The Monkey Cage

“We’ll be the checks and balances on this out-of-control, criminal government.”

Comments like that one were par for the course this past Saturday here in Washington, D.C. In what must have been a trial run for hosting the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association later this week, TV personality Glenn Beck led a “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial. I want to focus not on the rally’s content but on the motives of the many thousands who attended.

(Photo credit: Lee Drutman)

Even before it took place, the rally was being discussed as another example of the “enthusiasm gap” between Democrats and Republicans leading into the 2010 midterm elections. I think a better name might be the “threat gap.” That’s because the Tea Party appears to be the latest example of a mobilization in response to a perceived policy threat—in this case, a Democratic policy agenda being pursued by at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Nobel Prize-winning social science tells us that people are generally loss averse (gated), meaning that we’re likely to be more worried about shifts away from our preferred policies than excited about shifts toward them. That’s exactly what political scientists Richard Lau (gated), John Patty (ungated), and Joanne Miller and Jon Krosnick (ungated, gated) have separately argued: in motivating political behavior, threats are more energizing than opportunities. And that asymmetry hints at why there was no “Taxed Enough Already” movement driving the actual enactment of the Bush tax cuts in 2001.

Are such mobilizations in response to perceived policy threats rare in American politics? Not in the slightest: in October of 2002, January of 2003, and again in September 2005, many thousands of Americans of a very different political stripe came here to D.C. to protest against the War in Iraq. In fact, the quotation that opened this blog post, so seemingly at home in a discussion of the current right-wing mobilization, actually came from anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan at a 2005 demonstration. Yet strangely, discussions of the Tea Party almost never mention its recent left-wing analog.

At least in part, the Anti-War movement in the early part of the decade and the Tea Party movement at the end were both responses to shifts in public policy that many Americans—especially those not identifying with the party in power—saw as at odds with their values and deeply threatening. For one bit of evidence on this, take a look at national survey data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

In both the fall of 2000 and the spring of 2006, the survey asked Americans about their political ideology, and also asked if they had attended a political meeting or rally in the last year. It’s not that ideology shifted much, at least on the left. In both years, only about 7.5% of Americans called themselves “very liberal.” But the participation of that 7.5% differed substantially. In the fall of 2000, with a Democrat in the White House and no major policy changes in the works, the very liberal respondents were only slightly more likely than other Americans to be manning the proverbial barricades: 25% had been to a rally or political meeting in the last year. In the spring of 2006, with the ongoing Iraq War and unified Republican control, that number had jumped to 39%. The participation of other ideological categories seemed unchanged. Not long ago, the threat gap cut the other way.

Posted by Daniel Hopkins at 12:35 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)

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Pew center poll that found that fewer Americans believe Obama is a Christian and more believe he is a Muslim or simply don’t know what his religion is. The question is: why have people’s beliefs changed?

One hypothesis proffered by Newsweek and Jack Shafer is that some Americans are just dumb. They believe in stuff like ghosts and astrology, so why not this about Obama?

That doesn’t get us very far. It seems hard to imagine that Americans suddenly got dumber between March 2009 and August 2010, when the Pew polls were conducted.

A second hypothesis comes from political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who notes that there have been numerous attempts by some media commentators and political leaders to insinuate that Obama is Muslim. He writes:

Rather than faulting the public for the weaknesses of human psychology, we should identify the elites who deceive citizens with false information and hold them accountable for their role in fostering this myth. It’s time to stop blaming the victims.

If Nyhan’s hypothesis is true, we would expect to see sharper changes over time among people who are, first, predisposed to believe bad things about Obama. This implicates Republicans, and, indeed, Pew found that Republicans registered the sharpest increase in the belief that Obama is Muslim. Second, among Republicans, we should see especially sharp changes among those who pay attention politics and the news, because these people who would be more likely to watch, read, or hear any commentators and leaders suggesting that Obama is Muslim.

Via a contact at Pew, I asked them for additional information from their March and August polls: the results broken down not only by party, but also by political attentiveness.¹ The best measure of attentiveness in their surveys was the respondent’s level of formal education, which is a plausible but imperfect proxy for attention to politics. Nevertheless, it’s what I had to use.

Here are the trends from the March 2009 to August 2010 polls in the perception that Obama is a Muslim. I divide the sample into Democrats and Republicans. Independents who lean towards a party are counted as partisans (see here for why), so this analysis includes about 90% of the sample. I then divide the sample into the education categories that Pew provided: those with a high school degree or less, those with some college education, and those with a college degree or more.

The growth in this perception among Democrats is small and is consistent across education levels: a 2-4 increase within each level. By contrast, the growth in this perception among Republicans is more notable among those with some college education (a 19-point increase) or a college degree (15 points) than among those with a high school degree or less (9 points). In other words, better educated Republicans have changed more than the less educated Republicans. This flies in the face of the “dumb Americans” idea and provides some support for Nyhan’s hypothesis. The people most likely to hear the “Obama is a Muslim” meme are the ones whose beliefs changed most dramatically in the past 17 months.

Below is the full set of results, including the percentages who said Christian, Muslim, or expressed no opinion. (Click to make it larger.) Again, this tells a similar story: larger changes among the better educated Republicans. For example, the decline in the percentage of Republicans who believe that Obama is a Christian is larger among those with some college (-31 points) or a college degree (-24 points) than among those with a high school degree or less (-11 points).

Obviously, we cannot draw definitive conclusions from this analysis. It does not prove that some media personalities and political leaders are responsible for the increasing perception that Obama is a Muslim. But it points in that direction.

[Cross-posted at Ezra Klein’s blog]

¹ I thank Jocelyn Kiley of Pew for providing additional data. Neither she nor the sponsors of the polls — the Pew Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life — bear any responsibility for my interpretation.

Posted by John Sides at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

In the past couple weeks, there has been quite a bit of discussion about the tax rates of the rich and the super rich. Much of this is of course motivated by the coming expiration of the Bush tax cuts (see Paul Krugman’s column yesterday for example.) James Surowiecki takes this one step further by making a very thought provoking argument in The New Yorker that our current system of progressive tax rates is hopelessly out of date with its top bracket starting at $200,000 a year for individuals and $250,000 a year for households. He adds the memorable observation that Lebron James and his dentist both probably pay the marginal tax rate on additional income. Nate Silver responded to Surowiecki with a discussion of the economic implications of some of Surowiecki’s proposals, concluding that:

Let’s say we go with the plan of taxing marginal income above $1 million at 3 percent, and marginal income above $5 million at an additional 3 percent. That would produce a theoretical $39 billion per year. However, there would be some productivity losses, and perhaps some additional offsets resulting from people finding ways to transfer their income into more tax-advantageous activities, so perhaps revenues on the order of $35 billion per year, or $350 billion per decade, are more realistic.

I think the economic implications of the proposal are interesting as we head into an era when we need to consider all possible sources of tax revenue, but I am even more intrigued by the potential political implications of the tax. With the dominant political narrative these days being how President Obama is having trouble delivering a credible narrative of what he actually stands for, wouldn’t taxing the super rich be a political no brainer for the Democrats in the US? Wouldn’t this be an outstanding question for all Democratic candidates for congress to be able to ask their Republican opponents where they stand on the issue? Think the ground zero mosque in reverse. Commercials could be run saying “my opponent wants to keep taxes lower for millionaires - I want to keep them lower for you.” It seems like such a simple message that it would be perfect for a campaign year where the dominant trend - the state of the economy when you are the incumbent party - is running against you.

So I went looking for some data on this. I unfortunately couldn’t find any public opinion polls about a millionaire’s tax, so I’m hoping readers of the Monkey Cage can help. What I did find was the following, admittedly from last year, over at the Gallup website:

While I’d like to see these data broken down by party, it sure seems like there is plenty of support out there for increasing the tax burden on the right.

So I’m throwing the question out to readers of The Monkey Cage: convince me why it would be a bad idea for the Democrats to double-down on this taxing the rich issue and start pushing proposals for new tax brackets for those making over $1 million a year and those making over $5 million a year? Why couldn’t the Democrats emulate the Republicans 2004 gay marriage strategy? I’m particularly interested in comments from anyone who follows New Jersey politics, where Republican Gov. Chris Christie obviously did not fear vetoing a millionaire’s tax in his state. Are there any surveys of voters’ opinions in the aftermath of his veto out there?

*****

[I just came across this post from Ed Kilgore that makes a very similar point to the one I’ve made here, so I want to be sure to give him an ex-post hat tip….]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has a new report out with a fairly perplexing finding. The percentage of people who think President Obama is a Christian has declined sharply over the past year. In three studies from March 2008, October 2008, and March 2009, the percentage thinking he was a Christian stayed between 47-51%. Then, in the most recent study, it dropped to only 34%. The study was in the field from July 21-August 5th, so I think much of this predates the recent “Ground Zero Mosque” flap. Also, everything at follows is with the caveat that any one survey can always produce a result from the tails of a distribution, so we’ll want to see other surveys replicating this result before we can confidently conclude that public opinion in this regard has indeed shifted. But this is a blog, so let’s just posit for the moment that it indeed has shifted and continue with the discussion.

My question for those of you who study public opinion is the following: don’t we normally expect that factual knowledge about individuals increases over time as that person spends more time in the public eye? And it’s not like this issue wasn’t politicized from the start - opponents of Obama tried to make an issue of his religion during the campaign. So why would we expect fewer people now to know that he is a Christian?

Here’s the best answer I can come up with, and it’s a bit troubling. If we take a Bayesian perspective on the whole thing - people start with a prior, and then update as they get more information - here is the one stylized fact we actually know: Obama’s approval rating has dropped over the past year. So if we imagine that people start with a prior that Obama is a Christian, but it’s not particularly strong. Then time passes and they like him less - that’s the new piece of information. So then they have to update their belief as to whether Obama is a Christian, and lo and behold, fewer people think he’s a Christian. From this perspective, it suggests that - given enough initial uncertainty about a person’s religion - liking that person less makes one less likely to think he is a Christian. Interestingly, the drop in “Obama is a Christian” seems to be evenly split between thinking he is a Muslim and not knowing (other holds steady at 2%).

I’m open to other suggestions, explanations, etc. Also interested in whether readers have any other good examples of knowledge of factual information about a person declining as the person gets better known by the public?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

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)

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)

So asks James Ledbetter in Slate.

The answer: No.

That was easy.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

Glenn Greenwald:

In other words, the supposedly safe, moderate-appearing, blank slate nominee (Kagan) received fewer confirmation votes, and was less politically popular, than the supposedly risky, clearly liberal nominee with a long record of judicial opining and controversial statements (Sotomayor). Aren’t there important lessons in those facts? Doesn’t that rather clearly contradict the endless excuse-making from the Democratic establishment that muddled moderation is politically necessary? If you’re going to attract a tiny handful of GOP votes no matter what, why not nominate someone who will enliven the public, inspire your base, and provide an opportunity to advocate and defend a progressive judicial philosophy?

Jon Bernstein:

I would say: no, there are no important lessons in those facts. Kagan almost certainly did worse than Sotomayor not because of anything having to do with them as Court candidates, but because Barack Obama was far more popular in spring 2009 than in spring 2010. Greenwald supplies a nice Gallup chart showing support for various nominees over the years, and a quick glance reveals that support for nominees appears to be highly correlated with presidential approval levels (I don’t know of any research on that point…)

Here is a graph comparing opinion of presidents and their Court nominees, using the Gallup data on nominees that Greenwald presents and Gallup data on presidential approval from the week or two immediately before the outcome for each nominee:

The relationship that Bernstein hypothesizes is present, although 8 observations make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. (The slope on the regression line is 0.31 with standard error of 0.44; the r-squared is 0.08.) There is a lot of variation due to circumstances specific to each nominee. Consider Miers and Bork, for example.

With more data, we could probably draw a firmer conclusion about any correlation. Like Bernstein, I would appreciate references to relevant research.

Posted by John Sides at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Everyone knows this controversy by now. Here is the bill. Here is Mitch McConnell yesterday. It’s highly unlikely that this push to end birthright citizenship will go anywhere, but it’s worth probing public opinion on this question and on an underlying question: what should be the boundaries of the American national community?

Some quick searching did not turn up many polls on birthright citizenship per se. Rasmussen recently asked whether children of illegal immigrants should be citizens. In their sample, 58% of respondents said no, and 33% said yes. It would be interesting to know whether this is an objection to birthright citizenship per se or essentially an objection to illegal immigration.

Now to the broader question. In 2004, the General Social Survey asked a battery of questions on potential qualifications for being American. This was the preamble:

Some people say the following things are important for being truly American. Others say they are not important. How important do you think each of the following is…

Here is the average importance that respondents accorded to each qualification.

On average, respondents saw all of these qualifications are more important than unimportant. However, they also saw some qualifications as more important than others. In general, the more important qualifications reflect things that an immigrant can achieve: speaking English, becoming naturalized, respecting American institutions and laws. More exclusive criteria, and ones that immigrants cannot change (or change easily), are less important: being born in America, being Christian, or having American ancestry.

How might we interpret these results in light of the debate over birthright citizenship? Here are two possibilities.

First, Lindsey Graham and other opponents of birthright citizenship could take heart. Look, they might say, the public doesn’t even think being born in America is as important as other things. Given the importance accorded to American citizenship, we could make native-born children of immigrants go through the naturalization process and Americans would still see them as American. No harm done.

Second, some might object to that interpretation as a violation of the “spirit” underlying American public opinion. Americans’ sense of their national community is more inclusive than exclusive. Shifting American law in a more exclusive direction is not in this spirit. Why not recognize that more important than birthplace is speaking English, loyalty to the United States, and respect for its laws? And why not take heart that immigrants do learn English and are no less patriotic than native-born Americans? For evidence on this score, see this article by Jack Citrin, Amy Lerman, Mike Murakami, and Kathryn Pearson. Here is the abstract:

Samuel Huntington argues that the sheer number, concentration, linguistic homogeneity, and other characteristic of Hispanic immigrants will erode the dominance of English as a nationally unifying language, weaken the country’s dominant cultural values, and promote ethnic allegiances over a primary identification as an American. Testing these hypotheses with data from the U.S. Census and national and Los Angeles opinion surveys, we show that Hispanics acquire English and lose Spanish rapidly beginning with the second generation, and appear to be no more or less religious or committed to the work ethic than native-born whites. Moreover, a clear majority of Hispanics reject a purely ethnic identification and patriotism grows from one generation to the next. At present, a traditional pattern of political assimilation appears to prevail.

For more on this general subject, see my article with Jack Citrin, which compares qualifications for immigrants across the U.S. and Europe. More importantly, see Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s new book Who Counts as an American? The Boundaries of National Identity.

Posted by John Sides at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

One of my graduate students, Andrew Therriault, has a very interesting blog post up today about a recent Pew survey on public opinion towards the Bush tax cuts. First, the numbers in answer to the question Which comes closer to your view about the tax cuts passed when George W. Bush was president?

30% All of the tax cuts should remain in place.
27% Tax cuts for the wealthy should be repealed, while others stay in place.
31% All of the tax cuts should be repealed.

Andrew’s take on this:

This is pretty amazing. We could argue to no end about the reasonableness of (effectively) raising taxes during a recession, but that’s not the point. Nor are the exact numbers themselves gospel–I imagine more than a few respondents are reacting to the “Bush” part of “Bush tax cuts”, and the option of sticking it to the unspecified “wealthy” does summon the populist rage in a bipartisan fashion. What’s really important here is that, while Democratic lawmakers are clamoring to get on the tax cut bandwagon (or off of the tax increase bandwagon, if you’re thinking about attack ads), Americans appear willing to have a reasonable conversation about taxes, that is, one in which raising taxes is at least on the table.

His caveats:

In reality, the outcome is always somewhat muddled–voters vary widely in the amount and quality of information they hold about policy, and act accordingly. But given the pocketbook appeal of tax cuts and the public’s general disdain for government spending (waste and inefficiency aside, most everyone’s tax dollars at least partially fund things they oppose), along with the pundrity’s dire warnings against raising taxes in a recession, it’s remarkable that a clear majority of voters are open to raising at least some taxes. And moreover, many are willing to pay more out of their own pockets. I’d have to see more data to see what this means:

Is it the budget deficit worrying voters?
Do they want better services (healthcare, Social Security, education, or others) and are tired of hearing that there’s no money for them?
Are they simply reacting against the Bush-era economic policies in general, in light of their results? (The same poll shows that only 29% think Bush’s economic policies would be better right now than Obama’s.)

So to throw out to readers of the Monkey Cage: are we witnessing something new in American public opinion?

******

As an aside on the subject of social media, I became aware of Andrew’s post because he posted it to his Facebook page. So if you are an aspiring blogger, don’t be afraid to get out there and promote what you are writing. As the number of political scientists on Facebook in particular grows (and I’m guessing Twitter as well, although I’m less active there), this is becoming an increasingly valuable way to share information about research and opinions. With that in mind, has anyone thought about a Twitter search tool for new blog posts in political science? or new papers? How about #psblogpost and #psnewpaper?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

We examine the role of political factors in affecting quality of life in the context of the American states. In particular, we ask whether the choices made by voters, as manifested by the governments they elect, and the subsequent public policy regimes those governments establish, determine the degree to which individuals find their lives satisfying. We find that the different ideological and partisan orientations of state governments, as well as a state’s pattern of public policies, have strong effects on satisfaction with life, net of economic, social, and cultural factors. The more a state attempts to insulate citizens against market forces, the greater is satisfaction.

That is from a newly published paper by Ángel Álvarez-Díaz, Lucas González and Benjamin Radcliff. They find that Americans report more satisfaction with their lives when they live in states that have (1) more transfer payments from government to citizens, per capita; (2) more regulation of markets; (3) more liberal state governments; and (4) more Democratic state governments. The analysis controls for state population, income, racial diversity, and social capital; it also addresses concerns that “satisfied” states simply pass more liberal policies. The authors do not attempt to determine directly which of the 4 measures of policies and politics is the more important — i.e., by including them in the same model — but the evidence suggests that policies matter more. Finally, there is some evidence that the effects of these policies and political arrangements are somewhat larger for poorer citizens, although these effects are present even among the wealthiest.

The authors are cautious about drawing normative conclusions from their results:

…they do not provide any overall judgment on whether generous welfare policies are good or bad; whether liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican, governments are superior; or whether, in sum, human life is best served by the state taking an expansive or minimal role in economic management. These questions are inherently both normative and ideological. As such, they do not have empirical “answers.” We make no pretense of offering any.

They do argue that their evidence means that “politics matters,” in that it affects subjective assessments of how good life is.

Find the article here (gated) or here (ungated pdf).

Posted by John Sides at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We find that greater home-state public support does significantly and strikingly increase the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even controlling for other predictors of roll-call voting. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.

That’s from a newly published paper by Jonathan Kastellec, Jeffrey Lax, and Justin Phillips. Public opinion about the nominees matters over and above the overall ideology of a state’s voters, the nominee’s qualifications, and a senator’s party and ideology.

The analysis generates some fun counterfactuals:

Bork received only 42 votes in his favor (given actual opinion on his nomination, we would have predicted 43). If he were as popular as Alito, however, with the state-by-state popularity of Alito, we predict that he would have been confirmed with 54 votes…

…Thomas was more popular a nominee on average than was Bork, and a bit more popular than Alito. Did this make a difference in his confirmation vote? What if he had been as unpopular as Bork? Our prediction, applying Bork’s state-by-state opinion level instead of his own, is that Thomas would have received only 40 votes—a “landslide” vote against confirmation. Public opinion, it seems, was crucial to his successful confirmation.

Kastellec et al. also predict that Harriet Miers would have won only 32 votes.

Find the paper here (gated) or here(ungated).

Posted by John Sides at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jonah Lehrer puts together the Boston Globe article on political knowledge with Philip Tetlock’s work on expertise.

There is no cure for this ideological irrationality - it’s simply the way we’re built. Nevertheless, I think a few simple fixes could dramatically improve our political culture. We should begin by minimizing our exposure to political pundits. The problem with pundits is best illustrated by the classic work of Philip Tetlock … After Tetlock tallied up the data, the predictive failures of the pundits became obvious. Although they were paid for their keen insights into world affairs, they tended to perform worse than random chance. So those talking heads on television are full of shit. Probably not surprising. What’s much more troubling, however, is that they’ve become our model of political discourse. We now associate political interest with partisan blowhards on cable TV, these pundits and consultants and former politicians who trade facile talking points. Instead of engaging with contrary facts, the discourse has become one big study in cognitive dissonance.

On the one hand, this is slightly loose. Pundits-a-la-Tetlock are not quite the same thing as pundits-a-la-Lehrer. The former are professional prognosticators, while the latter are professional arguers. Or - to put it another way - the former are the folks who CNN calls up when something happens that they need an insta-expert on, and the latter are the folks who CNN pays a monthly retainer to. But on the other hand (and the other hand weighs a lot more here imo), what evidence we have (thanks to our late, and sorely missed co-blogger, Lee Sigelman) suggests that the latter are pretty terrible at prediction too). Indeed, they are arguably worse. Prognosticators have at least a modest requirement to be consistent in their predictions. They also have some need to avoid Delphic ambiguity, and in the test under discussion, Tetlock’s questions were designed specifically to force them to make clear and emphatic claims.¹ Professional talking heads, as Lee’s article illustrates, face neither of these constraints. It’s an open question how much such media contributes to public ignorance (n.b. that the consumption of cable news among non-elites is relatively low). But there are some findings (viz. Bartels’ graph on awareness of economic inequality) which suggests that selective consumption of partisan information does have negative consequences for actual awareness of political facts.

¹ As a complete aside, I’ve always been fond of the price-schedule offered by the soothsayer in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. “I respond to three questions,’ stated the augur. ‘For the twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I will speak a parable, which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”

Posted by Henry at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s been some discussion (for example, Mank and Krug), on the political and economic merits of economic stimulus vs. austerity. (Each of these options contains many choices regarding distribution; for example, “austerity” could be implemented via tax increases at the high end, tax increases at the low end, or various sorts of spending cuts. But right now, much of the discussion appears to center on the bottom line for the budget rather than on the details of how we’d get there.)

John Sides has an excellent discussion of the political angle of the stimulus-vs.-austerity debate, arguing that if Obama and congressional Democrats want to improve their prospects in the fall, they’d be smart to forget about deficit worries and just turn up the heat on the economy.

I just have a couple of things to add to John’s analysis. First, I suspect the Obama team knows about the research on the economy and election outcomes, and, more importantly, I think they knew about this in 2009 as well. That’s one reason they did the big stimulus last year, no? To put the economy on a better footing in the 2010 election year. And, according to many economists, the stimulus worked in that regard; in the absence of a stimulus, we might very well be in much worse economic shape (at least in the short term). But does Obama gain much by jump-starting the economy now, in July, 2010? At this point it might take too long for an additional stimulus to make much of a difference. And the last thing Obama wants is for a big improvement to come in 2011! On the contrary, the political logic suggested by the political-business-cycle work of Hibbs, Bartels, and others is to keep things mellow in 2011 and save the boom for 2012. Of course, the Republicans know this too . . .

My other comment is that the economic principles of Obama and his team may not be as clear as Sides, Krugman, Mankiw, et al. seem to think. Recall that in 2008 Obama was strongly supported by labor unions, poverty advocates, and . . . Wall Street. Whatever cynical feelings you might have about any or all of these three groups, I think we can all agree they have different economic priorities when it comes to taxes and spending.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That’s the title of a very nice article by Joe Keohane in the Boston Globe. The subject is political misinformation and the stubborn persistence of political beliefs in the face of correct information. Keohane focuses on the work of Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler (see here or here for our links to this work). The piece also mentions the work of Larry Bartels, Jim Kuklinski, Milton Lodge, and Charles Taber — as well as a working paper (pdf) by Jack Citrin and me on the (null) effects of certain information about immigrants.

Of course, the picture isn’t always that grim. In another paper (pdf), I find that correct information about who pays the estate tax — namely, a small fraction of people, all of whom are pretty rich — increases support for the tax and it does so among primarily among people whom you might think would resist this information: conservatives and Republicans.

But, as Brendan correctly notes, the study of information and misinformation is “very much up in the air.” Political scientists simply don’t have a very thorough account of why factual information corrects misperceptions and changes attitudes in some contexts but backfires in others.

Posted by John Sides at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

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)

The new issue of PS: Political Science and Politics has a symposium on torture, and the issue has been made available to the public. Here is the issue, and here is the press release from the American Political Science Association. I thank Sarah Vogelsong at APSA, as well as Cambridge University Press.

I will focus on one article from the symposium, co-authored by Paul Gronke, Darius Rejali, Dustin Drenguis, James Hicks, Peter Miller, and Bryan Nakayama. From the opening paragraphs:

Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack….But this view was a misperception…we show here that a majority of Americans were opposed to torture throughout the Bush presidency…even when respondents were asked about an imminent terrorist attack, even when enhanced interrogation techniques were not called torture, and even when Americans were assured that torture would work to get crucial information. Opposition to torture remained stable and consistent during the entire Bush presidency. Even soldiers serving in Iraq opposed the use of torture in these conditions…a public majority in favor of torture did not appear until, interestingly, six months into the Obama administration.

The public opinion data from 2001-2009 is pretty unequivocal. See the paper for the requisite tables and graphs. It’s also worth noting that majorities oppose most specific methods of torture or “enhanced interrogation” even when those techniques are not labeled “torture.”

So why would politicians and journalists misread public opinion? Gronke et al write:

A recent survey we commissioned helps shine a light on this question. Psychologists describe a process of misperception—“false consensus”—whereby an individual mistakenly believes that his or her viewpoint represents the public majority…Our survey shows that this false consensus pervades the opinions of those who support torture, leading them to significantly overestimate the proportion of the public that agrees with them. Those people opposed to torture, in contrast, have remarkably accurate perceptions of the rest of the public.

And here is the graph that shows the gap between perceived and actual opinion, comparing supporters and opponents of torture.

The gap is larger for supporters of torture than for opponents, suggesting that supporters are especially prey to the false consensus effect:

Those who believe that torture is “often” justified—a mere 15% of the public—think that more than a third of the public agrees with them. The 30% who say that torture can “sometimes” be justified believe that 62% of Americans do as well, and think that another 8% “often” approve of torture.

Gronke et al. conclude:

The people who had the most accurate perception of public attitudes turned out to be the people nobody believed or supported throughout the Bush administration—the 29% who were most opposed to torture.

The article is here.

Posted by John Sides at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Mark Palko sends in this from Sean Trende:

Writing on Peggy Noonan’s columns about a “Snakebit President,” and an earlier column titled “The Sentence,” [Brendan Nyhan] takes Noonan to task for suggesting that Obama’s falling approval ratings were due to an increased perception of weakness on the part of the President. Nyhan concludes (in part):

[T}his is silliness. If the economy was strong, public perceptions about “The Sentence” wouldn’t be a political problem. What was Bill Clinton’s “Sentence” in his second term? (Indeed, Noonan has argued that Reagan “knew, going in, the sentence he wanted, and he got it” and yet his approval ratings still declined substantially when the economy was bad in 1982.) The underlying problem is that Noonan and other pundits have strong professional incentives to construct these ad hoc explanations, which emphasize their own expertise in narrative construction and dramatize politics for public consumption. Until more pundits recognize the potential advantages of incorporating political science into their work, mysticism and superstition will continue to dominate.

The Nyhan quote seems reasonable to me. And, indeed, Trende writes:

As general matter I have no idea whether the public really perceives Obama as “snakebit” or “getting a bad Sentence.” It’s probably not how I would choose to explain Obama’s approval ratings. And let me reiterate my shared belief with Nyhan that pundits absolutely should do more to incorporate political science models into their work.

But all this political science punditry leaves a bad taste in his mouth:

But political scientists posing as pundits also need to be more modest about their work, and up-front about the limitation of their models. Non-quantitative punditry has a huge place in our discourse for many reasons, including one that is directly applicable here. There are all sorts of problems with these statistical models (the data are usually nonlinear, badly heteroskedastic, and limited (eg small “n” problems), and the political scientists are frequently every bit as ad hoc in selecting variables as is Noonan, just in their own way), but the most applicable problem here is that there is always a large portion of the data that have to be explained qualitatively.

Trende goes on to discuss examples in which presidential approval did not track with the unemployment rate, as a demonstration of the limits of quantitative analysis. Nyhan agrees that “there’s no question that qualitative insights can help us understand why presidential approval deviates from what we might otherwise expect given the state of the economy,” but this doesn’t let Peggy Noonan off the hook for attributing Obama’s 46% approval rate to being “snakebit.”

One thing Bill James pointed out many years ago, is that the people who privilege intuition over statistics often end up using statistics to make their points. They just don’t use statistics systematically. Instead of looking carefully at offensive contributions, they’ll say that someone hit .300 once and somebody else notched 100 RBI. In his blog, Trende discusses some presidential approval numbers but in a somewhat episodic way. That’s fine—he’s a political analyst writing for Real Clear Politics, not an academic political scientist, and he’s paid to do timely analyses, not to come up with rigorous peer-reviewed studies. But that’s Brendan’s point, I think: Systematic analysis takes work, and some of this work has already been published in the political science literature.

My problem with Trende’s position is slightly different. I completely agree with Trende (and, by extension, Noonan) that non-quantitative issues are hugely important in politics. All sorts of factors come into play, including personal relationships between congressmembers, intricacies of campaign contributions, news media ownership rules, and the roles of unelected political actors such as civil service employees and military contractors. And all of these topics deserve serious qualitative study.

But why, oh why, focus on presidential approval. Maybe because it’s easy to do. Reporting on the political process takes work, but it’s effortless to pull some poll numbers off the web. I’m not saying Trende and isn’t well-intentioned; what I’m saying is that if he really wants to get serious about qualitative analysis, maybe he should move away from the poll-reading.

Here’s how Trende concludes his summary of the case of Nyhan v. Noonan:

But it is perfectly plausible — and within the error term for most of these models — to say that the reason that Obama is at 46% approval in Gallup instead of 51% or maybe even 55% is because of supposed snakebitten-ness. There isn’t much in the way of data on this attribute so we can’t really disprove a relationship here. All we know is that there is always going to be a large portion of data — whether it be presidential approval, congressional midterm elections, or presidential election results — that can’t be easily explained quantitatively. This is where qualitative analysts like Noonan will always be valuable.

That’s his best defense of Noonan? “There isn’t much in the way of data so we can’t really disprove a relationship here.” And from this, “qualitative analysts like Noonan will always be valuable”? That’s setting the bar pretty low!

I’ll give Trende full credit for openness and honesty here. But the next step is for him to think carefully about what he just wrote. Is this the best that qualitative analysis can do, to come up with theories that can’t be disproved? Instead, why not take advantage of the work being done by the Brendan Nyhans and Nate Silvers out there and do some real qualitative reporting and analysis? The increasing accessibility of strong quantitative work should free you from trying to interpret every swing in the polls and give you the confidence to think qualitatively about psychology, human interaction, and the political process.

P.S. Some people got on my case for referring to Noonan as a “qualitative analyst.” But I’m just using Trende’s characterization here; I don’t want to get into a debate about terminology.

P.P.S. Let me be clear that I’m not trying to criticize Sean Trende’s work as a political analyst. As noted above, he’s admirably clear about the limitations of Noonan-style storytelling (at best, she’s giving us hypotheses we can’t disprove). For whatever reason, Trende was putting in a defense of this sort of storytelling that, to me, seemed a bit too strong—as I wrote at the beginning of this blog, I’m closer to Brendan Nyhan on this one. But I don’t for one minute want this to be taken as a criticism of Trende’s political analysis.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For background: the Jacobs and Page paper, my post on the paper, Andy’s post, and Kevin Esterling’s rejoinder.

I queried Ben Page for any further thoughts. He sends this via email:

It is simply not right to run one of these shows with no serious effort to get representativeness among participants and then claim to have discovered “public opinion.”

The “thorough” vetting of information materials managed to miss many misleading bits and several outright errors that various observers have pointed out. My favorite is talking about a “6.2%” Social Security payroll tax paid by employees, when virtually all economists agree that the actual burden is double that: the “employers’” share is subtracted from wages. And of course the whole thrust was to prime deficits rather than needs for or effects of social programs.

Jacobs and Page also wrote this piece for the Huffington Post.

Here are my further thoughts. The point of my original post was, of course, to publicize one perspective within political science on a topical issue. As I wrote then, I think that Page and Jacobs raise some important questions about deliberative forums, such as the representativeness of the participants. Certainly those questions need to be considered by any policymaker who also considers the results of the America Speaks forums.

In his reply, Kevin Esterling spoke to the issue of representativeness:

As John Sides points out in his posting, the opinions that citizens registered at the event closely reflect survey research findings on public opinion on fiscal issues. This finding contradicts all three premises of the Page and Jacobs paper, and the Sides and Gelman posts: these findings are simply inconsistent with the assertion that the events were badly unrepresentative, biased, or full of citizens who were easily manipulated.

I would not say that this finding “contradicts” anyone or necessarily assuages concerns about representativeness. Esterling could be right: the participants could have, by coincidence, been a roughly random sample of Americans. But it’s also possible that the participants were not representative and only ended up resembling the broader public because the deliberative forum changed their minds. We just don’t know until the data are analyzed. Ultimately, Esterling points out the deliberative forums can certainly be designed well. I agree. The question is whether this one was.

This leaves aside the issue of whether the information presented to the participants was accurate, etc. Esterling notes that diverse organizations were involved in developing the materials, which could have mitigated bias in the materials. That may be, although obviously the objections raised by Page and others suggest that this remains an open question. In any case, it’s not one I’m qualified to comment on.

Esterling also writes:

Sides concludes that the events taught us nothing about public opinion, but in fact we believe the evaluation will tell us a great deal. First, even if the aggregate opinion at the events mirrors survey research findings, there is some value in finding that considered opinion is consistent with general-population surveys, and indeed helps to show their validity. And while much of political science is focused on preferences and their tendency to change in response to deliberation, we believe there is considerable value in understanding how citizens respond to the events themselves, and in particular if citizens can learn to appreciate the positions and rationales of those with whom they disagree; if deliberation increases citizens’ motivation to become involved in politics; whether citizens change in their beliefs regarding legitimacy of a political process that values citizen input, and so on. That’s the focus of our research.

Specifically, what I wrote was “The outcome, however, suggests nothing particularly new about public opinion.” That was too dismissive. Esterling is right that it’s valuable to learn whether “informed” opinion mirrors general-population surveys — although, again, the value of informed opinion is also contingent on the representativeness of the participants. Esterling also notes that deliberation is not just important because it might change opinions, but because it might encourage tolerance for opposing views and engagement in politics. That is entirely correct. Particularly important is determining what kinds of deliberative exercises create this outcomes because, obviously, deliberation can just as easily create polarization as tolerance.

Ultimately, I think my overall point is not in conflict with Esterling’s perspective: we should report on the results of these forums — in terms of the representativeness of the participants, any opinion change, any other benefits of deliberation — but if the Bowles-Simpson commission takes these findings into account, they should also consider the voluminous survey research on related topics, the potential pitfalls of deliberative forums, and the objections raised to the America Speaks forums.

Posted by John Sides at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kevin Esterling, who is involved in evaluating the America Speaks forums, sends along the following (all links added by me):

Archon Fung, Taeku Lee and I are part of a research team that is evaluating the AmericaSpeaks townhall deliberative events on “Our Budget, Our Economy,” held on June 26. The three of us share an academic interest in deliberative field experiments. We were involved to a limited extent in the design of the events themselves. For example, at our request, AmericaSpeaks randomized seating assignments for the 300 or so small group discussions at the 19 events, which may allow us to estimate the causal effects of deliberation as the composition of participants and the nature of deliberation vary across discussion tables.

In earlier postings, John Sides and Andrew Gelman summarize and comment on a paper by Ben Page and Larry Jacobs that expressed several points of skepticism regarding these events and more generally deliberative democracy in practice. A number of their points are empirical, such as the representativeness of the participants who attended and the quality of the deliberation at the event, points we’ll be able to elaborate on in our evaluation of the events.

But what appears to be the greatest concern for the Sides and Gelman posts (and perhaps a motivation underlying the original Page/Jacobs paper) is a suspicion that, since the Peterson Foundation is one among several funders, the events must have had a right-leaning bias. (I should mention too that the funding for our evaluation is from MacArthur, not Peterson.). And if this bias were true, the events would tap into a serious concern among political scientists regarding deliberation, that ordinary citizens are simply malleable in their opinions and attitudes, and biases in the information provided or in the agenda must turn the events a democratic sham; in this case, a Pete Peterson ploy to justify his agenda to dismantle Social Security.

I can say that AmericaSpeaks tried very hard to ensure the information presented and the agenda were balanced and informative, and they structured the events in a way to promote free and open discussion. For example, AmericaSpeaks had the reading materials extensively vetted by 30 organizations, both left and right, and went to considerable effort to do so. And the event also was heavily funded by MacArthur and Kellogg; if the events really were an enormous push-poll engineered by Peterson, it’s not clear why these other two centrist funders would have found these events to be a worthwhile investment.

While AmericaSpeaks’ intent was to be neutral, and I can’t think of anything more they could have done, one certainly can read the materials and debate the extent to which they succeeded. But even if AmericaSpeaks did not succeed in correcting biases in the information, or even if the Peterson Foundation indeed had hijacked the event for its purposes, it is still conceivable that the 3,500 ordinary citizens who attended the events, who spent an entire Saturday reading through dense material and discussing the budget and fiscal policy with total strangers, strangers who were often very different from themselves, working without a lunch break (and in my case, on an absolutely beautiful day stuck in the Federal Circuit courthouse in Pasadena), perhaps these ordinary citizens were able retain a capacity to be critical and to think for themselves within the situation.

There is growing experimental evidence that ordinary citizens have considerable capacity to become informed and to think critically when given a motive and an opportunity to do so, that is, when the deliberative exercise is well structured. For example, in some of Jamie Druckman’s experimental work (pdf), question wording framing effects disappear in mixed groups but not homogeneous groups; Phillip Tetlock’s experiments show certain forms of accountability increase cognitive integrative complexity; some of my own work with Mike Neblo and David Lazer (pdf) shows that participants in a deliberative exercise more deeply encode policy information. Deliberative events, that is, can be badly designed, but it is possible for them to be well designed, to foster constructive and informed dialogue among interested citizens, even among those of the ordinary variety.

Was the June 26 event well designed? We don’t even have the data entered yet so it’s too early to tell. But we do have one set of findings to suggest that they were simply not Peterson-engineered sham events. As John Sides points out in his posting, the opinions that citizens registered at the event closely reflect survey research findings on public opinion on fiscal issues. This finding contradicts all three premises of the Page and Jacobs paper, and the Sides and Gelman posts: these findings are simply inconsistent with the assertion that the events were badly unrepresentative, biased, or full of citizens who were easily manipulated.

Sides concludes that the events taught us nothing about public opinion, but in fact we believe the evaluation will tell us a great deal. First, even if the aggregate opinion at the events mirrors survey research findings, there is some value in finding that considered opinion is consistent with general-population surveys, and indeed helps to show their validity. And while much of political science is focused on preferences and their tendency to change in response to deliberation, we believe there is considerable value in understanding how citizens respond to the events themselves, and in particular if citizens can learn to appreciate the positions and rationales of those with whom they disagree; if deliberation increases citizens’ motivation to become involved in politics; whether citizens change in their beliefs regarding legitimacy of a political process that values citizen input, and so on. That’s the focus of our research.

We would ask Page and Jacobs to give us time to finish the evaluation before reaching conclusions regarding the deliberative quality of the events. For anyone interested, you can sign up for working papers by sending an email to fiscalfutureresearch@ash.harvard.edu.

And perhaps of even greater value, those who value deliberation on normative grounds but are skeptical of deliberative democracy in practice might do well to examine the structure of the events, and to propose improvements. AmericaSpeaks’ single objective is to improve the discourse in our civic life, something that is sorely needed today, and they would love to hear any suggestions for how to improve on their design and methods.

See also Archon Fung’s response.

Posted by John Sides at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Sides reports on a paper by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs about so-called deliberative forums, in particular a set of meetings called America Speaks that have been organized and conducted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization formed by the former advertising executive, Secretary of Commerce, and investment banker to focus attention on the national debt.

Sides, Page, and Jacobs discuss three key points:

1. Any poll or focus group is only as good as its sample, and there is no evidence that the participants in the America Speaks forums were selected in a way to be representative of the nation.

Deliberative forums often fail to get a representative sample of Americans to participate, even when they try hard to do so. Worse, some deliberative forums make little or no serious effort to achieve representativeness. They throw open the doors to self-selected political activists with extreme opinions, or they compile a secret list of invitees. The result can be an extremely skewed, unrepresentative picture of “public opinion” that little resembles the actual views of the American public as a whole.

2. The results of the deliberation are to a large extent a product of the information given to the participants during the meeting. Page and Jacobs discuss the choice of what arguments are presented, how they are framed, what competing arguments are presented (the problem of “presenting the spectrum from A to B”), and even the possibility of giving false or misleading information with an air of authority.

3. Actual public opinion on economic policy, as measured by representative samples, is much more concerned about jobs and economic growth than about deficits.

This is not to deny concerns about deficits—in particular, a voter can be primarily concerned about jobs and the economy but, at the same time, feel that deficit spending is not a good economic plan. If, for example, you feel that we cannot simply spend our way out of a recession, you might strongly support measures to reduce the deficit—even while still feeling that jobs and the economy are the #1 concern.

Political actors, not impartial measurement devices

Sides, Page, and Jacobs make a convincing argument that the America Speaks forums, as currently designed, are a pretty useless way to assess public opinion, “deliberative” or otherwise.

Here I want to talk about a slightly different anlge. As noted above, the Peterson Foundation is not playing the role of an impartial research organization here. Now, sure, just about anyone who goes to the trouble of studying public opinion has political views, often strong ones—otherwise, why study opinion in the first place. (Just for example, Columbia University, where I work, has few institutional political stances, but the faculty and students, as individuals, overwhemingly lean to the left, but U.S. standards.) But what I’m saying here is something different. As Page and Jacobs note, it’s not just that Peter Peterson is a fiscally conservative Republican, it’s that his foundation is specifically focused on deficit reduction, which in turn is the topic of their study.

The right way to theink about the America Speaks forum, I think, is not as an attempt to measure public opinion but rather as an attempt to influence public opinion. As Jacobs and Shapiro write in Politicians Don’t Pander, political actors often view public oipinion not as a fixed constraint but instead as a tool that they can use to influence policy.

From this perspective, we can think of the Peterson Foundation forums as having three purposes:

- Getting publicity for the idea of cutting social spending for deficit reduction. The forums are big public events; just reporting them in the media can help keep the deficits issue on the front burner.

- Test-driving political messages. The organizers of the forum can see what messages seem to be effective in changing people’s opinions, then they can later roll out revised versions of these messages in ads, campaign pitches, and so forth.

- Affecting opinion about public opinion. If this unrepresentative sample, primed to focus on the deficit, ends up the views presented as centrist compromises by the Peterson Foundation, these results can be released to the news media and used by sympathetic poliiticians to emphasize the electoral viability of cuts in social spending.

I’m not saying that the Peterson Foundation is a bunch of sinister bad guys. Even if you view these forums as nothing but a publicity stunt—and they’re clearly more than that—it’s perfectly legitimate and expected for advocacy organizations to spend their resources in an attempt to inlfuence policy. I just think it’s more helpful to frame these forums in that way, rather than as a method (flawed or otherwise) to estimate public opinion.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 03:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As America Speaks holds town hall meetings and the Deficit Commission contemplates cuts in Social Security benefits, we urge Commission members and others to consider the full range of evidence about public opinion concerning deficits and Social Security. Deliberative forums – including the America Speaks version – are subject to serious pitfalls that make them unreliable as measures of “true” public opinion or as guides to future opinion. Expert analysis of evidence from many sources makes clear that large majorities of Americans strongly support Social Security, oppose benefit cuts (even for the sake of deficit reduction), and prefer to strengthen Social Security finances by raising the payroll tax “cap” or otherwise using progressive taxes. Officials who ignore these views will do so at their peril.

That is from a paper by political scientists Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs. This is the homepage of America Speaks. Nineteen townhall meetings were held yesterday, sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, one of whose goals is drawing attention to what it sees as unsustainable deficits. Here is one report on those townhall meetings, including some input from political scientist Kevin Esterling. who is helping to evaluate the meetings. The outcome of these meetings will be one factor considered by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission.

Page and Jacobs warn against taking the results of such meetings or deliberative forums as gospel. One problem is that they may not have representative samples. The report linked above suggests that only 100 people turned out in Los Angeles. If those 100 people were not sampled randomly, I think Page and Jacobs’ concern would easily hold in that case.

A second problem is that the value of deliberative forums depends entirely on the quality of the information presented. One specific concern, among others: if the information accentuates a particular problem, respondents may be more likely to see it as important. At the America Speaks forums, the emphasis — unsurprisingly, given the Peterson Foundation’s mission — is the deficit. Page and Jacobs write:

A focus on the “challenge” of deficit reduction (repeatedly emphasized in the America Speaks briefing book), if it temporarily distracts forum participants from other important concerns, could lead them to say they would tolerate cuts in Social Security benefits that most Americans – even the forum participants themselves – would strongly oppose if asked about them in the normal way at home or at work.

Page and Jacobs also argue that a large amount of evidence from public opinion surveys suggests, well, that the public doesn’t necessarily agree with the Peterson Foundation:

The bottom line is that many Americans express concern about budget deficits, but many more see other issues (especially jobs and economic growth) as the top priority. Most Americans do not favor cutting popular programs like Social Security (or education or health care) in order to reduce budget deficits. Support for Social Security is strong and widespread across the population, including among young people. Many more Americans want to increase spending on Social Security than want to decrease it, and that has been true for decades. Virtually any sort of benefit cut is opposed by substantial majorities of Americans.

Page and Jacobs conclude:

The Deficit Commission should take care not be fooled by misleading results from deliberative forums into believing in a phantom public that will support Social Security cuts.

This is certainly a paper that the Bowles-Simpson commission should read, along with the supporting scholarship cited therein. I agree that there is promise deliberative polls but there are also pitfalls. As yet it is unclear whether the America Speaks townhalls will avoid those pitfalls. More generally, any argument in favor of “informed” public opinion must first defend the information provided to the public. The many economists who are far more sanguine about deficits than the Peterson Foundation may not find its briefing materials all that accurate.

Finally, Page and Jacobs’s account of public opinion squares with my own sense, expressed in last week’s post. The public is concerned about deficits, but cares more about economic growth. And of all the means by which the deficit could be reduced, cuts or dramatic reforms to Social Security do not appear popular.

Indeed, participants in yesterday’s meetings took precisely that stance toward Social Security, according to the preliminary results. Participants apparently supported raising the cap on earnings subject to Social Security taxes — the very idea, Page and Jacobs point out, that majorities have supported in numerous surveys. Also popular were taxes on the wealthy and and a carbon tax. With regard to spending cuts, people favored larger cuts to defense spending than other discretionary spending.

Given the way these preliminary findings are written, I cannot tell exactly how many participants favored any of these ideas or anything about the attributes of the participants themselves. The outcome, however, suggests nothing particularly new about public opinion.

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

Andy notes this post by Ben Somberg, who is fussing at the Washington Post for this paragraph:

If Congress doesn’t provide additional stimulus spending, economists inside and outside the administration warn that the nation risks a prolonged period of high unemployment or, more frightening, a descent back into recession. But a competing threat — the exploding federal budget deficit — seems to be resonating more powerfully in Congress and among voters.

Somberg objects to “among voters,” citing numerous polls showing that the public prioritizes the economy and jobs over the deficit. He is correct. You can peruse some data here. So the first point is: Americans are concerned about the deficit, but not that concerned.

The second point: Americans don’t embrace spending cuts or higher taxes — the steps necessary to cut the deficit. This does not mean that Americans simply want a free lunch. Several studies have found that, when confronted directly with trade-offs, very few Americans simply insist that we somehow cut taxes and increase spending simultanously. In this 1985 piece (gated), Susan Welch writes:

We have found that support for expansion of public services is high. We have shown that the inconsistency of citizens wanting more for less, more services and less spending, probably is a paradox for only a minority. Most citizens are willing to raise additional revenue to pay for these services, or at least to reallocate from less desired to more desired services…Thus we have found that in the abstract at least, not as many Americans are looking for a “free lunch” as a simple comparison of taxing and spending preferences would suggest.

Similarly, in this 1998 piece (gated), John Mark Hansen examines preferences over taxes, spending, and deficits and finds that the public is remarkably consistent:

The public has the ability to make budget policy choices with reasonable discernment. Allowed by survey questioners to be practical in their views, ordinary Americans are practical in their views. They have well-formed and well-behaved preferences. Ordinary citizens may not have preferences over spending, taxes, and deficits that experts consider “correct,” but their opinions are coherent.

So the problem is not inconsistency or incoherence. The problem is that there is no large majority of Americans who favors cutting the deficit over other alternatives. An April 2010 CBS/NYT poll asked “If you had to choose, would you prefer reducing the federal budget deficit or cutting taxes?” 45% said cut the deficit and 47% said cut taxes. This same poll also asked respodents to choose between two options:

1) The federal government should spend money to create jobs, even if it means increasing the budget deficit.

2) The federal government should not spend money to create jobs and should instead focus on reducing he budget deficit.

50% chose spending money on jobs even if it increases the deficit. 42% wanted to reduce the deficit.

It’s also important to remember that it is difficult to find majorities of the public willing to cut any particular category of spending.

A third and final point: Americans don’t punish presidents for large deficits. They punish them for bad economies.

Let’s assume for the moment that voters would punish them for deficits much like they punish them for bad economies. If so, then it would be changes in the deficit or debt in the year prior to the election that mattered because voters are myopic about these things. For the sake of illustration, I will rely on the percentage change from the previous year in the gross federal debt held by the public (data here).

If you plot the incumbent party’s percentage of the vote against the percentage change in the deficit, this is what you get:

There is only a modest negative relationship. Comparing the historical low (2000) to the historical high (1976), the incumbent party’s predicted vote share would decline by only about 5 points. This contrasts with the large and well-known effects of economic growth (data here):

If you regress the incumbent party’s vote share on changes in the debt and in disposable income, the debt has an statistically insignificant effect while income has a large, positive, and statistically significant effect.

None of this means that Obama or members of Congress won’t act to reduce the deficit. They are (sort of) trying to do that now. But, contra the Washington Post, let’s not fool ourselves about the public: they don’t prioritize deficit reduction and don’t punish politicians who increase the deficit.

Posted by John Sides at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My colleague and co-author Matt Grossmann suggested this post.

David Brooks sees the public as largely opposed to the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic majorities in Congress. He believes that this reflects a miscalculation on the Democrats’ part: the public is not that liberal.

Some Kool-Aid sippers on the left say the problem is that Republicans have better messaging (somehow John Boehner became magically charismatic to independents). Others say the shift to the right is a product of bad economic times. But Dr. Faustus saw a deeper truth. Moderate suburban voters do not see the world as liberals do, even in the most propitious circumstances, and never will.

But there is another possibility: the public is simply a thermostat. When government spending and activism increases, the public says “too hot” and demands less. When spending and activism decreases, the public says “too cold” demands more. Here is Christopher Wlezien in a 1995 paper (gated):

We observe that the signals the public sends to policymakers, in the form of preferences for “more” or “less” spending, react to changes in policy…[T]here is negative feedback of spending decisions on the public’s relative preferences, whereby the public adjusts its preferences for more spending downward when appropriations increase, and vice versa.

Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson, writing in chapter 9 of The Macro Polity, refer to “the governing system as a thermostat.” Erikson et al. show that the public’s “mood” — a general measure of the policies it desires — moves in the opposite way as policy:

The correlation between policy innovation in one administration and before-after mood change is a strongly negative -0.76…The more liberal the policy stream, the more conservative is the change in mood. Notably, the most liberal presidency (Johnson’s full term ending in 1968) is associated with the greatest public reaction in the conservative direction. Similarly, the conservative presidencies of Reagan and Eisenhower moved the public in a liberal direction.

Brooks is wrong to assume that the public’s reaction to Democratic policies indicates a enduring ideological disjuncture or a failure of public relations. The public may not be more conservative. It may simply be saying “too hot.” As Matt put it in his email to me:

Current trends would not show that Democrats have been unusually unsuccessful in moving public opinion but that policy ideology in public opinion typically moves against the direction of policymaking. The public requests liberal policies, gets them, and then moves in the other direction; they then get more conservative policies and move against them.

Brooks wants to score this moment as a victory or defeat for someone — in this case, a defeat for liberalism and the Democrats. But If policy and thermostatic public opinion is cyclical, then any victory or defeat is temporary. The ebb and flow is the more important dynamic.

Posted by John Sides at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

538’s new pollster ratings are getting noticed, of course. Mark Blumenthal of Pollster weighed in on Friday with this lengthy post. Nate Silver replies here.

One of Silver’s complaints is that Blumenthal asks “how useful” are pollster rankings, but, in Silver’s view, doesn’t really answer the question. Silver sees them as indisputably useful, particularly because the reputation of pollsters has largely been based on impressionistic criteria.

So how useful are they? Here is my view:

Yes, we should have pollster ratings. Why? Because data are better than impressions. Are Silver’s ratings the gold standard? I don’t think there is such a thing, nor would Silver think so either, I suspect. What there are (or could be) are different attempts at ratings with different sorts of assumptions. Blumenthal critiques some of Silver’s assumptions, as well he should. Silver would defend them, I gather, as well he should. We need to have this debate. If other people came up with pollster ratings and were transparent about their data and assumptions, that’s fine — although I don’t think it’s a high priority (see below).

What do pollster ratings tell us about the “skill” of pollsters? Let’s assume for the moment that other ratings would generate findings similar to 538’s. If that were the case, then pollster ratings tell us that most pollsters aren’t really that different in terms of their “skill.” (I am leaving aside the deeper question of what “skill” means and whether it is actually captured by such ratings.) Blumenthal points this out. Scanning 538’s rankings, I agree. What does it mean to me that, with one exception (Zogby Interactive), the “best” and “worst” pollsters are about 1.8 points apart in their “pollster-induced error” (as calculated based on pre-election polls predicting election outcomes)? It doesn’t mean much. Rare is the election in which pollsters with a 1-point pollster-induced error are going to tell me something much different than pollsters with a 2-point error.

I can also speak to “are pollster ratings useful?” from this perspective: when I teach public opinion courses to undergraduate students, will I talk about these ratings, whether 538’s or anyone else’s? No. This is why I don’t think pollster ratings are a high priority. It’s because of the vast terrain that pollsters cover but within which we cannot rate pollsters even if we wanted — namely, polling about things other than trial heat election match-ups. This terrain includes other aspects of political candidates and leaders and especially political issues. The best pollsters want to do more than just tell us whether Candidate X will beat Candidate Y, and by how much. But we’ll never be able to rate them on their work in other areas because there is no event — no election — that will determine whether a pollster’s findings with regard to opinion on abortion reflect “skill.”

Moreover, there are many things that affect the responses that pollsters get: sampling strategy, mode of interview, question wording, question order, etc. On average, variations in these things will elicit far more variation in response than does the “skill” of any pollster. I’m not saying anything new here — certainly not anything that Silver and Blumenthal don’t know (they spend a great deal of time writing on these issues, and deserve credit for it) or that even any reasonably thoughtful layperson doesn’t know. But the enduring importance of these factors is why I will focus far more on them in my classes than on pollster ratings per se.

A final note. When I am cranky about polls, it often has nothing to do with “skill,” sampling, mode, question wording, etc. It has to do with interpretation. Pollsters sometimes send out press releases hyperventilating about changes that are well within the margin of error. They report on only their polls, even with other polls don’t show the same trends. Etc. Pollsters do a lot more violence to our understanding of public opinion with their slipshod and self-serving interpretations than they do with any “error” they induce. I suppose a set of pollster ratings could take this into account, however subjective such judgments may be.

But until then, I will be glad that 538’s ratings exist, even as I continue to evaluate polls primarily on dimensions that those ratings cannot capture.

UPDATE: David Shor tries his hand at pollster ratings and also finds little difference among pollsters. There are house effects, but little evidence of pollster-induced error.

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

But the Washington Post hasn’t been informed.

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

After reading the following from newspaper columnist David Brooks:

In times like these, deficit spending to pump up the economy doesn’t make consumers feel more confident; it makes them feel more insecure because they see a political system out of control. Deficit spending doesn’t induce small businesspeople to hire and expand. It scares them because they conclude the growth isn’t real and they know big tax increases are on the horizon. It doesn’t make political leaders feel better either. Lacking faith that they can wisely cut the debt in some magically virtuous future, they see their nations careening to fiscal ruin.

Henry writes:

Is it so hard to go to public opinion poll data to try to figure out what people think, or to acknowledge that you don’t know what they think when, like, your only source of information is what you think about the topic? No - it isn’t so hard. This is a particularly annoying pundit trick.

I see what Henry is saying—rather than assembling evidence on how various people would behave, Brooks is making assumptions based on his own internal logic..

But I disagree with Henry’s implication that poll data would answer Brooks’s questions, at least in two-thirds of Brooks’s examples.

- Brooks’s first example involves consumer confidence. Here, I agree with Henry that it would make sense to refer to some standard polling data on the topic.

- In Brooks’s second example, he is talking about business decisions. To start with business owners are a small percentage of the population, so you won’t get much on their opinions by simply taking the relevant subset of a national poll. Beyond this, a poll will tell you what people are thinking right now (or, at least, what they are willing to tell the interviewer), but it won’t necessarily give you a bead on what people will actually do.

- Brooks’s third example is how political leasers might feel. As Henry points out, Brooks’s views as a columnist are not necessarily representative of political leaders’ views (or even, for that matter, what Brooks’s views might be were he elected into such a position). But a survey of 1500 randomly sampled Americans won’t tell us much about this particular question either.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like to separate Henry’s criticism of Brooks for imputing his reasonable opinions into the minds of others, from Henry’s implication that it’s easy to answer the sorts of questions (about what businessmen might do) from polling data. Trying to guess what a fraction of the population are going to do in a new situation is quite a bit different from estimating what people in the aggregate feel about something right now.

As a public opinion researcher, I’m often impressed by what can be learned from surveys, but I think it’s important to recognize their limitations also.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 03:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I use the phrase because, apparently, Obama will be talking about kicking some ass on tomorrow’s Today Show (per Marc Ambinder).

I don’t think that the oil spill will ultimately affect either Obama’s popularity or the midterm elections. Consider two facts as a preamble:

• Katrina didn’t really affect Bush’s approval all that much, if at all. See this piece by Alan Abramowitz.

• Obama’s approval numbers have actually notched up in the past couple weeks when you do an apples-to-apples comparison of the polls. The differences are within the margin of error, so take “notched up” with all appropriate salt. But these numbers certainly don’t suggest that the oil spill is taking some toll. See this piece by Michael McDonald.

Now here’s the crux. BP capped the well. It’s capturing some, perhaps most, oil. It’s not capturing all the oil. Assume that this partial solution doesn’t prove faulty, leaving us at square one. That may be a big assumption, but stay with me. And also factor in the possibility that BP might actually be able to staunch the flow further, with relief wells or whatever.

If that assumption is true, and especially if the possibility of further improvement comes to pass, this will remove the drama from the media narrative. We won’t have the ongoing saga of tried-and-failed solutions (the top kill, etc.). Politicians will stop talking about it. Obama won’t have to cuss in front of Matt Lauer.

But won’t we have a big huge environmental mess? Isn’t that news? Yes, it is. But not for long. How many pictures of oily pelicans can you show on the nightly news? Not that many. We are once again in the world of the issue-attention cycle, which I discussed before with regard to natural disasters. I don’t think this man-made disaster will prove any different. The media will lose interest because the long hard slog of cleaning up Gulf beaches isn’t as newsworthy as an unstoppable gushing well. The ultimate effects of the oil on ecosystems and industry will take time to manifest themselves.

And so the public’s attention will turn elsewhere, and the spill will fail to have much impact on the fortunes of Obama or other incumbent leaders.

Posted by John Sides at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Mark Lilla’s essay, “The Tea Party Jacobins,” seeks to explain the origins of the Tea Party. I do not disagree the part of his explanation that emphasizes the most proximate causes — particularly the financial collapse, bailout, and health care reform. Nor do I disagree with his prognosis, which is that the Tea Party faces significant organizational challenges (see this earlier post). But Lilla believes the Tea Party also stems from a “populist mood that has been brewing for decades” and is a “manifestation of deeper social and even psychological changes that the country has undergone in the past half-century.” Here, I think he is quite wrong.

To Lilla, the public has taken a libertarian turn. It is characterized by “radical individualism”:

During the Clinton years the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation).

Americans have become more libertarian on some social issues, such as those related to gay rights, but not all. Lilla notes abortion (correctly). There are others. Consider these recent Gallup data and the continuing unpopularity of, say, extramarital affairs.

The bigger problem is Lilla’s assertion that the public has “moved right” on economic autonomy. In the very short run, there has been some increase in the percentage who believe that government is doing “too much,” although majorities are perfectly happy to have the government regulate Wall Street banks. Populism cuts in both directions.

But Lilla’s argument is over the long term (“brewing for decades”). Here the evidence is much more equivocal. I previously noted that, as of 2004, the percentage of people who thought that the government should provide “more services” was double that who thought the government should provide fewer — and this reflected an increase in support for government over time. And, as of 2008, even conservatives seem reluctant to cut many government programs. It is hard to reconcile such findings with some decades-long increase in the desire for autonomy from government.

Lilla also finds the origins of the Tea Party in a growing distrust of government:

Ever since the Seventies, social scientists have puzzled over the fact that, despite greater affluence and relative peace, Americans have far less trust in their government than they had up until the mid-Sixties. Just before the last election, only a tenth of Americans said that they were “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States,” a record low. They express some confidence in the presidency and the courts, but when asked in the abstract about “the government” and whether they expect it to do the right thing or whether it is run for our benefit, a relatively consistent majority says “no.”

This mischaracterizes the trend in trust in government, which I previous described here. See also these data. I’ll reprint the graph, just for the sake of illustration:

In short, the level of trust in government sharply increased in the 1990s, back to levels not seen since the early 1970s. If Lilla were writing this piece in 2000, he would be remarking on the massive turnaround in Americans’ confidence in government. I will say it again: there has been no secular decline in trust in government. It waxes and wanes with economic growth. If the Tea Party’s origins are tied to distrust of government, this is a short-term, not a long-term, phenomenon.

Lilla, citing this book by Marc Hetherington, buttresses his case with this “astonishing fact”:

in 1965 nearly half of Americans believed that the War on Poverty would “help wipe out poverty”—a vote of confidence in our political institutions unimaginable today.

Really? Quick quiz about health care reform: what percent of Americans believe that “changes the new law will make to the country’s health care system will be generally good for the country”? Nearly half.

Lilla goes further: he sees people alienated from a variety of institutions. This leads to several other assertions that are inaccurate or incomplete:

Democrats have edged slightly more left on political and economic issues, whereas the views of independents, the largest and fastest-growing group of voters, have not changed much over the years.

…as voters have become more autonomous, less attracted to parties and familiar ideologies, it has become harder for political institutions to represent them collectively

Italics mine. Regular readers of this blog know what I think of such assertions. I’ll say it again, again. Most independents are loyal partisans. Only about 10% of the public is truly independent. And party loyalty among voters has become stronger in both presidential and congressional elections. More importantly, the partisan complexion of Tea Party activists is consistently Republican.

Lilla is also wrong about parties in political institutions:

The disappointment only grew in subsequent decades, as Congress seemed less and less able to act decisively and legislate coherently. There are many reasons for this, some of them perverse consequences of reforms meant to make government more open and responsive to the public. New committees and subcommittees were established to focus on narrower issues, but this had the unintended effect of making them more susceptible to lobbyists and the whims of powerful chairmen. Congressional hearings began to be televised and campaign finances were made public, but as a result individual congressmen and senators became more self-sufficient and could ignore party dictates. Coalitions broke apart, large initiatives stalled, special interest legislation and court orders piled up, government grew more complex and less effective.

Italics mine. Lilla is basically describing the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. But 40 years have intervened. In that period, the parties have become more ideologically homogeneous and also ideologically distinct from each other (see this post). As a consequence, the parties’ rank-and-file have been more willing to empower party leaders. This is conditional party government theory. Small wonder, then, that party unity has increased.

Because Lilla gets this wrong, he gets the consequences wrong too:

And Americans noticed. Not recognizing themselves in the garbled noises coming out of Washington, unsure what the major parties stood for, they drew the conclusion that their voices were being ignored. Which was not exactly true. It’s just that, paradoxically, more voice has meant less echo.

The percentage of Americans who “think there are any important differences in what the Republicans and Democrats stand for” has actually increased over time. Here is one graph of data through 2004:

This makes sense, given that the parties are increasing ideologically distinct.

Similarly, over the period from 1988-2004, the percentage who think that “public officials don’t care much what people like me think” has not increased in any linear fashion. An apparent increase from 1952-86, when the question’s response options were different, has not continued during the past 20 years.

Ultimately, Lilla sees Americans as disconnected from many institutions: public education, as they increasingly opting for home schooling; and the medical establishment, as they refuse vaccines. Americans, he says, believe that “expertise and authority are inherently suspect” and instead harbor “fantasies of self-sufficiency.”

These are very broad claims, and so naturally they are leaky. Yes, the public is less confident of some institutions, like the medical establishment (Lilla cites these GSS data). But not the “scientific community.” And they actually seem to have become more, not less, deferential to authority in other respects. The GSS also asks “would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” The percentage who said “obey the law without exceptions” was higher in 2006 (55%) than in 1985 (43%).

Ultimately, Lilla thinks Americans have lost confidence in political parties, government, and other institutions, but gained faith in themselves. In fact, they have not lost their partisanship and see the parties as increasingly distinct, perhaps taking their cues from today’s ideologically polarized parties. In fact, they have lost and gained and lost and gained and lost confidence in government. In fact, they oppose government regulation and spending in theory, but often accept it in practice. In fact, they have lost confidence in some institutions but not others, and do not reject authority in principle.

The Tea Party is not the outcome of a rootless America. I would locate its origins elsewhere, in what Lilla describes only briefly. It is the outcome of a specific set of events: a deep recession and the government’s interventions to address that recession, an attendant financial crisis, and health care reform. If it did find fertile ground in attitudinal currents — such as distrust of government — those too are short-term products of the recession. It also grew from the objections of prominent conservative politicians and opinion leaders; Lilla cites Fox News as one example. This is a final oddity: Lilla emphasizes the alienation of Americans from parties and “familiar ideologies,” yet it is the fervor of Tea Party activists for an entirely familiar ideology and certain familiar ideologues that makes them distinctive.

Posted by John Sides at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Perhaps surprisingly, opinions about the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” are not correlated with each other. Most of those who have a positive reaction to “socialism” also have a positive reaction to “capitalism”; in fact, views of “capitalism” are about the same among those who react positively to “socialism” as they are among those who react negatively (52% and 56%, respectively, view “capitalism” positively). Conversely, views of “socialism” are just as negative among those who have a positive reaction to “capitalism” (64% negative) as those who react negatively (61% negative).

In the new Pew report. Via Alex Lundry.

Posted by John Sides at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama struggled to overcome widespread and persistent myths about their proposals to reform the American health care system. Their difficulties highlight the influence of factual misinformation in national politics and the extent to which it correlates with citizens’ political views. In this essay, I explain how greater elite polarization and the growth in media choice have reinforced the partisan divide in factual beliefs. To illustrate these points, I analyze debates over health care reform in 1993–1994 and 2009–2010, tracing the spread of false claims about reform proposals from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and analyzing the prevalence of misinformation in public opinion. Since false beliefs are extremely difficult to correct, I conclude by arguing that increasing the reputational costs for dishonest elites might be a more effective approach to improving democratic discourse.

That is from a newly published paper by Brendan Nyhan (pdf). Here’s the money graph:

The graph shows that in 1993 and 2009, Republicans were more likely than Democrats or independents to endorse a misperception, and this tendency actually increased when they perceived that they were knowledgeable about the health care plan. In 2009, the same phenomenon also afflicted independents.

Posted by John Sides at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clive Crook likes this passage from a new paper (pdf) by William Galston:

Can we honestly say that today’s mistrust—between the political parties, and between citizens and their government—remains within Madisonian bounds? Can we judge our party system healthy if it fosters this mistrust? If we knew how to change it, would we choose to perpetuate a situation in which the very process of self-government stands in such disrepute? These are not the questions of an aging academic looking back with nostalgia. They are the concerns of a citizen looking forward with alarm. Our adversaries around the world will never be able to harm us as much as we are now harming ourselves. And if our party system remains as it is, this process of self-destruction will only get worse.

Crook says that “The essay is essential reading, and I’ll have more to say about it later.” Since Crook focuses on that passage, so will I. Actually, let’s back up a couple sentences in Galston’s paper to the empirical proposition that animates that passage. Galston writes:

There is evidence, finally, that rising polarization is one of the forces contributing to sharply declining trust in government.

He cites John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s Stealth Democracy (previously discussed on this blog here). However, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse aren’t systematically testing this relationship. That is, they are not looking at whether polarization affects trust. You could read that implication into their findings — e.g., the finding that citizens don’t like conflictual political processes, which perhaps polarization breeds. But that’s not a direct test.

Let’s do a direct test. First, here are two graphs, one of the percent who trust the government (data discussed here) and one of the the difference between the median House Republican and Democrat in the 85th-110th Congresses (data here, courtesy of Keith Poole). As the the difference between the medians gets larger, so does polarization.

Already you can see the problem. The initial decline in trust precedes the increase in polarization. And then trust goes up and down and up and down, but polarization just goes — to quote my toddler as he ascends any staircase — “up up up.”

By matching the survey data to the last year of each Congress, you can plot trust against polarization.

The orange line is a linear fit. The gray line is a non-linear fit. The gray line would have us believe that a very modest increase in polarization leads to a huge decline in trust, but somehow the remaining increase in polarization — i.e., the last 30 or so years of history — had no effect on trust. The story looks even more shaky.

Let’s put the final nail in the coffin. Here is an updated version of my earlier graph comparing trust and the state of the economy. (As before, I used Doug Hibbs’s data, but modified his calculations to generated an estimate of economic growth in midterm years):

This relationship still looks sturdy. Now, what happens if you regress trust on both polarization and economic growth? The effect of economic growth is substantively and statistically significant (b=6.5, se=1.7 for my nerds). The effect of polarization is neither (b=-24.6; se=19.7).

I don’t know what more Clive Crook wanted to say about this essay, but perhaps this will save him some time:

Polarization does not affect trust in government.

Posted by John Sides at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

My article with Daniel and Yair has recently appeared in The Forum:

We use multilevel modeling to estimate support for health-care reform by age, income, and state. Opposition to reform is concentrated among higher-income voters and those over 65. Attitudes do not vary much by state. Unfortunately, our poll data only go to 2004, but we suspect that much can be learned from the relative positions of different demographic groups and different states, despite swings in national opinion. We speculate on the political implications of these findings.

The article features some pretty graphs that originally appeared on the blog.

It’s in a special issue on health care politics that has several interesting articles, among which I’d like to single out this one by Bob Shapiro and Lawrence Jacobs entitled, “Simulating Representation: Elite Mobilization and Political Power in Health Care Reform”:

The public’s core policy preferences have, for some time, favored expanding access to health insurance, regulating private insurers to ensure reliable coverage, and increasing certain taxes to pay for these programs. Yet the intensely divisive debate over reform generated several notable gaps between proposed policies and public opinion for two reasons. First, Democratic policymakers and their supporters pushed for certain specific means for pursuing these broad policy goals—namely, mandates on individuals to obtain health insurance coverage and the imposition of an excise tax on high-end health insurance plans—that the public opposed. Second, core public support for reform flipped into majority opposition in reaction to carefully crafted messages aimed at frightening Americans and especially by partisan polarization that cued Republican voters into opposition while they unnerved independents.

The result, say Shapiro and Jacobs, “suggests a critical change in American democracy, originating in transformations at the elite level and involving, specifically, increased incentives to attempt to move the public in the direction of policy goals favored by elites policies and to rally their partisan base, rather than to respond to public wishes.” They’ve written a fascinating and important paper.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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)

I noted the recent Politico/TargetPoint “exit poll” of Tea Party activists who gathered in Washington DC on April 10. In their analysis, Politico and TargetPoint note:

Despite a heavily Republican presidential voting record, Tea Party attendees are reluctant to embrace the GOP today. They are distinctly not Democrats, but they are also not extreme Republican partisans.

I was curious about this in light of Mark Blumenthal’s earlier post on the partisan leanings of Tea Partiers. Using national survey data in which people were asked about whether they supported the Tea Party, Blumenthal shows that over 80% identify as Republicans, once self-identified independents are asked a further question about the party they lean to.

Unfortunately, the P/TP exit poll does not ask this further question of independents. However, Alex Lundry of TargetPoint kindly ran me some numbers. He looked at any question where respondents could pick a party or not pick one and assigned a score of +1 for each GOP pick, -1 for each Democratic pick, and 0 when they picked neither. The 5 questions were: party identification, which party has better ideas for fixing government, the generic congressional ballot, and presidential vote choice in both 2004 and 2008. So the scale ranges from -5 to +5, with 0 as a “neutral” point. Here’s how the activists were arrayed on this scale.

It’s true, as P/TP suggest, that this sample of activists are not “extreme Republican partisans,” in the sense that they’re not clustered at +5. But the vast majority, about 80%, are on the Republican “side” of this scale.

This doesn’t mean that Tea Party activists automatically and everywhere favor Republicans. (Indeed, that would be true even if this poll had a better measure of party identification, as party identification does not determine one’s vote in every circumstance.) But their tendency, and it appears to be a strong one, is to favor the Republican Party. The question is whether the future, and in particular the 2010 election, provides them any better alternative.

P.S. TargetPoint provides a quiz where you can determine your own affinity with the Tea Party movement.

Posted by John Sides at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To follow up on John’s note on partisanship, let me repost the following graphs that Daniel Lee and I made showing the income distribution of voters self-classified by ideology (liberal, moderate, or conservative) and party identification (Democrat, Independent, or Republican). We found some surprising patterns:

(Click on image to see larger version.)

Each line shows the income distribution for the relevant category of respondents, normalized to the income distribution of all voters. Thus, a flat line would represent a group whose income distribution is identical to that of the voters at large. The height of the line represents the size of the group; thus, for example, there were very few liberal Republicans, especially by 2008.

The most striking patterns to me are:

1. The alignment of income with party identification is close to zero among liberals, moderate among moderates, and huge among conservatives. If you’re conservative, then your income predicts your party identification very well.

2. First focus on Democrats. Liberal Democrats are spread among all income groups, but conservative Democrats are concentrated in the lower brackets.

3. Conservative Republicans—the opposite of liberal Democrats, if you will—are twice as concentrated among the rich than among the poor.

Putting factors 2 and 3 together, we find that ideological partisans (liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) are not opposites in their income distributions. In particular, richer voters are more prevalent in these groups.

Which might be relevant for the debates over health care, taxes, and other political issues that have a redistributive dimension.

Further analysis appears here.

P.S. The 2000 and 2004 data are from the National Annenberg Election Survey; 2008 is from the Pew Research pre-election surveys. We show all three years to indicate the persistence of the general pattern. As a way of showing uncertainty and variation, this is much more effective than displaying standard errors, I think.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Marc Ambinder, commenting on the recent Pew poll:

When we think of Republican-leaning independents, our binary conception of politics draws the mind to conclude that these folks tend to be more centrist than the average Republican. But that’s not correct. In fact, the evidence from this poll is that they are more conservative; they reject the Republican identity not because it’s too conservative, but because it did not reflect their values enough. The GOP is shrinking as a party, but the number of people who’ll vote for Republican candidates is fairly constant. The tranche of Americans who occupy the space between Republican self-identifiers and the extreme reactionary right are the most politically engaged, and the most angry.

Here are some data from the 2008 American National Election Study that speak to Ambinder’s specific point about the ideology of Republican-leaning independents. Here, the ideology measure is rough-and-ready. Respondents place themselves on a seven-point scale from liberal to conservative. So the measure reflects self-identification, not positions on actual issues. Let’s ignore for the moment those who do not place themselves on the scale. The scale is coded 0-1 where 1 equals the strongest conservative, .5 equals “moderate,” and 0 the strongest liberal. Here are the means, for each category of party identification.

Strong Dem: .36
Weak Dem .40
Ind leaning Dem .40
Ind .52
Ind leaning Rep .74
Weak Rep .68
Strong Rep .79

Of course, these data can’t be read as indicating anyone’s literal location in ideological space. But spacing of parties relative to each other is the point. The data suggest that, first, Republican-leaning independents do tend to identify as conservative, and slightly more so than weak Republicans. “Slightly” is the key word, however: there are few differences among Republicans of any stripe. And, second, Democratic-leaning independents are close to the midpoint of the scale than are Republican-leaning independents. Of course, the midpoint of the scale is an artifact of measurement, not necessarily the “center” per se.

Caveats abound when measuring ideology, so take this quickie analysis as preliminary. But its provisional conclusion lines up with Ambinder’s.

Posted by John Sides at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Their headline:

April 21, 2010 - Obama’s Bounce Goes Flat, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; But Voters Confident He Will Pick Good Judge

The first paragraph of the press release:

President Barack Obama’s job approval, which bounced slightly to a 45 - 46 percent split March 25 in the wake of his health care victory, has flattened out at 44 - 46 percent, his lowest approval rating since his inauguration, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

Let’s be clear: I have nothing against the Quinnipiac Poll in principle. As far as I know, their polls are conducted soundly; they once kindly sent me some cross-tabs.

But their description of this “finding” is what the subject line says it is: malpractice. Here is the percent approving of Obama in each of their polls since January:

January 13: 45
February 11: 45
March 25 (pre-vote): 46
March 25 (post-vote: 45
April 21: 44

There is no “bounce. ” There is no “flattening out.” There is nothing but a big fat flat line. It doesn’t make for a good press release, but that’s the truth.

What’s mystifying is that, later in the release, Peter Brown of Quinnipiac says:

The White House had predicted passage of the health care overhaul would boost his fortunes, but that has not been the case…

I don’t know what the White House did or didn’t predict, but this statement is correct that there has been no boost. It is completely supported by the flat line in Obama approval. So why not simply make that point without conjuring up some mythical movement in the numbers?

Quinnipiac should retract its press release and issue a statement correcting its error.

The mistakes in the interpretation of poll results — including and even especially by the sponsors of those polls — are far greater than mistakes in the execution of the polls themselves.

Posted by John Sides at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

According to a new Gallup poll, there is more support for regulating “Wall Street banks” than regulating “large banks and major financial institutions.” The effect of question wording isn’t massive, and it seems limited to Republicans. But an interesting result nonetheless. Overall, the public is split 46-43 in favor of regulating large banks and financial institutions and 50-36 in favor of regulating Wall Street banks.

Posted by John Sides at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At Cato’s blog, Justin Logan discusses Adam Berinsky’s book In Time of War and Gary Jacobson’s recent article (gated) — both of which focus on public opinion during war, including the Iraq War. Logan marvels at the power of partisan identity. He cites this telling passage from Jacobson:

…support for the war was consistently higher among Republicans who did not believe that Iraq possessed WMD, that Saddam Hussein was involved in September 11, or that Bush was chosen by God to lead the global war on terrorism than among Democrats who did believe these things.

Logan then goes on to puzzle over an apparent point of tension between Berinsky’s and Jacobson’s accounts:

Importantly, Jacobson seems to disagree with Berinsky on one crucial point: how and why did Democratic voters come to oppose the Iraq War? Berinsky argues that even in the absence of Democratic elites making loud, principled arguments against the war in the first place, Democratic voters took their cues from the Bush administration and decided that if Bush was for it, they were against it. Jacobson tells a different story that is somewhat more like the ideal-typical democratic theory story: Dem voters developed beliefs about the war’s premises, which yielded opinions on the policy of going to war, which yielded opinions of the president who was taking the country to war.

Three points in response:

First, Berinsky does suggest that there wasn’t a “consistent and strong antiwar stance” among Democratic elites, at least as of the summer of 2004. I’m a little uncertain about that. It seems to me that while there were divisions among Democratic elites prior to the war’s inception, by the summer of 2004 (over a year after “Mission Accomplished”) there was concern among a larger number of Democratic elites that had been building for some time. See for example, the close vote on Ted Kennedy’s amendment to the 2005 defense appropriations bill. This concern about the war didn’t lead all the Democratic Senators who ran for president to renounce their vote authorizing the war, but certainly even they were criticizing Bush. However, some more rigorous analysis would be necessary to confirm my intuition.

Second, the lack of a unified Democratic opposition did not mean that Americans lacked for voices of opposition or were not influenced by the opposition. Danny Hayes and Matt Guardino have showed that in the months prior to the war, opposition from abroad was commonly reported in the news media (see also this earlier post.) Moreover, this opposition mattered:

Despite the fact that domestic political elites publicly voiced very little opposition to the Iraq War, large numbers of Americans—especially Democrats—remained opposed to military action throughout the pre-war period. We argue that some rank-andfile Democrats and independents expressed these negative sentiments because of the widely reported anti-war positions staked out by foreign, not domestic, elites.

That is the conclusion of a second Hayes and Guardino paper.

But note that both points only concern the nuances of the Iraqi case. The broader point — and Berinsky’s central contention — remains: cue-taking from elites was crucial for public opinion about Iraq and other wars.

Now, is Jacobson presenting a different claim, as Logan suggests? I don’t think so. Jacobson argues that Democratic support for the war declined because beliefs about the war changed (e.g., after no WMDs were found). Does this mean that Democrats were responding to new information in an “ideal-typical” way? Perhaps. But it’s also possible that Democratic voters came to hold those beliefs in part because of the cue-taking that is Berinsky’s focus. In other words, maybe Democrats picked up the newspaper in October 2004, read about the Duelfer Report, and changed their beliefs. But maybe opponents of the war, including some political elites, continually drew attention to the lack of WMDs and made other criticisms of the war effort that would lead to changes in yet other beliefs. Ultimately, we just don’t have enough information to distinguish the two processes. I’m inclined to see Jacobson’s and Berinsky’s stories as more similar than different.

Posted by John Sides at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new Economist/YouGov poll asked people “If government spending is reduced in order to balance the budget, which of the following government programs should receive lower federal funding than they currently do?” Respondents could check all that apply.

Not surprisingly, as Kevin Drum noted, few people wanted to cut most programs. The exception was foreign aid, which, as The Economist pointed out, makes up a tiny fraction of the budget. Jon Bernstein is skeptical that people would be that opposed to foreign aid if they knew where it went (e.g., a significant chunk to Israel).

I want to suggest that the problem goes even deeper. The programs that make up the largest share of the federal budget are typically the ones that the fewest people want to cut. Consider this graph, in which I attempted to match most of the YouGov categories to a plausible counterpart in Obama’s FY 2010 budget proposal. (I drew on additional stories for information about the budgets for health research and highways. Foreign aid is estimated at 0.5% of the budget.) Of course, Obama’s budget proposal is not the ultimate budget, but the comparison between it and the poll is still instructive:

As you move downward, into categories of spending that are increasingly popular, you get to the largest federal programs, particularly entitlement spending. Really, there is only one area of federal spending — national defense — that is sizable and that even a modest fraction (22%) is willing to cut.

In fact, there is a negative relationship between the budgetary share allocated to a policy area and the fraction who want to cut it. The correlation coefficient between the poll percentages and the budget percentages is -.33 (with or without the obvious potential outlier, foreign aid, included).

If Americans are forced to be specific, their recipe for cutting federal spending would do little to reduce spending.

UPDATE: Annie Lowrey had the same idea.

[Hat tip to Matt Dhaiti for sending me the poll.]

Posted by John Sides at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher claim:

Using nationally-representative data from the [1994] General Social Survey, we [Conley and Rauscher] find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.

But economists Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the exact opposite:

We [Oswald and Powdthavee] document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party. Our data, which are primarily from Great Britain, are longitudinal. We also report corroborative results for a German panel.

How to resolve these? See here.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the end, access to health care may increase, but the plague of misinformation won’t be cured any time soon.

So argues Brendan Nyhan in an op-ed in today’s New York Times. He cites some research with Jason Reifler. See the links in these earlier posts for more.

Posted by John Sides at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three quick observations on the apparently stunning turnaround in public support for the health care bill in the USA/Gallup poll now making the rounds of the blogosphere.

First, it is only one poll, and occasionally polls are outliers. That’s just the nature of statistics. So we’ll need to see more polls to be convincend the numbers are correct.

However, these numbers are not exactly surprising if you go back to my previous post on the topic of public opinion and health care reform, in which I noted that some of the people opposing the health care bill were doing so because it did not go far enough (ie., should have moved policy farther to the left). What is probably going on right now is that a non-trivial proportion of people who wanted a public option or even single-payer healthcare are starting to swing behind the bill as “a good first step”. The opposition to the bill from the right (those who think it went too far) is still there, but, as the USA Today article notes, this opposition comes overwhelmingly from Republicans and is apparently not a majority of the population, just as I suggested in my previous post.

Which bring me to my third point. Although I don’t have any data on this, anecdotally it seems that an awful lot of the Republican opposition to the bill of late has centered on the idea that health care reform was rammed through Congress despite the opposition of a majority of Americans (Glenn Greenwald has a nice summary of some of these types of comments). If the USA Today/Gallup numbers hold up, that is going to be an increasingly difficult argument to make. And as many commentators have noted, the bill is of course filled with numerous changes that are extremely popular with Americans, and many of these go into effect sooner rather than later, which suggests support for the bill - if anything - is likely to grow in the short term. Can the Republicans make an about face and start attacking the bill more on its merits and less on its popular support? I’m sure they will try, but they’d probably be much better off just going back to the state of the economy.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Monkey Cage has gone on record recently arguing that process in the health care reform debate is ultimately not going to matter that much (see Henry and John) in terms of driving support for the bill. Well, now we can quantify “not much”.

This graph appeared last month in a Gallup report. As a political scientist, I was less interested in the overall support levels (which apparently have already shifted a bit in favor of passing reforms since these polls were taken), but rather in the difference between the two graphs.* According to Gallup, respondents were first asked if they favored passing the health care bill, and then asked if they favored passing it using reconcilliation. The “process” in this case apparently cost about 3% points of support. So it is not irrelevant, but hardly a game changer in terms of public opinion.

********

*Slightly more wonkish technical discussion: It should be noted that Gallup did not use a true experimental design here, with half of the respondents being randomly assigned to receive one version of the question and the other half the other. So it is possible that a desire to remain consistent might bias respondents towards giving the same answer to both questions. On the other hand, it may also be possible that the fact that the question about reconciliation was asked second may have been cuing respondents that there was something “different” about reconciliation, and, given the media’s fascination with the issue, that perhaps this was supposed to change their opinion. Personally, I find in interesting that the number of “don’t knows” didn’t change. This suggests that reconciliation is not really having any affect on people who don’t already have an opinion on health care, although of course it is possible that reconciliation pushed some supporters into don’t knows and don’t knows into opposing, although my gut instinct is that this is not likely to be the case. For those interested in Don’t Know responses, see Adam Berinsky’s Silent Voices.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clive Crook resurrects the canard.

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, the public and their concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … Recovering voters’ respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how the public will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to prove an electoral tonic.

John, of course, has been all over this. However, he merely has ‘data’ and ‘analysis’ on his side. Clive Crook, in contrast, has the punditocracy’s trump card - confidently-worded assertions. Less sarcastically (OK - only slightly less sarcastically), when I become world dictator, my first act will be to decree that pundits who promiscuously write about how “the public” thinks this or that, without any reference to data on what the ‘public’ (a dubious concept in most of these debates anyway) actually thinks will be required, under pain of death, to rewrite their columns so as to substitute the word “I” and related personal pronouns/possessive adjectives for the word “the public” throughout. In the interim, readers are invited to make the necessary substitutions themselves. As illustrated by the following

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, me and my concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … My respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how I will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to win my vote.

which happily has the dual advantage of being punchier and more accurate than the original.

Posted by Henry at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Short answer: they self-segregate. Or such is the finding of a newly published paper by Henry, Eric Lawrence, and myself. Find it here (gated) or here(ungated pdf). (See also these earlier posts). Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers.We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Posted by John Sides at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sanjay Srivista draws some interesting connections between a recent Obama speech and a paper by P. E. Tetlock published in a psychology journal in 1981 (!). In general, I think we as political scientists don’t interact enough with research in psychology.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been quite a few studies of late that analyze the genetic origins of political attitudes as well as those that examine the influence of social networks. I had not yet seen something that looked at the interaction between the two until this new paper (forthcoming in the Journal of Politics) by Jaime E. Settle, Christopher T. Dawes, Nicholas A. Christakis, and James H. Fowler. Essentially, the study finds that conditional on having a particular gene associated with novelty seeking, having more friends makes you more liberal. Here is the abstract:

Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene(DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association.This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In comments on my first post, Marty Gilens alerts me to errors in the 2008 ANES data file that involve the spending variables that I used (noted here on their webpage). It is my fault for not having seen this. I have downloaded the corrected variables and revised the graph, which is above.

The story changes with regard to two programs — welfare and foreign aid — both of which are far less popular than in the original graph. About 49% of conservatives want to cut or eliminate foreign aid; 35% want to cut or eliminate welfare. The other programs, however, are again quite popular. The average percentage of conservatives who want to increase spending is unchanged: about 54%.

Thus, the original point of the Salon piece (to which corrections are forthcoming) remains: despite opposition to government spending in general, conservatives do not advocate reductions in government spending on particular programs.

Update: the corrected Salon piece is here.

Posted by John Sides at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

As Josh mentioned, Salon has started a new feature called The Numerologist. They describe it thusly:

The Numerologist is a Salon feature exploring the intersection between numbers and politics, wherein political experts use statistical information to shed new light on timely topics.

Josh, Andy, and I will be contributing occasionally, as will some other political scientists, I think. So watch that space.

My first contribution centers on the graph above. The post is here.

Posted by John Sides at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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)

In response to my earlier post on congressional approval, commenter David Adam cites Jim Stimson’s book Tides of Consent (large pdf). Stimson’s findings are even more profoundly related to my subsequent post on political trust and the economy.

Stimson shows that the public’s approval of virtually every aspect of government — the president, Senators, Congress, governors, the government itself — trend together quite strongly:

Occasionally the trends diverge, such as when the public rallied to Bush during the Persian Gulf War, but that divergence is the exception. Stimson writes:

The most important point, however, is that the lines are hard to pull apart and distinguish because they are pretty clearly measuring the same thing…Approval and trust are generic, a syndrome of attitudes toward public affairs that only appears to be affected by and directed toward particular people and institutions.

And what is driving these trends? The economy. Stimson plots a measure of approval that averages all of the relevant trends against the Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment:

The correlation isn’t perfect, obviously. For example, Stimson notes the divergence following September 11, 2001. But again, the correlation is quite strong. And the implication is this:

So what does it mean that citizens approve or trust? It appears to mean mainly that things are going well in the country. What is important about this pattern, and unexpected, is that the approval and trust are granted to those who have had no role in producing the outcomes. We have known for some time that presidents seemed to get more credit or blame than they deserved. With the pattern now extended to those who have had no conceivable role, we need to reassess what it means to approve.

Posted by John Sides at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

As part of the purpose of this blog is to get political scientists more involved in the mass media’s discussion of contemporary political issues, I just wanted to highlight the fact that Marc Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler’s book was featured in Nicholas Kristof’s op ed column this weekend; see as well this previous post by John on the book.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Barack Obama thinks it’s restrictions on lobbyists and more openness:

We face a deficit of trust — deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap, we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists, to do our work openly, to give our people the government they deserve.

David Brooks thinks it’s Barack Obama:

We can spend the next few years engaging in kabuki bipartisanship, in which each party puts on pseudo-events to show that the other party is rigid and rotten, or somebody can break the mold. We can spend the next three or seven years squabbling about the shrinking puddle of discretionary spending, or somebody can break out of the fiscal vise.

It would be an incredible legacy: Barack Obama restored America’s faith in its own institutions.

These prescriptions miss the point. It’s not special interests and partisanship that have made Americans lose their faith in government. In fact, nothing has been permanently lost: over the past 30 years, Americans have gained, lost, re-gained, and “re-lost” faith in government. Here is the trend in one indicator from the American National Election Studies. The survey question is:

How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right, just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?

“None of the time” was accepted as a volunteered response, and I include those who did so in the graph below. For the sake of argument, consider a “trusting” response to include “just about always” and “most of the time.”

The secular decline in trust in government stopped in 1980. Trust increased and then decreased during the 1980s. Then it increased sharply in the 1990s, rising to levels not seen since the mid-1960s. It peaked in 2002 and declined again thereafter. Another measure of trust that combines this and other survey questions shows a similar trend.

It is difficult to make these ups and downs conform to a narrative about partisanship or special interests. Partisan polarization in Congress has been increasing consistently over this period. I can’t imagine that special interests or lobbyists or their ilk suddenly had less influence in the mid-1980s or 1990s.

What drives the trend in political trust? By and large, it is the economy. People trust government when times are good. They don’t trust it when times are bad. For the presidential election years from 1964-2008, I merged the trust measure with the change in per capita disposable income, courtesy of Douglas Hibbs. Here is the relationship between trust and the economy:

The relationship is striking. The economy explains about 75% of the variance in trust. If you delete 1964, which looks like a potential outlier, the economy still explains 73% of the variance.

Of course the economy is not the only important factor. But it gets far less attention than it deserves when the hand-wringing begins. So, sure, perhaps we can and should tinker with the political process. Clip lobbyists’ wings. Get leaders to make nicey-nicey with the opposite party. But the process is less important than outcomes. More people will trust the government again when times are good, even if government ain’t.

Posted by John Sides at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

As one of the goals of the Monkey Cage is to get political scientists and their research involved in broader discussions of contemporary politics, we were very pleased to see that Del Ali of Research 2000 posted on Daily Kos Saturday to explain how they conduct their research. As frequent readers of this blog may recall, Research 2000 conducted the now fairly well known Republicans are Crazy poll for Daily Kos. And while correlation of course does not indicate causation, we did raise some concerns about the poll last week on the Monkey Cage in a guest post by Andrew Therriault. After looking Ali’s response, Andrew and I had the following thoughts:

Overall, Ali’s post is structured as a step-by-step guide to how polls are conducted. Much of the information included is very basic and not specific to Research 2000, but might be useful to anyone who hasn’t worked with surveys in the past.

But more important (for our purposes) is the degree to which the post provides new information which can be used to interpret the original results. Ali does answer one of the questions asked in our previous Monkey Cage post, which concerns the screening process, or the manner in which respondents were selected to participate in the poll. Research 2000 began their interviews by asking a fairly typical party identification question, and then only proceeded with respondents who answered “Republican” immediately—so, no leaners, as we’d thought.

This is actually a pretty crucial point. If we assume that extreme 5% of voters on either the left or the right have some pretty crazy ideas, then this alone can play a big role in coloring how “crazy” a given sample of Republicans (or Democrats) looks in a poll. To give a simple example, if somehow we restrict the Republican in our sample to only the farthest right 10% of voters (e.g., “strong” republicans) , then 50% of our sample of Republicans will look crazy, just on the basis of the 5% of crazies we’ve assumed to be out there. However, if we include as Republicans the farthest right 40% of voters (e.g., include strong Republicans, weak Republicans, and Republican leaners), then the 5% of crazies end up only making 12.5% of all Republicans look crazy. So by stopping at the initial probe of “Politically, do you consider yourself to be a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent, or of another party?” and not asking any follow up questions, the poll was setting itself up to probably get a more conservative sample of Republicans than if it followed the practice of, for example, the American National Election Study, and followed that question up by asking “Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican Party or to the Democratic Party?”. Had Research 2000 asked this question and then included Republican leaners in the survey, the poll would probably have contained more “Republicans” with moderate views. (For more on leaners, see this previous post by John.) However, to be fair, had the poll followed up with a question that asked if the respondent was a strong or weak Republican and then restricted the sample to strong Republicans, the sample would have likely excluded even more moderate views, and thus could have produced even more “dramatic” findings. So while it is the case, as one of the commentators on Andrew’s previous post noted, that Kos can choose to survey whatever population they like, it is also the case that as you make a political population more restrictive, you are probably going to get higher proportions of people echoing political views that look less mainstream.

All of our other concerns with the poll, however, still remain. Consider first particular opinion question wordings used, Ali simply restates a few of the questions and asserts that the binary response options (yes/no, favor/oppose) are “straightforward and objective.” He does not comment on whether the choice of wordings may have influenced the results or whether the binary response options oversimplified and distorted the actual distribution of public opinion. This concern is not out of the blue—the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) suggests in its question wording guidelines that balanced questions have midpoints exactly to avoid the problems we mentioned.

Continue reading "Transparency in Polling: More on the "Republicans are Crazy" Daily Kos Poll" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The Atlantic’s Chris Good says that it is:

Gallup released findings today on economic confidence by state, and it appears anxiety doesn’t give a clear partisan edge one way or the other.

Conventional wisdom says that an improved, or improving, economy is good for President Obama and Democrats, while economic anxiety is bad for the president’s party. Of the 10 states with the highest confidence ratings, five voted for Obama in ‘08 and five voted for John McCain; of the 10 states with the least confidence in the economy, six voted for Obama and four for McCain.

Five minutes later, the commenter “jennis psycho” said:

Your thesis does not follow from the data you cite.

And jennis psycho is correct. Good falls prey to our old friend, the ecological fallacy.

Better data is actually sitting immediately to the right of Good’s blog post: the ABC/WP consumer confidence index. You click on that link, then you click on the pdf in the ABC story.

Here is the consumer confidence rating of the three partisan groups (no word on how independent leaners were classified, but I am guessing they were classified as independents):

Republicans: -46
Democrats: -51
Independents: -49

So the difference here are small — especially compared to the differences across income groups, where consumer confidence ranges from -75 among those making $15,000 or less to -6 among those making $100,000 or more. It appears that a lack of consumer confidence is bipartisan.

But the most recent numbers obscure an important trend that indicates partisanship is at work. If you compare Democrats now to one year ago, their consumer confidence has improved by 10 points. But Republicans’ confidence has declined by 12 points. A year ago, Democrats were 27 points “less confident” than Republicans. Now they are 5 points less confident. Independents, meanwhile, are virtually unchanged.

A while back, Andy and I wrote up this basic finding and a number of others under the heading “Red and Blue Economies. The broader point is this. Even if Republican and Democrats currently have similar views of the economy — “bipartisanship,” in Good’s terminology — partisan bias may still be at work.

Posted by John Sides at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

According to a recent report from Public Policy Polling, Democrats were rooting for the Saints by a 36%-21% margin, while Republicans were narrowly pulling for the Colts by a 26%-25% margin. Interestingly, Independents looked much more like Democrats, preferring the Saints by 33%-20%. Alas, no info on Tea Party supporters.

Oh, and one other vaguely related point. I watched the Super Bowl (very late at night…) in Madrid, Spain, where we had the UK feed of the game. The commentator they had for expert studio analysis: the Southern Methodist University wide receivers’ coach. Despite the fact that we got a good laugh out of this when he was first announced, I have to admit he actually provided pretty good commentary.

[Hat Tip to Pollster.]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember that Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll from earlier this week that swept through the blogosphere (see here, here , and here). Well, like any poll with new, dramatic take-away healdines, it’s probably worth a second look. I had put that on my Monkey Cage to do list for later this week, only to discover one of my own graduate students, Andrew Therriault (who incidentally will be on the job market next year), had already beaten me to the punch, providing a - dare I say it - fair and balanced look at the poll’s methodology here, which he has graciously allowed me to re-post on the Monkey Cage as a guest post:

There’s a new poll out from Daily Kos, conducted by Research 2000 (story, crosstabs), that’s getting a lot of attention this week (see discussion at FiveThirtyEight and Politico, for example). In brief, it claims that an alarming number of Republicans believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win, believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election, and hold other similarly-extreme beliefs and opinions. While the findings are pretty striking at first glance, there are a number of potential problems with the poll that should throw a little cold water on anyone getting too hysterical about the results:

Sample selection
The poll asked these questions of “2003 self identified Republicans”, but no details are provided about the screening process—-what the specific eligibility criteria were, what the response rate was, what percentage of respondents fit the eligibility screen, and so forth. I would wager that Republican leaners are not included, but that’s only part of the issue. The poll measures the opinions of people who (a) answered the phone and were willing to be polled far from election day, (b) identified as Republican without any follow-up prompts, c) were interested and patient enough to sit through a moderately-lengthy survey, and (d) did this despite a list of questions which sounds awfully like a push poll. Each of these factors could be reasonably expected to favor respondents who are highly engaged with politics and predisposed toward a particularly conservative viewpoint. As such, it is highly unlikely that the sample of respondents who sat through the full survey is even close to representative of the typical Republican electorate.

Opinion strength
Every opinion question is binary (yes/no, favor/oppose, etc.) with an option for “not sure”. Looking at the percentage of “not sure” responses, almost every question has double-digits in this category, and many have 20-30% or more. This is a much greater incidence than for most survey questions (though data is scarce when it comes to questions comparable to these in tone), and suggests that there is a wide range when it comes to the strength and certainty of respondents’ opinions. So of the 63% who think Obama is a socialist, for example, it’s unlikely that all of those respondents think he’s the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin. More likely, a handful really believe that, some more think he’s socialist in the European, democratic-socialist sense, others have heard their friends say it and think it might be true, a few more don’t really know but are guessing (not wanting to admit to the interviewer that they don’t know), and a bunch have no idea what a socialist is in the first place but know that it’s evil and so Obama must be one. By only allowing for binary answers, this poll ignores the complexities and uncertainties of public opinion, and force responses into categories which sound much more extreme than they might otherwise be.

Continue reading "Revisiting that "Republicans are Crazy" Daily Kos Research 2000 Poll" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Time emphasizes what Americans hate and distrust about the legislative process (which is, put simply, the workings of the legislative process), and that drives them away from the bill.

That’s Ezra Klein, drawing on the book Stealth Democracy, by political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (buy it here!). Ezra quotes this passage from the book, which nicely summarizes their argument:

…they are consequently turned off by political debate and deal making that presuppose an absence of consensus. People believe these activities would be unnecessary if if decision makers were in tune with the (consensual) public interest rather than cacophonous special interests.

But there’s one problem in trying to explain opinion about health care with process considerations. What about the extraordinary partisan polarization on health care? See the graph from Gallup below:

Klein talks about what “Americans” think about the process and the bill. But there are no “Americans” here. There are groups of partisans with strongly divergent views. Clearly, the lengthy process isn’t turning off Democrats. In fact, their support has increased of late, according to Gallup:

Is it turning off Republicans? Perhaps. But a much more plausible explanation is that Republicans either didn’t support health care reform from the outset because it was associated with Obama and the Democratic Party, or came to dislike it after a barrage of criticism from Republican political leaders.

Okay, but what about independents? Are their views on health care due to their revulsion at “the process”? That would strike me as plausible if independents support for the bill kept declining as the process dragged on. In the graph above, there was a decline from the middle of September to the beginning of November. But no decline thereafter, even as the allegedly “worst” parts of the process — the Cornhusker compromise, the backroom conversations among Democratic leaders, etc. — took place. This is a point I’ve made before.

In fact, most of the growth in opposition to health care took place in the early stages of the process, not as the process wore on:

So while it’s true that opposition to health care reform is positively related to the length of the process, that doesn’t imply any causal relationship. The rapid increase in opposition and the partisan polarization in opinion suggests that the lengthy process matters not by opening people’s eyes to the cruel realities of legislating, but by giving opponents of reform additional time to attack it.

Posted by John Sides at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

David Shor writes:

I just read an idea for a pollster that crowd-sources statistical work, and was curious what you thought about the idea.

Here’s the idea:

Today, there is a new polling method available: IVR, or ‘Interactive Voice Response’ polling. Basically, the pollster records several questions, a computer auto-dials hundreds of landlines, and with the people who are willing to participate in the survey, they go through the script automatically.

Even though the old media pollsters and traditional polling organisations like AAPOR are busy discrediting those polls that they condescendingly call ‘robopolls’, there is not much evidence that they do any worse than live-interviewer polls- but they are much, much cheaper. . . .

Now, the next step to make polls even easier to access for everyone is there- with the mid-January start-up of the IVR pollster Precision Polling.

From Precision Polling’s website:

Automated Phone Surveys are phone calls where a recorded voice asks you questions and you type in responses on your keypad (e.g. “Who will get your vote for mayor? Press 1 for Joe…”). This provides a fast and affordable way to get answers from real people.

What do I think? I think it’s evil. These robopolls “fast and affordable” for the pollster but not for the person being hassled by the phone call. I think these machine phone calls should be illegal—yes, I would eagerly support a law making it illegal to call someone if there’s no human making the call (fax and data transmission excepted, of course). This would have the side benefit of making all those pre-election endorsement auto-calls illegal, as well as various obnoxious calls used by collection agencies.

It’s simply an abuse of the phone system, just as it would be an abuse of the electrical system to sneak into your neighbor’s house one night, plug in a really long extension cord, and run it out their window to your house to power your appliances.

“Fast and affordable,” indeed! Fast, affordable, and abusive is more like it.

P.S. I feel bad even giving these dudes publicity, but I figure, once it’s on Daily Kos it’s already been read by a million people, so I hope the good I’m doing by disparaging this idea outweighs the harm I’m doing by publicizing it.

P.P.S. I’m not saying the Daily Kos diarist (“twohundertseventy”) is evil, or even that that the people at Precision Polling are bad guys. I just don’t know if they’ve thought through the ethical implications of their suggestion, which amounts to bombarding millions of people with irritating calls at dinnertime. Or perhaps they have a retort to my ethical argument, something like: Lots of people enjoy answering polls, or Polls are essential to democracy. OK, if they’re so damn essential, try paying people to participate in your poll. You’re making money off of them, why not give something back to the people you’re hassling? Grrrr.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

…the fastest growing group of Americans are [sic] independents. That should tell us both something.

Barack Obama, at the House GOP retreat. The video is at C-SPAN. I’m just now listening, but early reports are that the Q&A was pretty interesting.

Posted by John Sides at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Janice Sinclaire of Miller-McCune sends along this July piece from their magazine, entitled “‘Independent’ Voters Are Generally Not.” There’s lots of good quotes therein.

Peter Brown of Quinnipiac:

There are an awful lot of people who call themselves independent because it’s fashionable in some circles. But their voting behavior is predictable. They are not swing voters.

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling:

While a disproportionate numbers of swing voters are independents, two-thirds of independent voters are not swing voters.

Scott Keeter of Pew:

This idea of the sage citizen who eschews party affiliation, is unbiased and persuadable by reason and facts, is very much a myth. Most people are committed to a party. They may not like the label, so some call themselves independents. But there are very few people who fit the archetypes of the wise, centrist independent. People who don’t have a lot of opinions tend to be disengaged from politics and less likely to vote.

The piece also quotes from political scientist John Petrocik, who recently published an article entitled “Measuring party support: Leaners are not independents” (gated, sorry). From the abstract:

Many Americans, especially middle class and better educated ones, call themselves independent and citizens who choose the better candidate regardless of party affiliation. Their numbers seem to have increased in recent decades to nearly 40% of the electorate. The description and estimate are misleading. Very few Americans lack a party preference. Our largely unchanged high levels of party voting and the willingness of most ‘‘independents’’ to acknowledge a party preference after a bit of probing indicates that independence is more a matter of self-presentation than an accurate statement about our approach to elections, candidates, the parties, and politics in general. Most of the independents in national surveys and most of the increase in their numbers are contributed by ‘‘leaners’’ (those who initially describe themselves as independents but then acknowledge a preference for either the Democrats or Republicans). Leaners are partisans. Characterizing them as independents underestimates the partisanship of Americans and leads to inaccurate estimates of party effects and the responsiveness of the electorate to short-term electoral forces.

Posted by John Sides at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The Pew Research Center has a new report out on the US Public’s Top Priorities. Here is the headline finding:

Healthcare and helping the poor (a clear component of health care reform, if one not often discussed) are still thought of as a top priority by a majority of the population, but it is clear that they are not at the top of the list. Nor are energy and global warming, another of the Obama administration’s top domestic priorities. Interestingly, though, tax cuts, a big theme of the tea-party movement, are also near the bottom of this list. Deficit reduction, however, is in the top half of the list, although, it should be noted, deficit reduction is far below concern over the economy and jobs, the top two items on this list.

How might these figures filter into actual policy making in the year to come? On the one hand, as I pointed out previously, the Democrats still clearly have the votes to do whatever they would like (for the most part) for the rest of 2010. As has been pointed out repeatedly (see in particular John Stewart’s excellent take on this a few nights ago), Obama still has more votes in the House and the Senate that George W. Bush ever had, and Bush certainly managed to advance elements of his legislative agenda. On the other hand, one thing Democrats in congress will want to do is get re-elected, so one can only imagine that close attention will be paid to these numbers. Exhibit one: The State of the Union Address?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fareed Zakaria:

…tens of millions of independents, the vast middle ground where elections are won and lost in America…

Matt Bai:

Even more consequential, though, is the fast-growing swath of voters who can summon no affinity for either party. As in other aspects of modern American life, brand allegiance in politics is at an all-time low; more than a third of Americans (and more than half of all Massachusetts voters) identify themselves as independents rather than as members of the blue team or the red.

Jon Bernstein beat me to this, but he has other fish to fry with Bai. Plus, I want to yell.

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

Posted by John Sides at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

The Washington Post describes this finding from the poll I noted earlier:

Among Brown’s supporters who say the health-care reform effort in Washington played an important role in their vote, the most frequently cited reasons were concerns about the process, including closed-door dealing and a lack of bipartisanship. Three in 10 highlighted these political maneuverings as the motivating factor; 22 percent expressed general opposition to reform or the current bill.

Karen Tumulty says that this dovetails with what she was hearing on the ground in Massachusetts:

Normally, you’d be surprised if people in Massachusetts even know who the Senator from Nebraska is. But the number of people I talked to who brought up Ben Nelson’s name, unprompted, was striking. I’m also told, by some who were doing phonebanking, that they got an earful about it over and over.

Voters I talked to also brought up the deal with labor. How come, they wanted to know, that everyone has to pay this “Cadillac Tax” on high-cost insurance plans except for the unions, who get a five-year exemption? People are so disgusted by the process, I think, that they have ceased to believe that there is anything in this bill for them.

Jon Bernstein tackles this from one angle, and I agree with him that Tumulty’s reporting is important. But I want to tackle the role of “process” from a public opinion standpoint. “Process” does appear salient in the minds of 30% of MA voters who voted for Brown. But there are three challenges in interpreting its importance:

1) What does process mean?
Well, according to the Post — see p. 5 of the pdf — it could mean “don’t like the way it is being handled” or “politics” or “deal-making” or “too complicated” or “not what the people want” or “partisanship” or “moving too fast” — among other things. The category is very broad and includes multitudes of different sentiments. Tumulty refers to something that sounds like the Post’s “deal-making.” The problem is that deal-making isn’t separated from “politics” or “don’t like the way its being handled” and several other sentiments. So the 13% who were classified as saying something in that category may or may not have in mind the deals with Ben Nelson or labor unions.

I would guess that only a small percentage of voters could tell you that there was a Cornhusker compromise and perhaps what it was. That’s just a hypothesis, but it strikes me as plausible because of the low levels of knowledge of many political facts, especially arcane ones like the Nelson deal. To take one example, 69% of respondents in a recent CBS poll (pdf) couldn’t even provide a basic favorable/unfavorable for the Tea Party movement, and it has been in the news for months.

2) How many opponents of health care reform care about process?
In Post’s poll the fraction of self-reported voters who (1) considered health care extremely or very important, (2) were therefore asked the open-ended question, (3) cited something related to process and (4) voted for Scott Brown was about 7% of their sample (my math).

So we’re not talking about a large number of people. It’s possible that they were easy for Tumulty to find in Massachusetts — at rallies or wherever — but this is not necessarily a widespread phenomenon.

3) Is process really the reason why people oppose health care reform?
Here I am pretty confident in saying no — and I would be equally confident even if large numbers of people knew of the Nelson deal. First, it’s important to remember that the “reasons” that people give for their choices — e.g., as in the Post’s open-ended question — are not necessarily the factors that actually caused those choices. People do not report accurately on their own mental processes, and often times their “reasons” are rationalizations. Lee had a nice post on this.

Second, there has been no increase in opposition to health care reform in the last couple months, even as the Nelson deal and the exemption for labor unions came together. In fact, according to the Pollster chart, there’s actually been a slight decline in opposition, although I doubt that’s anything meaningful. The Nelson deal didn’t seem to change anyone’s mind. It just gave bill opponents another reason to hate the bill, and it was salient enough at the time of the Post poll in Massachusetts for some unknown fraction to cite it.

Given how quickly partisan polarization on health care reform emerged, I think most people’s opinions were formed via the usual cue-taking from elites (as John Zaller’s work would suggest). The public routinely complains about aspects of the legislative process — see John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s work — but these are
general concerns not so much concerns about specific bills.

Tumulty thinks that the Cornhusker compromise was “one of the biggest blunders in modern political history.” I think that absent the deal, public opinion about health care reform would be no different whatsoever. Ultimately, most people do not base their views of legislation on the process by which it was debated or enacted. And after a months-long debate, I doubt that details of the process are changing many people’s minds.

Posted by John Sides at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A nice tidbit from the Washington Post/KFF/Harvard poll of MA special election voters (pdf):

As you may know, Massachusetts has a law that is aimed at assuring that virtually all Massachusetts residents have health insurance. Given what you know about it, in general, do you support or oppose the Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance Law?

Among Brown voters, 51% support this law and 44% oppose it.

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

That’s Ben Smith’s phrase. He cites George Packer:

Part of Obama’s weakness has been this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately, which would let Americans know that he is on their side. Reagan knew how to do it, which meant that, even when his popularity was sinking at a similar point in his presidency (remember 1982?), the public still knew where he stood, not necessarily on the details of policy, but on a few core principles that he could at least pretend never to sacrifice. This is partly a problem of communication, worsened by a tendency of the White House (as if the campaign never ended) to make Obama’s the face on every issue, so that the more he says, the less people know what he wants.

And William Finnegan:

He wants to accomplish too much, both domestically and beyond. So I see him being subtly changed by these pressures of office, becoming less incisive and cool, getting broader, more conventional, more conservative.

These perpectives dovetail with Maureen Dowd’s, discussed last week:

No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Ah, the narrative is starting to take shape. Unsurprisingly, it’s one bereft of evidence. Consider these data from a January Pew poll. What follows is the percent who say that a phrase describes Obama:

“Warm and friendly”: 77%
“Cares about people like me”: 64%

That’s hard to square with the idea that Obama is too cool or not “connecting.”

But Packer suggests something more than style: “this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately…” I couldn’t find any poll that directly speaks to this, but consider this from the Pew data:

“Strong leader”: 62%
“Good communicator”: 83%

And consider this question as well, “In making decisions, is Obama too impulsive, too cautious, or about right?” Only 20% said “too cautious.” 46% said “about right,” and 26% said “too impulsive” (a sentiment far more common among Republicans, naturally).

None of this squares with the notion that Obama has failed as a communicator. In short, Obama is more popular as a person than a president. There is little reason for him to adjust his personality.

More fundamentally, in these sentiments is yet more primitive magical thinking about what presidents can do if they only have just the right message or right tone. Perhaps Obama could give some speech (e.g., SOTU) that would reinvigorate key constituencies or congressional Democrats. But let us not fool ourselves that effective speech-making is going to have any real impact on public opinion. There is scant evidence that speeches may much difference.

There’s a further irony in Packer’s analogy to Reagan. He thinks Reagan articulated a core set of principles, and Obama hasn’t. But then he notes that Obama is in exactly the same position as Reagan was at this point. Their approval trends are virtually overlapping. So how is it that articulating core principles matters? If Reagan did and Obama didn’t, and they were both sitting at 50% after one year, what difference does the rhetoric make?

The analogy to Reagan actually suggests something quite the opposite: structure, not speeches, matter. A weak economy took its toll on Reagan and it’s taken its toll on Obama. Presidents are, as Brendan Nyhan put it, often “prisoners of circumstance.”

There is no cleverly crafted message that’s going to turn around Obama’s approval. Nor is there much evidence that his personality is the fundamental problem.

Posted by John Sides at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

That’s the argument of political scientists David Brady and Douglas Rivers, along with business and law professor Daniel Kessler. Here are the key graphs:

We have polled voters in 11 states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they feel about health reform and how they might vote in November. The interviews were conducted from Jan. 6-11 with 500 registered voters in Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

…Health reform is more popular in some of these states than in others. Where it’s popular, Democratic candidates don’t have too much of a problem, but where it’s unpopular—and that includes most states—the Democratic Senate candidates are fighting an uphill battle. Support for health reform varies in these 11 states from a low of 33% in North Dakota to a high of 48% in Nevada. Democrats trail Republicans in six of the states; three are toss-ups; and in two, Democrats have a solid lead. Support for the Republican Senate candidates in these races is closely related to voter opposition to the health-care Senate bill.

…How do we know that it’s the health-reform bill that’s to blame for the low poll numbers for Democratic Senate candidates and not just that these are more conservative states? First, we asked voters how their incumbent senator voted on the health-care bill that passed on Christmas Eve. About two-thirds answered correctly. Even now, long before Senate campaigns have intensified, voters know where the candidates stand on health care. And second, we asked voters about their preference for Democrat versus Republican candidates in a generic House race. As in the Senate, the higher the level of opposition to health reform, the greater the likelihood that the state’s voters supported Republicans.

Voters’ knowledge of how senators voted is key. In an earlier post, I argued that voters don’t often make decisions based on policy. In part this is because they don’t necessarily know where the candidates stand. But perhaps that won’t prove true with regard to health care reform in 2010.

UPDATE: Brendan is more skeptical.

Posted by John Sides at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Jon Cohen of the Washington Post nails it:

Only one of Monday’s five publicly released Massachusetts Senate polls asked prospective voters anything beyond their ballot preference, opinion of the candidates and a few demographics.

…Good survey research clarifies, providing data about “why” prospective voters make choices, both in terms of whether they will vote and how they will cast their ballots. Producing a solitary horse-race number is essentially a publicity stunt. That number may end up hitting the mark, but without any explanatory information behind it, it’s of no value to understanding the election.

Posted by John Sides at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a Coakley supporter in MA, and you feel like neither the candidate nor your fellow Democrats are taking the election seriously because everyone believes she’ll win by a large margin. A pollster calls you and asks you for whom you are planning on voting. What should you say? You could tell the truth and say Coakley, and risk yet another poll that shows her with a big lead and risks lulling Democrats even further into complacency. Or you could say Brown, in the hope that a closer than expected poll would light a fire under your co-partisans and/or convince some people who are planning on voting for Brown to “make a statement” because they think he has no choice of winning to avoid doing so.

This got me thinking: do we, as political scientists, really have a good handle on why and when people tend to tell the truth to pollsters? Much has been made of building up and tearing down the so-called Bradley effect, whereby whites voters might be less likely to admit to voting against black candidates. We also know from Adam Berinsky’s work in particular that sometimes certain voters are unable to articulate positions that they probably hold (see for example here or here). But what about situations like the one above, where it would serve the partisan interest of the respondent to lie about her intended vote choice? Or, to give another example, Adam Meirowitz and I have a formalized argument about why certain poll respondents ought to exaggerate their positions on policy positions (see the section entitled Intuition here; for more generalizable formal work on this topic by Meirowitz see here.)

Yet at the end of the day, we usually do seem to be able to predict most election results from the final set of polls before that election, which suggests people aren’t systematically lying in election polls. I’m not sure if we have any similar findings in terms of policy questions, but I certainly have never seen systematic evidence suggesting they do. So this seems to be an interesting puzzle: if people ought to lie to pollsters to advance their own political agenda, why don’t they? I posed this question to my colleague Neal Beck, and his guess was essentially that people who answer surveys want to get off the phone as quickly as possible, and putting any thought into answering a survey question would slow down that process. I’m curious as to what other people think. Why don’t people lie more often to pollsters? In my piece with Meirowitz, we raise the idea of a “small psychic cost” to lying, but why should that kind of psychic cost be any more troubling than, for example, not voting for your preferred candidate in an election for strategic reasons? Could it be that people don’t think politicians look at poll results? That seems overly naive. We could of course fall back on the “what would one different response matter?” argument, but we know that people vote strategically; certainly one strategic poll respondent out of 1000 can have a larger impact than one strategic voter out of a million.

Anyone aware of empirical research on these or related topics? Perhaps from the political pysch literature?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

One of the most fascinating things about political ideology is the following juxtaposition:

1. An ideology typically makes complete sense to the person holding the ideology—that is, it is internally coherent.

2. Different people have all sorts of different ideologies; thus, there is external incoherence.

To put it another way, one person might strongly believe in A & B, while somebody else equally strongly feels that A & not-B go together. The logic of ideology is not fully determined by what goes into it.

I remember thinking about this several years ago regarding positions on legalized gambling (casinos, state lotteries, and the like). Some commentators were iberal and pro-gambling (people should be allowed to gamble if they want, without fundamentalist bible thumpers telling them what to do), some were conservative and pro-gambling (people should be allowed to gamble if they want, without do-gooder liberals telling them what to do), and similarly on the other side. And I recall reading passionate arguments from various of these perspectives.

On aggregate, I suspect there’s a slight correlation between being a liberal or Democrat and supporting gambling (it’s a traditional morals issue, after all, William F. Bennett notwithstanding), but the correlation is surely weak if there at all, and it doesn’t stop all four of the above positions from making internal sense.

I thought about the issue again more recently when reading this discussion by Dennis Mangan (I found his site via a link from Seth’s blog) of the fascinating story of a businessman who built a minaret next to his shoe warehouse in Bussigny, Switzerland. From the news article:

In November, Switzerland voted to ban the construction of new minarets, the towerlike structures that adorn mosques. A week or so later, in an apparent act of defiance, a new minaret unexpectedly sprang up here.

But the new minaret is not attached to a mosque; this small town near Geneva doesn’t even have one. And it’s not the work of a local Muslim outraged by Switzerland’s controversial vote to ban the structures, which often are used to launch the call to prayer.

Instead, Bussigny’s minaret is attached to the warehouse of a shoe store called Pomp It Up, which is part of a Swiss chain. It was erected by the chain’s owner, Guillaume Morand, who fashioned it out of plastic and wood and attached it to a chimney. The new minaret, nearly 20 feet high and illuminated at night, is clearly visible from the main highway connecting Lausanne and Geneva.

“The referendum was a scandal,” Mr. Morand said recently at his cavernous warehouse, near pallets piled high with shoe boxes as pop music played on an old stereo system. “I was ashamed to be Swiss. I don’t have the power to do much, but I wanted to give a message of peace to Muslims.”

Continue reading "Internal vs. external coherence in political ideology" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This was Dowd, as quoted in my previous post:

But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Today, Gallup buttresses the CNN data noted previously:

U.S. Fear of Terrorism Steady After Foiled Christmas Attack

In a Dec. 11-13 poll, 39% were somewhat or very worried about “you or someone in your your family” becoming a “victim of a terrorist attack.” In a Jan. 8-10 poll, 42% were somewhat or very worried. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 points.

Posted by John Sides at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ABC News has new and remarkably thorough report available on their website on public opinion in Afghanistan (see here for the accompanying article discussing the report). This could undoubtedly represent quite a treasure trove of data for anyone studying this topic, which then led me to the question of whether there were actually any political scientists working on this topic. I did a quick Google Scholar search of “Afghanistan” and “Public Opinion” and couldn’t find anything, so I would like to invite readers of The Monkey Cage to comment if they know of any relevant papers or article. In particular, I’d be very interested in any studies of the reliability of the polls referenced in the ABC report.

On to the substance of the report, there are really a lot of interesting topics covered - and in most cases time series data are provided - including attitudes toward security and the US forces in the country, beliefs about corruption generally and fraud in the most recent presidential elections, and even questions on topics such as whether women should be allowed to work disaggregated by demographic characteristics of the respondents. But two of the most eye-catching results are as follows:

Here we can see that there has been a rather dramatic increase in Afghans’ optimism about the future essentially since US President Obama took office in January of 2009. Note that this appears to be both a short term optimism about one’s own life as well as a more long term optimism about the hope for one’s childrens’ lives.

Also interesting is the fact that there seems to be a reversal in blame for the violence in Afghanistan. A year ago, slightly more than a third of Afghans felt the US/NATO forces were primarily to blame for the violence while only slightly more than a quarter blamed the Taliban. Now more than twice as many people (42% - 17%) blame the Taliban as blame the US/NATO forces.

As mentioned previously, it would be great to know if anyone had any research on the reliability of these figures.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Maureen Dowd:

No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Percentage of Americans who were “somewhat” or “very worried” that “you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism”…

…two months before the attempted Christmas bombing: 36%
…two weeks after the attempted Christmas bombing: 34%

Percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or “a moderate amount” of confidence “in the Obama administration to protect U.S. citizens from future acts of terrorism”…

…four months before the attempted Christmas bombing: 63%
…two weeks after the attempted Christmas bombing: 65%

Source: CNN.

Posted by John Sides at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Not any more than you would expect a largely Democratic group to dislike her. Seth Masket has the definitive back-of-the-envelope math.

Posted by John Sides at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Henry noted the dust-up between the netroots and wonkosphere over health care. This has occasioned all kinds of speculation about whether Obama has a problem with the Democratic Party’s liberal base.

Mark Blumenthal provides some evidence to the contrary: Obama’s standing among liberals and among liberal Democrats is very high and hasn’t declined. Some relevant Gallup data are here.

Nate Silver pointed out a few weeks back that the visibility of viewpoints should not be confused with their prevalence. Another way of stating this — and one back by, oh, a half-century of political science — is that the public is often and at best a pale reflection of the views of politicians, journalists, bloggers, etc.

Posted by John Sides at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fascinating blog by Nate Silver on different ways a survey organization can be biased (or not). Issues of question wording, and of which questions to ask in a survey, come up from time to time.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A prefatory apology: some of the material in here is in previous posts (e.g., here), and all of this material will be very familiar and therefore unexciting to many political scientist readers. But elsewhere, people don’t get it, and so attention must be paid.

The three myths are:

1) Independents are the largest partisan group.

2) Independents are actually independent.

3) Change in the opinions of independents is always consequential.

Continue reading "Three Myths about Political Independents" »

Posted by John Sides at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Last week, I linked to my comments at the TPM Book Club on Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. I post two criticisms of the book, both intended as friendly and constructive. Marc and Jonathan replied here. Marc and I then began some further correspondence via email. The comments below capture my synthesis of these exchanges.

The underlying question: Is the American public more polarized today than in some previous period?

Continue reading "What We Don't Know About Polarization" »

Posted by John Sides at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This has been circulating for a few months on conservative blogs and websites — or so a Google search suggests — but it was just forwarded to me by a relative:

DO NOT MISS YOUR CHANCE TO CAST YOUR VOTE:

Finally, a chance to vote on President Obama’s performance on this Economy and where he is taking this nation… AT&T/YahooPoll… This totally non-partisan poll asks but one question. The question is stated very simply… and, to the point. No tricks. No hidden messages. JUST ONE SINGLE, SIMPLE QUESTION. I don’t know why this hasn’t been done before..

I’m impressed with the fact that the question is NOT “phrased” in a way that it can be interpreted or misrepresented later…to fit someone else’s desired answer.

http://js..polls.yahoo.com/quiz/quiziframe.php?poll id=46067

NOTE: After you vote, you will see a second page that shows the running total and what these voters opinions are.

Then pass it on… so others may cast their vote.

So I click the link and here is the question:

The president’s progress with the battered economy has been both praised and criticized. How well are his efforts measuring up with you?

• Extremely well. We are undoubtedly moving in the right direction.
• Fairly well. There’s still a long way to go.
• Not well at all. His plans are hurting more than helping.
• Not sure/No opinion.

At first I thought this was a hoax, but some searching didn’t suggest that this was true.

So then, where to begin? We’ll ignore the nonsense in the email — e.g,. the notion that only “finally” are people being asked their opinions about Obama and the economy. The bigger issue is the question itself. This is a poll sponsored by AT&T and Yahoo and this is what they come up with? Does the concept of “double-barreled” mean anything to them? What if I think that he’s done extremely well, but we have a long way to go? What if I think that we’re headed in the right direction and have a long way to go? Etc.

Obama’s performance on the economy has been measured over and over using better questions — questions that would even meet the author’s standards (“non-partisan,” “simple,” etc.):

More on the data is at Pollster.

And it will probably not surprise readers of this blog that the self-selected sample of respondents — and there have been over 40 million responses (not respondents, naturally) — tends toward strong opinions: 37% say “extremely well” and 61% say “not well at all.” Only 1% say “fairly well.”

This is the opposite of what is actually true. When given more options than “approve” and “disapprove” most people cluster in the middle options, not the extremes. For example, a November Harris Interactive poll found that 34% considered Obama’s performance on the economy to be “pretty good” and 30% it to be “fair.” Only 13% said “excellent.” Only 23% said “poor.”

I note that other AT&T Yahoo polls have this same problem. Here’s one on Lou Dobbs:

Longtime CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is making trouble for the network, reported a story popular on AT&T Yahoo! this week. His coverage of the “birther” movement, which questions the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, has brought the most fallout. His persistence with the story has embarrassed CNN execs and also contributed to a drop in ratings, say insiders. The bad press has put his job in jeopardy.

What do you think? Should Lou Dobbs keep his job?

• Yes. He’s an important voice in the news industry.
• No. It’s time for him to go.
• Not sure/No opinion

Much better would be just “yes” or “no.” It’s entirely possible to think he’s an important voice but that it’s time for him to go.

I am wasting my time yelling at random internet polls, of course. But you’d think with big corporate dollars behind this, At&T and Yahoo could come up with something better.

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

When I was giving talks on Red State, Blue State, I’d always get a laugh with the Starbucks/Walmart graphs. One thing I realized is that everybody hates Starbucks. From the left, Starbucks is a creepy bit of corporate America, whereas the right sees the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops as a snobby overpriced slice of big-city liberalism. Not everybody feels that way, of course—let’s not forget the zillions of latte-swilling customers out there—but the Seattle-based sugar-and-caffeine-dispensary does seem to be disliked by both ends of the political spectrum.

As is White House economist Lawrence Summers, who is despised on the left for his Wall Street connections, his links to the bank bailouts, and, of course, that infamous “pollution memo”—while also being mocked on the right for being an economic redistributionist who couldn’t even hold down the job of president of Harvard (a post that traditionally has a turnover rate closer to that of Popes than that of manager of the Steinbrenner-era Yankees).

P.S. The second link above comes from our co-blogger Henry. I found the first link by Google searching blogs for “Larry Summers.” It wasn’t hard to find some negative things!

P.P.S. It’s beyond my competence to make any judgments on Summers’s competence on economic issues. Heck, as a non-coffee drinker, it’s beyond my competence to judge Starbucks! I wouldn’t be surprised if Summers drinks a lot of coffee, though.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The New Republic has suggested that an op-ed I wrote last month with my colleague Pat Egan, and which I previously discussed in a Monkey Cage post here, ought to be recommended reading before viewing the president’s speech tonight. The first half of the piece draws on the issue ownership literature to explain why Afghanistan is a particularly difficult challenge for a Democratic president, while in the second half of the piece we lay out some suggestions for how Obama ought to try to present his decision to the American public once he made it. This included (1) framing his decision entirely in terms of US national security and (2) possibly invoking a similar logic to the “surge” in Iraq — bringing in more troops in the short term to improve the situation sufficiently so you can take out more troops in medium term — if he did indeed decide to add a significantly large number of new trips.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve written before on opinion toward various proposals about the public option — e.g., the option alone vs. with an opt-out provision. Last week, Quinnipiac released some new data that speaks to this question. These come from a poll of registered voters conducted from Nov. 9-16, 2009. At my request, they also supplied some additional cross-tabs, for which I am grateful.

The poll included questions about the public option, the opt-out provision, and the trigger:

Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?

There is a proposal that would allow states to opt out of a public option - that is it would be left up to each state to decide whether or not to give people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan. Do you think that is a good idea or a bad idea?

Some have suggested that the creation of a public option should only be triggered if the private market does not meet benchmarks to extend coverage to all Americans. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea?

In this poll, 57% favored the public opinion, 43% thought the opt-out provision was a good idea, and 38% thought the trigger was a good idea.

Obviously, we want to know about combinations of attitudes. For example, how many supporters of the public opinion are also supporters of the opt-out or trigger? Are their opponents of the public option that would support a triggered version? Etc. This is where the cross-tabs are useful.

The graph above focuses on those respondents who had opinions on both issues in each combination (public option and opt-out, public option and trigger). This is about 87% of respondents.

The graph shows that supporters of the public option are relatively evenly divided between supporting a pure public option and supporting a public option with either a trigger or opt-out provision. Opponents of the public option are evenly divided about the opt-out, but tend to oppose the trigger.

Thus, about one-third of the sample supports the “pure” public option. A slightly smaller group, roughly 30%, supports a “qualified” public option that features either an opt-out provision or a trigger. About 20% of the public oppose the option, but would support it with an opt-out provision. Thirteen percent oppose it but would support it with a trigger. Finally, there is a “diehard” group of public option opponents, who are about 20-25% of the population.

There is grist for both supporters and opponents of the public option in these findings. Supporters could take heart that about 75-80% of the sample supports some sort of public option — at least given how these various proposals are described by Quinnipiac. Opponents could take heart that only about a third of respondents supports the pure public option.

I also note that the “median” member of the public appears to support a qualified public option, which is not that different than the view of the hypothetical median Senator, at least as far as I can tell.

Posted by John Sides at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was reading Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics”: for a forum elsewhere on the internets and came across this interesting finding. Using ANES data from 2004, Hetherington and Weiler find that 95% of those who scored the minimum on their scale for authoritarianism (e.g. attachment to strong and traditional notions of public morality etc) thought that gay people ought to be allowed join the armed forces, as against 79% of those with middling levels of authoritarianism and 67% of those who maxed out the scale. Hetherington and Weiler are interested in what this tells us about the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians. But it also begs an interesting political question. Assuming that these values have not shifted dramatically in the intervening five years (and if they have, I would guess that they have shifted so as to make authoritarians more rather than less likely to support gays in the military), why has the Obama administration has not pressed for public changes, despite repeated promises, visible anger from supporting constituencies etc? If Hetherington and Weiler are right, the answer is not to be found in public opinion. More than two thirds of the population segment where you would expect to find most opposition is, in fact, in favor of allowing gay people to join the military. Other potential explanations?

Posted by Henry at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

A new PPP poll finds that 49% of McCain voters think that ACORN stole the election for Obama. 20% of McCain voters are not sure. Only 31% think that he legitimately won the election. By comparison, 93% of Obama voters believe that he legitimately won the election.

Let’s first acknowledge that this is one poll, with one question wording. The pollster in question, PPP, uses interactive voice response (aka robo-calls), which generate lower response rates than standard polls. A reasonable question, then, is whether this small self-selected sample is — even with sample weighting — skewed towards the kind of politically engaged citizens who are more likely to think and act as partisan or ideologues.

Second, let’s put this finding in some degree of context by considering opinions after the 2000 presidential election. In various polls, we see similarly large divisions among Bush and Gore supporters about the fairness of the process, whether the Supreme Court had partisan motives, who the real winner would have been under a full recount, etc.

Perhaps most relevant is this question from a December 2000 Newsweek poll: “”Will you consider Bush to be a legitimate president, or not?”

Nearly all Republicans (97%) said yes, as compared to 56% of Democrats. Forty percent of Democrats said no.

I am not suggesting that the 2000 controversy and the PPP question about ACORN are equivalent, of course. I just wanted to show that partisans of both stripes can be disgruntled after an election — leaving aside the relative merits of their cause, the empirical basis for their beliefs, etc.

The bigger question is whether suggesting that a president is “illegitimate” has any real consequence. Democratic voters didn’t rebel against Bush after 2000. Indeed, they rallied to his side for a brief time after September 11th.

Moreover, the kinds of Democrats and Republicans who consider an opposition President to be illegitimate — strong partisans, for the most part — would be unlikely to support that President’s policies or vote for him in 4 years even if their doubts about his legitimacy were removed.

We can also question the causal status of suspicions of ACORN. It’s entirely possible that opposition to Obama makes people more likely to suspect ACORN — rather than the other way around. So dispelling this suspicion wouldn’t make anyone support Obama.

Finally, we have to be careful in imputing some tangible political consequence to the responses that respondents give to a PPP robo-call. Simply stating a suspicion doesn’t imply that people will act one it. Moreover, there is a ritualistic quality to this sort of discontent that makes its true impact difficult to discern.

Posted by John Sides at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Jon Bernstein wants new polling data on the filibuster. The new CNN poll has one question about this:

As you may know, the filibuster is a Senate procedure which has been used to prevent the Senate from passing controversial legislation or confirming controversial appointments by the President, even if a majority of senators support that action. A vote of at least sixty senators out of one hundred is needed to end a filibuster. Do you favor or oppose the use of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate?

Just over half, 56%, favor the use of the filibuster, and 39% oppose it. Very few (5%) report having no opinion.

Of course, one poll with one question wording is hardly dispositive. I agree with Jon that we need more.

Posted by John Sides at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A new CNN poll asked:

Now thinking specifically about the health insurance plans available to most Americans, would you favor or oppose creating a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies?

A majority, 56%, favored the public option when described that way; 42% were opposed.

Then CNN asked:

Would you favor or oppose that plan if state governments were able to decide that the public health insurance option administered by the federal government would not apply to all people living in those states?

Then a vast majority, 66%, were opposed to the plan, and only 28% were in favor.

That surprised me because the public-option-with-the-opt-out has always been presented as a sort kinder, gentler public option that would appeal to more people — or at least to more members of Congress. Perhaps the CNN question wording doesn’t do it justice. I’m not well-versed enough on the opt-out to say, nor have I seen other polls on this specific provision.

Posted by John Sides at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has a new public opinion report out entitled The Pulse of Europe 2009: 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The report is based on surveys in nine post-communist countries (Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine) that asked close to 60 questions in all of these countries; there are also surveys from five established democracies (US, Spain, France, Italy, and Great Britain) for comparative purposes. The full report, with marginals for all of the questions, can be downloaded here, but here are a few particularly interesting tables:

We can see that in eight of the nine post-communist countries, a majority of the population continues to approve of the change to democracy; in four of these countries at least 70% of respondents approved. Ukraine is the clear outlier here, with support having dropped by 42% to only 30%. Particularly interesting in these findings is the fact that a greater proportion of Russians than Ukrainians continue to approve of the change to a multiparty system, despite the fact that the latter actually has functioning multiparty politics while one would be hard pressed to claim anything of the sort exists in the former.

Interestingly, support for the transition to a market economy remains almost as high across the region generally as support for the transition to multiparty politics. Once again, Ukraine anchors the bottom of the scale, but in this category it is joined now by Hungary, which has seem support for the transition to a market economy collapse almost in half, from 80% to 46%. With the Baltics and Hungary being among the hardest hit Eastern European countries in the current economic crisis, the fact that Hungary and Lithuania can both be found at the bottom of the table ought not to be too surprising.

As we look to the future, this final table raises interesting questions. Across the board, younger citizens are both more supportive of the transition to a market economy and to a multiparty political system. Only time will tell whether democracy and capitalism are always more favorable to the young than to the old or if this will turn out to be more of a cohort effect, with aggregate support for democracy and capitalism increasing over time people who have come of age under post-communism occupy an increasingly larger portion of the population. Of particular interest here is Russia, where a very sharp divide apparently exists between those under and over the age of 50 in terms of support for both multiparty democracy and market economies.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple weeks ago, I did two posts on the link between perceptions of crime and the actual crime rate. The puzzle was why perceptions of crime were so tightly linked to reality from 1989-2001, and then much higher in 2002-2008, even as the crime rate remained stable.

One thing that occurred to me is that the decline in the crime rate in the 1990s coincided with an economic recovery. And the perceptions of more crime from 2002-2008 coincided with a weaker economy. Could the economy also affect perceptions of crime?

A provisional answer is yes: it appears that people perceive more crime when the economy is doing badly. The following graph plots the percent who believe that crime has increased in the past year against consumer sentiment from the quarter in which the survey was taken (as near as I can tell from the original Gallup data):

The relationship is pretty strong, although there are outliers. If you regress perceptions of crime against the violent crime rate and consumer sentiment, both are statistically significant, and they explain about two-thirds of the variance in perceptions.

The logic could be: If the times are bad, people must be bad too. To be sure, this is a purely correlational analysis based on a small number of datapoints. But it does suggest a possible reason why more people perceived an increase in crime after 2002, even as the crime rate remained constant.

Posted by John Sides at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Really, the title of the post says it all…

[Hat tip to my colleague Pat Egan, who, for whatever reason, decided to scroll all the way down the different demographic characteristics in the Survey USA optional disaggregation category. And a big thumb’s up to Survey USA, for making so many different cross-tabs available for free(!), unlike certain other polling agencies who restrict this confidential information to premium members….]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As my own personal rebuttal to Senator Coburn and Patricia Cohen of the NY Times (see here and here), my colleague Patrick Egan and I have an article at The New Republic today that - gasp - attempts to use political science research to inform the discussion of an important contemporary political issue, in this case President Obama’s coming policy announcement on Afghanistan. Here are the first few paragraphs, you can find the full article here

President Obama faces an enormous political challenge in figuring out how to respond to General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more soldiers in Afghanistan. One the one hand, resisting troop requests from the military during a time of war is difficult for any chief executive—particularly for Democratic presidents. On the other hand, Americans are showing little stomach to once again commit more troops to a distant, war-torn region: No recent survey has found majority support for the idea.

No matter what choice Obama makes, he should not be deluded into thinking that his rhetorical gifts can move public opinion on this issue. According to research by Professor George Edwards of Texas A&M University, recent presidents, no matter how golden-tongued, have had virtually no power to change public opinion on foreign policy. Bill Clinton, for example, kicked off a high-profile call to send U.S. peacekeepers to Bosnia with a nationally televised address in November 1995. In response, public approval for the idea hardly moved at all, hovering around 40 percent for the next two years. Likewise, despite repeated pleas to the public, Ronald Reagan never moved support for aiding the Nicaraguan contras beyond the mid-30s.

Additionally, Democratic presidents like Obama face a particular handicap when making major foreign policy moves: For decades, the public has distrusted the Democrats on issues related to national security. That remained true throughout George W. Bush’s disastrous handling of the Iraq War. And even in early 2008, when the Republican Party was near its nadir in terms of popularity, survey data from the Pew Research Center indicated that Democrats’ best issues remained on the domestic front—health care and education—while foreign policy, terrorism, and even Iraq were all at the bottom of the list.

Click here to continue reading ‘The Hard Sell: How Obama should play the politics of an Afghanistan troop surge’

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An ABC/Washington Post poll finds that more people support an individual mandate for health insurance when you tell them that the government will help lower-income Americans buy insurance. Kevin Drum writes:

I have an assignment for an ambitious young PhD candidate with some free time on her hands. I’ve seen poll results like this a million times, and when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides. I’m pretty sure you could quote a couple of lines from Jabberwocky, ask an “in that case” followup question, and get a fair number of people to change their minds. So what I’d like to know is: what’s the average flip rate?

I don’t know of any calculations of a “flip rate.” I can address Drum’s point that “when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides.” A lot is going to depend on what is considered “detail,” and how many “a certain number is.” But on its face, I disagree with the statement: sometimes manipulations to survey questions affect response, and sometimes they do not.

For example, adding “death tax” to a question about the estate tax did not change responses very much at all.

In this article by Adam Berinsky, adding information to survey questions about Iraq — information citing the costs in lives or resources — didn’t seem to affect opinion much. (See Table 4.)

These are cases where survey respondents were randomly assigned to be asked different questions. They are not cases where survey respondents gave an answer, then were supplied with information, then were asked the initial question again. But I think the basic point holds. In the book by Howard Schuman that I previously summarized, he also notes that changes in survey questions do not always change in the distribution of opinion.

Whether people’s opinions change will depend first on the information provided. Is it new to them? Do they make a connection between the information and the issue? Are they able to counter-argue or rationalize away this information? Second, opinion change will depend on the individuals themselves. People with a larger store of cognitively consistent considerations will have much more “ballast” for their opinions than people who, for the most part, have never thought about the issue and have very little to support any particular opinion.

So those are a couple factors worth considering. We have a decent grasp of the second factor — based largely on theories of persuasion. The first factor is less well-understood. Only with a quite wide-ranging and verging-on-systematic study of information effects in polls could we begin to calculate anything approximating an average flip rate.

I would appreciate cites to other relevant studies in the comments. I’ve only scratched the surface here.

Posted by John Sides at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In comments on my earlier post, Andy and then Michael suggest that the proper comparison is between the Gallup item (“Is there more crime in the U.S. than than there was one year ago, or less?”) and the change in the crime rate. So here are three more scatterplots. They plot the percent saying “more” against the change in the crime rate vs. the previous year, 2 years ago, and 3 years ago. With each additional “lag,” particular years are lost, of course — and there is missing survey data in some years as well — but this comparison is still instructive. I put the correlation and associated p-value under each plot.

The challenge here is to figure out what people’s frame of reference is when they answer this question. My original post showed that, from 1989-2001 there was an extremely strong correlation (r=.97) between the violent crime rate and the percent saying “more.” However, after 2001, this relationship disappeared and a larger percent of people said “more” even as the crime rate remained flat.

If people are answering this question as it’s worded, then the topmost figure above — which depicts the change in the crime rate vs. the previous year — should show the strongest correlation. It does not. The strongest correlation is actually with the crime rate three years ago, although this correlation shrinks dramatically (to r=.43; p=.17) when 1992 and 1993 are excluded. So I’m not all that confident in this relationship. Such are the limitations of small datasets.

But let’s assume that this correlation vs. 3 years ago is real. It is puzzling, to say the least. In other areas — for example, the economy — voters are much more myopic, willing even to discard years of bad economic performance and reward incumbents for the most recent 6 months of economic gains (see this paper by Larry Bartels and Chris Achen). So why would perceptions of crime change so slowly?

All in all, these three plots illustrate my original point: there is a striking gap between perceptions and reality. You have periods with movement in opinion, such as in 2002-2008, but no real change in the crime rate. Moreover, consider the absolute level of opinion. There are many years in which the majority of the public says “more,” but crime has decreased relative to the previous year, 2 years ago, and 3 years ago.

Nothing in either of these posts is conclusive. But I’m still struck by the disjuncture I noted in the first post, and by how much perceptions simply don’t correspond that closely to crime rates.

Posted by John Sides at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A new survey from Gallup suggests that “Americans perceive increased crime in U.S.” The increase in the last 8 years is notable:

Do perceptions meet reality? Gallup says:

Whether there actually has been an increase in crime this year is hard to substantiate at this point, since official crime statistics for 2009 will not be released until next year. The most recent statistics, for the year 2008, show that crime in the U.S. decreased last year from 2007. Consistent with that change, Gallup’s 2008 measurement also showed a decline in the percentage of Americans perceiving more crime in the United States, from 71% in 2007 to 67% in 2008.

This misses the most important finding, however. Since 2001, perceptions of crime have become far worse even as the actual crime rate has remained stable. I took FBI’s violent crime rate from 1989-2008 and matched it up as best as possible to Gallup poll numbers for each year (eyeballing the graph above to determine the year in which each poll was conducted). Click here or click the graph to make it larger and more legible.

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

One can speculate about the reasons. September 11th seems an unlikely cause, especially of the increase since 2005. Local television news consumption affects certain beliefs about crime, according to this research by Frank Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar. But I don’t really think there’s been a massive uptick in local news consumption, or local news coverage of crime (which seems a perennial staple — if it bleeds it leads, etc.).

I welcome additional speculation in comments.

Posted by John Sides at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Several weeks ago, I discussed “Similarities between Left Wing and Right Wing Radicals,” an article by Herbert McClosky and Dennis Chong, and in particular noted how both camps can end up with similar views because of their strong distrust of

A contemporary example is the H1N1 vaccine:

Swine flu may have an unexpected side effect: political unity. The far left and far right agree that they’re sure as heck not getting vaccinated against swine flu…

…Now, thanks to the government’s plan to ship 250 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine to all 50 states this month, the two sides have finally found common cause. They may hold different political opinions, but they share a worldview: distrust—of doctors and modern medicine or of government.

That’s from Slate. See also Brendan Nyhan.

[Hat tip to Chris Moore.]

Posted by John Sides at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Keith Ellis writes:

I’ve been wondering about are the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques to discover what are the real-world political ideologies, starting without conventional preconceptions. The core idea I had when this came to many years ago was by way of reading some technical articles about color vision. I was struck by one paper, which I could barely understand, which attempted to determine the “spatial” dimensionality of color vision…I recall vaguely that the conclusion was that it is best described in a 28 or so dimensional space. This connected up, conceptually in my imagination, with what was then the nascent specialty of the stuff involved in the Netflix prize—I can’t recall the technical term…preference modeling?

Continue reading "Studying the dimensionality of political preferences" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was in the library the other day and saw a new book, Why are Jews Liberals?, by O.G. neoconservative Norman Podhoretz. This is right up my alley, research-wise, and so I took a look. I don’t think Podhoretz’s book will match the sales of Thomas Frank’s similar record of frustration, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”—there are very few writers out there who can match Frank’s skill with the perceptive quip—but this new book has something to offer, if nothing else by presenting the view of an influential battler in the world of political ideas.

Podhoretz’s argument (here’s a quick summary) goes as follows. Jews in America vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, even though you’d expect from their income levels that Jews would lean Republican. Expanding this, Podhoretz gives three reasons why Jews should vote for Republicans:

Continue reading "Why are Jews liberals?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rassmussen Reports has a lead story on its website trumpeting the fact that 43% of the country thinks Obama’s trip to Copenhagen is a bad idea. Fair enough, but my immediate suspicion was that the vast majority of the survey respondents holding that opinion would be people inclined to see anything Obama does as a bad idea. So I set off to try to find some cross-tabs for this question (being particularly interested in partisanship and region), only to find the following announcement:

Crosstabs and ( sic ) are available to Premium Members

Premium members, it turns out, are those willing to pay $19.95 a month, which immediately raised two questions in my mind. First, is there anyone out there who is willing to pay $19.95 a month for cross-tabs from Rasmussen? Second, how bad must the rest of their business be going if they have been reduced to selling cross-tabs on line?

More seriously, what is the responsibility of polling organizations that provide marginals that will clearly be quoted in news stories to also provide cross-tabs so we can begin interpret exactly what those marginals mean? Let me then add my voice to other bloggers following public opinion (here and here) calling for survey firms to make more of an effort to provide pertinent cross-tabs with their survey reports (and especially cross-tabs for partisanship and region).

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So the Pew Center is back, again saying that “support for abortion slips,” again using various vague questions, and again pretending that there are no other polls but its own.

Fortunately, Jon Cohen of the Washington Post saves me from having to write another post like this one:

The reason for skepticism (or at least restraint) is simple: other polls, including the Washington Post-ABC News poll have not picked up such a basic reorientation on this divisive issue…

…Elsewhere the trend is decidedly different, as there has been no fundamental realignment on the question of legal abortion in Post-ABC polls (we ask the identical question). Nor have recent Post polls in Virginia picked up any such change in that key swing state. National polls by the AP, CBS News and the New York Times and Quinnipiac University also show no big increase in opposition to legal abortion.

His post is here.

Posted by John Sides at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thomas Friedman has an interesting column in the NY Times today. In it he argues that “a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system”. What exactly are these trends?

1. “the wild excess of money in politics”
2. Gerrymandering of congressional districts
3. the 24 news cycle
4. a permanent presidential campaign
5. the emergence of a blogosphere that “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world” (I’m going to assume he’s talking about The Monkey Cage in the former part of that quote).

As a political scientist, my response is that, OK, all of these seem like credible explanations, but how would we know if any of them are actually correct? After all, we’ve got five explanations here for what is essentially one observation: the current state of the US political system. To be fair to Friedman, he’s probably got an implicit N (the number of observations) of 2 in mind: the US now, and the US in the past. This would at least get us variation on some of the variables he has proposed (e.g., the 24 news cycle, the blogosphere, and the permanent presidential campaign), but would still leave us with more explanations than observations.

One way to get more observations would be to put the question in more of a comparative framework by examining other political systems around the world, and then seeing the extent to which both the dependent variable (the ability of idiots to overwhelm political debate, which would of course have to operationalized somehow) and the independent variables proposed by Friedman varied across different contexts. My sense is that the 24 news cycle and the blogosphere are pretty ubiquitous phenomena in most democracies these days, but that the permanent presidential campaign and gerrymandering are not. I’m not aware of any comparative research to date that tests the effects of these types of variables on the civility of politics, but would invite anyone aware of such research to add to the comments section of this post.

Of the possible explanations put forward by Friedman, the claim that gerrymandering is at the heart of problems in our political system strikes me as an important one to explore. Intuitively plausible - gerrymandering makes most congressmen or congresswomen in the United States need to worry more about a possible primary challenger than an opponent from the opposite party - it also has the advantage of being something that ostensibly could be fixed by legislation (as opposed to, for example, the 24 hours news cycle). However, based solely on my own observation of the way politics are conducted the post-communist countries I tend to follow, there would seem to be little out there to support a claim that politics is inherently less civil and more idiot-prone in the US than elsewhere.

Turning to more rigorous analysis, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have a recent article in the American Journal of Political Science on the effects of gerrymandering entitled “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” (gated, earlier ungated version). Contrary to popular belief, they find:

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It is: trumpet the significance of small changes in responses to vague questions in a single poll. To wit:

Americans’ views of the proper government role in promoting traditional values had moved in a more liberal direction since 2005, to the point that last year, as many said the government should not promote traditional values as said it should. If that trend had continued, 2009 would have marked the first time Gallup found more Americans preferring that the government refrain from actively promoting traditional values. Instead, Americans’ attitudes reverted to a more conservative point of view on the matter. Now, Americans favor the government’s promoting traditional values by an 11-point margin, similar to the double-digit margins favoring that view through much of the prior two decades.

This “finding,” combined with their previous “findings” on abortion attitudes and on attention to the news, illustrate the tendency.

This focus — on the results of a single poll that is different from some previous poll or polls — ignores the possibility that this one poll could prove an outlier. This is what happened with the abortion result, even though Gallup actually conducted two polls to ensure that their “pro-life majority” finding was robust. The next Gallup poll showed that the this majority proved ephemeral.

Gallup often relies on survey questions that are hopelessly and unhelpfully vague. With the abortion finding, it was “…would you consider yourself to be pro-life or pro-choice?” I discussed that previously.

With the news finding, it was “how closely do you follow the national news (very, somewhat, etc.)?” Can people accurately report on their attention to news? No. Even if they could, does 36% vs. 30% in 2007 signal any meaningful difference? It strikes me as weak tea. (See also Nate Silver.)

And then there is the question on traditional values. What are “traditional values”? How do people interpret that term? I don’t know. Gallup doesn’t say. Democrats and particularly independents are the ones shifting, not Republicans. Maybe it doesn’t reflect a conservative shift at all. Maybe it just reflects the fact that Democrats and some independents are more willing to say that the government should promote traditional values when a party they favor is in power. This is also evident in the small, though not statistically significant, shift in the percentage of conservatives who said “not favor any set of values.”

I don’t know if that interpretation is true. The problem is that the Gallup question’s ambiguity admits of too many interpretations. No single survey question, or any combination of questions, is going to provide a bulletproof depiction of public opinion, but surely we can do better. Gallup is up to the task at other times — e.g., in this comparison of multiple surveys on health care, each of which uses somewhat different questions. They should do more of this, which is a much more satisfying meal than bowls of mush about “traditional values.”

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

Percent who have not heard of Glenn Beck: 42%

Percent who have heard nothing about the Baucus health care bill: 45%

Percent who have heard nothing about the ACORN prostitution scandal: 43%

Percent who have heard nothing about the 9/12 rally in Washington: 40%

(source; source)

Posted by John Sides at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seth Masket:

The conclusion, again, is that the question “Is opposition to Obama based on race?” does not have a simple answer. Racial resentment definitely exists in America today, but it’s more polarized along party lines than it has been in a long time. Many people who do not like blacks oppose Obama, but they would likely oppose him even if he were white since they’re Republicans.

Posted by John Sides at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

The Atlantic asks:

After President Obama’s five Sunday-show appearances this weekend, and his appearance on Letterman last night, we ask: How much do media appearances actually influence opinion? Do enough people notice, and does the impact last?

The answers, on average: very little, no, and no.

Posted by John Sides at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)