I’m a split-personality technophile-Luddite. I seem to buy just about every new technotoy as soon as it hits the market and love it until the next new technotoy comes along, at which point I set the old one aside and have a fling with the new one, and the cycle spins and spins and spins. Increasingly I rely on younger colleagues — the younger, the better — to help me solve the manifold mysteries that these widgets hold out for someone who grew up in a pre-television world. At the same time, while I’m reading magazines and even books online, I’m carping about how much I hate to see amazon.com and Google and JSTOR and their ilk displacing bookstores and libraries and good old-fashioned browsing, about how much I enjoy reading a real, i.e., paper copy of the morning paper, about how much better the literary quality of our professional journals was back in the old days before the spell-check and grammar-check routines that are built into word processors made it easy to scribble something down and send it off without worrying about the subtler niceties of style. So yes, I want it both ways. Nothing wrong with that.

Some of my ambivalence is nicely expressed in the following excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s essay in the current issue of The Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”:

In a 2005 Pew Research Center survey, 47% of self-described conservative Republicans said they were “very happy,” a mood that only 28% of liberal Democrats shared. Pondering these results, conservative columnist George Will concluded that “liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness.”

If we take this liberal-conservative happiness gap as a given, then a question naturally arises: Why? Why isn’t liberalism as conducive to happiness as conservatism is?

First, though, should we take the gap as a given? In a recent study, NYU psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost (drawing on data from the World Values Survey) replicate the Pew Center survey’s result. In the U.S., they report, “right-wing orientation” was indeed predictive of one’s sense of personal well-being (a compound of satisfaction with one’s own life and self-rated happiness). Even after statistical controls for the standard demographics (income, education, age, sex, marital status, employment status, and church attendance) were instituted, right-wingers scored higher on the subjective well-being scale. So the gap couldn’t be written off as an artifact of demographic differences between right- and left-wingers.

So again, why?

I’ve needed a new phone for some time now. I was thinking about something really cool like an iPhone, but a friend who’s more into techie stuff than I am has been singing the praises of this new Dutch multi-function phone. Have any of you had any experience, good or bad, with this unit? It looks quite promising to me, but what do I know about phones.

[Hat tip to Roland Smith]

The paper is motivated by normative questions about whether blogs facilitate deliberation and participation. We analyze this 2006 survey, in which about 15,000 respondents were asked whether they read blogs and which blogs they read. Some findings:

• 34% of respondents said they read a blog. 14% of respondents named a political blog.

• Political blog readers are, unsurprisingly, more educated, more partisan, and more interested in politics. These traits help give rise to the other findings described below.

• Almost all political blog readers read only blogs from one side of the political spectrum. Only 6% of political blog readers named both left and right blogs. Thus, most blog readers are “carnivores” rather than “omnivores”: they like partisan red meat, as it were. This is the self-segregation that the paper discusses.

• There is almost no overlap in the ideological orientation of readers of left- and right-wing blogs. Below is Figure 6 from the paper, mapping the ideologies of readers of some prominent blogs. The figure presents “violin plots.” The shape of the violins corresponds to where people are located on this measure of ideology. The white dots are the medians. Readers of the left-wing blogs are clustered on the lefthand side. Readers of right-wing blogs are on the opposite side. This is the polarization that the paper discusses.

• Blog readers are more likely to participate in politics than are people who don’t read blogs. Left-wing blog readers are more participatory than right-wing blog readers. We speculate that left-wing blogs have more fully embraced the tasks of social movements, thereby seeking to mobilize their readers.

These survey data do not allow us to make causal claims, but determining causation is is not the point of the paper. Instead, we use the observed patterns of association to draw implications for the normative value of political blogs. For most people, reading political blogs does not lead to deliberation — that is, to an exchange across partisan or ideological lines. People mainly inhabit “comforting cocoons of cognitive consonance.” But reading blogs may facilitate other normatively valuable behaviors, such as participation. Indeed, blogs like the Daily Kos explicitly want to stimulate participation more than deliberation (see Henry’s previous post).

This is a working paper, and suggestions are welcome.

(See also Henry’s post at Crooked Timber.)

Politicians are hypocritical for the same reason the rest of us are: to gain the social benefits of appearing virtuous without incurring the personal costs of virtuous behavior. If you can deceive even yourself into believing that you’re acting for the common good, you’ll have more energy and confidence to further your own interests — and your self-halo can persuade others to help you along.

That is from John Tierney’s column in today’s New York Times. He explores the psychological means by which we can rationalize hypocrisy and perhaps avoid it. Since his motivating examples are political — McCain’s rejection and then embrace of the Bush tax cuts; Obama’s support for and then rejection of public financing — I would add this: politicians shift positions for a variety of strategic reasons, and they can do so because it is rare for them to be punished obviously and explicitly for those shifts. Such shifts may even provide net electoral gains.

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

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

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

	Republican	Democrat	Independent
Christian	47	56	46
Muslim	15	12	11
Something Else	11	9	9
Don’t Know/Refused to Answer	27	23	34

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

	Non HS Grad	HS Grad	Some College	College Grad or More
Christian	31	41	53	67
Muslim	20	16	12	9
Something Else	18	9	7	9
Don’t Know/Refused to Answer	30	34	28	15

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

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

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

Democrats and Republicans separately

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

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

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

Details on data

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

P.S.

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

For the Inside Higher Ed coverage, click here.

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

Long live Uga VII!

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

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

“I don’t rock,” she told them.

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

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

[P.S. Detroit Rock City.]

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

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

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

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

Haldeman’s scrawled response:

You must be kidding.

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

And now you know … the rest of the story.

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

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

Do you support or oppose each of these measures?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Hat tip to Erik Voeten]