You may or may not know that you can commemorate the upcoming APSA meeting by purchasing an 2010 APSA Annual Meeting t-shirt. Or coffee mug. Or messenger bag. Or wall clock. Or beer stein (above).
Me, I’m holding out for the apron. More is here.
]]>I [Axelrod] am interested in building a model that predicts voting on the precinct level, using variables such as party registration, age, sex, income etc. Surely political scientists have worked on this problem. I would be grateful for any reference you could provide in the way of articles and books.
My reply: Political scientists have worked on this problem, and it’s easy enough to imagine hierarchical models of the sort discussed in my book with Jennifer. I can picture what I would do if asked to forecast at the precinct level, for example to model exit polls. (In fact, I was briefly hired by the exit poll consortium in 2000 to do this, but then after I told them about hierarchical Bayes, they un-hired me!) But I don’t actually know of any literature on precinct-level forecasting. Perhaps one of you out there knows of some references?
]]>Friday, Sept. 3
2-3:45 pm
Marriott Thurgood Marshall Ballroom North.
A variety of people will speak on Lee’s accomplishments and contributions, each of them with a very short time limit (as Lee probably would have wanted). There will also be cookies at the panel (as Lee definitely would have wanted).
Immediately following this panel, Cambridge University Press will sponsor a reception. This will be held in the room next door. Rumor has it that beer will be served. Lee didn’t drink, but I know he wouldn’t have minded if we drank in his memory.
]]>United We Govern? Roundtable on Obama and the Democratic Congress
Date: Thursday, Sep 2, 2010, 10:15 AM-12:00 PM
Location: Hilton Hotel, Cardozo Room
Participants: Steven Smith (Washington University, St. Louis), Tom Mann (Brookings), Norm Ornstein (AEI), David Mayhew (Yale).
Moderator: Sarah Binder (GWU-Brookings)
Filibustering and the 111th Congress: Too Many Hands on the Brake?
Date: Friday, Sep 3, 2010, 10:15 AM-12:00 PM
Location: Marriott (Woodley Park) Johnson Room
Participants: Steven S. Smith (Washington University, St. Louis), David Mayhew (Yale), Ezra Klein (Washington Post), Brian Darling (Heritage)
Moderator: Gregory Koger (University of Miami)
]]>
Ayres finds this depressing, and laments that black women have “an uphill battle.” TIME uses the study, and others of online dating sites, and concludes that black women “will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races.”Look, I deeply suspect that, on a national level, there are an unfortunate number of people who think black women are less attractive then women of other races. The remnants of white supremacy are not just economic, they are cultural. I also think that’s less true today then it was twenty years ago.
But that said, I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women. One significant problem is that, as any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don’t go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they’re truly high post, they go to EliteNoire. (Dig the sensuous piano riffs and candelabra.)
Black people who are going to a site like OKcupid are generally black people who, with some exceptions, are open to interracial dating. But the same isn’t true of white people on OKcupid.
That’s because all the black men who don’t want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection.
So the game is rigged—on OKcupid you have many white men who have no interest in dating black women, but very few black men with no interest in dating white women.
Also via Cosma, Power law mugs surely outgeek APSA beer steins by a pretty substantial margin.
]]>#1 was for the Minnesota Twins, but #2 was for Twins magazine. I clicked through to the magazine’s “Facts and Stats” section which indeed confirms that the birth rate for twins in the U.S. (as of 2002) was 1 in 32 babies, that is, 1 in 64 births, quite a big higher than the historical rate of 1 in 80 births.
But what really got me were its fun facts. They list 10 famous twins, which include Elvis Presley (of course), Ann Landers, John Elway, and 7 other people who really aren’t so famous. My guess of the least-famous of these is “Deirdre Hall, actress, Days of our Lives.” I mean, if twins really represent 1/40-th of the population (and they do), can’t they get 10 more famous people than this? Even Ann Landers really isn’t so famous as all that. And John Elway is a pretty impressive guy, but I certainly can’t believe he’s one of the 40 most famous athletes of all time. (He’s not in the Sports 100, for example.)
They also list some “Famous parents of twins,” a list which includes many truly famous people, including George W. Bush (of course), Bing Crosby, Pele, William Shakespeare, James Stewart, Robert De Niro, and Margaret Thatcher. A much more famous list throughout.
It’s interesting that their sample of famous twins (who represent roughly 1/40 of the population) is so much lamer than their sample of parents of twins (who presumably represent a very similar population fraction. Quick calculation: suppose that the average person has 2 kids, and each birth has a 1/80 chance of being twins. Then each person has roughly a 1/40 chance of being a parent of twins. Or another way of saying it: each pair of twins has 2 parents, so there will be roughly the same number of twins as parents of twins).
One might first attribute this to fertility treatments, causing a disproportionate number of modern celebrities to have babies, and twins, at advanced ages. But this wouldn’t explain George Bush, Bing Crosby, etc. My guess is that children of celebrities are more publicized than siblings of celebrities. Also, Twins magazine is clearly aimed at parents of twins, not twins themselves. But still I’d like to think that they could do better than mid-list actors…
]]>If CBO’s projected real GDP growth for 2012 (3.4% in Table C-1) is correct (and the administration and Fed projections seem to be in the same ballpark), Obama’s expected popular vote margin is 8 percentage points, +/- 7 (i.e., 85-90% chance of reelection). If GDP growth in 2012 turned out to be half of that, Obama would still be a 2-to-1 favorite.
]]>The economy is not “all that matters” by any means. For one thing, there’s that +/- 7. Also, my projection takes account of how long the incumbent party has held the White House. Obama’s ace in the hole is that it is very rare for a party to lose after just one term. Given that fact, Obama doesn’t need a great deal of economic growth (or anything else) to be favored for reelection.
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Where’s My Money? Donating as a Political Behavior
Date: Thursday, Sep 2, 2010, 8:00 AM-9:45 AM
Chair: Daniel A. Smith
University of Florida, dasmith@ufl.edu
Author(s):
Should the Evolving Role of the Internet in Political Fundraising and Organizing Alter Our Views About Citizens’ Participation in Elections? — Results of a Survey of 2008 Presidential Campaign Donors
Wesley Joe
Campaign Finance Institute
Michael J. Malbin
SUNY, Albany and The Campaign Finance Institute, mmalbin@cfinst.org
Clyde Wilcox
Georgetown University, wilcoxc@georgetown.edu
Understanding the Surge in the Numbers of Small and Large Donors to Federal Candidates, Parties and PACs in 2008 and What it Means for the Political Process in 2010 and Beyond.
David B. Magleby
Brigham Young University, david_magleby@byu.edu
Jay Goodliffe
Brigham Young University, goodliffe@byu.edu
Bradley Jones
University of Wisconsin-Madison, bmjones3@wisc.edu
The Political Geography of Campaign Contributions: Political Participation in a Complex Institutional Environment
Elisabeth R. Gerber
University of Michigan, ergerber@umich.edu
Jenna Bednar
University of Michigan, jbednar@umich.edu
The Kos Bump: The Political Economy of Campaign Fundraising in the Internet Age
John M. Sides
George Washington University, jsides@gwu.edu
————————————-
Daniel W. Drezner
Tufts University, ddrezner@gmail.com
Why the Rules We Got Weren’t Exactly the Rules We Needed: Transgovernmental Networks, Domestic Historical Trajectories, and the International Financial Architecture
Abraham Newman
Georgetown University, aln24@georgetown.edu
The Partial Rebirth of Keynesianism
Henry Farrell
George Washington University, henry@henryfarrell.net
The Mysteries of Markets: Risk Premiums for Sovereign Borrowers During the Great Recession
Layna Mosley
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, mosley@unc.edu
Politics and Publics in Large Open Economies
David Leblang
University of Virginia, leblang@virginia.edu
Market Power and the Future of the Dollar
Herman Schwartz
University of Virginia, hms2f@virginia.edu
You may or may not know that you can commemorate the upcoming APSA meeting by purchasing an 2010 APSA Annual Meeting t-shirt. Or coffee mug. Or messenger bag. Or wall clock. Or beer stein (above).
Me, I’m holding out for the apron. More is here.
]]>]]>Scott Rosenberg is too polite to suggest a more cynical reason for Carr’s anti-link obfuscation: it’s the latest episode in Carr’s profitable series as Web-critic-on-call. Nevertheless, Rosenberg’s piece is very worth reading especially for how it takes apart Carr’s misleading “studies show” appeal to scientific authority. I’m dreaming of a new blog called Studies Do Not Show with Rosenberg, Mark Liberman, Andrew Gelman, and Cosma Shalizi as founding contributors…
One criticism of the incumbent mayor Fenty is that he has favored predominantly white neighborhoods, like APSA’s host Woodley Park and its Northwest neighbors. Chairman Gray has echoed those concerns, telling a local radio station that “[b]e it real or be it perceived, there is a view that people in certain parts of this city, especially predominantly African American [parts], have not been well served by this administration.”
And that criticism—which is by no means unique to DC—points to a gaping hole in a wave of recent studies of local distributive politics conducted by economists and political scientists. While several of our studies have looked at the relationship between local ethnic/racial diversity and public spending across cities (here, here, or here), there is little systematic work on how public goods are distributed within cities. Our recent work has focused on the share of the city’s money devoted to parks or libraries, paying little attention to where within the city those resources are going. Claims like Gray’s are common in big-city politics. But political scientists haven’t been testing them systematically.
That’s what makes work now underway by Georgetown graduate student Lindsay Pettingill intriguing. Pettingill collected all of the calls made to D.C.’s 311 hotline—over 1.5 million calls in all—from 2000-2009. These calls are service requests, and the District tracks its response times to each request. Pettingill shows below how these response times vary both by ward and by year.
First, we see substantial improvement in average response times. In 2000, it was taking the District upwards of 40 days to respond. By 2009, that figure was down to 11 on average. Most of the decline took place during the tenure of Anthony Williams, Fenty’s predecessor. The other key fact: response times across neighborhoods have converged over the years, with just two days separating the neighborhood with the longest response time from the neighborhood with the shortest response time in 2009. Calls from the heavily black neighborhoods like Berry Farm and Kenilworth don’t seem to go unanswered. In fact, it was the predominantly white neighborhoods in Northwest that initially saw the slowest response times, although those gaps have closed. Of course, this is not the only metric of bias in District services—and capital projects could tell a very different story. But if you see a broken meter outside the Woodley Park Marriott, don’t expect special service because of that green Fenty sign on the nearby lawn.
]]>With that in mind, here’s the result of a survey question we asked in Poland in 2006 at the height of the “Kaczynski era”, when Lech Kaczynski was president of Poland and his twin bother Jaroslaw was the Prime Minister. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time twins have ever held the two highest executive offices in the land simultaneously anywhere. So what did the Polish people think about this situation at the time?
Interestingly, when Lech Kaczynski was elected President of Poland in 2005, it was (a) immediately following the parliamentary elections, which had been won by the party his brother headed and (b) in the second round of of a two-round majoritarian system, which meant that a majority of voters had to vote for him in the second round for him to be elected (and indeed he had received 54% of the vote). Following the partliamentary elections brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski had announced that he, personally, would not become prime minister, in part to reduce apprehension over the prospect of twins as president and prime minister. However, J. Kaczynski installed himself as prime minister in July of 2006, and our survey was taken two months later. An interesting research question would be to try to disentangle whether the answer to this question simply reflected disenchantment with the Kaczynski’s and their Law and Justice political party - they would go on to be soundly defeated in the 2007 parliamentary elections - and how much hostility towards twins holding the two highest offices in the land was (is) exogenous to the performance of the Kaczynskis and PiS and therefore might have actually instead been a partial contributing factor to PiS’s defeat in 2007.
]]>Ragusa notes, of course, that no one thinks health care reform will be repealed in its entirety and that “repeal” is a catch-all for various proposed modifications to the ACA. In the paper, he defines repeal as repeal of at least one major provision. Ragusa then examines a large dataset of “landmark laws” from 1951-2006 and uses a hazard model to estimate the likelihood of “death” (i.e., repeal).
He finds that for the first 10 years after enactment, policies become increasingly likely to be repealed, maxing out at 13% . After the 10-year mark, the probability of repeal declines consistently. After 40 years, the chance of repeal is maybe 3%.
Here’s a graph that shows how the probability of repeal for each 2-year period (i.e., Congress) after passage.
Ragusa writes:
During “disequilibrium” (t<10 years) policies are increasingly likely to be repealed as time passes. At the second stage, delineated by the maximum of the hazard function, the likelihood of any repeal is about 13%...I refer to this period as a "policy reversal window of opportunity." After this point the instantaneous likelihood of repeal decreases monotonically over the life of a policy. In this final stage, “equilibrium” (t>10 years), each year that passes renders existing policies less likely to be repealed.
Ragusa then uses his statistical model to predict the chance of repealing health care (with caveats, of course; see his post). Here is the upshot: depending on the future partisan control of the presidency and Congress, the probability of repeal of at least one major provision of the health care reform bill ranges between 52% and 69%.
Ragusa concludes:
…the newly enacted law will be most “at risk” not in the next Congress, but a decade from now. So sit tight.
]]>[And] there are some serious constraints the Republican Party will have to overcome to make major changes to the original law. True, some repealing activity is likely to succeed. But this is more a function of the law’s size than anything else. Still, if Democrats can maintain the Senate in 2010, and hold the White House in 2012, their prospects of defending the law from “repeal” is significantly greater.
Indeed, conservatives and liberals alike will continue to insist on nominating unadulterated candidates and will become more successful in doing so. And those candidates are likely to distrust their own establishments as much as they ideologically oppose the people at the other end of the political spectrum. In such an environment, the parties will be useful to help raise money, set the presidential nominating calendar and organize conventions, but that’s about it.
Whither the national parties? They’re already withered.
I asked Hans Noel, a co-author of The Party Decides, to respond. He writes:
Marc Ambinder is the latest commenter to find evidence of “withered” parties in the small recent spate of “outsider” upsets in primaries. Ambinder predicts that new technology spells the death of parties, as more and more independents will use it to beat the establishment. In The Party Decides, we argue that party insiders have much more control over presidential nominations than some might think.
In short, this parties-are-dead diagnosis makes three mistakes. First, it extrapolates from a small number of cases, forgetting that such cases happen all the time. Second, it assumes that party insiders are incapable of learning from outsider challenges, despite all the evidence that they do. But most importantly, it misunderstands what an “intra-party squabble” really is. Today’s outsider is tomorrow’s insider.
On the first two points, recall that “outsider” Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination by exploiting a new technology — the sudden increased importance of primaries and caucuses. But the Democratic Party quickly figured out how to respond, and no one since Carter has done the same. In 2004, Howard Dean (then also an “outsider”) came close, exploiting the Internet, but again, the party quickly learned how to use that technology. Now, everyone is doing it. You can see this pattern repeating itself since long before Franklin Roosevelt sent phonograph records of his speeches to important players in 1932.
But the more important problem is that such challenges to one authority in the party are coming from another power center in the party. Parties are not strongly hierarchical organizations to begin with, so the way in is just to start playing. Whatever else she is, Sarah Palin is the party’s most recent nominee for vice president. That’s not an outsider position. And so neither are the candidates she backs. And these candidates are contesting party primaries. But “outsiders” like outsider rhetoric, but they are in the tent. The Tea Party’s agenda — as well as the agenda of a diverse group can be defined — is indistinguishable from the Republican agenda of the last decade.
In fact, this particular intra-party tension is the most common, between the impatience of activists and the complacency and risk-aversion of elected officials. But it tends to work itself out. As “outsiders” win office, they quickly become insiders. If we want to extrapolate from today’s events, the right thing to expect is that the parties will continue to nominate ideologically consistent candidates, which they’ve been doing for decades. And these ideological partisans will quickly play their typical role in the party.
]]>Both of these phenomena are so well know that they were given names ages ago. John May in 1973 called the first the law of curvilinear disparity, while we’ve know the second as the Iron Law of oligarchy since Robert Michels spelled in out in 1911.