The Monkey Cage

Mike Axelrod writes:

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?

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via a colleague:

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.

Posted by John Sides at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In Sunday’s New York Times, Marc Ambinder writes:

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.

Posted by John Sides at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gary Andres has a nice piece in the Weekly Standard that discusses two new books about parties and partisanship in American politics: Sean Theriault’s Party Polarization in Congress and Matthew Levendusky’s The Partisan Sort.

Levendusky describes the process by which partisanship and ideology became increasingly aligned in the public. Interestingly, it stems more from partisans changing their ideologies than ideologues changing their partisanship. Theriault carries this story into Congress itself, noting how party leaders increasingly use procedural devices to deliver the legislative victories that their fellow partisans (and activists back in their districts and states) desire.

Andres’s bottom line:

Some think the November elections might produce more bipartisan harmony. Political forecasters predict Republican gains in the November elections. Won’t more parity between the parties forces the two sides to get along? Probably not. Understanding the roots of today’s polarized landscape explains why partisanship won’t be unearthed anytime soon.

I agree. When I read Mark Halperin yearning for bipartisanship, my reaction was to agree with Seth Masket. It’s not that bipartisanship is undesirable — although perhaps highly overrated — it’s just that we shouldn’t expect partisanship to dissipate into the ether, for precisely the reasons that Levendusky and Theriault describe.

Seth calls Halperin’s view a “Beltway fantasy.” To me, Halperin — and, similarly, David Broder — are political romantics: they proffer this idealized vision of politics that does not betray any real understanding of why politics is what it is, how we got here, what leaders’ incentives are, and what reforms might change those incentives. I’ve always found it odd that two veteran reporters would have romantic tendencies. You’d figure that after these many years or even decades they’d be pretty clear-eyed and even cynical about political leaders.

Posted by John Sides at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In response to my post earlier this week regarding the lack of accountability of the European Parliament, David Schleicher of the George Mason School of Law alterted me to a paper of his entitled What If Europe Held an Election and No One Cared? Here’s the abstract:

Last June’s European Parliament (EP) election was widely recognized to be a failure. Turnout was low across Europe and, as has been the case in each and every EP election since they were introduced in 1979, voters responded exclusively to domestic cues in deciding how to fill the European Union’s only directly-elected body. Campaigns were waged entirely on domestic issues outside of the purview of the EP and the popularity of domestic Prime Ministers, who were not on the ballot, was the most important factor in determining the results. The EP is supposed to provide a popular check on the other legislative bodies in the European Union (EU), which are either appointed or controlled directly by Member State governments, and hence reduce the EU’s “democratic deficit.” Instead, the failure of EP elections to generate popular feedback on EU policy allows the deficit to fester and undermines the EU’s separation of powers.

This paper argues that the problem of EP elections is much like problems in a variety of American state and local elections. Election laws ensure that national parties are on the ballot, and both legal limitations and strategic considerations make it difficult for major parties to develop separate localized identities, or in the case of EP elections, Europeanized ones. Rationally ignorant voters who know little about the individual figures in these bodies rely on the party heuristic that is available on the ballot, as it is the only relevant information they have, and do so even though it is unclear how closely preferences on European or local policies track preferences about national issues. The result is that national party preference ends up being reflected in these elections, despite the fact that winners will decide policies at another level of government. Put another way, there is a “mismatch” between the institutional role the EP is asked to play in the EU’s separation of powers - the voice of European citizens about European Union policies - and the level of party competition at which EP elections are contested.

Mismatch problems are endemic in federal systems and are generated by the interaction of constitutional theory about how democratic institutions should function and the actual practices of voters. However, mismatch problems can be solved or at least mitigated with election law tools. Following a procedure used in a variety of developing countries, the EU could pass a law that the EP will only seat members from those parties that both won seats from a given EU country and received a certain percentage of the vote in a quarter of EU Member States. This would force the coalitions formed in the EP - the so-called “Euro-parties” - onto EP ballots, as parties would need to contest elections across Europe. Voters thus would have access to a European, rather than national, heuristic on the EP ballot, which would better allow them to use these elections to express preferences about EU policy.

The full paper can be dowloaded here (although David notes that an updated version will be available shortly) and is forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal.

Let me offer a couple quick comments as well. First, I very much like the link between US elections and European elections. Europeans sometimes seem to have a “sky is falling” reaction to low turnout rates, and there is a lot that can be learned from comparing turnout in the US and Europe. Alex Pacek, Grigore Pop-Eleches, and I have a recent Journal of Politics aritcle on turnout in post-communist countries that makes a similar point. We find that turnout in “dominated” elections (that is for a president in a parliamentary system or a parliament in a presidential system) is on average about 10% points lower as in elections for “dominant” institutions (presidents in presidential systems and parliaments in parliamentary systems), which should not come as much of a surprise given our knowledge of how turnout is always lower in the US in off year Congressional elections as opposed to Presidential elecitons.

Second, I find the suggested solution of forcing the Euro-factions to actually compete as such in EU Parliamentary elections very interesting. On the one hand, it should serve the purpose of moving EU Parliamentary elections away from being 2nd order national elections. On the other hand, one could imagine that an election featuring pan-European parties would attract even less interest from voters than EU parliamentary elections already do. And if the reason that the most recent EU parliamentary elections were a “failure” was because of low turnout, moving competition away from national parties to pan-European parties might only exacerbate this problem.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ron Brownstein has a piece in the National Journal that is worth reading. There is this very straightforward and, I think, correct diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s current travails:

But their greatest problem is that they control all of Washington’s levers at a time when most Americans are deeply unhappy with the country’s direction.

The broader point of the piece is that Americans are alienated from a variety of institutions, both political and nonpolitical. I think the polling data suggest this as well. However, I don’t agree with two conclusions that Brownstein draws from this:

This deep, broad, and visceral discontent is a recipe for social and political volatility. As recently as 2004, GOP strategists such as Karl Rove saw in George W. Bush’s slim re-election evidence that Republicans were building a “narrow but stable” electoral majority. That was immediately followed by Democratic routs in 2006 and 2008 that reduced the GOP to virtually a rump Southern party and inspired Democrats to dream of their own lasting majority. Two years later, Democrats are struggling to hold even one chamber of Congress.

Nothing about recent elections strikes me as “volatile.” (Indeed, there is evidence that elections have become less volatile over time. See this old post.) The United States is more narrowly divided in terms of partisanship than in previous eras. There is also no solid Democratic South to mitigate the inevitable swings that arise from economic growth and recessions. Both things may contribute to more frequent changes in party control of the presidency or Congress, but that has nothing to do with alienation. That’s just what happens when neither party can claim a large majority.

Brownstein also sees this alienation as intractable:

They [recent polls] point toward a widely shared conviction that the country’s public and private leadership is protecting its own interest at the expense of average (and even comfortable) Americans. The lasting downturn has deepened those sentiments, but it didn’t create them and its end probably won’t dissolve them. Americans increasingly believe they are paddling alone on a treacherous economic sea — which helps explain why they so enthusiastically submerge those in charge whenever they get the chance.

Italics mine. Everything hinges on what “won’t dissolve them” means. Of course, some minimal level of alienation will always be with us. But what Brownstein appears to suggest is that economic growth won’t lead people to revise their assessments of political leaders and government. This flies in the face of 50 years of public opinion data, which I summarized here and especially here. There is a robust relationship between the state of the economy, approval of incumbents at virtually every level of office, and trust in the government as a whole.

Could this moment be different? I am very leery of assuming it is — if for no other reason than people imagine their historical circumstances are somehow exceptional, when they actually prove to be ordinary, predictable, etc. time and again. Lee had a nice post on this tendency. Obviously, I can’t make a precise prediction about how much alienation or distrust will exist in the American public at some future point in time. But I’m willing to bet that however much there is will be strongly conditioned by the state of the economy. We are not doomed to live forever alienated.

[Hat tip to Gary Andres]

Posted by John Sides at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Self-described “political operative” Les Francis, with real-world experience as former executive director of the Democratic National Committee:

I don’t need any polls to tell me that Republicans will do well in November. The “out” party almost always shows significant gains in the first midterm election of a new President.

Political scientists Joe Bafumi, Bob Erikson, and Chris Wlezien, from elite, out-of-touch, ivory-tower institutions Dartmouth, Columbia, and Temple Universities:

Game over.

P.S. The commenters at 538 were not happy with my explanation. Full story here.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

John Judis in September 2009:

Obama’s fortunes, like those of so many of his predecessors, are tethered to the economy.

John Judis now (not yet online):

The most important reason [for Obama’s struggles] has been an inability to develop a politics that resonates with the public.

And so Brendan Nyhan, once more unto the breach:

There’s nothing especially mysterious about why Obama has “somehow failed to connect with large parts of the electorate”…Presidents tend to be more successful at “connecting” and “resonating” with the public when the economy is doing well. When things are going badly, political messages tend to fall flat. What president has ever “connected” or “resonated” in a terrible economy like this?

There is much more at the post. Lots of the supporting data for Judis’s take — as was true in another of his analyses — just doesn’t hold much water.

Judis was right in September 2009. He should stick to that story.

Posted by John Sides at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Arizona law, the controversy over birthright citizenship — these and other aspects of the immigration debate are often thought to be politically treacherous for the Republican Party given the projected growth of the Latino population. But are they? Does advocating such positions actually alienate Latinos?

California provides some evidence that it does. Consider this from a 2006 article by Shaun Bowler, Stephen Nicholson and Gary Segura:

…we find that racially charged ballot propositions sponsored by the Republican party during the 1990s in California reversed the trend among Latinos and Anglos toward identifying as Republican…by shifting party attachments toward the Democratic party. Our results raise serious questions about the long-term efficacy of racially divisive strategies for electoral gain.

They examine the effects of Propositions 187, 209, and 227 — which, respectively, sought to deny state services to illegal immigrants, end affirmative action in state government, and replace bilingual instruction with English-intensive instruction.

Before 187, Latinos had a 38% chance of identifying as a Democrat, a 28% chance of identifying as independent, and a 34% chance of identifying as a Republican. After 187, they had a 52% chance of identifying as a Democrat. After 209, that increased to 62%, and after 227, to 63%.

By contrast, their chance of identifying as Republican fell to 12% after the votes on these propositions.

At the same time, the GOP experienced no gains from other ethnic groups, notably non-Hispanic whites.

The authors conclude:

The use of these three ballot propositions by the California GOP to improve their electoral fortunes was unsuccessful in the long-run and, in fact, constituted a significant political error with three demonstrable effects. First, they had a very sizable effect on galvanizing the rapidly growing Latino vote and shifting it toward the Democratic Party in California. Second, this shift actually reversed a trend that had previously been favoring the GOP. That is, up until the propositions, this Latino bloc had been drifting slowly toward the Republican Party. Third, there seems to have been no counterbalancing gain in party supporters from other groups, particularly non-Hispanic whites. That is, GOP alienation of Latinos may have been politically acceptable if it attracted Anglos in greater numbers. The evidence from our results suggests that this did not happen.

At the moment, the weak economy imperils the Democratic Party’s fortunes among most every ethnic group, including Latinos. The GOP could simply bide its time and benefit accordingly. So I’m puzzled by the sudden interest in a drastic constitutional change that (1) is unlikely to pass, (2) will mostly alienate Latinos, and, if the California experience holds, (3) won’t necessarily win over voters who aren’t Latino. What is the political upside?

Find the article here. Unfortunately, I can find only a gated version.

Posted by John Sides at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I learn today — belatedly — that Michelle Obama took a trip to Spain with her daughter. This is apparently controversial. Megan McArdle writes “What Was Michelle Obama Thinking?” And of course this is a topic tailor-made for Maureen Dowd.

Let me be clear. It does not matter where presidents or their wives go on vacation. IT DOES NOT MATTER. Presidential approval, election outcomes, support in Congress — nothing that does matter depends on where presidents go on vacation. It did not matter when Clinton apparently polled to figure out where he should go. It did not matter when Bush decamped to Crawford. It did not matter when the Obamas went to Martha’s Vineyard. It does not matter now.

Dowd writes:

In politics and pop culture, optics are all.

By that she means, “In politics and pop culture, optics are all that matters to me.”

You could not ask for a better distillation of why so much political commentary is so completely and utterly detached from what actually affects political outcomes. War and peace, economic prosperity and hard times, real scandals — these things pale beside the fact that the Obamas once went to New York City on a date!

If doctors were like Maureen Dowd, they would look at a patient who was unconscious, not breathing, and bleeding profusely, and say, “Oh my god, his shoelace is untied!”

David Axelrod tells Dowd: “not everything is political theater.” One thing that the Obama administration seems to realize — to its everlasting credit — is that the Beltway gossip that is Dowd’s and so many other’s fixation is of zero interest to the vast majority of Americans.

An unrelated postscript. Dowd suggests that, by taking this trip, Michelle Obama is somehow failing to support her husband:

The inimitable columnist Mary McGrory once said that if a first lady simply made her husband toast, that was enough, given how hard his job was.

And because his predecessor mucked things up so royally, President Obama’s job is ridiculously hard. But at moments when you think Michelle might make her husband toast, or better yet a martini, she’s often off on a girls’ trip…

…During the campaign, Michelle tried to offset her husband’s existential detachment with familial warmth. Now that he holds the world’s loneliest office, he needs that more than ever.

This is galling on many levels, but let me choose one. I will suggest to Maureen Dowd and others equally convinced of such insights that by now Barack and Michelle Obama probably know what they’re doing with this whole husband-and-wife thing. Indeed, if anything is worse than the political advice offered by the likes of Dowd, it is the marriage counseling.

Posted by John Sides at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

A colleague recently flagged this paper on a polisci listserv. It seems an important antidote to speculation — e.g., this, from a year ago, by Adam Nagourney — about GOP gains in the governor’s mansion, however likely they may be.

Using panel data from US states over the period 1941-2002, I measure the impact of gubernatorial partisanship on a wide range of different policy settings and economic outcomes. Across 32 measures, there are surprisingly few differences in policy settings, social outcomes and economic outcomes under Democrat and Republican Governors. In terms of policies, Democratic Governors tend to prefer slightly higher minimum wages. Under Republican Governors, incarceration rates are higher, while welfare caseloads are higher under Democratic Governors. In terms of social and economic outcomes, Democratic Governors tend to preside over higher median post-tax income, lower posttax inequality, and lower unemployment rates. However, for 26 of the 32 dependent variables, gubernatorial partisanship does not have a statistically significant impact on policy outcomes and social welfare. I find no evidence of gubernatorial partisan differences in tax rates, welfare generosity, the number of government employees or their salaries, state revenue, incarceration rates, execution rates, pre-tax incomes and inequality, crime rates, suicide rates, and test scores. These results are robust to the use of regression discontinuity estimation, to take account of the possibility of reverse causality. Overall, it seems that Governors behave in a fairly non-ideological manner.

That is from a 2008 paper by Andrew Leigh. Here are gated and ungated versions.

The tendency to treat elections by as a horse race makes it hard to acknowledge that electing a new party may not change policy that much. After all, if policy won’t change much, why should we fixate on who is winning and losing during the campaign? This leads people to overestimate executive power and underestimate how much current policies can be protected by less visible actors, such as legislators, bureaucrats, and interest groups.

Policies, like political institutions, tend to be sticky. That’s hardly a novel point, but it bears repeating.

Posted by John Sides at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Chris Beam has a nice piece [link now included] at Slate that takes on the whole “oh, what a terrible year for incumbents!” notion and shows it to be mostly wrong. There’s a cite to my post from a while back, but this is the real money:

But let’s put this in perspective. So far this year, 282 federal-level incumbents have been up for re-election. Of those, only six have lost their seats—four in the House and two in the Senate. (Aside from Bennett, Kilpatrick, and Specter, there’s Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va.; Rep. Parker Griffith, R-Ala.; and Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C.) That’s 2 percent of all incumbents. If you count only the 119 incumbents who have faced primary challengers, the proportion who were defeated goes up to 5 percent.

Kudos to Beam for actually counting both the numerator and the denominator and then dividing. That bit of simple arithmetic seems beyond a great many commentators.

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

John posted an excellent visualization by Adam Bonica of campaign contributions of business executives. Bonica writes:

These results challenge conventional beliefs about the political leanings of corporate leaders. Republicans have long been seen as the party of big business. To whatever extent this label should apply, it probably owes more to the party’s policies than the composition of its support base.

Bonica might be right about the conventional beliefs. I’d just like to add a few things:

1. Survey evidence suggests that business executives indeed are more Republican-leaning than the national average. See, for example, the graphs here, which appear in Red State, Blue State.

2. Within the field of political science (although maybe not to political journalists or to the public at large), it is well known that corporate campaign contributions vary by industry. Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, has written a couple of books on the topic, which we summarized in Red State, Blue State as follows:

Probably the best evidence [about the political views of the richest Americans] comes from studies of political contributions. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has tracked political donations of top corporate executives and the Forbes 400 richest Americans (or their equivalents, in earlier periods). The data presented in his 1995 book, Golden Rule, indicate that America’s superrich have generally learned Republican, but with some notable exceptions that have changed over time. Certain industries have persistently higher rates of contributions to the Democrats. In the New Deal, these included industries with a strong interest in free trade. Since the Reagan years, finance, and high technology firms have been much friendlier to Democratic presidential candidates than most of the rest of American business. For 2004, Ferguson consolidated the lists of top executives and richest families into a lot of 674 firms and investors. Out of this list, 53% contributed to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign and 16% donated to Kerry, with Bush doing better among the oil and pharmaceutical industries and Kerry getting more from investment banks and hedge funds.

The key points are that, yes, corporate contributions generally favor the Republicans, but they vary by industry, in ways that have changed over time.

P.S. Bonica has a research page that’s full of excellent graphs. I particularly like how he gives them long, descriptive captions so they are self-contained.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The above graph comes from Adam Bonica, a Ph.D. student in political science at NYU. Using political donations to estimate ideology, Bonica plots the ideological distribution of the members of various corporate boards. He writes:

These results challenge conventional beliefs about the political leanings of corporate leaders. Republicans have long been seen as the party of big business. To whatever extent this label should apply, it probably owes more to the party’s policies than the composition of its support base. Although board members from some sectors exhibit conservative allegiances—notably the oil, gas, and coal industries—most corporate boards are either dispersed across the ideological spectrum, or seem to have aligned with the left, as is the case of many of the growth stories of the new economy.

He then offers two hypotheses about the effects of Citizens United. Here is one:

Republicans will not be the clear beneficiaries of Citizens United.

See his post here.

Posted by John Sides at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Washington Post has this interactive graphic on who Sarah Palin has endorsed and whether they have won or are Tea Party types or are women. This is all nice, but the real question is not depicted in the graph: is Palin endorsing front-runners or underdogs? It means nothing if Palin’s “record” is 10 wins and 4 losses if we know nothing about whether the candidates she endorsed were already likely to win or lose.

Posted by John Sides at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I come to the London Review of Books for the interesting essays on history and literature; I stay for the prospect of overeducated people saying silly things . . .

Here’s a letter from Janet Malcolm:

Jackson Lears wants to ‘complicate the explanation for Gore’s loss, beyond a simple demonisation of Nader’, but the complications he cites – fraud by Republicans preventing 8000 people from voting and the Supreme Court decision halting the recount – would, in the first case, not have mattered, and in the second not have taken place, if Nader hadn’t run Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida.

Just to spell things out . . . if Nader hadn’t run, the campaign would’ve gone differently. 97,488 votes is chicken feed (albeit, approximately 97,488 votes more than I would’ve received had I been running). It was a close election, and it’s meaningless to try to pick out one factor as being the cause of Gore receiving more votes than Bush (or of Bush being ruled the winner).

I know it’s not the responsibility of the authors of articles or letters in the London Review of Books to think quantitatively about U.S. politics; still, given my own interests, I can’t help noticing these things.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A notion you hear a lot these days is that the 2010 election will depend primarily on who votes, and especially on whether Obama voters, or maybe first-time Obama voters from 2008, actually show up. Dan Hopkins sent me this post from Tom Jensen. Jensen writes:

There continues to be no doubt this fall’s election will have more to do with whether Democrats can turn out Obama voters than keep them in the fold.

This raises a question that political science can address: is variation in election outcomes due more to changing minds — such that some voters who preferred a candidate of one party in one election then prefer a candidate of the other party in the next election — or to changes the electorate, such that the election outcome changes because different groups of voters either stayed home or turned out.

Seth Hill addresses this question in a working paper (pdf). The answer is: it depends. Here is what Hill did:

I estimate the effect of changing electorate composition on vote share using millions of individual records of turnout behavior, hundreds of thousands of ballot images, and tens of thousands of precinct election returns from the state of California in 2004 and 2006.

Here is what Hill found:

Consistent with survey findings, I show that the partisan composition of the electorate between the two elections does not change much despite a large decline in turnout. I find that the effect of changes in who votes depends upon the nature of the contest…Of Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 10.7 point improvement in vote share in 2006 over Republican President George W. Bush in 2004, I estimate that 9.2 points are due to preference change and 1.5 points due to change in the group of citizens who vote. In contrast, change in U.S. Senate vote share across the two elections is about equally due to preference and composition change.

The 2004 and 2006 Senate races featured Democratic incumbents, Boxer and Feinstein, who each won a similar proportion of the vote.

Much more research is needed to determine the prevalence of preference vs. composition change across elections. I would suggest caution, however, in assuming that mobilizing voters (i.e., composition) is the key in 2010. Narratives about enthusiastic vs. dispirited parties don’t always survive scrutiny, as I argued with regard to the 1994 election. And survey evidence of voter “enthusiasm” is not a reliable predictor of turnout.

Here’s another point worth considering. In a forthcoming paper (pdf), Eric McGhee and I measured the partisan composition of voters using state-level exit polls from 1988-2006 and looked to see how it responded to presidential approval, economic performance, and the balance of campaigning in the state by presidential, Senate, house, and gubernatorial candidates (as relevant).

We find little evidence that presidential approval and economic performance affect the partisan composition of voters. The things you think might enliven or dispirit partisans — a popular or unpopular incumbent, for example — don’t really seem to matter. Campaigning, by contrast, does matter. The more a party dominates the other in spending, ads, etc., the more its partisans dominate that year’s electorate. (The paper dwells at some length on the possibility of reverse causation and finds little evidence of this.) But here’s the irony: the effects of campaigning are largest when one party spends much more than the other, and those races are precisely the ones where the dominant party has little chance of losing.

None of this research obviates the prospect that successful mobilization might change the electorate just enough to tip a very competitive race. It does, however, insert some uncertainty into the many confident predictions that 2010 depends mostly on who goes to the polls, and on whether the party’s respective campaigns can mobilize their faithful.

Posted by John Sides at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

David Paul Kuhn of Real Clear Politics has a piece today taking issue with Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman for over-hyping the role of the economy and elections. Klein, relying in part on a graph I supplied him, wrote:

For decades now, political scientists have been building election models that attempt to predict who will win in November without making any reference to candidates or campaigns. They can get within 2 points of the final vote, and they don’t need to know anything about the ads and the gaffes and the ground games. All they really need to know about is the economy.

Krugman wrote:

Midterm elections, where turnout is crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is all.

Kuhn objects that the economy isn’t all. He quotes me approvingly from an email exchange, in which I said “Elections are strongly related to the economy.” He quotes two political scientists and election forecasters, James Campbell and Alan Abramowitz, who say that “the economy is a junior partner” and “one factor and not always the most important one,” respectively. Then he describes a series of individual elections that illustrate the lack of complete correspondence between election outcomes and economic performance, concluding with this:

This is why politics is also a game of inches. Campaigns matter on the margins. But many a president has been made on those margins.

Kuhn is certainly right that we should talk about the economy and elections in probabilistic terms like “is associated with” or “is strongly related to.” And he is right that campaigns matter on the margins. But I’m not really sympathetic to the motivation behind his piece.

On one level, his literal reading of Klein and Krugman is unnecessarily uncharitable. These are smart guys. They understand correlation vs. causation. They’re just writing for a mass audience and so wrote cleanly and boldly without a bunch of quasi-academic qualifiers and caveats.

In fact, I think it’s extremely helpful for Klein and Krugman to make this case boldly — which is, no doubt, why Josh applauded Krugman yesterday. Here’s the position I find myself in as a political scientist. Economic performance explains some large fraction of the variation in presidential election outcomes, presidential approval, trust in government, and many other things. But most political journalism ignores this fact and prefers to talk about tactics and narrative.

Case in point: how many of the 15 “political experts” writing in the New York Times’s forum on “how Obama can rebound” emphasized the simple fact that the economy is weak and so Obama will not rebound significantly until it turns around? One. Mark Blumenthal. The rest wrote about policy hobbyhorses, strategery, and a bunch of other stuff that could matter “at the margins” but probably won’t, and certainly won’t matter as much as economic performance over the rest of his term.

It’s actually valuable to state the economic case as starkly as Klein and Krugman did. In my blogger persona, I sometimes do that too. There is strategic value in doing so. The view of many, if not most, political journalists is miles from where political science stands. If it takes a statement like Klein’s (or some of mine) to pull that view towards one that acknowledges that economic performance is the key driver, then that’s fine with me.

Posted by John Sides at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Paul Krugman (my former colleague in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton) has a great column today in the NY Times today. In it, he notes that:

The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.

But the only real puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting — who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback — actually matters…. What political scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the economy, stupid (emph added).

As evidence, Krugman cites a paper by political scientist Larry Bartels (another former colleague of mine from Princeton) which concludes that:

Objective economic conditions — not clever television ads, debate performances, or the other ephemera of day-to-day campaigning — are the single most important influence upon an incumbent president’s prospects for re-election

I am thrilled that Krugman has endorsed this point of view and given it the platform of his NY Times column. As readers of The Monkey Cage will by now know, we have been repeatedly discussing exactly this point in the Monkey Cage (see for example here, here, here, here and especially here and here; see as well Seth Masket’s blog here). I have no idea if Krugman is a reader of The Monkey Cage, but as part of our mission here is to get political science research into the public domain, I can only count this as a success! (Although the political scientist in me can’t help but notice that he cited a paper that appeared in an economics journal in 1997; for his next column on the topic, maybe he will take a look at some of the research posted by John here and especially here).

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ezra Klein writes yesterday about the effects of deficits and the economy on growth, with cameos from political scientists Larry Bartels, Gary Jacobson, Michael Lewis-Beck, and Seth Masket. He also discusses some of my graphs from this previous post, which showed how presidential election outcomes depend much more on the economy than on the size of the deficit.

The motivation for Klein’s article is this:

With merely five months before the election and the outlook grim for Democrats, we’re starting to hear rumblings of a fight within the White House. The political side, we’re told, wants to focus on the swelling deficit, which it believes is contributing mightily to the public’s sense that the economy isn’t being effectively managed. Karl Rove, who’s been on the political side of a White House himself, agrees with them: “People’s concern about the spending and the deficits and the debt and the out-of-control government have been growing and growing and growing,” he said on Fox News. “And it’s one of the key drivers in the 2010 election.”

See also Jackie Calmes’ reporting in the NY Times:

In Mr. Clinton’s day, the economic team, asserting that a credible commitment to fiscal responsibility would reassure financial markets and lead to greater long-term growth, won the argument in favor of deficit reduction, helped by moderate Democrats in Congress. These days, the Obama political team has the edge, again in the cause of emphasizing deficit reduction and with an assist from Congressional Democrats nervous about the midterm elections.

Do Obama’s political advisors and “nervous” Congressional Democrats — not to mention Karl Rove — really think that the deficit will cost them votes in the midterm election?

In my last post, I argued that (1) the public cares far more about economic growth and jobs than the size of the deficit; (2) there is nothing approaching majority support for deficit reduction when alternatives like tax cuts and spending on jobs are presented; and, as Ezra notes, (3) the public does not punish incumbent presidents for running up the deficit, they punish them for weak economies.

To that, let me add two further points. First, as this Gallup poll suggests, the deficit is much more of a concern for Tea Party supporters than anyone else. That is to say, concern about the deficit is strongest among those least likely to vote Democratic.

Okay, fine, but couldn’t Democrats still lose votes at the margins? My second point: historical elections data suggest that this is unlikely. Below I plot House seat losses for the president’s party against the percentage change in the federal debt from the previous year.

The line summarizing this relationship is nearly flat and the relationship itself is statistically insignificant. The story is also the same in midterm years only and in Senate elections. Contrast this with the well-known relationship between economic growth and midterm seat losses.

In congressional elections, just as in presidential elections, the president and his party are not punished for running up the debt. They are punished for a weak economy. To the extent that Obama and congressional Democrats face a trade-off between increasing the deficit and stimulating the economy, stimulus is the smart political choice.

Posted by John Sides at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Felix Salmon comments on a report that econ czar Larry Summers is likely to be leaving the government:

But if it’s true, where is he leaving to? . . . “Wall Street consulting” is probably a polite way of saying “a return to DE Shaw”, which happily paid Larry $5 million for one year of one-day-a-week work . . . The Summers exit could well be the most lucrative use of the revolving door yet seen in the short history of the Obama administration: if he was willing to work full time, Summers could command significantly more than the $10 million a year Citigroup paid Bob Rubin when Rubin left Treasury. As a result, Obama and his chief of staff are going to have to be very careful about exactly how they manage any Summers exit. . . . it’s going to be the easiest thing in the world for the Republicans to paint the Obama administration as the party of Wall Street fat cats.

Democrats as the party of Wall Street . . . this reminds my of the story of the political contributions of Richard Fuld, the disgraced former head of Lehman Brothers. . . .

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Regarding the picture above, see here. Credit for the search and picture goes to Alex Lundry.

• How to read research papers.

• Nebraska’s non-partisan legislature is surprisingly partisan.

• Lane Kenworthy’s slides (pdf) on “The Politics of Helping the Poor.”

• How Ohio newspapers depicted LeBron’s departure.

• Quantifying the concept of “spongeworthiness” (pdf).

Posted by John Sides at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Amy Walter:

A series of focus groups in five states conducted last month for the conservative nonprofit group Resurgent Republic found that while independent voters have soured on Obama, they haven’t abandoned him completely. The same can’t be said of their feelings for congressional Democrats.

In analyzing one such group in Orlando, GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen concluded that it was two issues, health care and BP’s oil spill, that ultimately soured these independent voters on Obama. On health care, van Lohuizen blames the process of the debate more than the substance for turning off independents. As for BP, voters are disappointed that they “don’t see strong leadership” from the president.

Ah, focus groups. What can’t they tell you? In this case, the truth. This is the percent of independents who support Obama, courtesy of Gallup’s weekly data, with a smoothed trend line:

Quite a roller coaster ride, eh? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, watch in amazement as independents “sour” on Obama during the health care debate. The percent who approved of him at the beginning of September 2009 was 46%. During the week he signed the bill it was…45%!

And how about that oil spill? Since the oil spill, Obama’s approval among independents is down by a whopping 4 points. Sour, indeed!

Someone just shoot me now.

Posted by John Sides at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

“It’s not clear” that he does, according to the hard-copy title of Matt Bai’s recent essay. This is his thesis:

Unlike his predecessor and some of his own political allies, however, Obama has never betrayed much interest in building political empires. Obama ran on the notion of transcending partisan distinctions, rather than making them permanent, and the political identity that enabled him to draw millions of new voters into the process two years ago is both intensely personal and self-contained. It’s not clear that Obama can translate his appeal among disaffected voters into support for a party and its aging Washington establishment. Nor is it clear, as he looks ahead to 2012, how hard he’s going to try.

I read this eagerly, looking for what Jon Bernstein calls “a well-reported descriptive piece on something that’s actually happening.” Ultimately, I learned some things, but little that suggested Obama didn’t care about leading his party.

Continue reading "Does Obama Care about Leading the Democratic Party?" »

Posted by John Sides at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A reader writes:

I’m interested in exploring the SC Dem Party Chair’s claim that the winner’s ballot placement was responsible for Tuesday’s outcome. I know of some research that supports that claim (Brockman 2003; Koppell & Steen 2004 — gated pdfs), but I haven’t seen anything that could support Ms. Fowler’s claim that ballot position resulted in Mr. Green’s double digit victory. Even in an extremely low information election, the research I’ve seen shows no more than a low single digit effect.

Here’s a little background on Greene, and here’s another piece by Kosuke Imai and Daniel Ho on ballot order, which finds similar effects (1-3 points) in primary elections.

All I have to go on here is some guesswork, but it seems plausible to me that ballot order could be an important factor here. This was a very low information race, it would seem. Greene’s opponent, Vic Rawl, only raised $186,000 for his campaign, which isn’t much money for a statewide race. The low salience of the race is also evident in the roll-off: 169,542 voted in this race vs. 188,576 in the Democratic primary for governor.

And I’m not sure that the potential ballot order effect is implausibly large. Assume for the moment that voters were essentially choosing at random between the candidates. That would imply a 50-50 outcome. The actual outcome was 58-41, which only implies that 8-9% of voters were influenced by ballot margin.

Another question is whether there was any information on the ballot that might have cued voters to choose Greene over Rawl. I wondered whether SC voters might have inferred the candidates’ racial background from the names of the candidates. I looked to see whether there was any relationship between Green’s percent of the vote in each county (data here) and the percent black in that county from the 2000 Census (data here).

There is a modest positive relationship, although it is not statistically significant. Ecological inference problems make this analysis suggestive at best, but I don’t see much happening.

I welcome other theories in comments.

UPDATE: See also Tom Schaller’s post at 538.

Posted by John Sides at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

With 97% of the votes counted, it now appears that the VVD (Liberals, economic right) has become the largest party by the smallest of margins: they have 31 seats (out of 150) while the PvdA (Social Democrats, left) have 30. The opinion polls indicated that the margin would be substantially larger. Being the largest party matters greatly as it usually means that you get to take the initiative to form a coalition government and deliver the prime-minister. The traditional powerhouse in Dutch politics CDA (Christian Democrats, centrists) lost 20 seats (it now has only 21 seats) and its party leader Balkenende (Dutch prime-minister for the past 8 years) has resigned.

The anti-Islamist PVV (Geert Wilders) did much better than expected by the polls, making his party the third largest with 24 seats (up from 9). The discrepancy between the opinion polls and the actual votes is widely attributed to what Americans call the Bradley effect but the Dutch name the “curtain effect”: the idea that people do things behind the curtains of a voting booth that they are hesitant to admit openly.* On the other hand, exit polls were pretty close to the actual results so it may also be due to strategic voting: people may have switched from their intended VVD vote as they thought the VVD was going to be the largest and they did not want the VVD to form a coalition with the left. Or, it could simply be the fairly large percentage of voters who didn’t make up their minds until the last moment. The election market was equally bad: underestimating the PVV vote by 6 seats and predicting a 5 seat gap between PvdA and VVD.

To say that coalition formation is going to be rough would be an understatement. Most within the VVD either want a coalition with the CDA and PvdA or with CDA and PVV. A coalition with the PVV would be a minimal one, making it dependent on whatever motley crew of individuals Wilders has managed to put together (always a problem with parties that suddenly become very large). This will make the CDA pause as they just lost half their seats. They may well think that it is not so great to be a junior partner in a coalition government: Better to sit this one out and bounce back (which is what they did the only other time they lost this bad in 1994). The PvdA has rejected any possibility to govern with the PVV and prefers a “purple coalition” with the VVD, D’66 (a centrist liberal party with 10 seats), and the Greens (left, 10 seats). This is hardly ideal for the VVD. They would be outnumbered by parties of the economic left when they campaigned so hard on economic reforms from the right. The ball is in the VVD’s court. Given that the PVV won so substantially, it would be difficult for the VVD not to at least have talks with them. Of course this puts the CDA in an odd power broker situation given how badly they were beaten up. For what it’s worth, the election markets now put the chance of a purple coalition at 60% and have the CDA/VVD/PVV coalition at 10%.

*The Dutch have a thing with curtains: we generally have them but don’t close them, allowing passers-by to look in. Some people think that this is a way for housewives to show that they keep the house clean. My theory is that high population density has made us eager to know what goes on next door. All kinds of unspeakable things may happen behind closed curtains. Better to show your neighbors that no funny stuff is happening inside your house.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So California’s Proposition 14 passed with 54% of the vote. California now has a “jungle primary.” It may yet be subject to litigation, although Richard Hasen doubts that the litigation will be successful. I noted earlier the research suggesting that the type of primary has little impact on legislative polarization, despite the claims of Prop 14’s proponents.

Here are some political scientists’ perspectives on Prop 14: Seth Masket, Jon Bernstein, Travis Ridout, John Pitney, and Barbara Sinclair. Reading these, I detect a theme!

Ridout:

But the lesson from Washington State is that politics as usual is unlikely to change much.

Pitney:

…don’t expect the new primary system to do much about it.

When California had a blanket primary for a brief spell, I was involved in some research on it. Based on that and other research, my sense of Prop 14, and a lot of political reforms generally, dovetails with what Ridout and Pitney say. In our research on the blanket primary (see this book), Jack Citrin, Jon Cohen, and I wrote this:

The blanket primary will lead to neither the millennium envisaged by its advocates nor the apocalypse predicted by its detractors.

I suspect the same will be true of the jungle primary.

Posted by John Sides at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In my earlier post, I noted the high reelection rate of House incumbents, even in year when voters are “angry.” In comments, several polisci types asked about retirements. Jeff Lazarus sums up the logic:

For each election in the period 1946-2000, the mean number of House incumbents not returned to office is 69. There’s obviously significant variation; the number ranges from 34 in 1988 to 118 in 1948 and 110 in 1992. But on average 16% of the total House membership turns over each election. As for the strategic retirement issue, about half the departures every election are voluntary (again, with some variation), which includes both retirements and attempts to move to other offices. Generally I’m wary of any claims resting on the high reelection rates of incumbents, because those high rates are a by-product of selection bias: many/most incumbents who don’t think they can win select themselves out of the pool running for reelection. Lots of literature shows that retirees are those who are vulnerable and/or would have faced a strong challenger in the upcoming election.

How does taking account of retirements affect things? The data I’m using come from Gary Jacobson’s The Politics of Congressional Elections, which has data from 1946-2006. For each year, he reports the number of House members who sought reelection and the number who were defeated in the primary or general. Let’s assume — very generously — that every member who did not seek reelection was retiring strategically, even though many are not. They could be seeking higher office, for example. (Jeff L. may have better data, but this is what I have available.)

So add up the number of who didn’t seek reelection and the number of losers. Subtract that from 435. Divide by 435. Multiple by 100. That gives you the percentage of House members who were “returned” to office in the House.

Now here’s a comparable graph to the one I posted earlier, except excluding 2008 where I don’t have the same data:

Again, I predict a value for 2010. It is 76%.

This buttresses my point. Lots of people are talking about “angry” voters and the treacherous climate for incumbents. Very few people bother to mention that in this treacherous climate, the vast majority of incumbents will likely be returned to office.

A footnote: according to this count, the number of House members who are retiring or running for higher office is 40. If that is accurate, then 395 members are seeking or have sought reelection this year. That is almost identical to the historical average for the 1946-2006 period (which is 398, according to Jacobson’s data). Whatever anti-incumbent sentiments exist, they haven’t translated into an abnormally high level of retirements.

Posted by John Sides at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Some of you may remember that back in February, I wrote a few blog posts about the collapse of the Dutch cabinet over the renewal over its mission in Afghanistan. Well, tomorrow the elections for a new parliament will finally be held. It is pretty remarkable how slow this process works in the Netherlands. Gordon Brown called for new elections in April and by mid-May the Brits had a new government. Even after these elections, it is probably going to take at least three months for a new cabinet to form. So, in the midst of an economic crisis the Netherlands will be without a fully functioning government for six months or more. Moreover, the timing of the elections really matters. As the graph above shows, the PvdA (Social Democrats, left wing) benefited tremendously from forcing the cabinet crisis. If the elections had been held in mid-March, they would have likely become the largest party and would have likely delivered the prime-minister. Now it appears that the VVD (Liberals, right wing) will become the largest party and deliver the prime-minister for the first time in its history.

Whatever the results, the coalition formation process will be terribly complicated. According to the Dutch political stock markets (see below), the most likely is a so-called purple coalition between a set of socially liberal parties from the economic left and right. This may be a bit surprising: One would think that in times of economic crisis parties would seek alliances with parties closer to them on economic issues, although the Dutch have a history of pushing economic reform through compromises between labor unions and employers. In any case, as the odds below illustrate, it is far from certain how things will work out. The second most likely option is that some “other” than the ten listed coalition possibilities will form. This is unusual even for the Netherlands. Some voters are trying to anticipate how their choice will affect the coalition formation process: about one-fifth of all voters say that they will vote strategically. This will mean different things to different people. For example, some may allocate their vote in a way that they think will maximize the probability of keeping the PVV and Geert Wilders out of office whereas others are motivated by keeping the PvdA out. If all of this illustrates one general point, it may well be that Andrew Gelman is right that “elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved”.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today, Gallup tells me that “U.S. Voters Favor Congressional Newcomers Over Incumbents.” The Washington Post tells me that “Voters’ support for members of Congress is at an all-time low.”

Let’s take a piece of data from Gallup: the percent who says that their U.S. representative does not deserve to be reelected. Gallup has these data from 1992-2010 (pdf). I’ll plot the percentage from the poll closest to the election against the percentage of House incumbents who were reelected in 1992-2008.

There is a relationship between responses to this item and the reelection rate (and it’s statistically significant, in fact). But the relationship is substantively very small. Perhaps the best evidence is the predicted reelection rate I calculated based on the 1992-2008 data, plugging in the most recent Gallup poll, in which a record 40% declared that their member did not deserve reelection. What is the predicted incumbent reelection rate?

87%.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote:

I would be very surprised if any “anti-incumbent fervor” put much dent in the extraordinarily high rates at which incumbents are reelected.

This back-of-the-envelope analysis is why.

Posted by John Sides at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

One fun thing about posting on 3 blogs is that I can reach different audiences. Zillions of people read 538, but as one of the many second-bananas to Nate, I’m always careful about restricting my posts there to just the facts. I don’t do a lot of follow-up posting there, and the comments section at 538 is enough of a zoo that there’s no real room there for in-depth back-and-forth discussion.

My main blog gets lots of readers and informed comments, but right now I have a backlog of over a month, which means that it’s hard to squeeze in a lot of topical material. If I start running 5 posts a day, I’m afraid people will get overwhelmed.

So I often post political stuff right here on the Monkey Cage which appears to reach a news-media audience not completely covered by my other blogs. For example, John Sides pointed me to Matthew Yglesias’s link to my recent remarks that “elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved.”

Yglesias writes:

That seems right on a theoretical level. . . . But for a political scientist’s post on a political science topic, Gelman’s was uncharacteristically lacking in specific references to research on the subject—I wonder what’s out there . . .

I have two quick responses:

1. Although I’m a professor of political science,I got my Ph.D. in statistics and am not very familiar with the political science literature. Just for example, I’ve never taught (or taken) an intro to American politics course. So, when it comes to the literature, I’ll have to defer to John Sides and my other co-bloggers here.

2. Just to complete my thoughts about stable and unstable elections: This is something that Gary and I thought a lot about when we were doing our research, 20 years ago. U.S. presidential election campaigns have a lot of things going for them to make the outcome more predictable:

(a) A long history: we can predict this year’s election, to some extent, from last year’s. The U.S. isn’t a country like Guatemala where they’ve only been having competitive elections for a few years.

(b) Clear separation between the parties. Talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum aside, the Democrats and Republicans are, according to Huber and Stanig, further apart on economic issues than are left and right groupings in just about every other industrialized country.

© Only two major candidates. Anderson in 1980, Perot in 1992 and 1996: they came close but they didn’t quite make it a real three-candidate race. It basically worked to focus on the Democrat and the Republican.

(d) Equal resources. Not quite: Nixon reputedly massively outspent McGovern in 1972, Bush had the edge over Gore in 2000, and Obama had a few hundred million to spare in 2008. Still, compared to referenda and elections for congress and governor, presidential races are on a pretty level playing field.

(e) A clear schedule: Voters have many months to sort out the information and make up their minds.

Various other elections violate rules (a), (b), ©, (d) above, to the extent that it would not make sense to try to predict the results nakedly from the fundamentals without information about the campaign itself. Back in the early 1990s when we were working on that paper, I was living in California and was thinking a lot about referenda, which violate conditions (a) and (d) above: There’s no track record, and typically one side is much better funded than the other. This is not to say that campaign spending is all that matters, only that it does seem to matter, and also there’s basically no baseline, no expected outcome to compare to. (And, no, early polls don’t count.) The British election violated condition ©, and maybe some of the others also. Primary elections typically violate condition (b) and (d), often condition ©, and arguably violate condition (a) as well, as each primary is really a different story. Elections for Congress typically violate condition (d). Special elections violate condition (e).

I don’t know of any systematic research on the predictability of elections and how they relate to the above conditions. It would be an interesting topic.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Chris Beam wrote this amusing article on the ways in which political scientists view political news differently than journalists do. Seeing this article gave me some satisfaction, as it suggests that some of our research in this area has reached the outside world.

In 1993, Gary King and I published an article, ” Why are American Presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable?”, in which we argued (with 10 figures and no tables (except for a brief summary of data sources in the appendix)) that short-term swings in public opinion during presidential election campaigns (for example, the predictable post-convention bounce) have little if any impact on the vote. The bit about elections being so predictable was not original to us—we leaned heavily on Steven Rosenstone’s 1984 book on forecasting presidential elections. What was new in our paper was to take that finding seriously and work through its implications for campaigns.

When we wrote the article, Gary and I wanted to make a difference, to elevate public discourse. It was so frustrating to see the news media focus on the horse race, especially given that there was no evidence that these horse-race stories made any difference. We thought our article might change things, because instead of the usual strategy—criticizing the media for distorting politics with endless stories on the horse race—we were taking the opposite tack, essentially mocking the media for running story after story about campaign gaffes etc. that had no effect. If it’s really true (as we found from our analysis) that what’s most important are the so-called fundamentals (political ideology, party identification, and the economy), then the way the media could have the most influence would be to report on the fundamentals—report what’s happening in the economy and report the candidates’ positions on major issues—rather than the trivialities.

We really hoped that, if our goal was to change how campaigns were reported, we’d do better to portray the standard media practices as ineffectual, rather than as harmful. If you want someone to change, it’s better to describe him as a loser than as a bad boy.

I was frustrated for many years at how little difference our argument seemed to have made. But, if Beam’s article is any evidence, maybe our message really has been getting through!

P.S. More here. We’ve become conventional wisdom!

P.P.S. I’m certainly not claiming that the political science research that Beam alludes to is all (or even mostly) coming from us. Rather, the work that Gary and I did is part of a large stream of research in the past few decades that many many people have contributed to, and continue to contribute to. I’m most familiar with our own part in all of this, which is why that’s what I focus on.

P.P.P.S. Many of the disputes between political scientists and journalists end up being decided on the details. The short story is: political scientists have a lot of time and don’t say much, so when we do say something, we can try to be careful not to make any mistakes. In contrasts, busy journalists are under pressure to say things all the time, so sometimes they get things wrong. I’m sure that political scientists would make lots and lots of silly mistakes too if we had to publish at the rate that journalists do.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

You know your ideas have had some success when they become conventional wisdom to the extent of being misunderstood.

David Runciman writes:

It is a truism of political science that what happens in election campaigns doesn’t make any real difference. By the time the formal campaigning starts the voters pretty much know where they stand. They then have to wait patiently (or impatiently) for a few weeks while politicians and journalists get their knickers in a twist over imagined gaffes and surges, swings and comebacks. Once that is all over, people put their crosses just where they were going to put them anyway.

Almost right. But what Runciman didn’t realize was that this “truism” (also known as “research”) relies on their being a two-candidate election with clearly distinguishable candidates. The recent U.K. election, with three contending major parties and lots of talk about tactical voting, didn’t fit that script.

To put it another way, when the race is between candidate A and candidate B, you might as well vote for the candidate you prefer, no matter who happens to be in the lead—and the evidence is that people do just that. I’ve not seen evidence of any bandwagon effects in races between two candidates of opposing parties. But when the race is between A, B, and C, then, yes, your vote choice can definitely be affected by the possibility that C really has a chance of winning.

To put it yet another way: Elections are inherently more unstable when more than two candidates are involved.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

General election voters, not primary election voters. But still, it’s interesting.

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).

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seth Masket and I have been pushing a few notions in response to this question, e.g., here and here. We put together our thoughts into a piece for the NY Daily News. Find it here.

Posted by John Sides at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In an excellent blog on the tea party protesters, coblogger John Sides writes:

Finally, I [Sides] think people see the Tea Party protests and think that something ideological is afoot in the broader American public. It’s not. . . . If the appeal is ideological, then who cares what the economy does? A growing economy isn’t going to shrink the size of government. If people are ideologues, the state of the economy shouldn’t matter. But they’re not ideologues. A mountain of political science establishes this. This political moment is not about ideology, it is about performance. People want conditions in the country to improve. They want a growing economy. Once that happens, people’s assessments of the government’s performance will also improve. Obama’s approval will go up. Trust in government will go up. Approval of Congress will go up. This won’t necessarily derail the activists at the Tea Party’s core, but it will be hard to see their ire reflected in the broader public.

I almost agree with this, but not quite. I think it’s more accurate to say that many voters are ideological and many are not, but that ideology has pretty much already been factored into people’s past votes and party identification. Ideology is hugely important and is one reason, for example, why Walter Mondale got 40% of the vote in 1984 rather than 0%, why John McCain got 46% of the vote in 2008 rather than 0%, and so on. Performance is what shifts people’s opinions and votes (in the short and medium term).

I agree with John completely that the fortunes of the tea party movement over the next couple of general elections (primaries are a different story) will depend much more on aggregate economic performance than anything else. I disagree only with his statement that the movement’s appeal is not ideological. The tea party participants are very ideological, and as many commentators have discussed, they’re people who were probably going to be voting Republican in any case. When thinking these things, I think it helps to separate the factors that are essentially fixed (ideology) from those that vary over time (most notably, economic performance). Both are important but in different ways.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I went easy on Matt Bai in my earlier post. Jon Bernstein does not. Here’s a choice passage:

It seems that Bai has heard of Jimmy Carter. That’s good! Now, my assignment for Matt Bai: go back and read about Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. And then try to argue that Barack Obama, backed by Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy (and established party insiders such as David Axelrod and David Plouffe) was anything like Carter in ‘76. What you’re going to find is that “thirty years ago” was the era of the upstart, not now. Citing Jimmy Carter to make a point that thirty years ago “you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office” is like citing Spiro Agnew to make the point that at forty years ago, only seriously accomplished politicians with a deserved reputation for personal integrity were considered for the Vice Presidency.

The whole post is highly recommended.

Posted by John Sides at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This rambling post begins with John Judis:

The Tea Parties are the descendants of a number of conservative insurgencies from the past two generations: the anti-tax rebellion of the late ’70s, the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition of the ’80s and ’90s, and Pat Buchanan’s presidential runs. Like the Tea Partiers I saw in Washington—and the picture of the Tea Partiers put forward by the Winston and Quinnipiac polls—these movements have been almost entirely white, disproportionately middle-aged or older, and more male than female (though parts of the Christian right are an exception on this count). A majority of their adherents generally are not college-educated, with incomes in the middle range—attributes that also closely match the Tea Party movement’s demographic profile. (A misleading picture of Tea Partiers as college-educated and affluent came from a New York Times/CBS poll of people who merely “support,” but don’t necessarily have anything to do with, the Tea Party movement. The other polls surveyed people who say they are “part of” the movement.)

This is wrong in a couple respects, I think. First, Judis ignores other data that suggests that Tea Party activists are indeed college-educated and affluent. The Political/Target Point exit poll of activists at the Washington DC Tax Day rally, found that 69% had either a college degree or some postgraduate study (pdf). Nearly a third (34%) made $100,000 or more each year, and 28% made $60-100,000.

A CNN poll that tried to identify the real activists as opposed to the “supporters” found the same thing. Jennifer Agiesta rounded up the results of both of these polls a month ago.

The P/TP poll also shows an enormous difference between the Tea Party and the Christian Right movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Judis thinks that Tea Partiers are conventional conservatives, with social views to match:

Likewise, the Tea Partiers have been moved to action by economic issues, but they share the outlook of social conservatives.

The P/TP poll found that there were significant fissures within their sample of activists:

Overwhelming majorities of 88% and 81% say government is trying to do too many things best left to individuals and businesses, and that government should cut taxes and spending, respectively. But in terms of values, Tea Party attendees are split right down the middle. A slim majority of 51% say “Government should not promote any particular set of values”, versus 46% that say “Government should promote traditional family values in our society.”

My point is not that the P/TP and CNN polls are the final word. But if we are trying to characterize a movement, the views and demographics of those who are actually taking action are just as important, if not more so, as those who “support” it. After all, movements aren’t going to be built by people giving casual responses to pollsters.

Both Judis (as well as Mark Lilla) link the Tea Party to the American intellectual tradition and to past movements. There have been other such analyses, and they’re useful. But we can’t predict much about what the Tea Party will accomplish by tracing its origins to the Puritans or whatever. The Tea Party’s success hinges on more mundane things: does it have an organization that will outlast this political moment? Judis notes, as have others, that its organization is diffuse:

Like many American movements, the Tea Parties are not tightly organized from above. They are a network of local groups and national ones (Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation), Washington lobbies and quasi-think tanks (FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity), bloggers, and talk-show hosts.

So, we’ve got a movement with fissures among the activists on important issues and no real overarching organization or leadership (other than, according to Judis, Glenn Beck). I will be more convinced about the longevity of the Tea Party when I am confident that its leaders will be able to coordinate their efforts and do the grassroots mobilization that will be less visible on cable news but more potent. (Marc Ambinder also makes this point.) Moreover, most analyses tend to consider the Tea Party in isolation, as if there aren’t other movements or large institutions in politics that, you know, have some power and oppose the Tea Party in some respects. Unlike Matt Bai, I am not prepared to write off party organizations. Nor am I prepared to write off the organization that Obama will pull together for 2012.

Let me note two other challenges that the Tea Party faces.

The issues that Tea Party activists do agree on — economic issues — are not issues on which the majority of the public shares their views. Sure, people say they’re concerned about the size of government and the deficit, but the public likes many government programs too. My earlier post on conflicted conservatives is one illustration. This Washington Post story is another.

Finally, I think people see the Tea Party protests and think that something ideological is afoot in the broader American public. It’s not. Judis makes this point:

And their [the Tea Party’s] core appeal on government and spending will continue to resonate as long as the economy sputters.

If the appeal is ideological, then who cares what the economy does? A growing economy isn’t going to shrink the size of government. If people are ideologues, the state of the economy shouldn’t matter.

But they’re not ideologues. A mountain of political science establishes this. This political moment is not about ideology, it is about performance. People want conditions in the country to improve. They want a growing economy. Once that happens, people’s assessments of the government’s performance will also improve. Obama’s approval will go up. Trust in government will go up. Approval of Congress will go up. This won’t necessarily derail the activists at the Tea Party’s core, but it will be hard to see their ire reflected in the broader public.

Posted by John Sides at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’ll defer to Nate on the details but just wanted to add a couple of general thoughts.

My quick answer is that you can’t learn much from primary elections. They can be important in their effects—both directly on the composition of Congress and indirectly in how they can affect behavior of congressmembers who might be scared of being challenged in future primaries—but I don’t see them as very informative indicators of the general election vote. Primaries are inherently unpredictable and are generally decided by completely different factors, and from completely different electorates, than those that decide general elections.

The PA special election is a bit different since it’s a Dem vs. a Rep, but it’s also an n of 1, and it’s an election now rather than in November. Nate makes a convincing case that it’s evidence in favor of the Democrats, even if not by much.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know I could lose my pundit’s license for saying this, but I have no idea what Tuesday’s elections mean.

That is Matt Miller, saying what no pundit has the courage to say. He goes on:

As in all such moments, we’re seeing an orgy of instant analysis that is largely useless.

Indeed! Someone asked me today why I hadn’t posted on yesterday’s elections. And say what, exactly? What can we make from a handful of primaries and special elections? Not much. I’ve said this before.

So kudos to Miller. Well, mostly kudos. And the end, after joking that his wife tires of inconclusive ramblings and urges him to “feign a strong opinion,” he proffers this:

My best guess is that we’re entering a period in which anti-incumbent fervor will become the default attitude of an electorate whose economic prospects have dimmed. This is not just because of the recession. Even after steady economic growth resumes, more and more Americans will find themselves struggling. What these trends portend is lasting voter frustration as it dawns on a widening swath of Americans that the perquisites of middle-class life, and the prospects of upward mobility for their children, may elude them.

I have no idea whether that will prove true at all, but I would be very surprised if any “anti-incumbent fervor” put much dent in the extraordinarily high rates at which incumbents are reelected.

But Miller saves himself with this conclusion:

Today that gives us Rand Paul. Tomorrow it may give us his opposite. Your guess is as good as mine.

The world would be a better place if all the political “analysts” on cable news were given the title “guesser.”

[Hat tip to Andy Karch for the Miller piece.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The team behind the British Election Study has posted some initial graphs from their data here. I’ve pasted one above. Among other things, it shows pretty clearly that Brown’s “bigoted woman” remark didn’t have much impact on how people perceived him.

Posted by John Sides at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or should have one at least. Via Matthew Shugart, she has apparently been blogging since 2008 (admittedly with varying levels of activity). See, for example, her interesting argument about voting preferences and the Liberal-Labour pact.

Those reading the tea-leaves often claimed that the British public ‘wanted’ a hung parliament but, in fact, this cannot be deduced from the outcome. Each citizen cast a particular vote in their specific constituency, but the final outcome was the collective result of millions of independent decisions. One way we can throw light on this question is to turn to the 2010 British Election Study (BES) which has just been released. … in particular the results tell us something important about the second choice of Liberal Democrat voters. If the decision about entering a coalition with either Labour or the Conservatives were in the hands of Liberal Democrat voters, what would they have wanted? … Among those in this group who cast a ballot for the Liberal Democrats, only 12% opted for the Conservative party as their second choice preference. By contrast, almost half the Liberal Democrat voters (48%) chose Labour as their second preference. Likewise, the Liberal Democrats were the 2nd choice preference of four out of ten Labour voters. In other words, it is not simply that the Labour and the Liberal Democrats parties are far closer in their manifesto policies and ideological values, but Liberal Democrat and Labour voters also recognized the close affinity in their willingness to switch votes. The Conservative party was in a far different position, where UKIP (to the right of the party) were their largest 2nd choice party. Thus the new coalition governing British politics has clearly shaken up the old pattern of British party politics.

Posted by Henry at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While many scholars have focused on the production of legislation, we explore life after enactment. Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are indissoluble, we show that programmatic restructurings and terminations are commonplace. In addition, we observe significant changes in programmatic appropriations. We suggest that a sitting congress is most likely to transform, kill, or cut programs inherited from an enacting congress when its partisan composition differs substantially. To test this claim, we examine the postenactment histories of every federal domestic program established between 1971 and 2003, using a new dataset that distinguishes program death from restructuring. Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of congresses have a strong influence on program durability and size. We thus dispel the notion that federal programs are everlasting while providing a plausible coalition-based account for their evolution.

This is from a newly published paper by Christopher Berry, Barry Burden, and William Howell (gated; ungated). The italics are mine. The data come from all federal domestic programs enacted between 1971 and 2003 (2,059 programs).

So how much do elections matter? When the majority party who enacted the program loses 10% of its seats across both chambers, the probability that a program is killed doubles. Similarly, if this majority party gains 10%, the probability of program death drops by 80%. The same shifts in the size of the enacting majority party produce either a .10% decline or .60% increase in program spending.

Berry, Burden, and Howell also consider other ways of measuring changing in political power — isolating changes in the House and Senate, counting the number of institutions (House, Senate, president) controlled by the enacting majority, factoring in the ideological composition of Congress, etc.

Since Berry and colleagues simulate the effects of a 10% shift in seats, it’s instructive to do this little back-of-the-envelope calculation. Currently, the Democrats control 59 seats in the Senate and 254 seats in the House, for a total of 313. One current prediction for 2010 has the Republicans gaining 7 seats in the Senate and 27 in the House — for a loss to the Democrats of…about 10%.

Posted by John Sides at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Boris Shor writes:

Alan Mollohan (D), who has represented West Virginia’s 1st District since 1983, was defeated in Tuesday’s Democratic primary by Mike Oliverio, a state legislator since 1993. . . . Oliverio is conservative. No, really, really super duper conservative. According to Wikipedia, he’s pro-life, and supports a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. . . . Exactly how conservative is he? Our [Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty’s] common space score for him is 0.25, which puts him into the 96th percentile of his party for conservatism in his state for the last decade or so. He’s about as conservative as the average WV state Republican, and more conservative than many of them.

If he wins the general election in November, he’d be replacing Mollohan, who scores a pretty liberal –0.5 [not far from the average for congressional Democrats]. . . . if Oliverio were to remain ideologically consistent (something I [Boris] consider very likely for all “graduating” state legislators), he’d be more conservative than the sole Republican in the state delegation to Congress, Shelley Capito. He’d be more conservative than a bunch of other Republicans, too. He’d be far more conservative than the most conservative Democrat in Congress, Idaho’s Walt Minnick, who voted against health care reform, the stimulus, and the Waxman-Markey environment bill.

That’d be amazing. Remember, in our polarized times, no Republican in Congress is to the left of any Democrat (and, vice versa, no Democrat is to the right of any Republican). If elected to Congress, Oliverio could be the first conservative Democrat in a long time to make at least some Republicans look liberal.

To translate this into the language of sabermetrics, Boris is echoing Bill James in saying that minor-league stats are highly predictive of major-league performance. And he seems to have been right about Scott Brown.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our readers, Jim Bach, sent us some interesting seats/votes curves for the three main parties in all UK postwar elections. It is no big surprise that the line is so flat for the Liberal Democrats but it did surprise me that the slope for the Conservatives is almost twice as steep as for the Labour party. If I read the graphs correctly, Labour had a seat/vote ratio of less than 1 in 12 out of 18 elections, whereas the Conservatives were below 1 only 5 times. This suggests that there may well be more at stake for the Conservatives in preserving the current electoral system than for Labour. The same idea emerges from the Guardian’s analysis of what the results might have been under a series of alternative voting arrangements (assuming, of course, that voters do not change their behavior under different electoral rules). I’ll ask readers more knowledgeable about British politics to speculate on what may be responsible for this difference between Tory and Labour return on their popular vote shares.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Seth Masket wonders whether Duverger got the 2010 UK elections right. Matt Singer, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, sent me the following analysis that answers this question with a resounding NO.

Continue reading "Duverger and the UK Election" »

Posted by Erik Voeten at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Phone calls encouraging citizens to vote are staples of modern campaigns. Insights from psychological science can make these calls dramatically more potent while also generating opportunities to expand psychological theory. We present a field experiment conducted during the 2008 presidential election (N = 287,228) showing that facilitating the formation of a voting plan (i.e., implementation intentions) can increase turnout by 4.1 percentage points among those contacted, but a standard encouragement call and self-prediction have no significant impact. Among single-eligible-voter households, the formation of a voting plan increased turnout among persons contacted by 9.1 percentage points, whereas those in multiple-eligible-voter households were unaffected by all scripts. Some situational factors may organically facilitate implementation-intentions formation more readily than others; we present data suggesting that this could explain the differential treatment effect that we found. We discuss implications for psychological and political science, and public interventions involving implementation-intentions formation.

That’s from a new paper by David Nickerson and Todd Rogers. A gated version is here. A short write-up is here.

Posted by John Sides at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Guardian’s data blog has all the election results in downloadable format and has created some beautiful maps with it, including the following map that shows swings from Labour to Conservative. There is much more there, including maps of BNP votes and turnout.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stochastic Democracy compares the various forecasts and the outcome here. One the most important question — the allocation of seats — the most accurate predictions came from political scientists — a team at PoliticsHome and Simon Hix and Nick Vivyan (see Henry’s earlier post). Some of you may have read the dust-up between the PoliticsHome team and Nate Silver of 538 about their respective forecasting models (see this post of Silver’s). Stochastic Democracy’s tabulation suggests that PoliticsHome got the best of the “NerdFight.”

At Psychology Today, Michael Alvarez discusses the possibility of tactical or strategic voting in this election (via Gary King). He describes the ongoing debate about whether voters have the sophistication and information to engage in strategic voting. Perhaps this election made that information a little more accessible:

In today’s UK elections, there is an interesting twist — an application of new technologies that provides information that will help voters to vote “tactically.” The Guardian has published an online “tactical voting guide”, that actually lets voters look up data from their area to determine how they might best vote tactically. If many voters use an online tool like this, we might see the rate of “tactical” voting in today’s election soar well above what has been estimated in past elections.

Posted by John Sides at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can find the webcast here and the live blog here. First big news seems to be that the Lib Dems will not be picking up seats this year, which is a great surprise.

Did any US universities do anything like this for the US presidential elections? If not, someone should start thinking about it.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthew Yglesias talks about the UK party system.

For my part, I’ll say that as I look at the scene emerging it does seem to be the case that what’s plaguing the UK isn’t so much a weird electoral system as it is a weird party system. If you look at John Cleese’s very funny pitch for electoral reform from the eighties you have to remember that he was talking at a very different time in the British party system. At that point, Labour and the Tories seemed determined to debunk the median voter theorem by being shockingly far apart ideologically. That paved the way for a revival (in alliance with some renegade moderate Labourites) of a centrist Liberal Party, a revival that was severely curtailed by the electoral system. Flash forward to 2010 and you have a situation in which Labour has moved to the right and the Tories have moved to the left, and the ideological posture of the Liberal Democrats vis-a-vis the other parties is pretty murky and contestable.

Jack H. Nagel and Christopher Wlezien have a brand new article (paywalled)in the British Journal of Political Science which touches on just this point. They are interested in the two way relationship between ideological polarization and votes for the Liberal Democrats. While one of their two mechanisms appears not to explain what is going on in the current election very well, the other offers some very interesting predictions regarding what might happen afterwards.

First - their argument as to how ideological polarization affects the vote for the Liberal Democrats. Roughly speaking, their claim is similar to Matt’s theory of the modern rebirth of the Lib Dems - that when the two major parties are ideologically polarized for whatever reason, the Liberal Democrats do well. This graph summarizes their results.

As is pretty clear from the graph, the more polarized that the two major parties are, the higher the vote for the Liberals (their blanket term for the various incarnations of the current day Lib Dems). Unfortunately, though, this relationship seems to be breaking down. As they acknowledge, the Lib Dems have done pretty well in the last two elections, even though both Labour and the Conservatives have moved towards the ideological center. Nagel and Wlezien hypothesize that we will see a return to form, and that a more moderate Conservative party will cannibalize much of the Liberal vote in the current election.

The strength of the occupied-centre effect on Conservative positions suggests that David Cameron may encounter substantial resistance within his own party, and that his attempt to lead it back to the centre might not succeed. But if he (or a successor) does prevail, one must expect that a strong, credible Conservative move to the centre will shrink the Liberal Democratic vote and produce a migration of activists that will be conducive to continued Tory centrism.

It would appear, however, that Cameron has succeeded in moving his party towards the center, but that the Liberal Democrat vote has not evaporated (perhaps it will on polling day - but I doubt it). Perhaps this is purely conjunctural (the Liberal Democrats are arguably benefiting from disgust driven by the spending scandal).¹ However, when you get conjunctural effects operating to the Liberals’ benefit three times in a row, you begin to suspect that there may be something deeper happening here.

But even if this mechanism is perhaps fading in strength, the other mechanism that they propose is pretty interesting. They find strong evidence that in elections immediately after elections where the Liberals have done well, the Conservatives tend to veer towards the right. Their (tentative) explanation for this: party activists.

As commentators often note, the Liberals and Conservatives are both middle-class parties…. As commentator David Walker observed in 2000, ‘Lib Dem voters … turn out to be remarkably similar to Tory voters in their middle-classness.’ Because attitudes and loyalties linked to social class are so important in Britain, we would expect that would-be party activists would usually find it easier to transfer their support between Conservatives and Liberals than between Labour and Liberals, because potential defectors from the Tories, unlike many who might consider leaving Labour, do not have to cross ‘tribal’ boundaries linked to social class and trade union membership. … If the Liberal and Conservative parties are alternative political vehicles for the middle (and upper) classes, then one must suppose that the years of Liberal decline resulted in an influx of centrists into Conservative party branches, and the subsequent Liberal rise must have depleted Tory ranks of potential centrist leaders and activists. If this reasoning is correct, then Liberal occupation of the centre caused a vacation of the centre first within the Conservative party and then by the Conservative party, as activists who might otherwise have been a force for moderation turned to the third-party alternative, helping create a vicious cycle.

We do not mean to suggest that these compositional effects resulted primarily from particular individuals moving back and forth between Liberal and Conservative activism, although some no doubt did. Because these processes occurred over many years and, for most people, political activism is a relatively brief phase in one’s life, it is enough to argue that, as the Liberals gained strength, the type of middle-class moderates who would have been comfortable in a Conservative party branch in the 1950s were more likely to have found a political home in Liberal constituency organizations.

This is (as the authors happily admit) speculative. But it leads one to speculate even further on the possible fallout if David Cameron does not form a government as he so obviously hopes to do. Plausibly, many people who might otherwise have become Conservative activists will become Liberal Democratic activists instead, thanks to Nagel and Wlezien’s mechanism. This will be reinforced by other dynamics - there are a lot of unhappy right wing conservatives, who have grudgingly accepted Cameron’s push toward moderation, because they are desperate to get back into power. If Cameron’s centrism doesn’t win the election, then they are likely to try to pull the party back sharply to the right. And they have a very good chance of succeeding. Together, these two mechanisms would have two consequences. First - a Conservative party that is much further to the right and less electable over the short term (and perhaps the long term too). Second - a Liberal Democrat party that positions itself a little to the right of center (and likely makes Nick Clegg a happier leader in the process).

¹ The authors note one other aberrant case. “Figures 4 and 5 do exhibit one large drop in the Liberal vote that is not well explained by Labour and Conservative manifesto scores. That dip, in 1979, no doubt owed much to a sensational scandal. While the campaign was being fought, Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader during 1967–76 and still an incumbent partliamentary candidate, was awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, who in 1976 claimed a homosexual relationship with Thorpe, a charge that (along with a financial scandal) led to the latter’s standing down as leader.”

Posted by Henry at 08:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Probably my final bit of pseudo-political scientific speculation on the UK elections before they actually happen. Apparently, David Cameron did well in the final debate - a lot of UK newspapers are touting this as heralding some kind of broader electoral resurgence. I’m quite skeptical about this. My best guess - as discussed before - is that the initial boost for the Liberal Democrats from the first debate was less a simple result of Clegg having done well, than of Clegg suddenly appearing to be a viable candidate, voters (who might have preferred to have voted Lib Dem if they didn’t think their vote was going to be wasted) seeing that others perceived Clegg as a possible winner and revising their own voting tactics etc. In other words - the debate didn’t pick winners or losers based on the strength or weakness of their performance so much as it revealed possibilities that voters had hitherto discounted. If this is right, we will not see a major boost for Cameron in the final vote. Instead, we’ll see a continuation of the trendline - Labor doing badly, the Liberal Democrats doing well, but bleeding some support, and the Conservatives doing fine, but not fine enough to win a majority in Parliament. That’s my bet - and I’m sticking to it. More seriously though, I do think that this is an interesting contrast (as I suggested in my original post) with the US experience, and I look forward to more serious political scientific work on it.

Posted by Henry at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Week before last I had a conversation with a Washington Post reporter whose beat for the 2010 campaign is voters. She’ll be traveling to districts and interviewing voters throughout the election. Here are some questions I suggested she might consider.

1) Will the “enthusiasm” gap in turnout persist, especially as both parties begin mobilizing their respective partisans in earnest?

2) There are aggregate relationships between economic growth (not unemployment!) and presidential approval on the one hand, and seat gains and losses by the president’s party on the other. How much will either factor change in the months ahead? (This wasn’t really amenable to her beat, so I suggested the next question.)

3) Given that the economy is still weak, how are incumbent Democrats dealing with it? Ignoring the issue in favor of others? If so, which issues? Talking about the economy but using particular kinds of frames to frame it in more favorable terms (e.g., blame Bush)? Lynn Vavreck’s book suggests the importance of how presidential candidates do or do not discuss “the fundamentals.” Her theory could be usefully applied to congressional candidates as well.

4) How much will congressional races reflect a nationalized agenda, particularly coming from the GOP?

5) On the flip side, what are the local dynamics in key races? Nationalized agendas are often visible to political commentators but not to voters. For example, in 1994 polls showed that most voters weren’t familiar with the Contract with America.)

6) When times are bad for the president’s party, the opposite party should be able to recruit more qualified challengers. Is this happening? It should be evident in their prior political experience, fundraising, name recognition, etc.

7) It is challenging to identify the effects of key congressional votes on voters’ decisions, and its those votes that often make up a nationalized agenda. But such effects appear to exist — especially for members of Congress who remain loyal to the president on these votes even though their districts lean in the opposite direction. (In 1994, vulnerable Democrats suffered in they voted for the Clinton budget, NAFTA, and/or the crime bill, according to research by Gary Jacobson.) Will Democratic incumbents suffer for their support of the president’s agenda?

We also talked about useful things to do with the sort of qualitative data she’ll be gathering in her interviews. I suggested returning to the same place more than once and interviewing the same people if possible. We also discussed the value of following on voters’ comments with questions that force them to explain or justify their views. That’s a bit tricky because clearly a reporter doesn’t want to seem antagonistic, but it takes advantage of the in-person interview by doing something that pollsters rarely do.

I welcome other suggestions in comments.

UPDATE: See also Jon Bernstein’s excellent questions.

Posted by John Sides at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nimmi Gowrinathan, a Phd Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (ngowrinathan@opusa.org) offers us the following election analysis from war torn Sri Lanka.

On April 8, Sri Lanka held its first nation-wide parliamentary election following the Government of Sri Lanka’s brutal military defeat of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ending nearly three decades of political violence on the island. Drawing on the political capital created by this victory, the UPFA party of recently re-elected President Mahinda Rajapaksa won a clear majority just short of the 2/3 needed to make significant constitutional changes (first on the president’s agenda: eliminating term limits)—signaling a more permanent shift in the nation’s political culture away from institutions designed to foster a multi-cultural democracy towards a top-heavy model, more akin to a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. (Interview with Director of the Center for Policy Alternatives).

In a nation where devolution of power (if not complete autonomy) has remained at the center of the island’s ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil communities, the consolidation of power at the center (reinforced and protected by an increasingly militarized state) further diminishes hopes for reconciliation within a unitary state structure. While the voter turnout in the recent elections was low island-wide (55% of 14 million registered voters), in the conflict-affected predominantly Tamil districts turnout was dismally so – ranging from only 17-25%.

Continue reading "Beyond the Borders of the Nation State: Can Transnational Governance Offer a New Paradigm for Political Representation?" »

Posted by Erik Voeten at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I missed this one the first time around:

Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program?” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote:

But I [Bennett] do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.

As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted—in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote!

P.S. Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . . . On his Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt supported Bennett’s reasoning, as follows:

If we lived in a world in which the government chose who gets to reproduce, then Bennett would be correct in saying that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” Of course, it would also be true that if we aborted every white, Asian, male, Republican, and Democratic baby in that world, crime would also fall. . . .

As John DiNardo points out, Levitt seems to be confusing the number of crimes with the crime rate. The latter has a denominator. Beyond this, the intervention being hypothesized would certainly have many effects, and it is highly doubtful that the result would be to leave the crime rate among non-blacks unchanged. This is pretty basic causal reasoning, although given what I’ve heard about ed schools (sorry, Jennifer!), I guess it’s not completely unsurprising that a former Secretary of Education could get confused on the matter.

Perhaps (to return to a familiar Kaus theme), it’s a problem with the teacher’s unions? With a more dynamic education system, less bound by bureaucratic constraints, we’d surely be appointing cabinet-level education who had a better understanding of causal inference.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mickey Kaus is an O.G. blogger—possibly the very first political blogger—who not long ago switched to Twitter and has even more recently decided to run for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in California. His concerns seem to be labor unions (which he thinks have too much power) and immigration to the U.S. (which he thinks there’s too much of).

He’s said that he has no chance of winning, and I’m assuming that the purpose of the race is to gather material for a book. “Kamikazefiles: A Skeptic’s Crusade to Bring Common Sense to California Poilitics,” perhaps? (Sorry—I already told you I’m bad at titles.)

I still wonder a bit, along with others, why Kaus isn’t running in the Republican primary—I’d think that his signature issues would fly better with Republican voters and, more to the point, somehow I’ve always imagined Republican politicians in California to be more colorful—better book material—than their Democratic counterparts. San Francisco aside, I imagine prominent California Democrats to be dry, time-serving bureaucrats (like the comically Dickensianly-named “Gray Davis”) in contrast to wacky offbeat characters on the Republican side of the aisle. On the other hand, perhaps the very fact that the Democratic primary is not competitive this year—the incumbent, Barbara Boxer, is facing no serious opposition—has encouraged Kaus to run. Perhaps he feels that people will feel it’s safe to pull the lever for him as a protest vote, safe in the knowledge that it won’t make a difference. In the more competitive Republican race, primary election voters probably won’t want to throw their vote away.

But back to the title of this post. From Kaus’s website, I’ve learned that William Bennett has a radio show, a discussion which prompted Kaus to ask “why doesn’t the GOP at least try to win over a piece of” the African American vote on the immigration issue, that “It’s a potentially deep fissure that could pry apart the Dems’ coalition.” I don’t really see blacks lining up with whites to support the right of the Arizona police to stop Hispanics on the street—but I haven’t seen poll data on this, so maybe there’s something going on that I wasn’t aware of.

The other thing I noticed was that Kaus is asking for campaign contributions. I can’t imagine he can get serious money from people clicking on the website, so this makes me wonder why bother—can’t he just buy the ads he wants from his own savings (or from contributions from wealthy friends)? One possibility is that if he gets a bunch of small donors, then he can say that X number of people contributed to the campaign. It’s an interesting general question—donors for money or donors for P.R. or donors as potential future activists.

What next?

The other question is, where does Kaus go next? I can’t see him returning to blogging. Blogging is fun, and it’s addictive, but once you stop, I think it shouldn’t be hard to quit. Also, after thinking about politics and policy for several months, it’s gotta be a bit boring to return to writing about how bad the L.A. Times is and bemoaning that the major news media isn’t picking up on National Enquirer stories. I’m not saying that these aren’t legitimate issues, just that it can’t be so interesting as a political blogger to be chasing down National Enquirer stories.

More likely, I think, is that Kaus will return to book writing, maybe following up his memoir of campaign hijinks with a more serious policy book. He’ll probably go back to the blog—if for no other reason than to keep his ideas out there—but I think with less enthusiasm and more of a sense of duty. And once you’re blogging out of duty—once blogging feels like a job—the jig is up.

Having a high-profile blog can be a great opportunity for Kaus to get involved in the give-and-take of political ideas, but my impression is that he has less interest in this kind of day-to-day engagement and would be happier focusing more deeply on the issues that concern him most. In my most recent interaction with Kaus, I was disappointed in his apparent lack of interest in following through on his original claims, but in retrospect this makes more sense given that his interest has moved from politics to policy.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Simon Hix and Nick Vivyan at LSE provide the most useful UK poll tracking and election prognoses that I’ve seen.

The dots in the figure show the results from the various polls and the shaded areas around the lines are the 95 per cent confidence intervals around the mean standings of the parties. … As of 26 April, the national standing of the parties was 33.3 per cent for the Conservatives (up 1.0 per cent from our 19 April analysis), 26.5 per cent for Labour (down 0.3 per cent), and 29.3 per cent for the Lib Dems (down 0.8 per cent).

It’s pretty clear from this that the first television debate did have substantial - and lasting - consequences for Lib Dem support. And remember - the UK has a relatively short campaign season, so that unless voters change their minds soon, this will plausibly have consequences on election day. Hix and Vivyan also examine how these numbers are likely to translate into seats under a variety of assumptions. Despite significant differences in number of seats, the basic picture remains stable across various assumptions. The Conservatives will have the largest number of seats - but not a majority. Smaller parties (regional parties) will not have enough seats to support a Conservative majority government on their own, let alone a Labour majority. The Liberal Democrats will have enough seats to either ally with the Labour party or the Conservatives so as to create a majority in the House of Commons and thus form a government. Obviously, projections can go wrong; a week is a long time in politics etc. But given current information, it is hard to imagine the Liberal Democrats being in a better strategic situation to choose a coalition partner, and to demand major electoral reform as part of their price.

Posted by Henry at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Dan Balz and Jon Cohen, summarizing the most recent Washington Post poll:

Disaffection among independents with Obama’s policies has been one of the major shifts in public opinion over the past year, making this small movement one to monitor over the coming months.

I don’t know how they would define “major shifts” but given the small number of pure independents, most of the decline in Obama’s approval is due to trends among Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Democrats. I showed this earlier using the Washington Post’s own polls.

They also write:

If the overall trends continue, the sour public mood could result in sizable House and Senate losses for Democrats in the midterm elections, particularly if the unemployment rate sticks near double digits.

Once again, economic growth, not unemployment, is what is most strongly associated with seat losses for the president’s party. Seth Masket’s graphs tell the story.

(NB: Jon Cohen is a friend.)

Posted by John Sides at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jaroslaw Kaczynski has announced he will run to succeed his twin bother as president of Poland. While I am aware of spouses attempting to fill the seats of their deceased spouse, I don’t know of a previous instance when a twin has attempted to do this. A key distinction between this case and other attempts at substituting one family member for another following a tragedy is that Jaroslaw Kaczynski is very well known to the Polish public as the head of the Polish Law and Justice party, and as an ex-Prime Minister (2006-2007). Moreover, of late Kaczynski has been distinctly unpopular:

Source: CBOS: Zaufanie de Politykow w Styczniu, Pub: BS/9/2010

The above graph compares his popularity (blue) both to this brother (green) - who was also unpopular but was better liked - and to Bronislaw Komorowski (green), the nominee of the ruling Civic Platform party and the current acting Polish president, over the past year and a half. Based on these numbers, the chances for J. Kaczynski to win the election look slim, so it will be interesting to see if gets any sort of “sympathy bounce”, and/or if this sympathy bounce is mitigated by his previous levels of unpopularity.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A reporter from Alternative Press asked me these questions:

Do you think voters are more/less likely to vote for a candidate who has gained notoriety in an entertainment field, whether it’s music, film, etc?

If a musician or actor runs for office, does that affect voter turn out?

Do you think music is generally an effective means of political change? Are there any example of this?

Do you have an opinion on someone like Jello Biafra who attempted to transform a music career into a political one? Can running for office after writing highly politicized songs be construed as “putting your money where your mouth is”?

And I responded:

The quick answer to the first two questions is “we don’t know.” There’s just no good data on entertainment personalities per se. There is work on political “amateurs” more generally — particularly David Canon’s book Actors, Athletes, and Astronauts — and it suggests the hurdles that they face. First of all, experienced politicians are choosy about which races they enter. They are likely to run for offices when and where they have a decent chance of winning. Amateurs are then more likely to be “pushed out,” meaning that they don’t run, or, if they do run, likely to lose to the experienced candidate. So, other things equal, it is probably going to be harder for amateurs — including musicians — to be successful. The only thing going for entertainment personalities is that, if they are famous enough, voters will have heard of them, which helps them overcome one barrier that candidates face: becoming familiar to voters. This could make it more likely that voters would vote for them, but, again, we simply don’t know whether this is true.

On the question of music as an effective means of change: I think of it as a small factor, at best. Music is sometimes used by political actors — citizens, candidates, social movements, etc. — to symbolize their cause. But the most important factors are really the organizing and hard work of these actors themselves, combined with the circumstances that facilitate or impede political change. That is to say, political change happens when the time is right and when people work for it. Music can be a part of that but it’s hard to say that music itself causes much change.

Alas, I had no thoughts on Biafra himself.

Posted by John Sides at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I teach strategic voting to my undergraduates, I define it as an instance where people rank candidates or parties in the order they would prefer to see elected, and then subsequently choose not to vote for whomever they rank first. By contrast, a sincere voter votes for her first choice. There are a variety of reasons why voters might choose to vote strategically (e.g., they might want to send a message to a candidate running in a subsequent election, or they might want to moderate policy outcomes), but the most popular reason in the literature seems to be that voters do not want to waste their vote by voting for a candidate that has no chance of winning the election; this is also known as tactical voting.

In recent years, Britain has been characterized as a 2 and 1/2 party system: it has two viable parties that can win elections (Labour and Conservative), and then a third party that wins a non-trivial amount of seats but has not really been considered a legitimate contender to win an election (Lib-Dems). While strategic voting ultimately occurs at the district level, one would have to assume that in the past, the Lib-Dems have been disproportionately hurt by strategic voters: with Labour and the Conservatives assumed to have viable shots at winning elections, we would have to guess that more often it is potential Lib-Dem voters that abandon their party to choose between Labour and Conservative than the other way around.*

Which brings us to the 2010 elections. As I noted in a response to Henry’s previous post, one effect of the recent British debates and the explosion of Cleggmania could be that it frees up Lib-Dem supporters who have in the past voted strategically to actually vote sincerely in 2010. This would suggest some sort of underlying tipping model: as long as Lib-Dem support stays below a certain level, added popularity in the polls might still not transfer into that many additional votes if strategic voters defect on election day. However, once the party reaches the level of the big three, (ie., Lib-Dems are presumed to be just as viable an option as the other two parties), then there might be a rather dramatic increase in actual votes for Lib Dems as the strategic voters come home.

My question for readers is the following: how could we know if this was actually occurring? Two options seem fruitful to me, but I am interested in other suggestions (especially from anyone who has surveys in the field!).

First, anyone with repeated surveys in the field could compare thermometer scores (0-100 rankings of how much you like a particular party) for the three parties with vote intention. The hypotheses would be that up until some “tipping point” there should be a significant gap between the proportion of respondents who rank the Lib-Dems highest on the thermometer scores and those intending to vote Lib-Dem. On the individual level, if we regress vote intention on ranking the Lib-Dems highest on thermometer rankings, we would expect to see the size of the coefficient on ranking the Lib-Dems highest increase after the tipping point. What’s great about the 2010 British elections is that we have a good guess at where this tipping point should be: in the days immediately after the first PM debate. Moreover, I think this type of analysis could work either with panel data or repeated new surveys, although with panel data we could of course track actual switchers.

A second strategy would be to compare the proportion ranking Lib-Dems highest on thermometer scores who go on to vote Lib-Dem in 2010 in post-election surveys (or immediate pre-election surveys) with previous elections. If the proportions are roughly constant, then we could conclude 2010 was no different, and - provided there was a drop off between the thermometer scores and the vote intention/choice - the strategic voters stayed away. If the proportions increased, however, it would be evidence that strategic voters came home.

What are some drawbacks of this approach? The most serious seems to be that voters who are planning on voting strategically might need to rationalize that decision in their own heads by changing their thermometer rankings to reflect vote choice. Does anyone have any previous research suggesting whether or not this is the case?

Other thoughts? Ideas for how to proxy for preferred party other than vote intention or thermometer rankings? Anyone have surveys in the field attempting to test for strategic voting in this election?

*************************

*It is possible that in individual districts, pre-election polling could convince a possible conservative supporters that their particular race was going to come down to the Lib-Dem candidate and the Labour candidate, and therefore strategic voting in that instance could actually help the Lib-Dem. That being said, I would still maintain that if the national election was presumed to come down to Labour and Conservative, the Lib-Dems should be disproportionally disadvantaged by strategic voting. Although the more I think about this, the more this strikes me as an interesting question: has anyone tested whether strategic voting at the district level is moderated by national implications of elections in parliamentary systems with single member districts?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If ‘00 CA SEN nominee/ex-Rep. Tom Campbell edges out ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina in the CA SEN race, he may have his ballot designation to thank.

So argues Felicia Sonmez at Hotline. She cites a recent poll that included the “occupations” of the candidates, which the candidates essentially choose and are listed on the ballot. In this case:

Fiorina is described as “Business Executive.” DeVore is “Assemblyman/Military Reservist.” And Campbell — despite his five terms in Congress and his tenure as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s state finance director — is listed as “Economist/Business Educator.”

Did it make a difference in this case? It’s hard to know, absent an otherwise equivalent poll that did not include the occupations. However, there is some political science research that suggests the inclusion of ballot labels matters. In this article (gated), Monika McDermott examined a 1994 Los Angeles Times poll that randomly assigned respondents to receive or not receive information about occupations. McDermott focuses on a bunch of down-ballot races (Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Treasurer, Controller, etc.).

Respondents who saw the occupations were more likely to make a choice (i.e,. not abstain), and there were also differences in their choices. For example, in the race for Treasurer, respondents were 13 points more likely to choose Phil Angelides (“businessman, financial manager”) over Matt Fong (“appointed member, state board of equalization”) when the occupations were given.

McDermott isn’t in the business of figuring out what kinds of labels are more effective than others. So while her findings from 1994 seem sensible — “businessman” sounds better than “state board of equalization” — we really don’t have any systematic understanding of this issue.

The ultimate question is how well these findings generalize to the CA Senate primary. McDermott notes that cues like occupation are probably most valuable when voters have little other information about the candidates. It’s unclear to me whether the California primary will meet these conditions. The Republican gubernatorial candidates will have advertised a lot and the smaller primary electorate will tend to be more attentive to politics generally. Occupational information would thus matter much less.

Posted by John Sides at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Matthew Shugart reports.

Today’s Guardian notes that Conservative leader David Cameron has left the door open to a possible post-election deal with the Liberal Democrats. This must have been quite hard for Cameron to swallow, as daily he warns of grave danger from a parliament with no majority party. But the reality is that his party’s fortunes will have to turn substantially in the less than two weeks that remain of this campaign if he is to govern at the head of a majority.

Cameron did not rule out including electoral reform as part of any such inter-party deal, although he reiterated his preference for FPTP:

I want us to keep the current system that enables you to throw a government out of office. That is my view.

That’s a view that is well past its sell-by date, given that this campaign has developed into one in which Labour might well retain a share of power due to the electoral system’s failure to replace a “defeated” incumbent, even if it drops 6-8 percentage points in the polls from where it was in 2005. Sometimes FPTP simply fails on its own terms, and this election looks set to become an iconic case of systemic failure: the second largest party in votes could be a distant third in seats, while it is still very possible that Labour could be a fairly poor third in votes yet have the most seats.

Cameron’s preferred institutional reform of late is one that would mandate an election within six months of any PM change that resulted from something other than an election.

As Matthew says, this is a belated recognition of the reality that the Tories will have a tough job getting the majority they wanted, and need to start thinking about fallback options very quickly. It also reflects some fundamental problems in the Tory campaign strategy. They had assumed that they could ride into power on the back of anti-incumbent feelings, and hence built an election around Gordon Brown. This strategy becomes quite problematic if - as has transpired - there is an alternative (and arguably more attractive) challenger for the status of anti-incumbent party. It’s too early, of course, to say, that the UK is going to have a hung Parliament. It is not too early to say that the various parties are rebuilding their strategies around the assumption that a hung Parliament is very likely (and perhaps the most likely outcome).

Posted by Henry at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A short follow-up to the post on Nick Clegg’s electoral surge in the UK. In the event of a hung Parliament, everyone assumes that Clegg is going to demand a change to proportional representation in exchange for his party’s political support. Plausibly, the more seats that his party gets, the more likely it is that Labour (the Liberal Democrats’ most probable coalition partner), will have an incentive to want PR itself, regardless or not of whether it wants Clegg’s support. The reason is straightforward. Duverger’s Law suggests that electoral systems like the UK’s have a strong tendency to lead to alternation between two major parties. Labour became one of those parties a century or so ago, replacing the Liberals (the organizational ancestor of the Lib Dems). The Liberal Democrats have been gaining ground over the last few election cycles, and may (if the polls bear out) win their biggest share of the vote since the 1920s. This could be interpreted by nervous Labour MPs as possibly presaging a switch back to a system in which the Liberals and Conservatives dominate (I emphasize the word could - this is likely to be a background fear rather than a worry in the foreground of their minds). In such a world, Labour would be better off in a system with proportional representation. In the rather implausible extreme of a significant lead for the Lib Dems and the prospect of becoming a genuinely national party, you could even see the Liberal Democrats deciding that they were better off under first-past-the-post than proportional representation - but this would be a very difficult u-turn to make under the best of circumstances. I’m not suggesting that this is likely to be a major factor - but in the event of a hung Parliament, and more-or-less equal shares of the votes for all the parties - it is a possibility that at least will loom in the background of any negotiations over government formation.

Posted by Henry at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This was the topic of our lunch time discussion yesterday at the Juan March Foundation, as I’m assuming it has been for many of you recently :) My primary question was if Labour and the Lib Dems combined to hold a majority in the parliament but the Conservatives had won the largest number of seats in the election, was there any way that the Conservatives could block Labour and the Lib Dems from forming a coalition government (if they wanted to) and instead rule as a minority government? We were able to come up with a hypothetical set of institutions that might make this possible, but as it turned out, nobody actually knew what the rules were in the UK.

So I emailed my NYU colleague Mik Laver, an expert on government formation in parliamentary systems. Mik helpfully alerted me to this draft cabinet procedures manual from the British Cabinet Office, and then further clarified:

You will see (sections 16 and 17) that there will in effect be a Dutch-style informateur system with the Secretary to the Cabinet (ie head of the civil service, Sir Gus O’Donnell - a smart cookie) in the role of informateur.

Crudely, the incumbent PM is first formateur (Section 16). If this loses or would lose a vote of confidence there is freestyle negotiation between party leaders (Section 17):

“Where a range of different administrations could potentially be formed, the expectation is that discussions will take place between political parties on who should form the next Government. The Monarch would not expect to become involved in such discussions, although the political parties and the Cabinet Secretary would have a role in ensuring that the Palace is informed of progress.”

So the answer to my question is apparently no: if Labour and the Lib Dems had a combined majority and wanted to form a coalition government, the Conservatives could not block them from doing so, even if they (the Conservatives) had “won” the election by receiving the largest number of seats in the parliament. Interestingly, doing so would be even easier than any of us thought in this scenario, because as the incumbent party, Labour, would get the first invitation to form a new government, and could simply implement a coalition with the Lib Dems.

Mik also alerted me to the LSE’s Election Blog, which has much, much more expert commentary on the UK election, including a set of posts on the possibilities for a hung parliament. I also like their countdown clock, detailing exactly when the election begins to the day, hour, and minute.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new Pew report on trust in government is out, and, as we would expect amidst an economic downturn, trust is low. One question is what this means for the 2010 election. Pew notes “record anti-incumbent sentiment.” This leads Chris Cilizza to write:

..unrest…is at the foundation of what is shaping up to be a strongly anti-incumbent political year…Those soaring levels of dissatisfaction have to worry incumbents of both parties — although the electoral pain will almost certainly be felt more by Democrats since, well, they have a lot more incumbents in the House and Senate.

This suggests a testable hypothesis: more congressional incumbents lose elections when trust in government declines. Conveniently, Pew put some data on-line. It has the number of House incumbents who lost their elections (1958-2008) as well as a database of trust questions (from which I take the American National Election Study data, which I charted previously, combined with one CBS/NYT poll from October 2006, a year when the ANES did not field its standard election survey). Here is the graph:

Hmm, so much for the anti-incumbent effects of trust. Thanks to a few outliers, the relationship between trust and incumbent losses is actually positive, although it is not statistically significant. Thus, I call this a null relationship.

To be fair, both Pew and Cilizza make a second, more qualified claim: this distrust of government is really worse for Democratic incumbents. Here is the key Pew tabulation:

Here is Cilizza:

More potentially problematic for Democrats is that the Pew poll also shows that the discontent toward the federal government runs far stronger among Republicans and independents and appears to be directly correlated with voter intensity.

But Cilizza’s choice of the word “correlated” is important. We really don’t know, based on this tabulation, whether it’s distrust of the government that driving anticipated voting behavior or something else that is correlated with distrust — namely, dissatisfaction with the economy. The distinction is important. If the economy is the key, the Democrats may not have to fix the government to mitigate their losses in 2010, simply preside over an improving economy. To that end, I note some new Gallup data, which show increasing satisfaction with the direction of the country among both Democrats and independents. Levels of satisfaction are still low in absolute terms, but if these trends continue, the Democratic majorities might yet survive 2010.

Posted by John Sides at 04:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The shortened campaign seems likely to have whatever campaign effects do exist to have a greater potential impact, while the long, drawn-out American campaigns have the advantage of allowing for a greater convergence to the fundamentals.

That’s David Bateman in a comment on Henry’s post on the recent British “presidential debate.”

In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.

That is from a 2000 article by Randolph Stevenson and Lynn Vavreck. Find the article here (pdf).

Posted by John Sides at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So the United Kingdom had its first of three ‘presidential’ debates¹ between the three main party leaders yesterday evening. Gideon Rachman suggests that it gave a polling bump to the Liberal Democrats, whose leader, Nick Clegg did extremely well.² If the debate has significant long term consequences for public opinion, as Rachman argues (perhaps from hope as much as rigorous analysis) then this would diverge from the findings of US political scientists, who argue that the effects of presidential debates on public opinion are moderate at best. Such divergence might be a bit embarrassing for me - I made a strong version of the ‘they don’t matter’ argument to a bunch of politically interested Brits at dinner a couple of weeks ago. But it would be intellectually pretty interesting. If these debates have no very great impact in the US, but do measurably affect politics in the UK, this might provide some interesting comparative insights into the underlying mechanisms at work here.

One plausible story might go as follows. The US has a strong two party system, in which third parties usually only emerge temporarily, to subside, or, in very rare instances, to successfully challenge one of the two major incumbents in a new version of the old game. The UK, which perhaps should be a two party system under Duverger’s Law is in fact a two-and-a-half party system, in which the Liberal Democrats stay in the game - but are not strong enough to challenge either Labour or the Conservatives. This is in large part because the incentives towards strategic voting incline voters in many constituencies, who are ideologically closer to the Liberal Democrats to vote either for the Conservatives or Labour rather than to waste their vote on a no-hoper party. Such expectations can of course become self-fulfilling - but can also be fragile under certain circumstances.

In particular, one might surmise that the “Clegg effect” could have consequences in situations of this kind. The impression that the leader did well in the debates may reassure potential Liberal Democrat voters that others too are likely to vote for the Liberal Democratic candidate, and that their own vote (if they cast it for the Liberal Democrats) will not necessarily be wasted. This can create an alternative set of self-fulfilling expectations under which many more people vote for the Liberal Democrats than otherwise would have done so. Of course, this is all entirely speculative - and even if it were to work out, there would be no very sweeping results (a first past the post system is still going to work against smaller parties without a strong regional base). But it could have real consequences on the margins, and is one plausible way in which ‘presidential’ debates could have greater consequence in non-US systems than in the system that gave birth to them.

¹ This FT article is an excellent primer on how UK politicians came to agree to these debates.

² I once interviewed Clegg, on the exciting topic of telecommunications ‘last mile’ regulation, when he was a lowly MEP. He struck me as extremely sharp, albeit somewhat technocratic (in fairness to him, local loop unbundling is not a topic that lends itself to politically punchy dialogue).

Posted by Henry at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Thomas Ferguson and Jie Chen wrote an article tying the recent Massachusetts Senate election to national political trends:

Passage of the health care reform bill has convinced some analysts that the Massachusetts Senate election might be a fluke. In fact, polls taken after the legislation passed show Republicans widening their lead in fall congressional races. This paper takes a closer look at the Massachusetts earthquake. It reviews popular interpretations of the election, especially those highlighting the influence of the “Tea Party” movement, and examines the role political money played in the outcome. Its main contribution, though, is an analysis of voting patterns by towns. Using spatial regression techniques, it shows that unemployment and housing price declines contributed to the Republican swing, along with a proportionately heavier drop in voting turnout in poorer towns that usually provide many votes to Democratic candidates. All these factors are likely to remain important in the November congressional elections.

Continue reading "1, 2, 3, Many Tea Parties?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Monkey Cage reader emailed me and solicited my thoughts on question he recently was asked:

Someone asked me if I thought Republicans could get political traction by promising to “run the House differently.”

And so we’re back to the question of whether concerns about the political process will drive voting behavior. I’ve already suggested that concerns about process were not crucial to opinion about health care reform. I’ve also argued that the economy, not aspects of political process, drive trust in government and evaluations of incumbent leaders.

So, naturally, I’m skeptical that the GOP would make any headway with this claim. We’ll leave aside the fact that any party who makes such a claim is lying. The main Republican complaints about how the Democrats have run Congress are the same complaints Democrats had when Republicans ran Congress: in short, “you don’t let us do anything.” I wouldn’t expect either party to suddenly embrace bipartisanship.

Thus, it seems pretty unlikely to me that people will vote out incumbent Democrats because a Republican majority will run Congress in a consensual bipartisan matter. It also seems unlikely that people will vote out incumbents of both parties and just replace them with fresh blood. People like their representative and don’t tend to hold him or her responsible for what “Congress” does or doesn’t do.

Fundamentally, I don’t think that people evaluate candidates in some objective fashion based on the “process” they do or don’t promise. I certainly don’t think that Obama’s promise to change government was all that consequential for his election. The number of votes and seats that Republicans win in 2010 will depend much more on the economy, presidential approval, and local dynamics in contested races, than on promises to govern differently.

Posted by John Sides at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Via a correspondent, David Cho of the Washington Post engages in some unlicensed political science.

But by suggesting the deficit may have peaked, administration officials are taking a political gamble. If the favorable number does not hold up in coming months and the budget shortfall surpasses the $1.4 trillion recorded last year, voters in the November midterm elections could punish the Democrats for offering false hope.

It is certainly true that the electorate ‘could’ punish the Democrats for offering false hope on the deficit. But it’s also possible that the electorate ‘could’ punish the Democrats for how much Tim Burton’s latest movie sucked, for increases in shark attacks, or for failing to prevent the massive invasion of green alien space monkeys that’s due to take place this summer. Actually, there is some interesting evidence on the shark attacks. The false hopes, Alice in Wonderland and green space monkey effects? Not so much.

Posted by Henry at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Boselli writes:

Continue reading "Conservatives for Hillary? Part 2" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Transparency Data is a central source for all federal and state campaign contributions made in the last twenty years. Here you can begin your search, find the information you need and then download records of what a candidate has received, what an individual has given, and how much companies and their employees have given.

This looks like a very useful resource. Find it here.

[Hat tip to Kevin Collins.]

Posted by John Sides at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John discusses an argument by Bruce Bartlett that it made sense for conservatives to support Hillary Clinton in 2008, based on the following reasoning:

Surveying the political landscape, I [Barttlett] didn’t think the Republican candidate, whoever it might be, was very likely to win against whoever the Democratic candidate might be. Therefore I concluded that it was in the interest of conservatives to support the more conservative Democratic candidate . . . Hillary Clinton . . . probably would be governing significantly more conservatively than Obama.

I’m surprised to hear this, because I thought the consensus view among conservatives—general voters and elites alike—was that Hillary Clinton was extremely liberal, that Bill was the moderate one with Hillary pulling him to the left. Bartlett argues that Hillary Clinton was more conservative than Barack Obama based on their voting records in the Senate, but I thought the consensus among conservatives was that Hillary Clinton’s core beliefs were far left, and that her Senate votes were just a matter of positioning in preparation for her presidential push.

I also had the impression that support for Hillary Clinton from conservative Republicans in 2008 was coming from three factors:

1. A feeling that Hillary Clinton was a polarizing and unpopular figure and thus would be a weaker candidate for the Democrats in the general election.

3. Once it was clear that Barack Obama was probably going to become the Democratic nominee (and, ultimately, president), it is natural for Obama opponents to put him down by saying nice things about his opposition (Hillary Clinton, in this case).

Bartlett writes:

I [Bartlett] also noticed that some conservatives were saying nice things about Hillary—people like National Review editor Rich Lowry, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, New York Times columnist David Brooks and even right-wing columnist Ann Coulter.

I don’t buy it. I’m pretty sure that, had Hillary Clinton won the nomination and Obama lost, we would’ve heard a lot from conservatives about how the Democrats chose the old-fashioned New Deal-style liberal instead of the modern consensus-builder. I say this not as a slam on Republicans or conservatives—it’s just natural partisanship.

Coulter, for example, said on 1 Feb 2008 that she would campaign for Hillary Clinton if she were running against McCain. I don’t believe this for one minute. This seems much more like positioning to me, consistent with items 1, 2, and 3 above. Similarly, Bill Kristol on 28 April 2008 wrote, “we also see the liberal media failing to give Hillary Clinton the respect she deserves,” and goes on about her ability as a candidate. This doesn’t sound like an endorsement of her conservatism; it sounds much more like a desire for the primary election battle to continue.

Another data point from Bartlett:

A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll last October asked people if Hillary had won the election would she be doing a better or worse job than Obama. Among Republicans, 34% said [Hillary would be better], while only 22% of Democrats did.

In this poll, 34% of Republicans thought Hillary would be doing a better job than Barack, 29% thought worse, 20% thought same, and 23% said they didn’t know. (The last is what my response would be, incidentally.) I think these survey results reflect anti-Obama feeling more than anything else, though. Again, I’d bet that if Hillary Clinton were president, similar numbers of Republicans would be saying that Obama would be doing a better job.

I’m not questioning Bartlett’s sincerity here, just suggesting that his view of Hillary Clinton as being (relatively) conservative might not be so much of a consensus as he might think.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bruce Bartlett has a column at Forbes that discusses how to apply the theory of the second best to voting. He discusses his calculations from 2008:

Surveying the political landscape, I didn’t think the Republican candidate, whoever it might be, was very likely to win against whoever the Democratic candidate might be. Therefore I concluded that it was in the interest of conservatives to support the more conservative Democratic candidate so that candidate would be more likely to get the nomination and become president than the more liberal one.

That led him to favor Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. He thinks he made the right choice:

think the evidence suggests that Hillary Clinton could have won the Democratic nomination with just a little bit more support, and probably would be governing significantly more conservatively than Obama. For one thing, given her disastrous experience with health care reform in 1993-1994, it’s reasonable to assume that she would have stayed away from that issue at all costs.

I’m not so sure. It’s a tough counterfactual on how Clinton might have governed viz. Obama. Would she have stayed away from health care? I doubt it. It was an important issue in her campaign, and politicians tend to follow up on campaign promises. Indeed, she was already talking about health care in 2004. I also think it’s pretty certain she would have pursued a stimulus package similar to what Obama got. That strategy just seems like mainstream economics on the Democratic side of the aisle. Perhaps the open question is one of priority. Would she have pursued health care as soon as Obama or would she have subordinated it to other issues?

After reading Bartlett’s piece, I searched in the political science journals on JSTOR but turned up no applications of the theory of the second best to voting behavior. If anyone knows of any research, please leave a comment. It seems like there could be some interesting and unexplored applications of the theory here.

Posted by John Sides at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Political scientist Michael Franz followed up on my previous post to see whether the prediction markets moved much after various events during the Democratic primaries. Below is his graph.

Most of the movement is due to actual primary results. You can see the effects of Iowa, NH, SC, Super Tuesday, Ohio/Texas, and NC/Indiana.

The other events — Wright, the “bitter” comment, the debate, Wright II — appear to have had very small effects at best. That seems significant given that bettors in these markets are much more attentive to news about politics than is the average voter. If these people aren’t reacting, then there simply isn’t much to react to.

Thanks again to Michael!

Posted by John Sides at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Political scientist Michael Franz followed up on my previous post to see whether the prediction markets moved much after various events during the Democratic primaries. Below is his graph.

Most of the movement is due to actual primary results. You can see the effects of Iowa, NH, SC, Super Tuesday, Ohio/Texas, and NC/Indiana.

The other events — Wright, the “bitter” comment, the debate, Wright II — appear to have had very small effects at best. That seems significant given that bettors in these markets are much more attentive to news about politics than is the average voter. If these people aren’t reacting, then there simply isn’t much to react to.

Thanks again to Michael!

Posted by John Sides at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following on my earlier post, I want to examine three more moments in the campaign that Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson see as significant. Indeed, I think many observers thought these moments “mattered.”

The first is Obama’s “bitter voters who cling to guns” comment. of April 6. Axelrod tells Balz and Johnson:

It was mildly damaging. But it came in the same period as the Reverend Wright stuff, which I think was much more damaging. At the end of the day…I think he fought his way through it and they overplayed it.

The second is the April 16th debate between Obama and Hillary, when Obama was asked about not wearing the flag pin, “bittergate,” Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayers.

The moderators [Gibson and Stephanopolous] drew considerable criticism for their questions, especially from Obama’s network of supporters around the country. But Obama suffered most from his performance…Given the state’s demographics and the solid working-class voters Clinton continued to attract, Obama was almost destined to lose Pennsylvania. But after the Wright controversy and the damage from his ‘bitter’ comments, the debate slowed his movement and turned the primary wholly in Clinton’s favor. (p. 209)

The third is Jeremiah Wright’s interview with Bill Moyers on April 25 and his National Press Club speech on April 28:

After Wright’s reappearance, Obama’s numbers plummeted in Indiana. (p. 211)

Here is a graph of the national primary polls from 2008. I have put vertical lines for a slew of events, including the major state primaries and Super Tuesday, the first Wright hullabaloo, the “bitter” comment, and the debate. There are two lines denoting the Wright’s two media appearances in late April.

The graph shows that Obama’s standing shot up after the earliest primaries, particularly after South Carolina (although the smoothed trendline somewhat obscures the apparent abruptness of the trend at this point). By mid-February, a sort of stasis emerged. This looks a lot like what Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck describe in the paper I discussed earlier: lots of momentum (Big Mo) replaced by little momentum (Slow Mo).

This stasis is important. Simply put, there are no meaningful changes in the candidates’ standings after about March 1. According to the smoothed trendlines, Obama’s standing ranges between 46% and 50%. Clinton’s ranges between 42% and 45%.

Obama is not “damaged” by the Jeremiah Wright scandal. By his comments about “bitter voters.” By the debate. By Wright’s reemergence. I said this before when Wright and “bitter voters” hit the news, but now let me shout it: ALL OF THESE EVENTS BASICALLY HAD NO IMPACT ON VOTERS NATIONWIDE.

The state-level polls that Balz and Johnson refer to tell a similar story, or non-story. Here is Pennsylvania, where Obama’s performance in the debate “slowed his movement”:

One problem is that Obama wasn’t “moving” before the debate. In the two weeks before the debate, there were 20 polls by 13 different pollsters. Those polls put Obama’s vote share between 37 and 45%. The trendline doesn’t move. It sits right at 41%. After the debate, you can see a little 1% downturn in Obama’s standing and a 2% upturn in Clinton’s. Perhaps that’s enough to persuade Balz and Johnson that the debate mattered. But if it mattered, the debate “turned” very little.

Finally, here are the Indiana polls. This graph begins later because there was only one poll before the end of March.

Because some points lie on top of each other, you cannot quite tell that there are three polls just before Wright’s April 25 interview and then three in between the interview and his speech on April 28. So the data is a little thicker than it appears. The question is whether Obama’s standing “plummeted” after Wright’s “reappearance.”

The trendline doesn’t conform to this interpretation. After Wright’s interview, Obama’s “plummet” was equal to about 2 percentage points. Clinton’s standing increases by this same amount. That doesn’t strike me as altogether momentous. Moreover, soon after Wright’s speech, Obama gained back what he had lost over the subsequent two weeks. So ultimately, it’s not clear that Wright’s “reappearance” had any systematic effect. At best there were only small and temporary consequences.

We are left, then, with a picture of the 2008 Democratic primary in which the vast majority of ink was spilled about events that mattered little, if at all.

[Many thanks to Chris Mitchell for putting together the polling data used in this and the previous post.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A while back, I noted some of the many interesting tidbits in Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson’s book on the 2008 election, The Battle for America. Now it’s time to deal with its problems.

It’s a little unfair to pick on this book in particular. The book’s main problem is endemic in much journalism about political campaigns: a belief that campaigns matter, but an unwillingness to look hard for actual evidence. I am going to examine five events, all of which Balz and Johnson (and, in one case, David Axelrod) believe were important. This posts examines the first two.

First, at the Oct. 30, 2007, debate among the Democratic, candidates Hillary Clinton’s answer to the question about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Balz and Johnson write:

Hillary Clinton’s stumble over immigration proved to be highly damaging to her campaign. (p. 99)

See also Balz’s blog post at the time.

The second is Obama’s Nov.10, 2007, speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa:

The next morning, David Yepsen, the most influential political columnist in the state,wrote, ‘Should he come from behind to win the Iowa caucuses, Sunday’s dinner will be remembered as one of the turning points in his campaign here.’ Obama’s speech created an immediate surge of energy for his campaign, and a growing sense that caucus night in Iowa could become a climactic showdown.” (p.120)

The first graph below is from all national pre-primary polls. The second is from all Iowa pre-primary polls — where Obama’s speech might be expected to matter more. The graphs are pretty self-explanatory. The key is the vertical lines demarcating the events.

In the national polls, it sure looks like something happened after these two events: Clinton’s poll numbers dropped and Obama’s increased. But were these events responsible? Probably not. For one, the timing wasn’t really right. Clinton’s “gaffe” was on October 30. Her standing in the polls, according to the smoothed trendline, was 44%. A week later, it was…44%. Two weeks later it was…44%. Here are some apples-to-apples comparisons from before and after. Zogby, October 26: 38% for Clinton; November 16: 38%. Rasmussen was in the field during the debate. They put Clinton at 42%. A week later, they had her at…42%. Where is the “damage to her campaign”?

Let’s consider Obama’s speech in light of the graph above and this one with the Iowa polls:

In the graph of the national polls, Obama’s numbers trend upward in the weeks after the speech, but it’s very difficult to peg that to the speech itself. According to the trendline, Obama was at 23% on the day of the speech and at 24% two weeks later. The same apples-to-apples comparisons don’t suggest much of anything. The Economist/YouGov did 4 polls in November, one before the speech and three after. In these polls, Obama’s numbers were 24, 23, 18, 25. No evidence of any “speech bump” there.

But it’s Iowa where the speech should matter most. There, the evidence is even more equivocal. Obama’s numbers were improving in Iowa in a pretty linear fashion throughout 2007. After the speech, they improved at a slightly faster rate, but it was still a pretty slow increase over a long period of time. His numbers on the eve of the Iowa caucus are only 3 points higher than his numbers right before the speech. Some specific polls tell a similar story: Zogby showed no Obama bounce between its early and late November polls (actually, a 1 point decrease). Strategic Vision was in the field right around the speech and then two weeks later. They showed a 2-point increase, well within the margin of error. In short, there appears to be no “turning point” here.

Both the national polls and Iowa polls found Obama gaining ground as 2007 came to a close. But he was doing so gradually, not in sudden leaps after any barnburner speeches. Similarly, Clinton’s declining standing in the national polls did not begin until well after her purported stumble. And even if you think I’m wrong, and these events somehow mattered, the candidate’s poll numbers changed by only a few percentage points — changes that seem much smaller than phrases like “highly damaging” and “immediate surge” would suggest. Whatever effect these events had was much larger in the minds of journalists than the minds of voters.

Posted by John Sides at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

How did people arrive at a decision during the Democratic primary? And what predicted their movement to or away from Obama as the primary went on? In particular, what role did race play?

Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck have a forthcoming paper that speaks to these questions. I think Lynn for kindly sharing with me ahead of publication. Jackman and Vavreck frame their central question thusly:

Are there limits to the momentum that a black candidate can build if he is running against a white opponent? In other words, does “Big Mo” become “Slow Mo” for a black candidate as attitudes about race prevent voters with high levels of racial animus from joining the bandwagon even in a Democratic primary?

To answer this question, they draw on the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, which interviewed the same group of voters four times over the course of the presidential primaries: December 2007, January 2008, March 2008, and the, post-primary, in September 2008. The analysis is rich and detailed. Let me highlight several findings.

First, at the outset of the primary, a measure of racial prejudice — known in the political science literature as racial resentment — is strongly associated with preferences. The graph above shows how strongly. Whites who scored high on this scale — the “racially resentful” — were much more likely to support Hillary Clinton or to have no preference, and much less likely to support Obama:

Jackman and Vavreck write:

This point cannot be made too subtly: white Americans voting in the Democratic nominating contests were driven to choice in these elections in large part by their general attitudes toward race in America.

Second, Obama’s Big Mo did indeed become a Slow Mo. He gained a great deal of support from January to March. This was due to three processes:

Clinton loses support to Obama over time; he holds his support better than she does; and people who are forced to make a second (or third) choice are more likely to choose Obama over Clinton.

But after March, his momentum slows considerably:

…among respondents voting in the Democratic primaries held after mid-March, Obama does not gain vote share. Moreover, among this set of voters, Obama loses as much support to Clinton as she loses to him.

Third, and most importantly, attitudes toward race slowed Obama’s momentum. In particular, Clinton’s infamous remark in May — “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again” — helped “racialize” her candidacy:

We suspect that Clinton’s focus on Obama’s dwindling support among hard-working, white Americans tells much of the story. That is, as Obama’s chances of becoming the nominee increase, the contest becomes more racialized and two things occur, racial liberals move toward him and racial conservatives move away from Obama.

They then analyze why people moved to Obama or away from Obama. Not surprisingly, racial identity mattered: among those who initially preferred Obama, blacks were less likely than whites to move away and support another candidate. Sex also matters: women who initially support some other candidate are more likely than men to end up supporting Clinton; sex does not affect movement from Clinton to Obama.

Surprisingly, family income, education, and a general measure of liberal-conservative ideology have little impact. As much as commentators wanted the primary to be about social class — Obama’s working class problem, etc. — the data just don’t bear out that interpretation.

What does matter is racial resentment:

The combination of Obama’s losses in the March-September period and the increased relevance of attitudes about race for those who are initially unsure who to support highlight the slowing of Obama’s momentum in this period. Among those initially supporting Obama, but voting after March 21st, even those with average levels of racial resentment are much less likely (roughly 20 points) to stay with Obama than are otherwise similar respondents who voted before the March wave. The same is true for those with the highest levels of racial animus who were unsure which candidate they preferred in December; these voters are roughly 20 points less likely to choose Obama if they vote after March 21st than if they vote before this date. Obama’s momentum stalled | and attitudes about race explain a good bit of the slowdown.

Giving the spacing of the panel waves, it is difficult to attribute significance to any particular moment in the campaign, such as Clinton’s remark about hard-working white voters. But the pattern of results signals that racial prejudice was important from the beginning and continued to be so throughout the campaign. Jackman and Vavreck conclude:

By far, the strongest predictor of transitions to and away from Obama are attitudes about race. Increasing levels of racial antipathy lead to lower rates of transition to Obama, across all waves of the nominating process for voters and irrespective of a respondents’ initial preference. Not until late in the process do Obama voters switch away from his candidacy with increasing levels of racial resentment, thus slowing his momentum.

Find the paper here.

Posted by John Sides at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This week I will have several posts discussing new research on the 2008 election — all using the “Why Obama Won” heading. While the attention of pundits and journalists has turned elsewhere, for obvious reasons, many questions about the 2008 election remain unanswered. Political science research helps to answer these questions and revise or update existing narratives of the campaign.

Here’s one piece of conventional wisdom: Obama won by bringing lots of new voters to the polls. You can see this notion reflected in concerns that these voters won’t show up in 2010, thereby hurting the Democrats’s chances. And while this notion may be true, it’s far from the full story.

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s campaign brought many new voters to the polls. Were these new voters necessary for Obama’s victory? In this study, I find that they were not.The basis of this finding is an examination of decisions made by people who voted for George W. Bush in 2004. I show that Bush voters’ decisions not to vote or to support Obama were a sufficient condition for Obama’s victory.

That is from soon-to-be published research by Arthur Lupia, who kindly shared it with me ahead of time. Lupia arrives at this conclusion via analysis of vote returns in key states and also the 2008 National Election Study. One piece of data: in the NES, nearly 25% of respondents who voted for Bush in 2004 did not vote for McCain in 2008. About 15% voted for Obama. About 7% did not vote. The remainder voted for another candidate. These figures are based on respondents’ self-reports, which are potentially fallible, but still, the combination of these data and others suggest that turncoats were numerous enough to matter.

Simply put, Obama probably didn’t need new voters to win the election, even though they clearly added to his victory margin. Here is Lupia’s conclusion:

Barack Obama’s success in bringing millions of new voters to the polls was an impressive achievement. But these new voters were not a necessary condition for his victory. When considering whether or not to support John McCain in 2008, a number of Bush voters decided, “No We Can’t.” The number of 2004 Bush voters who decided to stay at home, or to support a Democrat, in 2008 did not grab the same kinds of headlines as new voter stories, but they were a sufficient condition for Obama’s Electoral College victory. Hence, future presidential hopefuls’ attempts to draw lessons from the 2008 campaign should focus not only on how the Obama campaign got so many new people to the polls, but also on why so many people who voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 2004 chose to do something different in 2008. If 2008’s new voters are less energized in 2012, the story of that election may turn on whether voters who once supported a Republican can be convinced to do so again.

Find Lupia’s piece here.

Posted by John Sides at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Freakonomics blog:

In the U.K., however, Conservative leader David Cameron — the likely winner, per the prediction markets, in the yet-to-be called election — has just unleashed a doozy: his wife Samantha is expecting the couple’s fourth child. Their first-born, Ivan, recently died at age 6 from a rare neurological condition. It is hard to imagine that a pregnant wife won’t help Cameron a bit more.

“It’s hard to imagine”? Not that hard. I can well imagine that voters in Britain (as in the U.S.) will choose their candidates based on their records, their party positions, and so forth. Also I’ve heard that the economy can be a factor. I’m not saying Freakonomics is wrong, I’ve just never heard of the pregnant-wife-wins-votes theory before. The hidden side of everything, indeed.

That said, I’m not current on the political science literature, so maybe there’s something I’m missing here. Perhaps our readers could educate me on this one?

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I recently read A Magnificent Catastrophe, Edward Larson’s account of the 1800 election. I’m not a historian and so lack the qualifications to write a real review. But let me note some good stuff in the book. It is a history that political scientists can certainly love.

Continue reading "Tasty Bits from the 1800 Election" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Eric McGhee, the author of the PPIC report I discussed in my previous post, sends along the following:

As the author of the Public Policy Institute of California’s report on primary reform mentioned in John’s and Andrew’s posts, I thought I would chime in with some thoughts of my own in light of my research.

Andrew argues that “even a few crossover legislators of each party and a few centrist candidates running and winning election might make a big difference in how the legislature operates.” I think this is an excellent point, and one that I hear often in the context of California. The most important vote in the California legislature is the budget, and observers often argue that primary reform will be successful if it can produce enough moderates to ease the budget negotiations.

Nonetheless, there are reasons to be skeptical. First, under California’s last experiment with primary reform—the “blanket” primary—the budget was about as late as ever, suggesting the negotiations were no easier. Moreover, the biggest effects of the blanket were for Democrats in the State Assembly, but the 2/3 threshold for passing the budget makes Republicans the critical votes. If they don’t become more moderate in sufficient numbers and to a sufficient degree, there will continue to be a struggle every year.

A similar point can be made about health care reform in the U.S. Congress. There were already quite a few cross-party moderates on that bill—the 34 Democrats who voted “no”! If the Democratic leadership wanted an easier vote, the surest path would have been more partisanship, not more moderation.

Andrew’s larger point, however, still stands. Politics is often about big, important events. If a legislator behaves like a hardened partisan on every bill, but then crosses party lines to support (or oppose) health care reform, do we care about the other bills? How much more meaningful is the one vote on health care, as opposed to the dozens of snoozers? I don’t think that we, as a discipline, have good answers to those questions.

My own feeling is that voters would expect primary reform to produce more than accommodation on a handful of bills, even if the bills are important ones. They want a general change in the tone of politics, and that is best measured by broader patterns of behavior. Anything less and they will feel disappointed. I might be suffering from Henry’s “me, the people” disease on this point, but I’ll leave it to others to decide for themselves.

Posted by John Sides at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I saw this op-ed by Phil Kiesling the other day (recommending nonpartisan primary elections as a way of reducing polarization in Congress), I had several thoughts.

John Sides offers a more thorough, research-based discussion of the effects of open primaries, which I’ll discuss below. But first my immediate reactions to Kiesling’s op-ed:

Continue reading "Nonpartisan primaries as a solution to congressional polarization?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Want to get serious about reducing the toxic levels of hyper-partisanship and legislative dysfunction now gripping American politics? Here’s a direct, simple fix: abolish party primary elections.

So says Phil Keisling in the New York Times. A recent USA Today story examines the topic as well. Unfortunately, it waits until the very end to cite the, oh, evidence about the effect of primaries on polarization:

Not everyone agrees that changing the primary system will draw voters and centrist candidates. A study by the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California concludes that the proposed new primary system would only have “a noticeable but modest effect.”

Here (pdf) is the PPIC study, authored by Eric McGhee. (NB: Eric is a friend from graduate school.) I want to delve into its conclusions, which suggest very limited effects indeed. These are particularly evident in the technical appendix (pdf) that accompanies the report.

Basically, Eric looks at the effect of primary rules on polarization in various contexts, leveraging variation across states to look at polarization in the US House and variation across time within states (e.g., when the CA blanket primary was in place for two election cycles) to look at polarization in state legislatures or House delegations. When you count up all the different models — across these different contexts, with different measures of ideological preferences and polarization, with different measures of primaries — there are 40 coefficients that indicate the effect of primary type on preferences. (My count from Tables 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, and 9 of the appendix.) How many of those coefficients are statistically significant?

Eight.

In other words, there is really no robust direct effect of primaries on polarization at all. Moreover, when those effects emerge, they are not very large. Consider the effects of primary type on moderation using one measure of ideology in the US House:

At best, these forms of primaries might make Democrats and Republicans a few points more moderate, but that is a far, far cry from “reducing toxic levels of dysfunction.” Small wonder, then, that the appendix concludes:

This study has examined the available roll-call evidence to determine the effect that open primaries have on representation. The results suggest that most of these systems have little effect on moderation.

To be sure, in the report itself, Eric is properly cautious about the effects of California’s proposed “top-two primary,” particularly over the long term. But the report still concludes that any effect is likely to be “modest.”

I’ll go further and define “modest” as: (1) not big enough to do anything near what the proponents of primary reform claim, and (2) not big enough to affect the day-to-day dynamics of policymaking in state and national legislatures.

In short, don’t expect primary reform to spawn a magic new race of centrist representatives.

Posted by John Sides at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Next month, the Sudan plans to hold elections as agreed to in a comprehensive peace agreement signed by the main parties in the various conflicts that have devastated the country. These are the country’s first competitive elections in a quarter-century. To say that there are issues with the elections would be an understatement. To start with, Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. Yet, he and his party are running in the election as candidates. To complicate matters further, major international organizations (including the UN) have backed the election and are sending monitors, which according to ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is like “monitoring a Hitler election,” not really helping his image as an overzealous prosecutor (regardless of what one may think of the analogy, it is not really his job to comment on this, although it is perhaps understandable from an emotional perspective given the criticisms he has faced recently). In the mean time, Bashir has done little to undermine Ocampo’s words. He said that the Sudanese government will respond to critical foreign election observers by cutting off their fingers and putting them under our shoes.

All of this has led NGOs like Save Darfur to appeal to U.S. President Obama not to recognize the elections as their only purpose is to legitimize the rule of a war criminal. Others, like Alex de Waal, are more optimistic and believe that the peace process and the elections are going quite well given the extraordinary circumstances. It is especially important that multiple parties are competing with varying platforms (see here if you want to take an on-line quiz to determine who you would vote for). I don’t know enough about the Sudan to evaluate such competing claims. For much more, I refer to the appropriately titled blog Making Sense of Sudan.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you may have heard, the Democratic Congress just passed a big health care bill on a close-to-party-line vote, the Democratic President is about to sign it, and—oh yeah—the Democrats are expected to get slaughtered in the upcoming November elections.

But, as the timing of the above links reveals—the 2010 election prediction was made in September, 2009—it would be a mistake, when November 2010 rolls around, to attribute a Republican sweep to the events of March, 2010. During all those months from September through Feburary, a period when passage of the heath care bill was far from certain, the Republicans maintained their lead in the polls and thus their anticipated midterm election gains.

And I think that, when November rolls around, the pundits will realize this. Sure, one or two might say something about how the voters were punishing Obama and the Democrats for going too far in March, but then the more clueful pundits will get on their case and say: “No! Remember, the Republicans were expected to do well in the midterms, with authoritative predictions being made as early as September, 2009.”

One thing that interests me here is the role of the political science profession in this story. By laying out our 2010 predictions early, we short-circuited what could otherwise have been a popular narrative about the election. This is something I’ve been thinking about for over 20 years—ever since Michael Dukakis’s election loss was attributed (inappropriately, according to our research) to campaign strategies rather than to general economic and political conditions.

It feels good for once to be ahead of the story. And I think we as quantitative researchers should be proud of this, whether we’re happy or sad about the new health bill, and whether we’re happy or sad about the possibility of a Republican takeover in November.

Quantitative research is not just about making predictions; it’s also about changing the storyline.

Continue reading "Good timing: The role of quantitative political science and political reporting in shaping perceptions" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

By now, anyone who follows politics closely knows that yesterday the House finally passed health care reform. I’ll leave it to health care professionals and economists to explain the economic implications of the bill, but I want to take a stab here at the political implications of the bill. As readers of this blog know, I have been skeptical that passing health care reform would be any worse for the political fortunes of the Democratic Party in 2010 than not passing health care reform at this point (see here and here). Thus the following two pieces in the blogosphere caught my attention yesterday. The first was arguably the oddest headline I came across, which I found on Politico:

House Republicans Begin Victory Lap

Odd because this was not exactly what one expects to see after a party suffers a major defeat on a landmark piece of legislation. But of course the piece was about the now familiar story that health care reform would lead to huge Republican victories in the fall. Thus it was with great interest that I read the following piece from conservative blogger David Frum entitled Waterloo:

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s. It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

Interestingly, Frum seemed to be picking up on exactly what we at the Monkey Cage have been arguing (see here, here and here): the midterm elections in 2010 are likely above all else to be a function of the state of the economy, which, as Frum notes, may actually be looking better by November.

They will also, as John has noted, be a function of President Obama’s approval ratings, which have held relatively steady at around 50% for months, despite all the supposed angst in the country since then over health care reform. And, if President Clinton is correct, they may be going up now that health care reform has passed.

Meanwhile, let me take one last crack at interpreting the latest polls on support for health care reform. According to the most recent Gallup poll, as of early March, 48% of Americans wanted their representative in Congress to oppose the health care reform plan, 45% wanted their representative to support it, and 7% didn’t know their opinion. (That’s worth noting again: as of early March, opposition to health care reform was running at 3% higher than support, or within the margin of error of the poll. So this was hardly a case where one party spoke for the people and another did not.) Let me posit one assumption: some fraction of that 48% that opposed the plan did so because they favored including either a public option or a single-payer system: in other words, they wanted reform to move health care policy further to the left than it actually did. I don’t know (does anyone?) what proportion of that 48% this is, but it surely is not 0%. Let’s call this faction the “dissatisfied left”. So with that in mind, let’s forget the economy, incumbency effects, etc. and pretend for a moment that the 2010 elections will be contested purely as a retrospective vote on health care reform:

- Best case scenario for Republicans in 2010 : the dissatisfied left stays home (they are obviously not going to vote for Republicans), the remaining opponents of health care line up solidly behind Republicans, and a non-trivial proportion of these health care opponents turn out to be people who previously voted Democrat (or stayed home) and are disproportionately concentrated in swing districts in House races.

- Worst case scenario for the Republicans in 2010: the dissatisfied left is energized by fact that Obama actually managed to pass a major piece of social legislation and/or the Republican response to the health care debate, turns out to be a non-trivial proportion of the 48% the oppose health care, and the remaining opponents of health care are simply Republicans who never voted for a Democrat in the past or never would have under any scenario in the future, and tend to be over-represented in heavily Republican districts.

Again, personally I think most of what we know about midterm elections in the US suggests that the elections will not purely be a retrospective vote on a policy issue and instead will be a function of economic conditions and presidential approval, but even so, it is interesting to consider which of these scenarios is more likely to unfold.

Let the political implications of health care reform debate begin!

[Hat tip to Ben Smith at Politico for the Clinton reference.]

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Update: Professor Stanley Feldman writes in with the following:

If you look at the Ipsos/McClatchy survey from Feb 26-28 posted here, you can see that 37% of the respondents who said they opposed the Democrats’ health care reform proposal said they did so because it did not go far enough. 54% said they were opposed because it goes too far. In other words, 25% of the sample supported the Republican position while 17% wanted even greater reform (in addition to the 41% who supported the plan).

I must admit, the proportion of those opposing healthcare that are members of the “dissatisfied left” is even higher than I expected. So if we go back to the original game and pretend that the 2010 elections will be decided wholely by the health care vote, the Republicans can count on the support of the solid 25% of the population that opposed health care reform because it went too far (ie., the Republican position). Anyone want to venture a guess at for whom that 25% of the population voted in the previous election???

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

These are the occupations on the opposite extremes of the liberal-conservative spectrum based on their campaign contributions according to research by Adam Bonica. As Andy put it: the conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong, even after using sophisticated statistical methods and hard data. See here for more on what campaign contributions can tell us about the ideology of PACs and candidates.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 06:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

John Judis says yes:

[A] president’s political acumen—his ability to put the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments—can mitigate the effects of rising unemployment. That’s what Ronald Reagan and the Republicans achieved in the 1982 midterm elections…

Using economic models, some political scientists predicted that Democrats would pick up as many as 50 House seats. The Democrats also hoped to win back the Senate, which they had lost in 1980. But when the votes were tallied, the Republicans lost 26 House seats and kept their 54 seats in the Senate.

And Brendan Nyhan plows this argument under. The problems are many. Judis picks one forecasting model but ignores others that got the seat loss almost correct. And, even troublesome for Judis’s thesis, Reagan’s approval actually declined during 1982 — precisely the time when he was “putting the best light on his and his party’s accomplishments.”

The lesson has nothing to do with Reagan per se. It’s simply that presidents are far less powerful as communicators than Judis and others seem to believe.

Posted by John Sides at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The anti-immigrant Front National did much better than pollsters expected in recent French regional elections. Arthur Goldhammer reports that the French newspaper Le Monde suggests that this may be due to a Bradley effect: the idea that voters are reluctant to admit that they are voting against a popular black candidate or (by extension) for a party widely deemed to be racist. The Monkey Cage featured a lot of discussion on this issue during the 2008 Presidential election. The general consensus appeared to be that there was no evidence for a Bradley effect during the 2008 election and that the effect in general had been waning in recent years. My colleague Dan Hopkins concluded (non-gated, gated) in his brilliant study into the Bradley (or Wilder) effect that it is “the product of racial attitudes in specific political contexts, not a more general response to under-represented groups.” It seems like France represents another potential political context to study this effect. Indeed if, and I think Dan is right, political context conditions attitudes on racial and ethnic issues, then this should be a very fruitful area for comparative research.

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Posted by Erik Voeten at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I know all of you have been eagerly awaiting updates about the Dutch cabinet crisis I blogged about earlier. Well, here are some interesting recent developments. First, the most recent polls show that the PvdA (the red line in the graph below) continues to gain from resisting troop renewals in Afghanistan and forcing the cabinet crisis. The party has won nearly 10 seats in the pollls since the crisis.

Second, and more puzzling, two of the politicians who stood to gain most from these developments have decided in the last two days that they need to spend more time with their families (see also here). PvdA leader Wouter Bos, who was much beleaguered before the crisis but came out of it the undisputable leader of his party, made the announcement today. This follows a similar announcement by Camiel Eurlings, who was seen as the crown prince for current prime minister Balkenende.

Third, the recent polls and local election results imply that the prospect of Geert Wilders’ PVV becoming the largest party is a realistic one. In the Netherlands, the largest party almost always delivers the prime-minister. Speculation on what this would mean will have to wait until another blog post. In the mean time, go read why Daniel Pipes is enthusiastic about it and even calls him “the most important European alive today” while Ian Buruma is a little less impressed with Wilders.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to the wonders of podcasting, I can now listen to NPR’s Marketplace while jogging practically anywhere in the world. Because of this, I had the opportunity over the weekend to hear Megan McCartle claim on Friday’s Marketplace that - and I’m paraphrasing here a bit - if the Democrats went ahead and passed healthcare without Republican support, it would cost them the House and the Senate this November. Apparently, McCartle is not the only one to hold this viewpoint, as today’s Washington Post features a quote from Rep. Cantor essentially making the same point; the Post quoted him as saing that “if Democrats push the bill through on party lines, they will ‘lose their majority in Congress in November’”.

Really? Let’s parse this logic for a second here. Implicit in these claims seems to be the following two beliefs. First, if the Democrats don’t push through healthcare reform on party lines, they will hold on to their majorities in the House and the Senate. Second, if they do push healthcare through and susequently lose their majorities, it will be because of the Healthcare bill.

John has already addressed the first of these points in his prior posts on how the midterm elections will most likely largely be a function of the state of the economy (see here and here), so I’m going to set aside the question of how the Democrats would do in the 2010 midterms if they had never even brought up healthcare (answer: if unemployment is still at 10%, lousy).

Instead, I want to focus on the second question: are the Democrats somehow better off politically if they fail to pass a healthcare bill? Here are the numbers according to the most recent Gallup Poll. If the two parties can not reach an agreement, then 42% of Americans favor passing the Democratic plan, and 49% oppose it. Note that that 49% could include those who want a public option, a single payer plan, etc. But either way, 42% support the plan, 49% oppose it. If the question wording is changed to include the use of reconciliation, then support drops to 39% and opposition goes up to 52%.

So if the bill is passed, it will not have the support of the majority of the country. At the same time, if healthcare fails, then a significant portion of Obama’s first year(s) in office will have been wasted on a failed major policy agenda and the Democrats will be portrayed as divided, incompetent, etc. Which would you rather take into the midterm elections? The President/Congress that succeeded where Clinton, Truman, etc. had failed in the past by passing healthcare reform - but without the support of a majority of the population - or divided, incompetent, failure? Now I’m not saying that the fate of this bill will significantly impact who controls the House or Senate after the 2010 elections one way or another, but it seems to me that if it did, then not passing your most meaningful domestic policy objective would ultimately be more damaging to your political prospects then passing it with the support of only 40% of the country.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

During the 2008 presidential election we submitted letters to the editor at 100 major U.S. newspapers as part of a field experiment to test whether interest in the letter depended on which candidate the letter supported. We find, contrary to what charges of a liberal media bias would suggest, that newspapers expressed more interest in pro-McCain letters than pro-Obama letters. Further, we find that papers were most likely to be interested in letters supporting the candidate they did not endorse, a result that is consistent with the idea that editors seem to be using their gate keeping powers to allow dissenting opinions to be heard.

That is from a newly published paper by Daniel Butler and Emily Schofield. An ungated version is here.

Posted by John Sides at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The forecast is Alan Abramowitz’s, discussed here. A couple of tidbits:

Contrary to many other analyses, however, the results of the forecasting model indicate that the main factors contributing to likely Republican gains in November are structural and do not reflect an especially negative political environment for Democrats. The current political environment only appears unfavorable for Democrats compared with the extraordinarily favorable environment that the Party enjoyed in both 2006 and 2008…

…Even under what might be considered a best-case scenario for Democrats, if President Obama’s net approval rating were to improve from a +5 to a +20, and Democrats were to regain a 10 point lead on the generic ballot, Democrats would still be expected to lose about 20 seats in the House.

Posted by John Sides at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Salon is starting a new feature called The Numerologist which is going to feature political scientists writing about politics using analysis that involves at least some reference to numbers or figures; I believe most posts will involve a figure or a graph. They asked me to write the first one - I think John is up on Wednesday - which featured the graph above. It was accompanied by short a blog post reiterating the point made by the chart that – at least for now – there are actually more Republicans than Democrats currently vacating seats in both the House and the Senate, a situation that was definitively not the case in 1994. Now this doesn’t mean that the Democrats won’t get hammered anyway due to the state of the economy or that Republicans aren’t retiring from safer seats than Democrats, but it is worth keeping the basic numbers in mind, something that seems to get lost in the media’s response every time another Democrat announces a retirement. For more, see the post at Salon.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few months ago, I wrote that, based on the so-called generic ballot (surveys that as, “If the elections for Congress were being held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your Congressional district?”) and some research by Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien, the Republican Party looked to be in good shape in 2010.

Recently, Harry Joe (who took a statistics course from Joe Bafumi at Dartmouth!) crunched the early poll numbers, does the adjustment based on the Bafumi/Erikson/Wlezien regression, and comes up with a forecast that the Republicans will win by 8 percentage points (that’s 54%-46%); that is, 1994 all over again, but this time without the benefit (yet) of any Newt Gingrich-like figure (although I’m sure there will be many proto-Gingriches around to claim the credit if this all happens). Here’s Harry Joe’s plot:

Continue reading "The Democrats are gonna get hammered" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For those who haven’t tired of this subject, Mark Blumenthal of Pollster has a nice column at the National Journal. He was kind enough to cite my post on the myths about independent voters. See also this piece by Alan Abramowitz, which Mark notes and I (somewhat inexcusably) had not seen before.

Mark’s column updates my chart of Obama approval and also discusses the implications of “independent leaners” for the Tea Party.

Posted by John Sides at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Forrest Maltzman beautifully noted in his eulogy, Lee didn’t like to leave things undone. One exception is the only paper he and I wrote back in 2004, which means quite rightly that the blame must fall on me.

Our paper analyzed the extent to which daily perceptions of campaign negativity (measured in the Annenberg survey) tracked actual negative attacks by the Bush and Gore campaigns in the 2000 elections. Our answer: not at all. Instead we found that perceptions stayed remarkably consistent throughout the campaign with one major exception: on October 11 (the day of the second debate) a sudden but lasting change occurred (see the graph below). Up until then, the Bush campaign was thought to be more negative than the Gore campaign by about ten percentage points. Yet, Bush more than neutralized that difference in one day.

What happened? It wasn’t an unusually negative attack by Gore nor was it Gore’s performance in the second debate. Almost all interviews were held before the debate actually took place and the result holds when we remove the other survey respondents from the analysis. Instead, we suggest that it was a media effect:

Tens of millions of Americans watched the first debate, but the lasting effects of that evening’s developments – especially Gore’s exasperated sighs and overbearing demeanor – were not registered until more than a week later, when, on the eve of the second debate, virtually every discussion focused disparagingly on his first-debate performance.

A nice twist in the paper is that we applied a Bayesian change point model to identify the precise day in which a shift in perceptions occurred. We submitted the paper as a research note and received an invitation to revise and resubmit from a respectable journal. Nevertheless, we thought it would make more sense to wait until the 2004 Annenberg survey came out to see if similar sudden shifts in perceptions of campaign negativity occurred. Unfortunately, we never got around to this (and I promised Lee’s spouse not to remind him of this). Although I know it won’t help my Sigelman number, I have now made the paper available on SSRN (the link to it from my web-site had been broken for years).

Posted by Erik Voeten at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently attended a talk by Dan Kselman about the relationship between electoral systems and corruption; a draft of the paper is available here. In the paper, Dan develops a model that includes the assumption that legislators in PR systems will identify a particular region within their district to target particular attention. There was a bit of a spirited discussion about the merits of that particular assumption, so I thought it might be interesting to throw the question out to the readers of the Monkey Cage. For those of you who have closely studied party competition in PR systems, does this sound like something you have observed in practice? Conversely, does this sound like something that does not happen in the country(ies) you have observed? Either way, please let us know in the comments section, especially if there are published works documenting either type of campaign strategies.

I also asked Dan to provide a brief synopsis of the argument for the readers of the Monkey Cage, and this is what he sent along:

The posted paper draft (not quite complete…) develops a game theoretic model to study legislators’ incentives to provide constituents in their electoral districts with particularistic goods and services (pork, social services, ombudsman services, etc). In single-member district systems, identifying the ‘target’ of such legislative particularism is fairly straight-forward: incumbents target such projects and services to residents of their single-member district.

In multi-member district systems, specifying theoretically the set of voters whom incumbents may target to receive particularistic goods and services is less straight-forward. For example, studies of clientelism in countries as varied as Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey have emphasized that clientelistic targeting requires ‘deep’ constituency relationships, and that incumbents have no way of maintaining such relationships with all voters in larger multi-member districts. As such, incumbents tend to maintain personal relationships in regional or municipal strongholds within larger electoral districts (aka bailiwicks). Similarly, research on Japanese politics suggests that incumbents often maintain personalistic relationships with particular professional subgroups within larger electoral districts.

On the other hand, one could also think of legislators in larger multi-member districts building a bridge which pleases all voters in that district, and not simply those in a well-defined geographic or professional strongholds. So, the question is this: how do legislators in multi-member district systems choose the subset of district constituents to which they will target their particularistic efforts? In the attached paper, the assumption is that legislators can choose (or choose not…) to develop personalistic relationships with subsets of voters in multi-member districts. Does anyone have examples outside of those mentioned above where this type of ‘carving out’ occurs? Or, does anyone have examples of situations in which particularistic efforts are targeted to the entirety of voters in a multi-member district?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In a post last week, I raised the question of why it was that whenever we think about economic voting in legislative elections as meaning that bad economic conditions hurt the incumbent candidate, we always consider the incumbent to be the candidate representing the president’s party. In a closed-list proportional representation electoral system, this makes perfect sense: the only option the voter has to vote for or against particular parties, and the voter has no say over which party members actually get to sit in the legislature. But in single member district electoral systems, as we have in the United States, angry voters could choose to throw the current office holder in their district out of office, regardless of whether that office holder was of the president’s party or not.

In response, John cited research by Alan Abramowitz suggesting that empirically this just doesn’t occur very often (although note Abromowitz is talking about the even more proximate cause of discontent with Congress, as opposed to just poor economic conditions):

Discontent with Congress does not lead to a general tendency to kick out incumbents. Occasionally voters do get upset and give the boot to a large number of incumbents—but they almost always take out their dissatisfaction on the members of only one party—the president’s party.

Larry Bartels offered a reason why this would be the case. Looking for a punishment effect of the type I suggested:

requires one to ignore lots of good evidence that voters see little connection between “Republicans in Congress” and their own Republican member of Congress.

And as John noted, Abramowitz also wrote that:

As the noted congressional scholar Richard Fenno has observed, Americans generally love their own congressperson even though they dislike Congress. They tend to see their own Senators and Representatives as the rare good apples in an otherwise rotten barrel.

So with that discussion in mind, here are some interesting results from a new CNN poll (for details, see here). The figure displays the percentage of respondents who believe (a) that most members of Congress deserve re-election and (b) that their representative deserves reelection in 2000 and 2010. (The bars do not sum to 100% because I did not graph the “no opinion” respondents.)

Two facts are quickly apparent. First, Americans are clearly much more dissatisfied with Congress now than they were a decade ago. Second, both in 2000 and 2010, Americans liked their own representative more than they liked Congress as a whole.

The interesting remaining question, though, is what to make of the fact that the proportion of Americans who believe their own member does not deserve to be re-elected is now close to the proportion believing their representative does deserve to be reelected? It is of course possible this is simply picking up partisan preference (ie., Democrats who have a Republican representative and visa-versa), but then shouldn’t we have seen a roughly similar pattern in 2000? It is also possible that the Tea Party movement and the liberal blogosphere are combining to make many Democrats and Republicans prefer potential primary challengers to their representative (and thus answer the my representative question with a “no”), but that they will return to the fold once primary season is over. Alternatively, the data could be consistent with the claim that we are approaching an election where anti-incumbency sentiment could work against both Democratic and Republican incumbents. Potentially further evidence in this regard is the fact that poll also reports that while 54% of respondents believe most Democratic members of Congress do not deserve to be re-elected, 56% believe most Republican members of Congress do not deserve to be re-elected.

Of course, if Abramowitz is correct that the only thing that matters in Congressional elections is presidential approval rate, then I suppose we can safely ignore these figures. I guess I would feel more confident doing so if we could find elections where similar proportions of the population were dissatisfied with their own representative - thus undercutting the micro-level mechanism Bartels and Fenno suggest is at play here - and we still found only candidates from the president’s party being punished as “incumbents”. Any data out there?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From a grad student in our department who used to work at the FEC:

Anecdotally, of the 300 committees I reviewed at the FEC, only one corporate PAC made independent expenditures over $5000 in the 2008 election and it was the Human Rights Campaign, which is a non-profit corporate PAC. The rest were unions (AFSCME, SEIU, etc.). I think labor unions are going to take much greater advantage of the decision than corporations - especially when it comes to things like GOTV drives and voter contact communications. I think the types of corporations that will get involved with that type of activity are the non-profit interest groups (Human Rights Campaign, NRA, Chamber of Commerce, etc.) as opposed to for-profit corporations like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.

Posted by John Sides at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Were Republicans more likely to be elected governor in states without restrictions on corporate campaigning than in states with restrictions?

Was control of governorship more likely to flip from Democratic in 2002-05 to Republican in 2006-09 where business was not restricted?

Were Republicans better able to hold on to the governorship in 2006-09 in states where business campaigning was not restricted?

Did Republicans have more control of state legislatures prior to 2008 where business campaigning was okay?

Did Republicans have more control of state legislatures after 2008 where business campaigning was okay?

Are states that lean Republican in presidential races (a quasi measure of the ideology/partisan culture of states) especially likely to have no restrictions on business campaigning?

Are state and local taxes less progressive where business campaigning is okay?

Are states where business can campaign likely to have good scores on business climate from the Tax Foundation in 2010?

Did states where business can campaign improve their Tax Foundation business climate score between 2006 and 2010 more than states where they couldn’t?

Are states where business can campaign likely to rank better on business climate from Forbes in 2009?

Are states where business can campaign likely to rank better on the regulatory environment from Forbes in 2009?

Is there a difference between the average Forbes business climate ranking for states with and without restrictions?

Is there a difference between the average Forbes regulatory environment ranking for states with and without restrictions?

Is there a difference between the average Forbes business costs (labor, energy, and taxes) ranking for states with and without restrictions?

Is there a difference between the average Tax Foundation business climate score for states with and without restrictions?

The provisional answer to all of these question is “no.” The analysis comes from political scientist John Coleman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (pdf). His findings dovetail with those of Lee Drutman and Nick Seabrook. As with their analyses, Coleman’s comes with necessary caveats, which he states in the conclusion. Nevertheless, as he writes:

But these data, as they are, recommend some caution toward the most extreme statements about the effects of the Court’s decision [in Citizens United] on election and policy outcomes.

Posted by John Sides at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Arlen Specter shares a birthday with Abraham Lincoln but is much, much younger. Lincoln would be be turning 201 if he were still alive today, and Specter is only 80. Which means, if he succeeds in his reelection campaign, he will be a mere 86 at the end of his next term in the Senate. Fortunately, the job entails no heavy lifting.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is apropos of Josh’s post below. The New York Times story he cites says:

The poll suggests that both parties face a toxic environment as they prepare for the elections in November. Public disapproval of Congress is at a historic high, and huge numbers of Americans think Congress is beholden to special interests. Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans say members of Congress deserve re-election.

Here is some relevant analysis from Alan Abramowitz. He makes several important points. First, approval of Congress is strongly correlated with presidential approval, even under divided government:

The data show that when the president is more popular, Congress tends to be more popular and when the president is less popular, Congress tends to be less popular. Moreover, this is true even when Congress and the presidency are controlled by different parties.

Why? He posits that opinions of both are related to underlying structural features, such as the economy:

This may indicate that evaluations of Congress are influenced by evaluations of the president or that both are influenced by feelings about the condition of the country and the overall performance of the federal government.

And of course there is this truism, which somewhat undercuts the notion that incumbents are threatened by low congressional approval:

As the noted congressional scholar Richard Fenno has observed, Americans generally love their own congressperson even though they dislike Congress. They tend to see their own Senators and Representatives as the rare good apples in an otherwise rotten barrel.

To speak to Josh’s question about bipartisan anti-incumbent voting, Abramowitz writes:

Discontent with Congress does not lead to a general tendency to kick out incumbents. Occasionally voters do get upset and give the boot to a large number of incumbents—but they almost always take out their dissatisfaction on the members of only one party—the president’s party.

Finally, and most importantly, and please please shout this from the rooftops:

This brings up the most important point about evaluations of Congress. They have very little influence on how Americans vote in congressional elections. When it comes to choosing candidates for Congress, it is opinions of the president’s performance that matter.

Posted by John Sides at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The NY Times has released a new poll today which basically says that while voters are not thrilled with President Obama’s job performance, they are even less thrilled with Republicans in Congress. Particularly interesting is that attempts to tar the Republicans as the party of no combined with Obama’s gestures at bipartisanship seem to be working: 62% of respondents see Obama as trying to work with Republicans in Congress, while the same percentage believes that Republicans in Congress are not trying to work with Obama to get things done. This is not good news for Republicans in Congress, as large majorities of respondents think both Obama and Cogressional Republicans should be compromising to get things done (see here and here).

All of this raises the interesting question: what happens in an election when voters are angry at everyone?

When I was first reading the classic political science works on economic voting in US congressional elections, I was struck by the fact that the “incumbent” in all of these studies - as in, incumbents should perform worse when economic conditions are worse - were almost uniformly defined as as congressional candidates from the president’s party. Thus a congressman who had been in office for twenty years would not be considered an incumbent if he or she was from a different party than the president, while his or her first time challenger - who could have never held national office - would be coded as the incumbent, as long as he or she was in the same party as the president. Off the top of my head, I’m not aware of any study of economic voting in the United States which tracks whether poor economic conditions adversely effect incumbents - defined now as the actual office holder - from both political parties. I ask this because I wonder whether it is possible that we could be heading into an election where sitting office holders from both political parties risk the ire of the voters.

The only work on economic voting of which I am aware where the actual incumbent office holders are included in the analysis as such concerns work done in Poland (ungated draft and gated) and Ukraine (gated) by Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, Goldie Shabad, and Jakub Zielinski, although even in these countries they find that the effect of the economy is conditioned on whether an individual legislator is a member of the opposition party or the governing party (although there are also interesting findings in the Poland piece about legislators who attempt to avoid the voters’ wrath by switching to a new party).

So I’m interested in opening this up to discussion. More generally, is it time to revisit what we mean by “incumbents”? As I have noted in my own research, figuring out how to code incumbents in multi-party system, especially unstable ones, is often not intuitively obvious. More specifically, is there any literature out there tests whether voters ever punish actual incumbent office holders in the US regardless of which party they are in? How about any evidence of this occurring outside of the United States? And if such research exists, can it give us any insight into the coming 2010 US mid-term elections? Received wisdom from existing research on economic voting in the US would suggest that the president’s party will be in trouble. But then what are we to make of the NY Times poll showing that voters are even more disappointed with Congressional Republicans than they are with the sitting President?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve been remiss in following up on my promise to discuss political science research on campaign finance. Fortunately, Nick Seabrook, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Buffalo, sends a back-of-the-envelope analysis that speaks to the potential consequences of the Citizens United decision:

In following the coverage of Citizens United in the mainstream media and blogosphere, two major criticisms of the decision have become apparent: (1) that the massive influx of corporate money into the electoral process will effectively allow corporate sponsorship to dictate election outcomes (let’s call this the McCandidate hypothesis); and (2) that this surge in independent corporate expenditures will disproportionately benefit Republican office seekers (the Fat Cat hypothesis).

While testing these propositions on federal elections will require waiting at least until the outcome of the 2010 midterms, state legislative elections offer an ideal quasi-experiment for analyzing the implications of the decision (24 states ban independent corporate expenditures in state races, 26 do not).

For another project, I put together complete election data for 2002 upper and lower house state legislative districts in 9 states, 4 that ban corporate expenditures (AZ, KY, NY, SD) and 5 that allow them (CA, FL, MD, NV, OR). We can test these two hypotheses by running some simple regressions. Here, state legislative election results are modeled as a function of incumbency, district partisanship, and candidate expenditures.

We can indirectly test the McCandidate hypothesis by splitting the sample between states that ban corporate electioneering and those that do not. If independent corporate expenditures have a significant effect, an observable implication of this would be that these other factors (incumbency, party, and money) should have less of an impact. However, there is no evidence that this is the case – the models explain just under 90% of the variation in the two-party vote in each case, and the coefficients and significance levels are pretty much the same (a Chow test confirms this). Elections appear to work similarly whether a state allows independent corporate expenditures or not, and if corporate money is affecting election results in these states, it is doing so at the margins.

What about the Fat Cat hypothesis? Recombining the data into a single model and introducing a dummy variable for states that allow corporate expenditures, the results are surprising. All else being equal, allowing independent corporate money actually works to the detriment of Republican candidates to the tune of between 2% and 3% of the two-party vote (b=-2.3; s.e.=.6). If we exclude New York from the sample (NY places restrictions on corporate spending but does not ban it outright), the coefficient is statistically insignificant. Similarly, if we run a logit model where the dependent variable is which candidate wins rather than their vote shares (same independent variables), the corporate dummy again fails to reach statistical significance. From these data, there is simply no evidence that Republican candidates are benefiting from corporate campaign involvement at the state level.

Of course, some caveats apply: we can’t really generalize too much from a sample of just 9 states in a single election year, and it’s unclear whether the dynamics of corporate electioneering may be different at the federal level than they are in state elections. Nevertheless, these results suggest that we should be cautious about simply assuming that Citizens United will inevitably produce wholesale changes in the functioning of our electoral system

Posted by John Sides at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Which state’s politics are the bigger trainwreck, those in Illinois or New Jersey? I am always happy to give the nod to New Jersey, but Illinois is coming on strong.

Posted by John Sides at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Voting geeks and political scientists can sometimes engage in quite vigorous arguments over which system of vote-counting is best. But entertainment value is rarely one of their criteria. It should be - and from my personal experiences as a tallyman in Ireland when I was a teenager, it is one on which PR-STV (proportional representation with a single transferable vote) scores very highly. In PR-STV, the voter votes for the candidates, recording her order of preference (Farrell 1, Tucker 2, … Sides 6 and so on). The votes are then counted. If a candidate reaches the quota with first preference votes, then she is deemed elected, and her surplus votes are distributed to other candidates, according to the second preferences recorded on them. If no candidate reaches the quota with her first preference votes, then the weakest candidate is eliminated, and his votes are distributed to the other candidates according to the second preferences, and so on, until all the vacant seats have been filled.

What makes this system entertaining is that much depends on the order in which candidates are eliminated. If one candidate goes first rather than another with a nearly equal share of votes, this can have significant knock-on repercussions for who gets elected and who doesn’t. The candidates are usually present at the count, and observing them, whey-faced, trying to figure out whether they will lose their jobs or not, as wizened old mountainy men, (who know their end of the constituency from decades of tramping its back-country roads and boreens, and have a good idea of where the second, third and fourth preferences are going) offer predictions based on the way that this or that ballot box seems to be going, is enormously entertaining for heartless teenagers with a predilection for politics.

Which brings me to my proposal. Under the new Oscars system, the ten Best Pictures nominees are chosen under some PR voting system, which may not be PR-STV but is likely to be at worst a closely related cousin. So the Oscar ceremony, rather than cutting to the smug accountant who presents the results as a fait accompli at the end of the ceremony, should instead be cutting back and forth to a vote counting process which would be happening simultaneously, live. Alongside the main Oscar broadcast, one might even have CNN running an “Oscars Voting Special” in which underemployed political pundits could opinionate on who is winning and who is losing, who deserves to win and so on. This would make gripping television for a substantial subsection of the population who is uninterested in Oscar dresses and awards for best fly-grip camera and so on. I can see three possible objections. First - that CNN political pundits don’t actually know anything interesting or useful about the movie industry. This seems to me to be both true and uncompelling - they don’t (with a few exceptions) know anything useful or interesting about politics either. And they can always hire me for a moderately outrageous retainer fee. Second - that the US public would be unlikely to find processes involving complicated math at all entertaining. For rebuttal, I offer you the countless millions of baseball statistics bores to be found in this fine country. Third - that this will lead inevitably to family friction over whether we should watch the Oscars-proper ™ or the Oscars Special Vote Count edition ™ from the Finest Names in News (or whatever the slogan is this week). This seems to me to be the most plausible of the objections (but since I’m the only person in our household who really knows how to use the remote-controls, I’m not particularly worried about it meself).

Posted by Henry at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Murray Hill plans to run in Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th congressional district. See the above ad, and the campaign’s webpage. There are even t-shirts! Then read Emily Badger’s post at Miller-McCune.

[Hat tip to Erinn Larkin and Janice Sinclaire]

Posted by John Sides at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Political scientists believe unanimously that economic conditions play an important role in shaping public opinion. I don’t think you could find one who would suggest that a president one year into his term facing double-digit unemployment could avoid a significant drop in popularity.

One complaint I have with the mainstream media is its habit of ignoring such structural factors and explaining changes in public opinion almost solely as the outcome of ideological positioning by candidates and elected officials. In defense of the MSM, they do this in a bipartisan way. Whenever a party suffers electoral misfortune, the media will attribute it to a failure to heed to wishes of the center, coupled with demands that the losing party purge itself of ideological sin and embrace the moderate center.

The rest of the piece is an argument with a former aide to Karl Rove. For the purposes of this blog, I’m just happy to see political science get its due. Chait also notes that he did not over-intepret the 2008 election as a sweeping mandate, for which he deserves credit.

[Hat tip to Brendan Nyhan.]

Posted by John Sides at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This one is making the rounds:

From the Orleans Parish coroner’s race.

[Hat tip to Eric Lawrence.]

Posted by John Sides at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In our continuing series of election reports, we are pleased to have Paul Staniland, a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies present the following post-election analysis of the 2010 Sri Lankan presidential election:

Sri Lanka’s presidential election, the first since the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, further entrenched the incumbent government of Mahinda Rajapaksa. Rajapaksa’s major opponent, General (ret.) Sarath Fonseka, was the chief of the army in the victorious struggle against the Tigers but had turned against Rajapaksa when he was stripped of real power after the war. The campaign was ugly and sometimes violent, marked by charges of war crimes, coups d’etat, vote rigging, treason, and corruption. Approximately 800 violent incidents were reported during the course of the campaign. The aftermath of the election included government charges that Fonseka had planned a coup against his government, while Fonseka is reportedly now considering going into exile.

Rajapaksa and his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-led coalition ultimately took 57% of the vote while Fonseka, the common opposition candidate, won 40%. Despite expectations of a tight contest, Rajapaksa dominated in ethnic Sinhalese areas and thus overcame Fonseka’s higher levels of support in cities and ethnic Tamil and Muslim regions. This map shows the demographic breakdown: Rajapaksa won the Sinhalese-majority southern and western parts of the country, while Fonseka did better in less-populous Tamil and Muslim areas in the north and east. What can we draw from both the process and the outcome of the election?

First, the government and SLFP used state resources and patronage to get out the vote. Fonseka was a threat because he could undermine Rajapaksa’s credit for defeating the LTTE. In response, the Rajapaksa campaign fully exploited the advantages of incumbency, in sharp contrast to a shambolic Fonseka campaign. Organizationally, the SLFP’s patronage machine was highly effective at mobilizing rural voters and at pulling away defectors from the opposition. Crucially, Rajapaksa’s campaign skillfully exploited its position in power. Rajapaksa was portrayed in the state media as the prime reason for the destruction of the LTTE while Fonseka’s gaffes on the campaign trail were ideal fodder for criticism and often-dubious accusations. Rajapaksa offered a clear Sinhalese nationalist political line that was linked to economic development promises. The election commissioner publicly protested these irregularities, but there is no evidence of massive vote rigging.

Continue reading "2010 Sri Lankan Presidential Election: Post-Election Report" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)