from. Lots of people have complicated personal lives, and it’s not clear at all that these difficulties have much if anything to do with governing. But I don’t know if I agree with him on the wall of separation between private comportment and public service.

Consider the Sanford case. Schaller’s a Democrat, so he can evaluate Sanford on his policies. But if Schaller were a Republican, he might very well want Sanford out of there because he tarnishes the brand, makes the party a laughingstock, etc. Also makes it harder for Sanford to convincingly follow a “family values” agenda which Schaller (if he were a Republican) might want. These are legitimate concerns for a Republican to have. Even if you don’t think Sanford’s personal indiscretions are important, you might want him gone and replaced by a more effective Republican. Just as, from the other direction, a Democrat would’ve preferred a zipped-fly version of Bill Clinton.

]]> But the first thing I noticed in Schaller’s otherwise excellent post were the ugly pie charts. Boy are they ugly. Damn! Some quick points:
- The wedges aren’t labeled directly. Instead, the reader has to go back and forth, back and forth, between the chart and the legend.
- The color schemes are a mess. The top graph goes from blue to purple to yellow to green??
- The responses are ordered, and the pie obscures this by being circular. For example, in the top graph, the natural order is More, Same, Less (with Don’t Know as a separate category); in the second graph, Yes, Not Sure, No.
- The goofy orientation of the second graph makes it hard to see that the blue area (“Yes”) is larger than the red area (“No”).
- On the plus side, the charts are reasonably sided (not too large, not too small), have clear titles, are unambiguously labeled, and are not tilted or 3-D (thus, areas actually do represent proportions).

These aren’t hard-and-fast rules. The real point is that it’s hard for me to just look at the pie charts and see what’s going on. There are too many colors, legends, numbers, etc., floating around. When all is said and done, I guess the charts aren’t horrible, but they’re the graphical equivalent of meandering, hard-to-follow paragraphs.

Documentary on Katz and Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence

2009-07-01T01:37:58Z

Drawing from more than 25 hours of oral history interviews, Dr. Glenda Balas of the University of New Mexico has written and produced “The Long Road to Decatur: A History of Personal Influence.”

The video documentary chronicles the development of the classic (and controversial) book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, first published in 1955.

The webpage of the documentary, with a video file to download, is here. I haven’t yet watched the video. The book is still in print. Here is a critique of how the book’s findings have been interpreted.

[Hat tip to Doug Hess.]

UPDATE: Here is a summary of a 2008 lecture by Katz. Thanks to Francisco Pérez.

Redistribution and National Identity

2009-06-30T16:12:28Z

What looks to me like one of the most important articles in political science over the last several years is out in the new American Political Science Review under the rather unprepossessing title, “A Model of Social Identity with an Application to Political Economy: Nation, Class and Redistribution” (available here for APSA members; ungated earlier version available here). Moses Shayo briefly lays out a model of identity that borrows insights from both economics and social psychology. What is interesting is that the model’s predictions are (a) starkly counter-intuitive about the relationship between national identity and preferences over redistribution, and (b) appear to be born out by the data.

]]> Most people tend to assume that strong national identity and strong preferences for redistribution go hand-in-hand - the plausible intuition here is that we are more likely to give to our fellow citizens if we identify strongly with them. This intuition (I’ll get back to this in a little bit) underlies a significant chunk of political theory argument about the relationship between the nation-state and redistributive obligations. Shayo’s argument points in a very different direction - he argues that strong national identity goes together with high income inequality and low desire (among working class voters) for redistribution.

Why? The more similar someone is to other members of a group, the more likely she is to identify with the group, and the higher status the group is, the more likely an individual is to identify with it. This suggests that working class voters are less likely to identify with their class in situations of high inequality (being working class is less high status), and this has consequences for voting behaviour. When working class voters identify more strongly with their class, they are likely to push for redistribution (which will favor their class interests). When working class voters identify less with their class (perhaps because that class is ethnically heterogenous), and more with their nation, they are less likely to want redistribution. Furthermore, these mechanisms are partly recursive - lack of redistribution may increased inequality which makes class identification less attractive still for working class voters, or alternatively, exogenous decreases in inequality may make workers more likely to identify with their (now higher status) class rather than with the nation as a whole. Eventually, an equilibrium is reached:

two types of equilibria may emerge. In the first, the members of the lower class (who constitute a majority) identify with their class. Hence, they vote for a relatively high level of redistribution. A high level of redistribution can in turn help strengthen that class identity by endowing it with a higher status. In the second type of equilibrium, members of the lower class tend to think of themselves more as members of the nation as a whole than as members of a low-status part of it. They are thus less concerned with income redistribution and vote for a lower level of redistribution than they would under class identity. Again, low levels of redistribution can in turn help make identification with the lower class less attractive.

This model seems to be born out by the (admittedly low N) data.

in most economically advanced democracies, national identification reduces support for redistribution. This effect appears to be very large when compared to the effect of economic self-interest. … the model implies that regardless of whether differences in redistributive systems arise from exogenous factors or from multiple equilibria, we should observe a negative relationship between the prevalence of national identification and the extent of income redistribution. A cross-country analysis reveals a very strong negative relationship between these two variables. Indeed, when looking at well-established democracies, the R² is between 60% and 72 %.

The key graph is here:

Shayo here graphs the percentage of income gained by the lowest quintile of the population via redistribution against a six item national identity scale for advanced industrialized democracies. The negative relationship is striking - the more people identify with their country, the less redistribution is likely to occur, and vice-versa (the relationship is fuzzier when less established democracies are included in the data set, but still looks to be there.

If this all holds up (and I note that this is not a debate that I am directly involved in), it has a number of interesting implications. Here’s one. Some left-leaning political theorists such as David Miller (see his On Nationality ) have sought to reconstruct social democracy around the model of the nation state, arguing that in the absence of other solidaristic identities, nationalism is the most likely way to generate mass support for e.g. welfare states. If Shayo is right, then Miller is wrong on this - the more nationalism, the less solidaristic redistribution we are likely to see (perhaps Miller might rescue his position by arguing that he wants to see a more civic nationalism which is distinct from the kind of nationalism picked up in opinion polls - but this still looks like a quite damaging finding to me). And there are plenty more suggestive lines of argument like this - I imagine that this piece is going to spur a lot of debate.

"The Homosexual in America"

2009-06-30T15:00:13Z

The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.

Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life.

From a 1966 article in Time. I’ll pair this with a graph from the General Social Survey. The question wording is “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex—do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”

Your 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Winner

2009-06-30T14:14:32Z

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

The Bulwer-Lytton contest is to write the worst first line of a novel. The runner-up is equally awful:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor—the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Many more are here.

Honduras Bleg

2009-06-30T01:42:35Z

The removal of an elected president by the military, and the installation of a civilian as the new president, leads a friend to ask:

It seems to have become much more common in the post-1989 period for coupsters to hand over at least the nominal reins to some sort of civilian entity as quickly as possible — to pose as a democratic coup, if you will, recognizing the pro-democracy ethos that is pressed by the OAS, AU, UN, etc after coups. This has happened quite frequently in Africa in recent years; see also Thailand and Bangladesh. But do the numbers bear me out?

Does anyone have a sense of systematic data on this subject?

The Hobbesian World of Democrats

2009-06-29T14:10:41Z

John’s excellent post, just below, on the differential morality of Democrats and Republicans brought back memories of a piece I wrote long ago, around the time when John (who is a few years my junior) was focusing more on picking up some new Michael Jackson dance moves to show off at the junior high sock hop than on political science.

I wrote the following in, I think, 1994, and Richard Morin, who was then doing a column for Washington Post on offbeat research findings, picked it up and ran it there. It’s good to know, based on John’s post, that my argument is as true today as it was then.

(By the way [shameless self-promotion], the following will be reprinted in a forthcoming volume titled The Wit and Humor of Political Science (please hold your sarcasm), edited by Sigelman, Newton, Grofman, and Meier, to be published jointly by APSA and ECPR.)

The Hobbesian World of Democrats

Democrats are stupid (Sigelman 1988) and ugly (Sigelman 1990). This much is certain. From these hard but uncontestable truths it is but a small step to an image of Democrats as bottom feeders in a dismal swamp, relegated by the flatulence of their intellects and the unsightliness of their visages to the bottom rungs of a societal pecking order in which looks and smarts are what count.

Until now, there has been no hard evidence — merely logic and common sense — to indicate that Democrats are miserable failures in life. In the grand tradition of social science, my purpose here is to confirm what everyone already knows, or at least should know. However, because social scientists are themselves notorious Democrats (Ladd and Lipset 1975), it is never safe to assume that they know what they should.

My argument is simple: Compared to respectable Americans, i.e., Republicans, Democrats can be expected to inhabit a Hobbesian state of nature, a world in which life is poor, short, solitary, brutish, and nasty (Hobbes 1968). My method is equally simple: I compare Democrats’ and Republicans’ answers to questions about their lives that have been asked in the ongoing NORC General Social Survey, 1972-1993 (Davis and Smith 1993).<1>

]]> Findings

Poor. I will begin by saying what goes without saying: Democrats are substandard wage earners. The mean family income of all 1972-93 Democratic GSS respondents was 25% below that of their Republican counterparts — $21,900 versus $27,300 (p<.001).<2> This means that most Democrats can only dream about the really great stuff that the average Republican can buy every day — nougahyde recliners, gas barbecue grills, vacations at Disney World, and the like.

Short. Many dead people vote a straight Democratic ticket — the so-called “graveyard vote” that has been responsible for so many Democratic victories over the years. The preponderance of cadavers among Democrats could conceivably be taken as evidence that people put themselves at risk of dying by being Democrats, but I prefer a more conservative interpretation: people put themselves at risk of becoming Democrats by dying.

What evidence, then, is there that Democrats have short lives? Because most survey respondents are alive when they are interviewed,<3> it is somewhat awkward to use survey data to try to establish that Republicans live longer than Democrats do. However, once we realize that healthy people live longer than unhealthy people do, the facts begin to fall into place. Democrats are significantly less healthy (p<.001) than Republicans: Asked to describe their own health as “excellent,” “good,” “fair,” or “poor,” Democrats, on average, fall between “fair” and “good” (1.9 on a scale on which 0 denotes “poor” and 3 equals “excellent”), while Republicans fall between “good” and “excellent” (2.1 on the same scale). Democrats are also better bets to take their own lives. Birds of a feather flock together, and when asked how many people they know who have committed suicide, Democrats average .26, Republicans a mere .08 (p<.05). But the single most compelling datum is simply that the average Republican is a full year older than the average Democrat (47.5 years versus 46.6, p<05), which must mean that Republicans live longer than Democrats do.

Solitary. Democrats — impoverished, sickly, suicidal, doomed to an early death — are hardly the sorts of people any rational individual would seek out for companionship. Accordingly, they are significantly less likely than Republicans to be married (58% versus 63%, p<001), and, if they have ever been married, are significantly more likely to have been separated or divorced (31% versus 24%, p<001).

Nasty. So far, we have seen that about all Democrats have to be thankful for is their relatively short life span. Reflecting the wretchedness of their lives, they also have lousy dispositions. Only 31% of Democrats, but 39% of Republicans, describe themselves as “very happy” (p<001), and 13% of Democrats, but only 8% of Republicans, consider themselves “not too happy” (p<001). They also have a dismal view of human nature: Asked whether “most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance” or would “try to be fair,” 40% of Democrats but only 30% of Republicans see people as predators (p<001); asked whether “most of the time people try to be helpful” or “are mostly just looking out for themselves,” 49% of Democrats but only 40% of Republicans see people as self-serving (p<001); and asked whether “most people can be trusted” or “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” 61 of Democrats but only 50 of Republicans endorse distrust (p<001). In short, by comparison to Republicans, Democrats are curmudgeonly misanthropes; in this light, it is little wonder that so few people are willing to marry them or stay married to them.

Brutish. As noted above, it has already been established that Democrats are stupid and ugly, two prime characteristics of brutishness. Moreover, they are singularly lacking in self-control and are apt to be involved in all sorts of mayhem and disreputable behavior. For example, 37% of them smoke, as compared to only 30% of Republicans (p<001), and 23% of them have seen an X-rated movie within the past year, as compared to only 17% of Republicans (p<001). These differences might be pooh-poohed as lifestyle choices,<4> but during their adult lives Democrats are also significantly more likely than Republicans to have been hit (p<.001), shot at (p<.01), robbed (p<.01), and burglarized (p<.01), and no normal person chooses to be hit, shot at, robbed, or burglarized.

Conclusion

Might these differences between Democrats and real Americans be spurious? For example, Democrats are disproportionately poor, and many of the uncivilized attitudes and feral behaviors considered here are known to be linked to social class. So is it possible that the differences catalogued above say less about the kind of people Democrats are than about the kind of people who are Democrats?

To these questions I offer two responses. First, when all the differences reported above were reanalyzed with statistical controls instituted, as appropriate, for income, race, and age, only the differences in age and in the probabilities of being shot at, robbed, and burglarized declined to nonsignificance. All the other significant differences — 13 of the 17 — remained. Based on this evidence, I conclude that the great majority of the differences reported above reflect the kind of people Democrats are, not the kind of people who are Democrats. Second, no matter whether these differences reflect the kind of people Democrats are or the kind of people who are Democrats, the differences are real: Democrats are the dregs of society.

What, then, does the future hold for Democrats? The answer, I believe, is that the differences documented here will only widen. Because no respectable person wishes to mate with someone who is not only stupid and ugly but also diseased and desolate, Democrats are fated to continue in-breeding, producing new generations that are even stupider, uglier, and more pathology-ridden than the last several generations have been.<5>

Notes

1.I classify Democrats and Republicans according to their answers to the GSS party identification question: “Generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or what?” It has been argued that, no matter how they themselves feel about it, “weak” Republicans and Democrats should be reclassified as independents, and partisan-leaning independents should be reclassified as Republicans or Democrats (Keith, Magleby, Nelson, Orr, Westlye, and Wolfinger 1992); I strongly suspect that this is a dumb Democratic attempt to make Democrats seem less stupid.

2.In the GSS data file, family income is given in categories, e.g., “$5,000-$5,999,” rather than in raw dollars. To calculate means, I expressed each respondent’s income as the midpoint of his or her category. For the highest category, which is open-ended (“$25,000 or over”), I arbitrarily assigned a value of $50,000; if anything, this should understate the Democrat-Republican income gap, as there are certainly more rich Republicans than rich Democrats.

3.This proposition may be controversial. Study after study has established that most citizens are impervious to new political information. The assumption that most survey respondents are dead provides a powerful, yet parsimonious, explanation of this phenomenon.

4.A position with which I myself concur. If Democrats wish to behave like animals, then I consider it their right as Americans to do so.

5.The 1992 shift in the Democratic locus of power to the state of Arkansas was an obvious step in this direction.

References

Davis, James A., and Smith, Tom W. 1993. General Social Surveys, 1972-1993 [machine¬-readable data file] Principal Investigator, James A. Davis; Director and Co-¬Principal Investigator, Tom W. Smith; sponsored by National Science Foundation. —NORC ed. — Chicago: National Opinion Research Center [producer]; Storrs, CT: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut [distributor], 1993.

Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Keith, Bruce E., David B. Magleby, Candice J. Nelson, Elizabeth Orr, Mark C. Westlye, and Raymond E. Wolfinger. 1992. The Myth of the Independent Voter. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ladd, Everett Carll, and Seymour Martin Lipset. 1975. The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics. New York: McGraw Hill.

Sigelman, Lee. 1988. “Are Democrats Stupid?” Journal of Irreproducible Results 33: 2-4.

Sigelman, Lee. 1990. “Toward a Stupidity-Ugliness Theory of Democratic Electoral Debacles.” PS: Political Science & Politics 23: 18-20.

Are Republicans More Likely to Have Affairs and Get Divorces?

2009-06-28T22:25:08Z

Charles Blow revisits familiar findings: “red” states have higher divorce rates as well as higher rates of teen pregnancy and higher rates of on-line pornography consumption. He writes:

While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.

Welcome to another episode of “The Ecological Fallacy”! Once again: you cannot infer the behavior of individuals — Democrats and Republicans — from data at an aggregate level, such as states.

What happens when we look at individual-level data? Blow’s story falls apart. Using the General Social Survey, I first created a relevant measure of marital status: whether the respondent was divorced or separated at the time of the interview, or had ever been divorced or separated. So you are coded 1 in those cases, and 0 otherwise (i.e., if you had never been married or if you were married or widowed but never divorced or separated). The GSS included marital status in 27 surveys between 1972-2008. These surveys contain about 50,000 respondents.

I also created a measure of whether the respondent admitted to having an affair (leaving aside the issue of how many survey respondents answer this question honestly). For this measure you are coded 1 if you admitted to having an extramarital affair and 0 if you had not. I excluded respondents who had never been married. So this measure includes only those who are married or were married at some point. The GSS included the affair question (charmingly labeled “evstray” in the dataset) in 10 surveys between 1991-2008. These surveys contain about 16,000 respondents.

What do we find? Simple descriptive statistics suggest only small differences between Democrats, Republicans, and independents (here, independents who “lean” toward a party are counted as partisans):

About 29% of Democrats, 30% of independents, and 26% of Republicans are or have been divorced or separated.

About 19% of Democrats, 19% of independents, and 15% of Republicans admit to having an extramarital affair.

If anything, Republicans are slightly less likely than both Democrats and independents to get divorced or mess around. This is the opposite of what Blow suggests — which, yet again, reveals the problems of using aggregate data to make individual-level inferences.

To see if additional factors could explain even these small differences among groups of partisans, I then estimated two logit models. Here, the probability of being divorced or having had an affair is a function of a binary measure of partisanship (coded 1 if Republican and 0 otherwise, since there appears to be little difference between Democrats and independents), as well as controls for these factors: age, sex, race, educational attainment, and year of survey.

There are statistically significant, but small, differences between Republicans and Democrats/independents: other things equal, Republicans are 2 percentage points less likely to be or have been divorced. They are 4 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair. To put that latter effect in some context, men are about 9 points more likely than women to admit to an extramarital affair.

These effects are slightly larger if we focus only on the 2008 data: Republicans are 4 points less likely than Democrats or independents to be or have been divorced, and 5 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair.

This is a very simple analysis. Perhaps there are other factors one should control for, and perhaps there are interactions between party identification and the partisanship of states — a la Andy et al.’s research.

But I think the basic finding is likely robust: partisanship has a very weak relationship with either divorce or infidelity, and the relationships that do exist suggest that Republicans are less, not more, likely to get divorced or be unfaithful. Those, like Blow, who want to decry Republican “hypocrisy” on issues of family and sexuality may want to focus their ire on Sanford, Ensign, et al., and not on Republicans in the mass public.

Even More Weekend Frivolity: Balls, Strikes, and Camera Angles

2009-06-28T20:47:03Z

“Baseball is so much harder to televise than the other sports because it is a game of angles.” — Tim McCarver.

Tim McCarver was a major league catcher for many years and he’s been a major league announcer for just short of forever. He never shuts up, and some of the things he says even make sense.

If baseball is a game of angles, as he says, then the folks who sign Tim McCarver’s paycheck have been getting it all wrong. Here’s the story, as told by Slate’s Greg Hanlon.

Weekend Frivolity: Suburban Yuppie Rap

2009-06-27T12:50:06Z

Some of this consists of inside jokes for those of us who live in the DC area and who— as all right-thinking people do — despise the Northern Virginia suburbs. But lots of it is about generic suburbia and should be recognizable no matter what part of the country you live in, because suburbia is so … well, generic.

Correct Model for the Iranian Revolution?

2009-06-26T21:57:41Z

Here’s something to spark discussion over the weekend. Is it time to say that the window of opportunity for an Iranian “colored” Revolution - e.g., a massive protest following electoral fraud that succeeds in overturning the results of that election and/or changing the leadership of the country as a result - is coming to a close? It now looks likely that these election results are going to hold - in part for some of the reasons I suggested in a previous post - and Ahmadinejad is going to get inaugurated for a second term later this summer. If this the case, then the potential for an Iranian colored revolution is over.

This is not, however, meant to sound the death knell for protest in Iran, or even for the possibility of some sort of regime change in Iran in the future because of these events. But I think now the model becomes the Iranian Revolution of 1979 itself. While I am far from an expert on these events, the general story is that protest built up gradually from late 1977 through 1978 and then culminated in regime change only in 1979. Given the memory of these events in the minds of many Iranians - and probably passed along to younger generations by parents and grandparents as well - it strikes me that we at least need to consider the possibility that this will become the new model for the many Iranians that the past weeks revealed are so clearly dissatisfied with the current regime. And to the extent that the events of the last two weeks may have revealed the Iranian regime to be more of your typical petro-dictatorship propped up by security forces (here and here) than its citizens may have believed previously, then perhaps this sort of scenario is slightly more likely than it might have seemed in previous years.

Thoughts?