The Monkey Cage

Henry, Eric Lawrence, and I have just finished a working paper that analyzes the first decent dataset of blog readers. The paper is here on SSRN or here, ungated.

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.)

Posted by John Sides at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The current issue of Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the current brouhaha over whether the American Political Science Association’s 2012 meeting should be moved out of its designated site, New Orleans, due to Louisiana’s anti-gay and lesbian policies. APSA President Dianne Pinderhughes, speaking for the APSA Council, recently reaffirmed the Association’s intention to meet in New Orleans, pointing to local conditions and policies rather than state-level ones, the role that holding meetings in New Orleans can play in restoring the city, and APSA’s self-imposed prohibition against taking stands on policy issues. This reaffirmation has distressed many gay and lesbian activists, who are concerned not only about the hostile atmosphere for them in Louisiana but also about potential health risks of being in a place where the health care benefits that are available to family members would not be available to them or their partners. Talk of a boycott of the meeting is in the air.

For the Inside Higher Ed coverage, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Via an email from Chris Albon, I see that Nicole Suveges, who did an MA at GWU, and a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, was killed in Iraq while working there for a contractor. She appears to have been in GWU before my time, so I didn’t know her; my deepest sympathies go out to her friends and family and those who did know her.

Posted by Henry at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Syracuse University political scientist Jeff Stonecash has been doing public opinion research for the last quarter-century, using university facilities and paying Syracuse students to serve as interviewers. He has conducted surveys for non-profit organizations and the local newspaper, among other sponsors, and for numerous candidates for public office — Republicans and Democrats alike. Now Stonecash is being told by Syracuse University authorities to cease and desist — this following complaints from a Democratic candidate about a survey that Stonecash recently conducted for his Republican opponent. The complainant alleges that Stonecash is a partisan Republican whose survey results are biased. (Actually, Stonecash is a registered Democrat.) When informed of these concerns, Stonecash indicated that he “would have done the same thing for [the Democratic candidate], but they never asked. I’m not a partisan pollster.”

This episode raises all sorts of questions about “applied” research in academic settings, especially in politically charged circumstances. For details, click here.

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m generally a little leery of “how-to” books, perhaps because I’m lousy at following directions and have managed to do pretty well by making it up as I go, flying by the seat of my pants, ad-hocking, etc.

However, in several years of service as an NSF program director and later as the APSR editor and as a senior member of a department full of publication-conscious colleagues, I’ve repeatedly found myself being called on to answer questions ranging from the rudimentary to the sophisticated about the way that peer review processes work; and I’ve found that many scholars — especially but by no means exclusively the younger ones — are grateful for specific, concrete advice about how to proceed.

All this by way of introduction to a just-released and extremely useful “how to” collection for political scientists, focused specifically on publication-related issues, titled Publishing Political Science: APSA Guide to Writing and Publishing (Stephen Yoder, editor). I was asked to provide a back-cover blurb for this volume, but because I was skeptical I decided that I’d better read the book before saying yes or no. After reading just a few chapters, I quickly said yes. Here’s the blurb I wrote after reading the rest of the chapters:

Publishing Political Science is a wonderful resource that should be read thoroughly and consulted frequently by scholars at all stages of their careers, ranging from college students writing an honors paper through graduate students confronting for the first time the manifold mysteries of their intended craft and junior faculty members trying to negotiate their way through the strange and sometimes forbidding world of academic publishing, and yes, extending even to senior faculty members who think they already have a good grasp of the way things work (but probably don’t). The beauty of this volume is that it conveys so much useable information about the structure of the publishing industry or the nature of the review process, for example, along with how-to hints about writing not only article and book manuscripts, but also reference works, textbooks, and blog items, among others. If every aspiring or practicing political scientist would read this book and take its lessons seriously, our discpline would be enormously improved.

And I meant every word of it. If you’re a political scientist (or, for that matter, a social scientist of a different stripe), this is a volume that should be on your bookshelf. Even if you think you already know everything you need to know, you’re going to find this a very handy book to have on hand.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Omar at Orgtheory.net

An interesting message from Christopher Zorn to the POLMETH listserve showed up at my desktop this morning. It appears that the 2007 impact factor of the methodology-heavy journal Political Analysis, “rose from 0.917 to 2.535, an increase of 176 percent.” That makes Political Analysis the top journal in Political Science, by-passing APSR. Now I understand-before you get all perklempt-that JCR impact factors are a problematic measure of “impact”, have criterion validity problems, not all of the relevant jourmals are included (and there seems to be no rhyme or reason for which journals get included) and are probably not even reproducible by third parties (we’ve covered some of this ground before; here, here, and here), and all the rest, but I still wonder whether this signals some permanent substantive change in the nature of the field (i.e. the Cambridge-led “political methodology” movement has finally made-over the discipline), or whether it is just another random JCR fluctuation (and yes, AJS and ASR are still the top impact journals in the 2007 rankings for sociology).

Posted by Henry at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Recent discussion about the “Reagan Democrats” and their role in the 2008 election begs the question of who these voters were. The standard story is that these voters were blue-collar whites, conservative on social issues, and disenchanted with the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, in many respects, this characterization is inaccurate.

The “New Republicans” were not drawn disproportionately from the middle to lower strata of the population; their conservatism was not more marked on social issues than on economic issues; they were neither more religiously oriented nor more alienated from government than other voters; finally, they bore little similarity to the constituency that provided the core support for Wallace in 1968.

This is from an analysis of the 1980 election by Jerome Himmelstein and James McRae, Jr., which was published in the Public Opinion Quarterly in 1984. “New Republicans” are simply those who said they voted for Carter in 1976 but Reagan in 1980. This may not be what everyone means by “Reagan Democrat,” but given the amorphousness of the term, it is a reasonable working definition.

Himmelstein and McRae find that these New Republicans supported Reagan for much more ordinary reasons: they disapproved of the performance of President Carter, especially with regard to the economy. This kind of behavior — retrospective voting based on the performance of the national economy — is well-documented and, well, a lot more pedestrian than prevailing theories either then and now.

A question raised by Ezra Klein in the post linked to above is: what happened to the Reagan Democrats? Did they permanently defect to the Republicans, or did they return to the fold in later elections? There is no good data on this, in part because we have few surveys that interview the same voters over multiple elections. But Himmelstein and McRae’s findings strongly suggest that Democratic defections to Reagan had more to do with current economic circumstances than some sort of deep-seated ideological discomfort with the Democratic Party. This likely explains why not very long after Reagan, Democratic loyalty to the Democratic presidential nominee was at or above its historical norm (see this previous post).

The Himmelstein and McRae paper is here (gated). If anyone can find a non-gated version, please put the link in the comments.

Posted by John Sides at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Women have made less progress toward gender equality in the Middle East than in any other region. Many observers claim this is due to the region’s Islamic traditions. I suggest that oil, not Islam, is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many other countries. Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions.

That is Michael Ross in the latest American Political Science Review. The paper is here. In the statistical analyses, oil rents per capita are associated with lower female labor force participation and fewer female seats in parliament — controlling for factors such as GDP per capita, region (Middle East, etc.), the proportion of the country that is Muslim, and other demographic and institutional characteristics of states. Moreover, if one focuses only on the Middle East, these same findings hold.

See also Ross’ work on how oil contributes to civil war and other conflicts — here in the Journal of Peace Research and here in Foreign Affairs.

Posted by John Sides at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Uncivil exchanges in political debate shows do not diminish confidence in public officials, government institutions, and the media among those who choose to watch them.

That is from a recent paper by Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson. There has been growing concern that contentious political programming “hurts America.” That, of course, is Jon Stewart’s famous line when he went on “Crossfire” to take down “Crossfire.” Some political science research — discussed by Lee in this previous post — also finds that exposing people to shows like “Crossfire” makes them less trusting of government.

The problem, as Arceneaux and Johnson note, is that previous research randomly assigns people to watch specific kinds of programs, but in reality, our television habits are far from random. So Arceneaux and Johnson set up an experimental design in which people were either forced to watch a political debate show (“Hannity and Colmes”), or could choose among “Hannity and Colmes” and two other, non-political programs. This is a small pilot study, but the results are noteworthy.

The people who spent the most time watching “Hannity and Colmes” were not sensitive political naïfs. They were partisans interested in politics. Unsurprisingly, then, those subjects who were allowed to choose their program did not emerge from the experiment less trusting in government: those who might have been turned off by “Hannity and Colmes” tended not to watch it. However, even those who chose to watch “Hannity and Colmes” emerged somewhat less sure of their own ability to affect politics — an attribute political scientists call “internal efficacy” — as did subjects forced to watch “Hannity and Colmes.”

Given this research, and that of Markus Prior on increasing media choice, the next wave of media effects research will likely have to incorporate people’s tendency toward selective exposure.

The Arceneaux and Johnson paper is here. Recommended.

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

For those too young to remember him, Tom Lehrer, an MIT mathematician, wrote and recorded some wonderful songs in the 1950s and 1960s satirizing various aspects of life, politics, and society.

At MIT, Lehrer regularly taught a quantitative methods course for political scientists, and based on that experience he composed a song about political science. (Are there any other songs about political science?) Yes, yes, I know: the name of the song he bintroduces a half-minute or so into this YouTube clip is “Sociology,” not “Political Science,” but it’s really about political science, as he explains.

If this brings back old memories for you, good. If you’re hearing it for the first time, even better.

[Hat tip to Harvey Feigenbaum]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In his influential Atlantic magazine article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” published after the 2000 election, David Brooks compared Montgomery County, Maryland, the liberal, upper-middle-class suburb where he lives, to rural, conservative Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a short drive away but distant in attitudes and values, with “no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble,” plenty of churches but not so many Thai restaurants, “a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.”

In Brooks’s home state of Maryland, there is no clear pattern of county income and Republican vote, and it was not difficult for him to go from Montgomery County, the prototypical wealthy slice of blue America, to a poorer, more Republican-supporting county nearby. Here are the data from 2000:

Brooks lives in a liberal, well-off part of the country. It is characteristic of the East and West Coasts that the richer areas tend to be more liberal, but in other parts of the country, notably the South, richer areas tend to be more conservative. A comparable journey in Texas would go from Collin County, a wealthy suburb of Dallas where George W. Bush received 71% of the vote, to rural Zavala County in the southwest, where Bush received only 25% of the vote:

When we showed our graph of Texas counties to another political scientist, he asked about the state capital, noted for its liberal attitudes, vibrant alternative rock scene, and the University of Texas: “What about Austin? It must be rich and liberal.” We looked it up. Austin is in Travis County and makes up almost all of its population. Travis County has a median household income of $45,000 and gave George W. Bush 53% of the vote in 2000, about midway between Collin and Zavala counties. (Austin has its own red-blue divide, with a highly Democratic university area and urban center, and strongly Republican suburbs.)

This is not to dismiss Brooks’s insights but rather to place them in the national context of income mattering more in poor states than in rich states, which is the subject of our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book (from which the above graphs were taken).

Posted by David Park at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Apparently, someone at the Los Angeles Times reads The Monkey Cage, because they asked me to write a short piece apropos of these two posts about the “divided” Democrats and the reinforcement effect in campaigns.

The op-ed is here. The gist of the argument is:

Despite ugly battles and policy differences that sometimes seem intractable, the reality is that presidential campaigns tend to unify each party behind its nominee. Political scientists call this phenomenon the “reinforcement effect.”

Some references for works and data cited in the piece:

• The Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet study.

• The National Annenberg Election Study.

• The Pew center poll.

• The piece by Ben Highton. Thanks to Ben for doing some additional data analysis for me.

• The National Election Study data showing that 90% of the public identifies with or leans toward one of the major parties.

• Gary Jacobson’s study of public opinion during the Bush administration.

Posted by John Sides at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A journalist queried me about whether anyone had studied efforts at voter suppression, such as “the distribution of flyers or use of robocalls in black neighborhoods with false information about election dates, polling locations,
eligibility requirements, and so on.”

Readers, is there any credible study that has actually sought to measure the effects of such tactics? Please leave any tips in the comments.

Posted by John Sides at 08:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In response to my post below on David Brooks, Ian McDonald comments:

Your last paragraph (tongue in cheek, I guess) makes me wonder: what do you think is the right symbiosis between good journalism and good social science?

I ask because: I think good journalism needs to take risks. I am a big David Brooks fan and I will cut him a lot of slack on factual precision, because he asks good questions, and he always entertains me. While he writes about his social disparity ideas a lot, I don’t agree that he’s completely vested in one interpretation (see the last paragraph of this Atlantic piece). http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/brooks.htm

Sure, some pundits get it wrong, habitually, because of self-serving motives, and thus poison the conversation. I think you would agree: Brooks isn’t one of them.

At the same time, nobody wants to be flat out wrong (I think). Maybe social scientists and journalists really can help each other. Proactively and hate free. And still make deadlines and stay interesting.

Ian raises a very good question. I completely agree that social scientists and journalists can work together.

My further thoughts are these. First, I want to distinguish between David Brooks and journalism. Obviously, he writes columns, not news articles, and thus is in the business of commentary, not reporting. Brooks is also often an amateur social scientist, and, as such, I hold him to a weaker version of the standards to which academics are held. That is to say, I wasn’t at all joking when I said this:

If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word. (David Park is ready to run your regressions.) Give us a call.

I would not demand that David Brooks worry about all of the ideals of empirical social science: rigorous theories, careful conceptualization and measurement, appropriate evidence, caution in drawing inferences from inherently limited data. But what I am suggesting — simple analysis to confirm the most basic thrust of a hypothesis — is not asking too much. In fact, given the platform Brooks has at the Times, it is his responsibility not to present arguments without making more of an effort to confirm them with data, where appropriate. I think his bad arguments — e.g., red and blue states — actually do violence to our discourse about politics. (See also Barry’s comment on my original post.) If Brooks wants to take risks by proffering new ideas without digging up the necessary evidence, then he needs to moderate his tone to convey the appropriate uncertainty.

Yes, I realize that columnists have an incentive to be provocative. Yes, they write on deadline. And yes, most do not have the necessary skills to analyze large datasets. That is why my offer to help Brooks do analysis is not at all facetious or sarcastic. I really would do it. And for much less than the $4000 Bill Kristol is paid to write each column.

What about reporters and journalists?

Continue reading "On the Relationship between Journalism and Social Science" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Two relevant recent posts are at Crooked Timber: this earlier one by Henry and today’s post by Kieran Healy. See in particular the quote from Tilly’s CV that Kiearan includes.

Posted by John Sides at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Statistical evidence from Sierra Leone’s civil war offers support to three major literatures that seek to account for revolutionary mobilization…[P]articipation in a military faction does depend on an individual’s relative social and economic position, the costs and benefits of joining, and the social pressures that emanate from friends and community members. While these arguments are often presented as rival, multiple logics of participation do coexist within the same conflict.

That is from a recently published paper by Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein (gated, ungated).

The data come from a survey of demobilized combatants and non-combatants in Sierra Leone. This work, along with recent work by Stathis Kalyvas and Ana Arjona, is pushing the frontiers of both international relations research, in which civil wars figure prominently but individual-level actions are rarely investigated, and political behavior research, in which individual-level actions are the focus but civil war is rarely investigated.

Some other noteworthy findings concern the meaning of grievances:

At the same time, our empirical results challenge conventional accounts of participation that emphasize grievances. While proxies for standard grievance explanations receive support in our study of those who rebel, we find that the same indicators—poverty, a lack of access to education, and political alienation—also predict the decision to defend the status quo.Moreover, these factors also distinguish those who are abducted into a fighting force from those who remain on the sidelines. Conventional interpretations of welfare measures which emphasize the individual and group frustrations that drive participation in violence are thus called into question. Individual characteristics that observers may readily take to be indicators of frustration with the state may instead proxy for features such as a greater vulnerability to political manipulation by political and military elites, a greater frustration with more peaceful forms of protest, or most simply, a lack of other options.

As well as the importance of social pressure:

Our work suggests as well that involuntary participation is a fundamental part of revolutionary mobilization and political violence. Although this fact is already well appreciated by scholars of the Sierra Leone conflict, traditional theories of mobilization within political science make little mention of coerced participation.

I would add that studies of participation in genocide also emphasize the importance of coercion. See in particular Scott Straus’ work on the Rwandan genocide.

For a sort of postlude to this work, see Humphreys and Weinstein’s investigation of how to demobilize and reintegrate civil war participants (e.g., here and here).

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been many criticisms and self-criticisms of media coverage in the months before the Iraq War began (see, e.g., here and here). But systematic data is only starting to emerge.

Matt Guardino and Danny Hayes have examined every story about Iraq that appeared on ABC and CBS between August 1, 2002, and the beginning of the war, March 19, 2003 — 908 stories in all.

Their main conclusion is:

Bush administration officials were the most frequently quoted sources, the voices of anti-war groups and opposition Democrats were barely audible, and the overall thrust of coverage favored a pro-war perspective.

Dissenting views did appear, but, notably, they came not from domestic sources, such as Democrats and others opposed to the war:

Instead of emanating from Democratic elites, leaders of the anti-war movement within the United States, or other sources of domestic dissent, however, the campaign against a war—at least according to network TV news—was spearheaded by Saddam Hussein and other foreign leaders.

Guardino and Hayes note that perhaps relying on Hussein and, say, Jacques Chirac doesn’t put the anti-war case in the best possible light:

But by going overseas for that perspective—to France, Germany, Iraq, and elsewhere—the anti-war view was accorded a difficult position, from the perspective of domestic public opinion. It is well known that source credibility is central to the persuasiveness of communication, political or otherwise. And while many Americans were skeptical of the Bush administration’s motivations for a confrontation with Iraq, we would surmise that even greater skepticism infused Americans’ perceptions of Saddam Hussein’s arguments about why war was a bad idea.

That is putting it mildly, needless to say. The paper is here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The 2004 U.S. presidential election was a wartime contest that entailed a great deal of discussion about the role that previous military service plays in elections for both candidates and the electorate. Using polling data throughout 2004, this article examines party identification, candidate affect, and vote choice preferences among veterans and nonveterans in the electorate. Despite widespread assumptions depicting the veteran population as deeply Republican, those with military experience in 2004 largely mirrored their nonveteran peers in terms of partisan identification, warmth toward candidates, ballot intentions, and vote choice. One important exception manifested after the “Swift Boat” advertisement in September, which impelled significant numbers of veterans who identify with the Democratic Party to express the intention to vote for George W. Bush.

That is from this paper by Jeremy Teigen. There will be much speculative discussion of the veteran vote during this campaign; this piece (and this one) provide some welcome data.

Teigen does find that, in 2004, McCain was perceived more positively by veterans (as was Colin Powell) than by non-veterans, but it’s an open question whether that will remain true in 2008. Teigen suggested to me:

Perhaps veterans respect or admire political elites who share their military experience, but inside the pressure cooker of a presidential election, partisan affinities, issues, and electioneering outweigh the biographical effects. At the same time, John McCain’s military service as a Navy pilot and POW is much more well-known and less likely to be disparaged.

Ultimately, beware of bivariate relationships expressed as fact. Teigen notes:

Republican tendencies among veterans disappear once one controls for the fact that veterans are overwhelmingly a group of older males.

For more on attitudinal variation among veterans, see this post by the artist formerly known as Mystery Pollster.

[Addendum: See also this paper by Ben Bishin and Matt Incantalupo, in which they find that veterans are no more likely to vote for either Republicans or veteran candidates, once other factors are taken into account.]

Posted by John Sides at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anybody got a problem with the idea that military service — from boot camp through combat — breeds hyper-aggressive behavior?

Well, yes. Regina Titunik does.

In an article titled “The Myth of the Macho Military” that appears in the latest issue of Polity, Titunik, an associate professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, writes:

The public debate about the incorporation of women in the U.S. Armed Forces has primarily included feminist-insipired critics, who denounce the hostility toward women they perceive is promoted by the military’s masculinist culture, and, alternatively, opponents of the greater inclusion of women in the military, who valorize the exclusivist masculine qualities that many feminists criticize. Although these ideological adversaries differ in their estimation of military culture, they both share — and have reciprocally reinforced — a view of the military as steeped in the traditions and practices of aggressive masculinity. This article shows that the prevailing view of the military as hyper-masculine is misguided. Not unhindered aggressiveness, but camaraderie, discipline, and service are the qualties instilled in soldiers. These qualities foster military effectiveness and counterbalance sexist tendencies producing a complex institutional culture congenial to women in significant respects.

In other words (mine), Rambo is a rogue, not a good soldier, and the military virtues are feminine in nature. An interesting twist that I hadn’t encountered previously.

ADDENDUM: Clyde Wilcox forwarded the following to me — living proof of a turn away from macho in the Spanish military. Click HERE to see for yourself..

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism — notably, this book — has attracted a lot of attention (e.g., here). He was also — and here is a fact I did not know until today — an advisor on Ron Paul’s campaign team.

Pape analyzes data on all 188 suicide terror attacks between 1980 and 2001. He concludes that almost all of these attacks shared one common feature: they targeted a country believed to be a foreign occupier. This, not religious extremism, was the motivation of those who committed these suicide attacks.

Now a soon-to-be-published paper argues that Pape’s data cannot support that conclusion. The paper is here, authored by Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay. In short, they argue, the problem is this. To know whether X causes suicide terrorism, we need to know how the propensity to use suicide terrorism varies with X. That is, we not only need data on when suicide terrorism occurs, we need data on when suicide terrorism does not occur — i.e., when groups choose other tactics besides suicide terrorism. Analyzing only instances when suicide terrorism occurred is not sufficient.

Ashworth et al. conclude:

The data Pape collects do not speak to the correlates of suicide terror, and the policy conclusions he advocates cannot be justified by appealing to the data he collects.

Posted by John Sides at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Public opinion polls show consistently that a substantial portion of the American public would vote for a qualified female presidential candidate. Because of the controversial nature of such questions, however, the responses may suffer from social desirability effects. In other words, respondents may be purposely giving false answers as not to violate societal norms. Using an unobtrusive measure called the “list experiment,” we find that public opinion polls are indeed exaggerating support for a female president. Roughly 26 percent of the public is “angry or upset” about the prospect of a female president. Moreover, this level of dissatisfaction is constant across several demographic groups.

That is from an interesting new paper by Matthew Streb, Barbara Burrell, Brian Frederick, and Michael Genovese (gated here, ungated here).

Here’s the experiment, which was conducted in a March 2006 poll. One half of the sample is asked how many of the following things make them angry or upset.

• The way gasoline prices keep going up.
• Professional athletes getting million dollar-plus salaries.
• Requiring seat belts to be used when driving.
• Large corporations polluting the environment.

Then the second half of the sample is asked the same question, with one additional item on the list:

• A woman serving as president.

The difference across the two groups in the mean number of “things that make you upset” gives us the percent of the public that is upset about a woman president. That fraction — 26% — is much larger than extant polling would lead you to believe.

Notably, the percent who are upset does not vary much based on respondents’ gender, level of education or income, age, or region. The only remaining question is whether it varies by party identification, to see whether people who read “A woman serving as president” are really thinking “Hillary Clinton serving as president.” Unfortunately, the survey did not include a measure of party identification. However, it’s worth noting, as Sreb et al. do, that generic polling questions have not revealed any recent decline in the fraction who would vote for a woman president, despite Clinton’s candidacy.

There is more interesting discussion in the paper. See also here for a list experiment that reveals substantial racial prejudice.

Posted by John Sides at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Via Cosma Shalizi , this is a nice tool for mapping the relationship between donations from energy companies and politicians in Presidential, House and Senatorial elections. Since John has just opinionated on an international relations piece, I figure I’m entitled to ask one question of Americanist political scientists. Why is it that there appears to be so little literature out there on this kind of network? Is it the difficulty of establishing causal relationships (although surely this would invalidate whole swathes of US political science if this standard were applied rigorously)? Is it difficulties in gathering the relevant data (Cosma notes that gathering it and cleaning it up is surprisingly hard)? The perceived publication practices of major US journals? I’m genuinely puzzled as to the reason why there’s this gap in the literature. Both comparativists (Jerry Easter) and IR scholars (Charli Carpenter) have published well regarded articles in the major journals of their field on the importance of networks in domestic and international settings. So why not Americanist political scientists? (Or perhaps, there is a significant body of work on this that has simply evaded my notice.)

Posted by Henry at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

David Epstein suggested that we should have a simple graph in the beginning of our book that could concisely summarize the Red State Blue State paradox. We came up with this figure. What do you think? Does this convey the paradox, or not? I’m deliberately not providing a full explanation of the graph since we created it to be self-explanatory.

P.S. Thanks for all the comments regarding the cover design. All the design covers were a very rough mock-up. I’ll let you know which cover wins as soon as I hear.

Posted by David Park at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For more than half a century, realist scholars of international relations have maintained that their worldview is inimical to the American public. For a variety of reasons – inchoate attitudes, national history, American exceptionalism – realists assert that the U.S. government pursues realist policies in spite and not because of public opinion. This paper takes a closer look at the anti-realist assumption by examining survey data and the empirical literature on the mass public’s attitudes towards foreign policy priorities and worldviews, the use of force, and foreign economic policy over the past three decades. The results suggest that, far from disliking realism, Americans are at least as comfortable with the logic of realpolitik as they are with liberal internationalism. The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.

That is from a recent paper by Daniel Drezner (ungated version here). Drezner surveys a vast amount of polling data and argues that there is an “intuitive realism” or “folk realism” in American public opinion:

• Americans prioritize realist goals — e.g., protecting the U.S. against terrorist attacks — more than internationalist goals — e.g., promoting democracy and human rights.

• Americans favor the use of force much more when the mission is based on realpolitik (e.g., missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998) than when it is based on humanitarian concerns (e.g., Haiti in 1992-95).

• Americans are “mercantilist” with regard to trade, expressing concerns about the loss of American jobs and favoring a relative gains approach.

Drezner argues, convincingly, that the null hypothesis among some IR scholars is “the American public is hostile to realism.” If that’s the null, then Drezner has amassed impressive evidence to reject the null.

At the same time, I wondered if this folk realism was, well, entirely real.

Continue reading "Is the American Public Realist?" »

Posted by John Sides at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Florida’s voter file as of 2005:

Percentage of blacks among registered voters: 12%

Percentage of blacks among those whose voter file entry is missing the apartment number: 19%

Percentage of blacks among those whose voter file entry is missing or has an incorrect zip code: 25%

That is from an analysis by Michael McDonald. He concludes:

It is my opinion based on an examination of easily identifiable address errors on the Florida voter registration file that such errors more frequently occur among African-American Florida registered voters than registered voters of other races. These errors will cause disproportionate problems with the delivery of mail ballots to African-Americans, as proposed by the Florida Democratic Party as a means to conduct a second 2008 presidential primary within the state.

While a second FL primary appears unlikely — or so I glean from this — such problems with voter files may affect other aspects of elections, including the ability of parties and others who purchase these files to target voters and the extent of mismatches between the voter file and voters’ own identification materials (where required).

Posted by John Sides at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Blattman is posting from Liberia. This story will warm the hearts of anyone who’s ever taught research methods:

You know experimental program evaluation has become a craze when even the Imams want it.

Today we sat down with an inter-faith network of Liberian religious leaders to talk about their peace building plans. They are a truly inspiring organization, building local capacity to resolve conflicts, and training mediators to resolve disputes in the community. The countryside is, to some extent, a powder keg, and they are building local early warning systems and rapid response capability to potentially serious conflicts.

Moreover, to reduce tensions in conflict-prone places, these religious leaders—principally Muslims and Christians—do not just aspire to a new social contract, they sit down with ethnic and religious leaders in each village and coax them to actually write one, specifying norms and sanctions.

And they want to know if it’s working.

I hum and haw about comparison groups, going through my impact evaluation 101 schpiel. I have serious concerns that one would or could develop a control group, let alone randomize, for such a program. So I dance delicately around the subject.

“Wait a minute,” interrupts the Imam, “Are you talking about a randomized control trial?”

I gape.

“Oh I see!” says one Reverend Minister, “We need a control group! This is a good idea.”

It turns out his holiness was once an agronomist. “This is just like our control plots for fertilizer. But how are we going to control for spillover effects?”

An older Methodist leader frowns sitting in the corner glowers. “Please, a moment,” he says. “I see a real problem here.”

Here it comes. Here is the doubt and questioning I expected. We’re talking about a peace building exercise, not fertilizer on a farm plot. Even I have my reservations. This man, of an older generation, clearly has other priorities.

“How,” he asks “are we going to select a proper sample?”

Posted by John Sides at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

President George W. Bush receives a briefing on hurricane damage from FEMA Director Mike Brown in Punta Gorda, Florida, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2004 (source ).

In the aftermath of the summer 2004 Florida hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed $1.2 billion in disaster aid to Florida residents. This research presents two empirical findings that collectively suggest the Bush administration engaged in vote buying behavior. First, by tracking the geographic location of each aid recipient, the data reveal that FEMA treated applicants from Republican neighborhoods much more favorably than those from Democratic or moderate neighborhoods, even conditioning on hurricane severity, home value, and demographic factors. Second, I compare precinct-level vote counts from the post-hurricane (November 2004) and pre-hurricane (November 2002) elections to measure the effect of FEMA aid on Bush’s vote share. Using a two-stage least squares estimator, this analysis reveals that core Republican voters are easily swayed by FEMA aid - $16,800 buys one additional vote for Bush - while Democrats and moderates are not. Collectively, these results suggest the Bush administration maximized its 2004 vote share by concentrating FEMA disaster aid among core Republicans.

The paper is by Jowei Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s Department of Political Science. Chen has amassed some fascinating data, and the use of hurricane strength as an instrument in the two-stage least squares model is quite plausible. Ultimately, the Bush administration’s strategy is constitutes evidence for some political science theories (e.g., here) that emphasize the strategic value of mobilizing core supporters.

Two notes in response to anticipated questions:

1) This is not illegal. Chen writes:

FEMA enjoys wide statutory discretion in distributing disaster aid among applicants within each hurricane-affected county, once that county has received a disaster declaration. There are few formulaic rules, and the statutory language that authorizes the disaster aid program is sufficiently broad to afford FEMA significant latitude in distributing its money. Hence, there is nothing unlawful about the Bush administration’s apparent vote buying strategy documented in the data.

2) Vote-buying did not win Florida for Bush in 2004. Chen writes:

…there is no possibility that the pro-Republican bias in Florida FEMA aid altered the outcome of the election.

Of course, the story is provocative nonetheless. The paper is here. Highly recommended.

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

A daughter with her senatorial father: Meghan and John McCain

In research published in the March 2008 issue of the American Economic Review, Ebonya Washington begins by noting that “Psychologists have demonstrated a link between offspring gender and parental beliefs on … issues of political significance.” Prior studies have established, for example, that parents of daughters are more likely to support pay equity, comparable worth, affirmative action in regards to gender in employment, and Title IX policies. (Click here for the abstract of a pertinent study.)

Might this relationship carry over the highest stratum of political decision makers?

Washington finds that it does. Based on her analysis of roll-call voting in the U.S. Senate, she concludes as follows:

While the notion that a legislator’s children influence his congressional voting behavior appears commonsensical, there has, to this point and to my knowledge, been no evidence to quantitatively substantiate this intuition. This paper begins to fill this hole in the literature. I find that conditional on number of children, parenting an additional female child increases a representative’s propensity to vote liberally on women’s issues, particularly reproductive rights. Such a voting pattern does not seem to be explained away by constituency preferences,
suggesting not only does parenting daughters affect preferences, but also that personal preferences affect legislative behavior.

Consequently these results [suggest that] to the realm of environmental effects, such as peers and neighborhoods, … we should add offspring effects.Not only should we consider the impact that parents have on children’s attitudes and behavior, but we should consider that there may be reverse causality in the parental/child attitude relationship.

A second contribution of this work is to the literature on congressional voting. This paper not only provides a robustness check on the finding that ideology impacts legislative voting, it also serves to identify an additional component of that ideology: child gender composition.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

M. Marit Rehavi, a PhD candidate in economics at Berkeley (yes, economics) explores this question in Sex and Politics: Do Female Legislators Affect State Spending? She examines over 20,000 bills and finds that the dramatic movement of women into US state legislators over the past 25 years was responsible for a modest shift in the rise of state health spending but not in other areas associated with women, such as education. She also finds that “[W]omen elected in close races have a larger effect on spending priorities than the average female office holder.” Read the complete working draft here.

Posted by David Park at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The short answer is no:

Political campaigns are just now learning how to put the Internet to best use. Low transaction costs and huge economies of scale tempt campaigns to move traditional activities online, but the effectiveness of virtual campaigns is unknown. This paper conducts 13 field experiments on 232,716 subjects to test whether email campaigns are effective for voter registration and mobilization. Both registration and turnout were unaffected, suggesting that email, while inexpensive, is not cost-effective.

The paper (here) is by David Nickerson. The key to successful mobilization, as Nickerson argues and other field experiments confirm, is personalized contact:

These results fit neatly into the pattern of voter mobilization results where the effectiveness of a technology is directly proportional to its personalized nature. High cost and relatively intimate face-to-face contact successfully moves people to the polls, whereas direct mail does little to change behavior. Given the ubiquity of unsolicited email and the low transaction costs associated with the medium, email should exhibit little success in mobilizing voters and this expectation is borne out.

Other posts on the internet and campaigns:
What’s in Candidate Websites?
Is the Internet “Democratizing” Campaign Donations?
Did “Macaca” Lose the 2006 Election for George Allen?

Posted by John Sides at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In this Politics magazine piece, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason magazine envision a future when a candidate like Ron Paul is President:

And when that future arrives — and it will, sooner or later — we’ll all look back at the failed campaign of a guy who said he didn’t want to run our lives, the economy, or the world, and wonder what took us so long.

How does one get to such a conclusion? Follow these easy steps:

#1. Extrapolate political trends from cultural trends. Use hackneyed cultural references when possible:

The key to such an optimism is recognizing that politics is a lagging indicator of American society, which has been moving with broadband-like speed [hackneyed #1] into an era of Do It Yourself culture and not-so-rugged individualism. Think of what Americans have come to expect and insist upon in their social and economic lives: increasingly individualized service, culture and consumer products at every level (“You want soy with that decaf mocha frappucino?” [hackneyed #2]); more and more control over education, healthcare and retirement; and a nearly full-throttled embrace of lifestyle tolerance and pluralism that was unimaginable in a pre-Netflix, pre-”Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” pre-iPod America [hackneyed #3, 4, and 5].

Gillespie and Welch will have to explain to me the connection between individualism and “Queer Eye” — perhaps that’s what “not so rugged” implies? — but in any case I can give them one piece of disconcerting news. Every year since 1982, the National Election Studies has asked this question:

Some people think the government should provide fewer services, even in areas such as health and education, in order to reduce spending. Other people feel that it is important for the government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending. Where would you place yourself on this scale, or haven’t you thought much about this?

The percentage who wanted government to provide many more services has increased in the past 10 years to 43%, while those who want the government to provide fewer services has decreased to 20%. The data are here. Maybe “not so rugged” just means “not.”

Continue reading "The Active Fantasy Lives of Libertarians" »

Posted by John Sides at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Lane Kenworthy shows how it’s done.

Posted by Henry at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)