October 7, 2008
Red-blue roundtable
Here's a fun discussion (still developing, it'll be going through Thursday, I think) on red and blue America, featuring pollster John Zogby, journalist Bill Bishop, consultant Valdis Krebs, and myself, moderated by Tom Nissley at Amazon.com.
My strategy is to make my points using graphs.
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October 6, 2008
Macartan Humphreys's paper on coalitions
I gotta read this article:
The game theoretic study of coalitions focuses on settings in which commitment technologies are available to allow groups to coordinate their actions. Analyses of such settings focus on two questions. First, what are the implications of the ability to make commitments and form coalitions for how games are played? Second, given that coalitions can form, which coalitions should we expect to see forming? I [Humphreys] examine classic cooperative and new noncooperative game theoretic approaches to answering these questions. Classic approaches have focused especially on the first question and have produced powerful results. However, these approaches suffer from a number of weaknesses. New work attempts to address these shortcomings by modeling coalition formation as an explicitly noncooperative process. This new research reintroduces the problem of coalitional instability characteristic of cooperative approaches, but in a dynamic setting. Although in some settings, classic solutions are recovered, in others this new work shows that outcomes are highly sensitive, not only to bargaining protocols, but also to the forms of commitment that can be externally enforced. This point of variation is largely ignored in empirical research on coalition formation. I close by describing new agendas in coalitional analysis that are being opened up by this new approach.
And also this. And then relate all this to my research on coalition formation as a prisoner's dilemma.
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How Liberal Was Obama as a State Senator in Illinois?
Head over to the Red State, Blue State blog for my post on my new measure of Senator Barack Obama's (and other prominent IL Democrats) ideology from his service as an Illinois state Senator (from Hyde Park). It comes from a new research project of mine on state legislative ideology.
Posted by Boris at 2:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 5, 2008
Amazon, U.S.A.
Amazon.com has this cool website showing which sorts of political books people are buying in which states:
What struck me was the similarity of this to the "voting patterns of the rich" map from our book:
I wonder what data from Wal-Mart from Wal-Mart would look like. Maybe like one of the lower of the two maps? I'm not sure, though, since, even at Wal-Mart, buyers of political books are more politically active and thus maybe more like "rich people" in their red-blue divisions.
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This week's Red State, Blue State events
There's a lot going on for those of you in the NY/NJ area.
1. On Monday morning I'm doing an activity on the Electoral College. But you can't come to that unless you're a 4th grader in Zacky's school.
2. Monday 4.30pm at room 801 International Affairs Building (at Columbia), I'm speaking on Red State, Blue State in an event cosponsored by the Columbia Journalism School, with discussions by Nicholas Lemann and Thomas Edsall and moderated by Sharyn O'Halloran.
3. Monday 7pm at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan, I'm speaking and signing books. You can only go to this one if you're a member of the club, I think.
4. Tuesday 4.30pm at Robertson Hall at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, there's an event sponsored by the New York and New Jersey chapters of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, featuring Joe Lenski, Chris Achen, Larry Hugick, and myself. After the panel there will be lots of time for informal discussion as well.
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October 2, 2008
Cool historical maps
Hey, see here for info on a site that has cool interactive electoral vote maps with good historical details. Here's the map for the most important of all presidential elections:
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Why do swing states matter?
Hey, I got quoted in the Weekly Reader! Much cooler than the Annals of Statistics.
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September 29, 2008
Mavericks of the past
Phil Klinkner writes:
History doesn’t repeat itself, the saying goes, but it does rhyme.
To me [Klinkner], the recent House defeat of the financial bailout bill echoes the defeat of the national sale tax in 1932. The Depression dried up federal revenues, so the Hoover administration proposed a national sales tax to raise money. Business and the leadership of both parties favored the bill, but the public was overwhelmingly opposed. Liberal Republican Fiorella LaGuardia led a bipartisan revolt against the bill. House Speaker John N. Garner actually left the speaker’s chair to go into the well and plead with his fellow Democrats to pass the bill. Garner normally had tight control on his party, but not this time. The bill was defeated 153-223.In both cases, an unpopular Republican administration put forward a proposal to deal with an economic crisis, supported by the Democratic leadership in the House and the vast majority of the business community. Nonetheless, a bipartisan populist revolt sent it down to defeat.
And, Phil forgot to mention, James Garner was Maverick.
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September 26, 2008
Interactive graphs of polls
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Conspiracy-mongering, or, The one advantage that we have over the New Yorker is that we have Google and they don’t
See here for my failed attempt to construct a political conspiracy theory around Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis.
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September 23, 2008
Mellow liberals and jumpy conservatives
Jamie points out this interesting article by Douglas Oxley et al. that appeared in Science last month. Here's the abstract:
Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals? experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.
I myself am extremely sensitive to sudden noises, so make of that what you will . . . Seriously, though, this seems related to John Jost's work on personality profiles and political affiliation.
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Drew Linzer's poll tracker
Here. See here for my thoughts.
Posted by Andrew at 9:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 22, 2008
Red-blue on Wisconsin Public Radio
I'll be talking about Red State, Blue State on the Kathleen Dunn show on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow (Tues 23 Sept), from 10-11 Central Time (that's 11-12 Eastern Time). For the second half of the show, you can call in with questions!
Posted by Andrew at 10:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Tom Holbrook sez: chill out about the debates
Here.
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September 21, 2008
Red State, Blue State in Philadelphia
I'll be speaking on the Red State, Blue State book this Monday (22 Sept) at 4:30pm at the University of Pennsylvania. It'll be at the Annenberg School for Communication, Room 109. The address is 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA. This is your chance to ask questions and also to meet some interesting people: the talk is cosponsored by the departments of Statistics, Biostatistics, and Political Science as well as the Annenberg School.
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September 19, 2008
Practicing political science without a license, or, all the rants conveniently in a single place
Larry Bartels writes about how "the contemporary electoral landscape, which is less volatile and more partisan than it has been at any time in the past half-century or more." Larry's presentation is clean and well illustrated by graphs, adding nicely to earlier discussion of this topic by John Sides.
Larry also has some comments about the problems that can occur when a historian is "moonlighting as a political scientist." Which reminds me of my own rants:
- The astronomer moonlighting as a political scientist
- The qual moonlighting as a quant
- The physicist moonlighting as a computer scientist
- The physicists moonlighting as political scientists
- The legal scholar moonlighting as an electoral historian
- And, my favorite, the English political theorist moonlighting as an Americanist ("But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable")
- And, really really my favorite, the sociologist moonlighting as a biologist (follow the links, if you can stomach it).
Seeing all this, you can probably conclude:
1. I spend way too much time focusing on the mistakes of others.
2. Political scientists (if I'm any example) are super turf-conscious.
But really I'm happy when people moonlight in political science. After all, I'm primarily a statistician and thus am myself a moonlighter. Whatever mistakes people make can ultimately be cleared up, and this is one way we share our knowledge with outsiders.
P.S. Larry's entry is part of his new blog (with Nolan McCarty and others) on the 2008 election. Check it out.
Posted by Andrew at 5:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The electoral college does not favor large states
Every four years, some hardworking and enterprising journalists do some digging around in the political science literature, talk with some people who sound like they know what they're talking about, and then resurface to tell the world about the counterintuitive finding that the Electoral College actually benefits voters in large states.
Well, as I like to say to my social science students: Just 'cos it's counterintuitive, that don't make it true.
The Electoral College benefits voters in swing states, and it slightly benefits voters in small states (on average). Large states are not benefited (except when they happen to be swing states such as Ohio or Florida, but we knew that already).
See here for the fuller discussion.
I just wanted to put this out here to get out in front of the discussion. So that if any of you do see this argument floating around, youall can shoot it down before it fully takes off...
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September 17, 2008
Graph of voter turnout by age
Here's a pretty picture (from Charles Franklin, link from John Sides):
What a great graph! I won't be picky, but if I were, I'd make the following suggestions:
- Bigger numbers on the axes--as is, they're hard to read.
- Add percentage signs on the y-axis.
- Label age every 20 years rather than every 10.
- Put the "80-84" age group at 82 (rather than 80), and put the "85 and up" group at 88 (rather than 85).
- Pick colors other than red and blue.
Posted by Andrew at 8:26 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
September 15, 2008
Do more unequal places tend to vote for Democrats?
Jim Manzi says yes, and he has some data. He says that in 46 out of 48 states, there's a positive correlation between a county's neighborhood-level inequality and its vote for Kerry.
P.S. Also see interesting thoughts in the comments section below.
P.P.S. This paper by Mark Frank also seems relevant to the discussion. Frank writes:
For many states, the share of income held by the top decile experienced a prolonged period of stability after World War II, followed by a substantial increase in inequality during the 1980s and 1990s. This paper also presents an examination of the long-run relationship between income inequality and economic growth. Our findings indicate that the long-run relationship between inequality and growth is positive in nature and driven principally by the concentration of income in the upper end of the income distribution.
P.P.P.S. See also the graphs here (from chapter 5 of the Red State, Blue State book).
Posted by Andrew at 3:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 13, 2008
My talk at Harvard on Wed 17 Sept
I'll be speaking on Red State, Blue State this Wed, 17 Sept, 12-1:30, in the Government Dept at Harvard. It's at 1737 Cambridge St., Room K-354. If you live in the Boston area, this is your chance to come and ask your questions and give your suggestions.
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September 10, 2008
My talks this week in D.C.: today (Wed.) at George Washington University, Thurs. at the Cato Institute
If you're in D.C., you should stop by. . . . I'm speaking in the statistics department at George Washington University on the topic of interactions. Here's the powerpoint and here's the abstract:
As statisticians and practitioners, we all know about interactions but we tend to think of them as an afterthought. We argue here that interactions are fundamental to statistical models. We first consider treatment interactions in before-after studies, then more general interactions in regressions and multilevel models. Using several examples from our own applied research, we demonstrate the effectiveness of routinely including interactions in regression models. We also discuss some of the challenges and open problems involved in setting up models for interactions.
The talk will be today, Wed 10 Sept, at 3pm at 1957 E Street, Room 212. If you don't know where that is, you can call the department (202-994-6356) and they should be able to give you directions.
Tomorrow (Thurs) I'll be speaking with Boris at noon at the Cato Institute on Red State, Blue State. It's not too late to sign up for that.
Posted by Andrew at 12:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 9, 2008
Back and forth with David Frum on income inequality and voting
David Frum responded at his blog to my graph-laden comments on his New York Times article.
Frum emphasizes the difference between looking at county-level inequality as compared to state-level inequality. He also makes the point that inequality (at the state and county level) is often associated with big cities. Interesting stuff.
Frum also mentions Missouri, which is one of the states where richer counties favor the Democrats. Richer counties also lean Democratic in Nebraska, and most of the western and northeastern states (see pages 68-70 of the book), but in Indiana, South Dakota, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and most of the South, it goes the other way, with richer counties being more Republican. (I showed this in the map of Texas in my previous blog entry.) The patterns really do look different in different parts of the country, and Missouri is not like Texas in this respect. In any case, I haven't crunched the numbers on county-level inequality, and I agree with Frum that the patterns within a state can differ from those between states. Individually, richer Americans still lean Republican, but location matters a lot also.
Posted by Andrew at 3:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 8, 2008
Frum's facts and fallacies
David Frum, author of “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” wrote an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday that has some interesting insights and but also suffers from some of the usual confusions about rich and poor, Democrats and Republicans. Overall I think Frum has some interesting things to say but I want to point out a couple of places where I think he may have been misled by focusing too strongly on the D.C. metropolitan area.
Income inequality and Democratic voting
Frum writes: "As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican." At least at the state level, it's not so clear. Below is a map of the states with high income inequality (in dark colors) and low inequality (in light colors), revealing high-inequality Democratic states such as California and New York but also high-inequality Republican states such as Texas and Arizona, with the most unequal states being those with high immigration. Overall, the Democrats’ vote share by state is slightly correlated with income inequality, but much less than the correlation with income itself. It is in the rich states, but not consistently the unequal states, that Democrats are doing best:
Rich and poor counties
Frum writes about rich Fairfax County, Virginia, which, we writes, was largely middle class a third of a century ago and now is rich. During this period, Fairfax, like many wealthy east-coast suburbs, has moved from the Republican to the Democratic column. This is interesting but I want to point out a few things:
1. This is a coastal thing. In other places, the rich suburbs go for Republicans, not Democrats. See this graph of Bush vote vs. county income in Texas:
The graph above shows the pattern: Collin and Zavala (the dark circles on the scatterplot) are the richest and poorest counties in Texas, and there is a clear pattern that poor counties supported the Democrats while the Republicans won in middle-class and rich counties.
When we showed this to a political scientist, he asked about the state capital, noted for its liberal attitudes, vibrant alternative rock scene, and the University of Texas: "What about Austin? It must be rich and liberal.'' We looked it up. Austin is in Travis County and makes up almost all its population. Travis County has a median household income of $45,000 and gave George W. Bush 53% of the vote, putting it about midway between Collin and Zavala counties in the graph.
By comparison, if you go to a state such as Maryland or Virginia, the pattern isn't so clear, and it's possible to pick rich or poor counties that go either way.
2. Fairfax County is rich now, but it was also rich a third of a century ago. Here are some numbers. In 2004, when Kerry beat Bush in Fairfax County, the median family income there was $90,000, which 1.7 times the U.S. median of $54,000. In 1979, it was $33,000, which was 1.7 times the U.S. median of $19,500. Fairfax is, by some measures, the richest county in America today. A third of a century ago, it was in the top five richest, I believe.
3. Frum writes, "America’s wealthiest ZIP codes are a roll call of Democratic strongholds." Again, this is a red-state, blue-state thing. In the coastal blue states, rich areas are likely to lean Democratic, but in red states, rich areas are more Republican. See the graphs on pages 68-70 of Red State, Blue State.
4. The "media center" thing. Frum lives in D.C. and he is naturally attuned to patterns in the northeast. If he were to go to Oklahoma or Texas, he would see that it is the richer areas, and the richer voters, who are more Republican. By focusing on Fairfax County, Virginia, he's missing the big picture.
Concerns about inequality in general
Frum talks about Republicans' attitudes toward inequality. One thing I'd like to add, in favor of his argument, is that, on average, inequality has been decreasing in poor, Republican-controlled states and increasing in richer states, which tend to have Democratic majorities. In poor states, the poor have been getting richer:
And in rich states, it is the rich who have been getting richer:
See here (and in chapter 5 of our book) for further discussion of this point.
P.S. See here for Frum's further thoughts and here for my thoughts on Frum's thoughts on my thoughts on Frum's thoughts.
Posted by Andrew at 7:39 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
September 5, 2008
Red-blue event at Cato in Washington, D.C.
Boris and I will be speaking at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., next Thurs (11 Sept) at noon on our Red State, Blue State book (also written with David Park, Joe Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina). The event will be moderated by Will Wilkinson; see the description here of the event on his blog.
All are welcome to come, but you should register online for the event. We'll be having a panel discussion with Michael McDonald (Brookings Institution and George Mason University) and Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute. I'm curious what they have to say about our work, especially some of the stuff at the end of chapter 9 about the connections between public opinion and policy.
Posted by Andrew at 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 4, 2008
Popular governor of a small state
See here for discussion.
Posted by Andrew at 7:44 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
September 3, 2008
Harold Ross would never have let this one get by . . .
David Remnick, writing in The New Yorker about the Democratic convention:
Michelle Obama tore up the wing-nut caricatures of herself as a closet radical by revealing, without exploiting, the irresistible charms of her children and delivering a warm, genuine, and impassioned introduction to her husband.
Huh? Where do I start on this?
- Can't a "closet radical" have irresistibly charming children?
- Can't a "closet radical" deliver a good speech?
And, the biggest thing of all: if you're really a "closet" radical, then of course you'll try to act like a normal person when you're on national TV.
I mean, sure, you can say she gave a good speech or that you agree with what she had to say or even that she seems likable (although that seems to be stretching it; after all, it's just a prepared speech). But a public speech has gotta be the last place to look if you're trying to evaluate whether someone has a hidden agenda!
P.S. Just to be clear: I'm not saying anything at all about Michelle Obama here. I'm just stunned at the gap in logical reasoning here. Isn't The New Yorker famous for its fact-checkers???
Posted by Andrew at 9:20 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Prosperity and views about the European Union
Josh Tucker sent me this paper by Alexander Herzog and himself on attitudes toward the European Union in different European countries. Here's the abstract:
In this paper, we [Herzog and Tucker] document a hitherto unrecognized “micro-macro paradox” of EU accession in post-communist countries: on the micro-level, economic prosperity increases the likelihood of supporting EU membership; while on the macro-level, economic prosperity decreases aggregate levels of support for EU membership.
We first present evidence demonstrating that economic winners were consistently more likely to support EU membership than economic losers across five years (1995, 1996, 2001, 2002, 2003) and ten countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Czech Republic). We then demonstrate that across this same set of countries we are unable to find a systematic corresponding link between aggregate level measures of economic prosperity and aggregate levels of support for EU membership. Moreover, in almost every analysis where we can find a consistent pattern, it is in the opposite direction: less economic success translates into higher levels of aggregate support for EU membership. Our explanation for the micro-macro paradox of EU accession builds off of previous work by one of the authors (Tucker et al. 2002) suggesting that for citizens in post-communist countries the EU represents a guarantee that the economic reforms will continue. However, we argue here that there may be other meanings for EU membership as well and that the relative salience of these different meanings may in particular be conditional on the passage of time and on a country’s likelihood of joining the EU. We then demonstrate how this more nuanced approach to the meaning of EU membership in the post communist context both explains the original paradox and test the extent to which additional observable implications of the argument are supported by the data.
Interesting. It makes sense to me that poor countries should want to join the EU, because it's economically redistributional. Also, as Herzog and Tucker discuss, there's the idea that the EU will protect your country from dictatorship. I don't know enough about the internal politics of the EU to have a sense of why richer people within a country should support the EU. I mean, I know the whole story of populists vs. Eurocrats or whatever, but I don't really understand where this is coming from. (I could easily imagine an opposite scenario in which upper-income voters would feel they have more to lose from the EU, with lower-income voters, especially in poor countries welcoming the opportunities that would come.)
I'd like to see some estimated varying slopes--I think this is in the article but it's hard for me to find--and also data on support for EU in other European countries, not just the 10 east European countries in the dataset.
And, of course, I love that the connect this to our red-blue stuff.
Posted by Andrew at 12:25 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 30, 2008
Barney Smith and Smith Barney
Tom Ferguson writes:
At the Democratic Convention, perhaps the most memorable line was by one Barney Smith, who said that he wanted a candidate who cared more about Barney Smith than Smith Barney. Just for the record, Smith Barney is owned by Citigroup (it's Salomon Smith Barney). We all know who sits at the top of Citigroup: one Robert Rubin. The director of research for the Obama campaign is Jason Furman, who is closely associated with Rubin and the latter's Hamilton Project. Citigroup's cash is split massively in favor of Obama; about $400,000 to 260,000 or so.
Overall, the richest Americans give much more to Republicans than to Democrats, but the financial services industry is one of the Democrats' strengths.
Posted by Andrew at 6:50 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
A (former) Alaskan's view of Sarah Palin
Ubs writes that the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, is extremely popular in her home state of Alaska because of her bipartisan competence. I think Ubs has some interesting things to say, both about Alaska politics and about competence and ideology in general. But I think he may be overinterpreting the poll data on her popularity.
I'll copy over some of Ubs's words and then give my thoughts:
Ubs says:
Holy crap, he actually did pick her! I've had a long, half-composed Sarah Palin post in the back of my mind since about May, when I first saw her mentioned as a running-mate candidate. . . . My initial reaction was that this tells me McCain doesn't expect to win. . . . But then I have to pause ... because my own opinion, in fact, is that Palin would probably be a pretty good president. . . .The most interesting part of that formula — and unfortunately the part we'll probably hear the least about — is "popular governor" part. Sarah Palin is not just popular. She is fantastically popular. Her percentage approval ratings have reached the 90s. Even now, with a minor nepotism scandal going on, she's still about 80%. . . . How does one do that? You might get 60% or 70% who are rabidly enthusiastic in their love and support, but you're also going to get a solid core of opposition who hate you with nearly as much passion. The way you get to 90% is by being boringly competent while remaining inoffensive to people all across the political spectrum.
Bipartisanship is a perpetual topic in political punditry, but it is distorted by the media environment. Due to the nature of what makes a story, the news media thrives on partisanship. Everything is viewed through partisan-colored glasses. , , , The real significance of Gov Palin's success and her phenomenal approval ratings is that they demonstrate her genuine talent as a non-partisan.
Ubs gives a long discussion of Alaska's unique politics and then writes:
Palin's magic formula for success has been simply been to ignore partisan crap and get down to the boring business of fixing up a broken government. . . . It's not a very exciting answer, but it is, I think, why she gets high approval ratings — because all the Democrats, Libertarians, and centrists appreciate that she's doing a good job on the boring non-partisan stuff that everyone agrees on and she isn't pissing them off by doing anything on the partisan stuff where they disagree.Because politics is only news when there is conflict, the political narrative focuses exclusively on those issues where there is disagreement. . . . Politicians are judged by where they stand on these partisan issues. Those who don't consistently fall on one side or the other (eg, Lieberman, Hagel) are newsworthy, while those who are reliably partisan on the partisan issues but devote most of their political effort to issues that are not partisan in the first place (eg, Feingold, Lugar, Coburn, and, yes, Obama) are not.
My comments:
1. I know next to nothing about Alaska, and it is interesting to learn all this stuff that Ubs tells us in his full post (follow link above).
2. But I think Ubs may be overinterpreting Palin's popularity. I haven't seen enough poll data on governors to be sure, but my impression is that it's nothing remarkable for a governor to be extremely popular, especially in a small state. For example, I found this on the web, from Rasmussen Reports. 64% of Alaskans rate Palin "excellent" or "good". This indeed is popular--the only three who are doing better are Mike Beebe of Arkansas (68% popularity, by this measure), John Hoeven of North Dakota (72%) and Jon Huntsman of Utah (68%)--but there are a few others who aren't far off. (Although I have to admit I'm a little suspicious of these numbers, considering that Janet Napolitano (Arizona) has ratings of Excellent, Good, Fiar, and Poor that add up to 108%!)
My impression is that you can maintain high popularity if you are noncontroversial and do not have serious opposition. See here (unfortunately from 2006). Of the 14 governors with over 70% approval, all but two came from small states. Again, this is not to dispute Ubs's impressions of Palin's competence, just to suggest that, while "popular governor of a small state" is indeed a political accomplishment, it's not so remarkable as he might think.
Posted by Andrew at 8:38 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
108% of respondents say . . .
I was looking up the governors' popularity numbers on the web, and came across this page from Rasmussen Reports which shows Sarah Palin as the 3rd-most-popular governor. But then I looked more carefully. Janet Napolitano of Arizona is viewed as Excellent by 28% of respondents, Good by 27%, Fir by 26%, and Poor by 27%. That adds up to 108%! What's going on? I'd think they would have a computer program to pipe the survey results directly into the spreadsheet. But I guess not, someone must be entering these numbers by hand. Weird.
P.S. Mark Blumenthal writes that the question of whether to trust Rasmussen is complicated:
On the one hand (as Charles Franklin, Nate Silver and others can attest) their final polls in statewide races usually score as well or better than other pollsters on measures of accuracy. On the other, they break a lot of the rules: They now seem to prefer to do one night samples, make no call backs to non-contacted numbers (even with multi-night polls) and make no effort to randomly select a respondent within each household. Their questionnaire design choices can be...unusual.
And he links to this column which is relevant.
Posted by Andrew at 8:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 27, 2008
Red State, Blue State on the radio
If you live in NYC, you can hear me tomorrow (Fri 29 Aug) from 12.30-1 on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC, 93.9 FM and AM 820. I'll be talking about our Red State, Blue State book.
P.S. The interview is here.
Posted by Andrew at 10:51 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
August 25, 2008
When voting on Supreme Court nominees, senators respond to public opinion
John Kastellec sent me this attractive paper:
We [Kastellec et al.] study the relationship between state-level public opinion and the roll call votes of senators on Supreme Court nominees. Applying recent advances in multilevel modeling, we use national polls on nine recent Supreme Court nominees to produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of each nominee in all 50 states. We show that greater public support strongly increases the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even after controlling for standard predictors of roll call voting. We also find that the impact of opinion varies with context: it has a greater effect on opposition party senators, on ideologically opposed senators, and for generally weak nominees. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.
Another triumph of the Lax/Phillips approach of linking policy to state-level opinion (see also here). Also another example of the synergy that's supposed to happen with an academic department, with Jeff, Justin, John, and myself each bringing unique contributions. I don't think any of this would've happened if we weren't all brought together with repeated interactions on the 7th floor.
One could certainly disparage this work by pointing out that it's no surprise that senators are responsive to public opinion. That's the idea, right? But, as Kastellec et al. point out, it's not so clear at all from the literature. So they're making a real substantive contribution as well as an analytical tour de force.
Also, the graphs are just beautiful. I find it a bit distracting that some of the histograms in Figure 1 use different bin widths, but that's about all I can say. At a substantive level, it's interesting how high the average levels of support are. There's clearly a presumption on the part of the public to support almost any nominee.
Posted by Andrew at 9:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 22, 2008
"Red State, Blue State" reviewed in the New York Observer
I realized while reading Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State that I hadn’t seen a book with so many charts and graphs since I struggled though economics and statistics—and that if the textbooks back then had been as interesting as Andrew Gelman’s analysis of the American electorate, I might have done better in college. . . .But how do the Democrats manage to win in the rich states without winning rich voters? This is the Freakonomics-style analysis that every candidate and campaign consultant should read. . . .
That was our aim. . .
Posted by Andrew at 5:14 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
The conventions: who's bouncin'?
From Gallup Polls. Some discussion is at the blog of our Red State, Blue State book:
Posted by Andrew at 12:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 14, 2008
The difference between "quals" and "quants"
In an article on U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics, Samantha Power writes:
Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm.
So here's the difference between qualitative and quantitative researchers. Samantha Power knows more about foreign policy and politics than I'll ever know. But she could whip off the above sentence without pause. Whereas, when I see it, I think:
- Why start in 1968? Is this just a convenient choice of endpoint? Eisenhower ran as a national security expert, no?
- What evidence can you expect to get about public opinion from the essentially tied elections of 1968, 1976, and 2000?
- Anyway, if you're talking public opinion, it was Gore who won more votes in 2000--so it's funny to be taking that as an exception at all!
- How are "perceived danger" and "relative calm" defined? Was 1988, when George H. W. Bush floored Michael Dukakis, really such a time of "perceived danger"?
I have no expertise to comment on the rest of Power's article; I just think it's funny that she'd throw in a sentence like that. It's just a throwaway comment she made; I wouldn't put it in the class of David Runciman's "but viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable" or John Yoo writing an entire op-ed on something he appears to know nothing about. It's just one of these things that rings alarm bells to a "quant" such as myself but just passes right by the qualitative analyst.
P.S. On an unrelated note, that same issue of the New York Review of Books had this great line by Michael Dirda: "Real readers always read for excitement; only the nature of that excitement changes through life."
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August 11, 2008
Partisan Bias in Federal Public Corruption Prosecutions
Sandy Gordon sent me this paper, which begins:
The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal has raised the specter of political bias in the prosecution of officials under federal corruption laws. Has prosecutorial discretion been employed to persecute enemies or shield allies? To answer this question, I [Gordon] develop a model of the interaction between officials deciding whether to engage in corruption and a prosecutor deciding whether to pursue cases against them. Biased prosecutors will be willing to file weaker cases against political opponents than against allies. Consequently, the model anticipates that in the presence of partisan bias, sentences of prosecuted opponents will tend to be lower than those of co-partisans. Employing newly collected data on public corruption prosecutions, I find evidence of partisan bias under both the Bush and Clinton Justice Departments. However, additional analysis suggests that these results may understate the extent of bias under Bush, while overstating it under Clinton.
Interesting. This reminds me of Bill James's comment that Major League Baseball's discrimination against blacks could be seen by the fact that black players had much better statistics than whites: under a discriminatory regime, they were taking marginal white players who were worse than the marginal black players. It's also similar to what we found in Section 5.3 of our stop-and-frisk paper: the whites who were stopped were more likely than the blacks to be arrested, which suggests that police were disproportionally stopping minorities, at least with regard to this measure.
Gordon writes,
Employing an approach from economic models of discrimination, I [Gordon] treat partisan bias as a "taste" or preference for prosecuting one's political opponents (or for not prosecuting allies). This approach, pioneered by Becker (1957), has been employed recently to study discrimination against minorities in setting bail (Ayres and Waldfogel 1994; Ayres 2001), racial pro ling (Knowles, Persico, and Todd 2001), and discrimination against female candidates in congressional elections (Anzia and Berry 2007).
I actually think this model makes more sense for studying prosecutors (as in the current paper) than for studying racial profiling of police (the subject of my paper with Jeff Fagan and Alex Kiss). Without any direct knowledge of prosecutors or police, I'm only speculating, but the idea of a "taste" or political pressure to prosecute one side or the other makes sense to me, whereas the idea of a police officer having a "taste" for stopping one race or the other sounds a little silly. My impression of police stops is that the police use whatever cues they have, and many of these cues are correlated with race. That to me doesn't seem like the same thing as having a preference for stopping racial minorities per se.
Gordon writes, "The 2007 U.S. Attorney firing scandal raised the possibility that federal corruption laws could be deployed for partisan ends. In this paper, I have sought to move beyond anecdotes to construct a systematic test of partisan bias in corruption prosecutions." This makes sense to me. What I'd also like to see is some work bridging the anecdotes to the quantitative results, giving a sense of who are the people being prosecuted that are driving these results.
Little things
I find Table 1 confusing (also, the numbers can be rounded to the nearest percent). Perhaps a flowchart like Figures 2 and 3 here would be clearer?
I'd also recommend that the captions of the tables be expanded. I don't know if many other people are this way, but when I read an article I flip through to the graphs (or, if there are no graphs, the tables). So, for example, when I got to Table 2, I couldn't figure out what was meant by "Public" and "Private." I also couldn't figure out why there were data from 1998-2000 and 2004-2006, but nothing from 1993-1997 or 2001-2003. I'm sure this is described in the article somewhere, but it would be good to see in right there in the table.
The numbers in Table 3 can be rounded. For example, there's no way that "21.86 months" is informative. "22 months" would be fine. A graph would be better, but if it's a table, please round! Similarly for Tables 4 and 6. You certainly don't need to present things such as p-values to 3 decimal places. The usual asterisks would be fine! And for Table 5, please use a graph such as in Chapter 10 of our book.
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August 6, 2008
My comment on Bryan Caplan's comment on the Red State, Blue State book
See here and here for his comments and here for my further thoughts.
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August 5, 2008
If you're at the Joint Statistical Meetings
You can see a copy of my new book, Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, at the CRC Press booth. (It's not actually published by CRC but they kindly agreed to bring one copy so people could look at it.)
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My talk in Denver
I'll only be at the Joint Statistical Meetings for a couple of hours. My talk is on Wed at 3pm. (The session goes from 2-4pm.).
See here for a brief description of what we did, or see here for the full paper, where we say:
Could John Kerry have gained votes in the 2004 Presidential election by more clearly distinguishing himself from George Bush on economic policy? At first thought, the logic of political preferences would suggest not: the Republicans are to the right of most Americans on economic policy, and so in a one-dimensional space with party positions measured with no error, the optimal strategy for the Democrats would be to stand infinitesimally to the left of the Republicans. The median voter theorem suggests that each party should keep its policy positions just barely distinguishable from the opposition.In a multidimensional setting, however, or when voters vary in their perceptions of the parties’ positions, a party can benefit from putting some daylight between itself and the other party on an issue where it has a public opinion advantage (such as economic policy for the Democrats). We set up a plausible theoretical model in which the Democrats could achieve a net gain in votes by moving to the left on economic policy, given the parties’ positions on a range of issue dimensions. We then evaluate this model based on survey data on voters’ perceptions of their own positions and those of the candidates in 2004.
Under our model, it turns out to be optimal for the Democrats to move slightly to the right but staying clearly to the left of the Republicans’ current position on economic issues.
The material is also in chapter 9 of the Red State, Blue State book.
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August 1, 2008
The nonpuzzle of the close opinion polls
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July 30, 2008
Differences between researchers in psychology and political science
See here.
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My proposed budget cut
Politicians always promise to cut government waste but the experts always say it can't be done. But I came across an example today. A bunch of trucks came by to tear up and repave our street. But our street is just fine. The city clearly has money to burn in this budget line.
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July 25, 2008
Question wording effects
Get Dr. Kahneman on the line . . .
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July 23, 2008
Answers to questions about our graphs of left-right ideology of voters, congressmembers, and senators
At our Red State, Poor State, Rich State, Poor State blog.
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July 21, 2008
Left-right ideology of voters, congressmembers, and senators
See here for some pretty pictures (from our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book) that display the distributions of voters, House members, and senators on a common scale.
Posted by Andrew at 2:06 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 14, 2008
Thoughts on new statistical procedures for age-period-cohort analyses
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July 11, 2008
538
Julie Rehmeyer has a nice article up about Nate Silver's election models. A nice motivator for all the quantitatively minded students out there.
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July 10, 2008
More graphical propaganda
John Sides reproduces this graph showing Kenyan election results:
What a horrible graph! The re-coloring and re-ordering of the wedges makes the difference between "official results" and "poll" seem much greater than they are.
As in my earlier example of PDA (propaganda data analysis), I have no comments on the merits of the case (for example, what can you learn from a poll taken six months after the election)--I'm just weighing in on the graphical presentation.
Posted by Andrew at 3:27 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
July 9, 2008
Capital punishment and recidivism
Greg Mankiw writes,
Cass Sunstein and Justin Wolfers say we don't really know whether or not capital punishment deters crime.Maybe so, but it does solve the problem of recidivism.
He links to a news article that refers to an excellent article by Wolfers and Donohue. But I don't think Mankiw is correct about capital punishment solving recidivism. A key aspect of the death penalty in the U.S. is how rare it is for prisoners to actually be executed. I don't see how you solve the problem of recidivism by executing on the order of a hundred people a year. And, given that already our best estimate is that a person who is sentenced to death has a two-thirds chance of having that sentence reversed by a higher court, it's hard for me to believe that the rate of executions can be increased very much.
Posted by Andrew at 12:36 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
July 8, 2008
Education and the hardening of political attitudes
Henry presents another example of more educated voters being more ideological:
The above graph (from Larry Bartels) shows the probability that liberals or conservatives agree with the statement that income inequality between rich and poor people has increased. The two groups diverge in their attitudes as they get more information.
Democrats can get things wrong, too
The above is an example where conservatives with high information levels get things wrong. Just as balance, here's an example (also from Larry Bartels) where Democrats are the ones in error. The example is in chapter 8 of our forthcoming red state, blue state book:
Even objective features of the economy are viewed through partisan filters. For example, a survey was conducted in 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, asking various questions about the government and economic conditions, including, “Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?” Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during Reagan’s eight years in office.
The data on perceptions of inflation come from the 1988 National Election Study, as reported by Larry Bartels in his article “Beyond the running tally: Partisan bias in political perceptions,” published in Political Behavior in 2002. It was not just Democrats who misperceived or misremembered economic statistics—even among strong Republicans, only half thought inflation—but the gap between the parties is disturbing.Another mysterious pattern in these surveys is that respondents of both parties thought more favorably about trends in unemployment than inflation. For example, among strong Democrats, 30% thought that unemployment had improved, but less than 25% said this about inflation; among strong Republicans, the corresponding numbers were 85% for unemployment and only 70% for inflation. Actually, though, unemployment declined only slightly during Reagan’s time in office (from 7.1% to 5.5%), compared to inflation falling by more than two thirds.
P.S. Here's the graph I posted earlier showing divergence of attitudes on climate change:
Posted by Andrew at 11:22 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 7, 2008
More info on the state liberalism/conservatism graph
In response to some of the questions about our graphs on state liberalism/conservatism:
- A lot of surveys don't include Alaska and Hawaii. I guess in the days of face-to-face surveys these places were too far to go to, and even for telephone surveys you have to deal with time zones.
- I can't remember the sample sizes, but in the small states they're not huge, so you can't take seriously the exact ordering of all the states in the graphs. When David gets back in town we can take a look at the uncertainty in these estimates.
- Could we look at dispersions as well as averages within each state? Yes, but I don't know that we'd get much out of this; dispersion measures are notoriously noisy.
- We show positive numbers as conservative and negative numbers are liberal because the number line goes from left to right.
- Yes, it would be interesting to look at other issue dimensions such as foreign policy.
- Some people asked what exactly was in our scales. From page 195 of our red-state, blue-state book:
We construct estimates for individual states using a multilevel linear model fit separately to each of the four sets of correlations, with economic and social issues scales that we constructed from the following questions in the 2000 Annenberg survey.
Economic: are tax rates a problem, favor cutting taxes or strengthening Social Security, federal government should reduce the top tax rate, federal government should adopt flat tax, federal government should spend more on Social Security, favor investing Social Security in stock market, is poverty a problem, federal government should redu