November 23, 2008
Political engagement on the web
The Compete Blog (which posts a wealth of interesting data charts mined from monitoring web surfers) posted statistics
about proportion of web surfers that visit political websites:
Colorado, Connecticut and New Jersey are at the top. Colorado was a battleground state.
Posted by Aleks Jakulin at 5:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 22, 2008
A question about the youth vote
Shivaji Sondhi writes:
I had a question for you about the youth vote. What are its ethnic and red/blue composition? The reason I ask is that I was trying to integrate the apparently growing Democratic dominance in this segment with various other beliefs I have seen expressed, e.ga) that red states have larger fertility (affordable family formation or whatever)
b) that families have an impact on the political beliefs of children (more than educators, as educators insist - at least at the college level, I haven't really seen a discussion of school teachers) which would then provide a mechanism for (a) to affect voting share to the right of the spectrum
c) that the minorities form a growing share of the young which would tilt the playing field to the left.
My reply:
1. I don't yet have raw survey data. The exit polls on the web do break down the vote by age and race. Among blacks, Obama won about the same among all age groups. Among Hispanics, Obama did 8% better among the young than the old, and among whites, Obama did 14% better among the young than the old.
But . . . if you believe the exit polls (which I don't, completely), there was an interaction between age and race: many more of the young voters were ethnic minorities. Among blacks and Hispanics, there were three times as many under-30's as over-65's. (By comparison, among whites, there were more old voters than young voters.)
So the age effect partly arose from lots of young ethnic minorities coming out to vote.
2. People do tend to vote like their parents--children of Republicans are, on average, more likely to vote Republican--but cohort effects go on top of this. The recent economy and George W. Bush's approval ratings aren't likely to make the Republican Party popular with young people--especially those who are ethnic minorities. Any differences in birth rates between states are small compared to these big political swings, which are not just about Obama; see this graph from 2006:
Posted by Andrew at 5:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 18, 2008
Estimated votes by county among non-blacks
Ben Lauderdale writes:
I [Ben] had this map [see below] on my door for the last week. Based on exactly the same calculation using constant 95% black support and census-proportional representation. The white counties are the ones whose census names didn't match properly with the names used in the library(maps) package in R, I was too lazy to fix them.
Cool. I'd only suggest using light gray rather than heavy black lines between counties; the map as it is overemphasizes the county borders, I think. But I respect his laziness; there's always time later to fix the details.
Ben continues:
[Below are] the state-by-state county share plots for the lower 49, Obama vote share as a function of black population share. V.O. Key's observation that whites who live near blacks in southern states are less positively inclined towards them is *still* visible in several states.
The circle areas are proportional to county voter turnout. (The biggest circle is L.A. county in California, and so forth.)
Ben also had this comment about his map:
It reminded me of something Bob Putnam would say every time someone presented an empirical talk in our Center for the Study of Democratic Politics series during the year he was a fellow here at Princeton: "You should include miles to the Canadian border as a variable in your regression, it is the most important proxy for political culture in America!" At least in the eastern half of the country, he has a point.
Except for New Hampshire and Vermont, I think.
P.S. For graphics enthusiasts, here are some earlier graphs that I gave the thumbs-down on before Ben came up with the 50 plots above:
First version:
Second version:
Ben was skeptical about proportional circle sizes, but I think it turned out pretty well.
I'd also recommend non-alphabetical ordering of the states and moving away from the misleadingly square 7x7 grid, but I didn't want to hassle Ben any more.
Posted by Andrew at 4:25 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 17, 2008
Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in
I said I wouldn't do more posts on the election, but . . . Eric Rauchway merged our provisional county data with Census numbers on %black and made some graphs, which I played with a little to get the following:
Percent black acts as a floor on Obama's vote share; beyond that, it predicts his vote better in some regions than others.
But really there are two things going on. First, Obama's getting nearly all the black vote; second, depending on the region, whites are voting differently in places with more or fewer African Americans.
Then I had a thought. Obama got 96% of the black vote. If he got 96% in every county--which can't be far from the truth--then we can use simple algebra to figure out his share of the non-black vote in every county. If B is the proportion black in the county and X is the (unknown) Obama vote share among non-blacks, then, for each county,
obama.vote = 0.96*B + X*(1-B)
And so
X = (obama.vote - .96*B) / (1 - B)
This is only an approximation--for one thing, it assumes turnout rates are the same among blacks and others--but it can't be too far off, I think. And it leads to the following graph:
(Lowess lines are shown in blue.) None of this is a huge surprise: outside the south, places with more African Americans tend to be liberal urban areas where people of other ethnicities also vote for Democrats; in the south, many African Americans live in counties where the whites are very conservative.
Notes:
1. These graphs are non-blacks, not whites. Some of the variation has to be explainable by the presence of other minority groups.
2. For a few of the southern counties, our estimates of X are negative; that just means that Obama got less than 96% of the black vote there, or there was differential turnout, or some combination of these.
Posted by Andrew at 11:19 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 16, 2008
How did the Democrats do in the 2008 congressional elections?
John Kastellec made this graph of seats and votes in 2006 and 2008. For each year, the dot is what actually happened and the line is our estimated seats-votes curve based on modeling from the previous election year.
The Democrats did well in both years, but they didn't get as many seats as we would've expected, given their vote share. As I've already discussed, the Democrats' 56% share of the average district vote was pretty impressive, a 5.7 percentage point gain since 2004:
But the Democrats performed less well than expected in converting votes to seats. This explains to me why Charlie Cook et al. felt that the Democrats' performance was disappointing. At the level of voters, however (and of public opinion), the party did fine in congressional voting.
Posted by Andrew at 8:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 15, 2008
Election decided by toss of a coin
I just love these stories.
Posted by Andrew at 4:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 13, 2008
What's going to happen in the Minnesota Senate recount?
Michael Herron sent me this article-in-progress by Jonathan Chapman, Jeffrey Lewis, and himself on residual votes in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race. They conclude:
In the Minnesota Senate case there is no doubt that the number of residual votes dwarfs the margin that separates Coleman from Franken. We show using a combination of precinct voting returns from the 2006 and 2008 General Elections that patterns in Senate race residual votes are consistent with, one, the presence of a large number of Democratic-leaning voters, in particular African-American voters, who appear to have deliberately skipped voting in the Coleman-Franken Senate contest and, two, the presence of a smaller number of Democratic-leaning voters who almost certainly intended to vote validly in the Senate race but for some reason did not do so. . . . At present, though, the data available suggest that the recount will uncover many of the former and that, of the latter, a majority will likely prove to be supportive of Franken.
Posted by Andrew at 9:26 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 12, 2008
"Not a few" = 6?
In a discussion of the historic nature of Barack Obama's election, Christopher Hitchens writes, "there were not a few elected black American representatives 40 years ago."
This claim surprised me, so I looked it up. In 1968, there were 5 African Americans in the House of Representatives and 1 in the Senate. This sounds like only "a few" to me! Was Hitchens just confused here, or am I missing something?
P.S. Somebody pointed out that there were black state and local officeholders as well. I guess it all turns on what is meant by "not a few." Blacks were certainly a very low percentage of all U.S. elected officials back then.
Posted by Andrew at 11:04 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
"Cooperation is the selfish act that hurts the larger group"
Tyler Cowen's recent remark against team players reminded me of my paper a few years ago, Forming Voting Blocs and Coalitions as a Prisoner's Dilemma: A Possible Theoretical Explanation for Political Instability:
Individuals in a committee or election can increase their voting power by forming coalitions. This behavior is shown here to yield a prisoner's dilemma, in which a subset of voters can increase their power, while reducing average voting power for the electorate as a whole. This is an unusual form of the prisoner's dilemma in that cooperation is the sefil sh act that hurts the larger group. Under a simple model, the privately optimal coalition size is approximately 1.4 times the square root of the number of voters. When voters' preferences are allowed to di ffer, coalitions form only if voters are approximately politically balanced. We propose a dynamic view of coalitions, in which groups of voters choose of their own free will to form and disband coalitions, in a continuing struggle to maintain their voting power. This is potentially an endogenous mechanism for political instability, even in a world where individuals' (probabilistic) preferences are fixed and known.
Cool jargon, huh? Here's a pretty picture from the article:
And here's a schematic of the reasoning:
Posted by Andrew at 8:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It's about who you are and where you live
Richard Florida writes:
The critical feature of the creative economy is that it makes place the fundamental feature of politics, culture, and economics.
This isn't literally true, at least not in Alabama and Mississippi, where whites went 8 to 1 for McCain and blacks went something like 25 to 1 for Obama. But I think what Florida means is that place is more important than it used to be within demographically defined subgroups of the population (in particular, upper-middle-class whites).
The question is: how to state this hypothesis carefully, how to test it, and how to understand where (in space and time) it's largely true and where it's not. This is an important research project, I think.
Posted by Andrew at 12:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 11, 2008
More on the swing in the House vote
In yesterday's blog entry I looked that the swing in congressional voting nationally (House Democrats gained 5.7%, on average, compared to 2004) and by state (compared to 2004, House Democrats gained in nearly every state). My graphs elicited several interesting comments including this from Steve Sailer:
Perhaps the reason that the GOP House losses of seats were considered not so bad compared to 2006 was because in 2008 the Democrats ran up huge turnouts in black-represented Congressional districts, which were already all Democratic?
Let's look at some district-by-district swings, starting in 2002:
Here, I'm excluding uncontested elections and those in which the challenger got less than 10% of the vote; dots indicate incumbents running for reelection, circles are open seats, and red points are those with black representatives as of 2008. (I just pulled the names off the Congressional Black Caucus website and didn't try to go back to earlier years on this.)
What happened? Overall, the Democrats gained a bit in 2004, a lot in 2006, and some in 2008. But we knew that (see the time series plot in the blog entry linked above). We also see a bit of scatter. Beyond this, yes, there are some patterns. In 2006, the Democrats particularly gained in Republican areas--see how those dots in the lower left of the second graph are way above the 45-degree line? In 2008, the swing is more uniform. (In addition, the black Democrats did pretty well in 2008 compared to 2006, but it doesn't seem like a big part of the story.)
Returning to the "How well did the Democrats actually do in 2008" question, I think that one problem is that people are comparing Obama's vote to Kerry's vote but then comparing the congressional Democrats in 2008 to the congressional Democrats in 2006. I think it's more appropriate to compare 2008 to 2004 in both cases. As Paul Krugman put it, "Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections."
P.S. This is about it for now, I think. Time to return to regular statistics posting.
Posted by Andrew at 11:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Estimating public opinion in the states: gay rights and policy responsiveness
This is cool stuff (by Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips).
Posted by Andrew at 7:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The success of models predicting the election outcome from the economy
Mark Schmitt writes:
The long election cycle featured as many theories about how the election would turn out as there were presidential candidates in those first debates in 2007. Let's give some of the theories a post-final-exam assessment.
He discusses a bunch of things here, but the one that interests me the most is:
Economic Determinism: B. Some political scientists and economists like to remind us that for all the Palin jokes and PUMAs and debate gaffes, elections are pretty simple -- a good economy benefits the party in power; a bad economy creates a change election. There are various models that, ignoring all polls, aggregate and weight economic data to predict the outcome. The best known model is that of Yale's Ray Fair, which predicted an Obama victory with 51.9 percent of the vote, off by just a percentage point. Other models were also accurate.
My comment: Regarding the political science theories, I think "economic determinism" is a bit strong. These models do have other predictors and they also acknowledge error. Also, I know that Ray Fair did this stuff early on, but nowadays I think that political scientists such as Bob Erikson, Chris Wlezien, Doug Hibbs, Jim Campbell, and Larry Bartels are the more serious researchers in this area. If you want to read a whole book about the topic, I recommend Steven Rosenstone's Forecasting Presidential Elections from 1983. "Economic determinism" may look kind of simplistic, but I think the work of Rosenstone and his successors captures important truths.
Posted by Andrew at 10:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 10, 2008
Voter turnout update
Michael McDonald posts his updated estimate of voter turnout. Here's the updated graph:
And here are McDonald's comments. They are interesting from the standpoint of statistical inference as well as politically:
My [McDonald's] revised national turnout rate for those eligible to vote is 61.2% or 130.4 million ballots cast for president. This represents an increase of 1.1 percentage points over the 60.1% turnout rate of 2004. . . .
My [McDonald's] initial estimate of 133.3 million ballots cast proved to be too high due to an over-estimation of absentee ballots outstanding in states that have in the past reported a smaller proportion of their mail-in ballots on election night. . . .Oregon and Washington appeared to suffer from a turnout decline similar to other states that lost their battleground status from 2004, further including Maine, West Virginia and Wisconsin (South Dakota's decline may be a consequence of the hot 2004 Senate race between Daschle and Thune which drew more votes than president in some counties). The largest turnout rate increases from 2004 were experienced in states that shifted onto the battleground, such as Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia. Other non-battleground Southern states such as Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina (and the District of Columbia) experienced turnout increases, perhaps a consequence of high turnout among African-Americans excited to vote for president-elect Obama. Turnout declines in deep red states such as Alaska and Utah may reflect less enthusiasm among Republicans for Sen. McCain.
Posted by Andrew at 1:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 9, 2008
A Democratic swing, not an Obama swing
There's an idea going around that the Democrats turned in a disappointing performance in Congressional races this year. For example, a politically-minded friend of mine of the liberal persuasion wrote: "The election was good news, although the Democrats did not do quite as well in the Senate and House as I expected. Obama did not have very long coattails--given how anti-Republican Americans are these days."
Some of the pros say this too; for example, Charlie Cook writes, "given the strength of the top of the ticket nationally, one might have thought that the victory would have been more vertically integrated. . . . what happened down-ballot was not proportional to what happened at the top."
And Mickey Kaus attributes this to moderate ticket-splitters who, expecting that Obama would win, decided to support Republicans in Congress: "swing voters compensated for the bold, hopeful risk they took on Obama (including for overcoming any race prejudice) by gravitating back toward Republicans in their local Senate and House races."
The only trouble with this theory is that it's not supported by the data. Obama won 53% of the two-party vote, congressional Democrats averaged 56%. The average swing of 5.7% from Democratic congressional candidates in 2004 to Dems in 2008 was actually greater than the popular vote swing of 4.5% from Kerry to Obama.
Let's look at what happened state by state. Here I'm plotting the swing in average district vote in each state, comparing the congressional elections of 2004 to those of 2008, ordering the states by Kerry's share in 2004:
The horizontal blue line shows the average swing of 5.7%. The Democrats gained in nearly every state, with, unsurprisingly, some big swings in some of the small states that have only one or two congressional districts.
Now let's compare this to the state-by-state swing in the presidential vote:
Obama beat Kerry nearly everywhere, fairly uniformly with only a few exceptions--we knew that--but my point here is that Obama's swings weren't quite as large, on average, as the state congressional delegations'.
If you want, you can look at both swings at once:
In the states in the upper left of this graph, the Democrats improved more in the congressional than in the presidential vote; the states in the lower right are those where the Obama-Kerry swing was greater than the Democrats' swing in House races.
There are a lot more states in the upper left than in the lower right. Each state has its own story--for example, I wouldn't attribute Don Young's squeaker in Alaska to Barack Obama's coattails--but given the graphs above, I think it's hard to make the case that, overall, the voters were saying No to the Democrats in Congress. On the contrary, congressional Democrats averaged 56% of the vote--their best showing since 1976 (and far more than the Republicans' 52% in 1994).
Here's the story in a map:
For some historical perspective, here are the Democrats' two-party vote share in presidential elections and average two-party vote in congressional elections since 1946:
Presidential voting has been much more volatile than congressional voting (incumbency and all that). This makes the Democrats' 5.7-point gain over two elections even more impressive.
Summary
I think Charlie Cook was closer to the mark when he wrote, "The political environment and momentum that Democrats seemed to have in recent months may have led to an unrealistic set of expectations. In this, perhaps we pundits share some blame." I don't think it makes a lot of sense to consider Obama's 53% "enormously impressive" and congressional Democrats' 56% a disappointment.
The data demolish the idea that voters in 2008 were pulling the lever for Barack but not for the Dems overall (not for "Nancy Pelosi," if you will).
Notes
1. I thank John Kastellec and Jared Lander for gathering the data and sharing their thoughts.
2. I'm counting uncontested House candidates at 75% of the vote (see our earlier article for discussion of this and similar technical issues).
3. We use average district vote rather than total vote because congressional vote totals vary a lot, and we're trying to assess national public opinion (as judged, for example, in Kaus's quote above).
4. The Democrats won resoundingly; this means that the voters preferred them to the alternative; it does not necessarily mean the voters want the specific policies proposed by the Democrats. Recall the Democrats' surprising lack of popular success after 1976 and the Republicans' struggles after their 1994 sweep.
5. I'm talking about public opinion here, not campaign strategy. I'm sure that Democratic leaders were disappointed in their party's performance in key congressional races, especially given their immense financial resources this year. At the level of public opinion, though, the Democrats in Congress outperformed Obama overall and in 38 states--and their swing beat Obama's overall and in 32 states--so I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the voters were balancing toward the Republicans in congressional voting. This is not to say that the voters have given the Democrats a blank check, but it really was a Democratic swing, not an Obama swing.
Posted by Andrew at 11:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 8, 2008
Big city Barack
This note by Nate inspired me to check the vote swings by county population. I don't have the urban/suburban/rural status of counties in an easily grabbable form (maybe Boris has these and can send to me) and so as something quick I plotted vote swing vs. county population. Actually, I don't have county population right here either and so I used total number of votes in the county in 2004. Many of the large-population counties are urban (such as Los Angeles, the largest); others are major suburban counties. Anyway, here's what we see:
The blue line is the lowess curve fit to the data. There's a lot of variation--county size is not such a good predictor of swing--but there is indeed a pattern of bigger Obama swings in larger counties. (The counties are already ordered by size so there's no need to use larger circles to indicate larger counties as I did in the plots of county income posted earlier.)
To understand this better, let's break up the data by region of the country. Also, since we're at it, let's look at swings in the past couple of elections as well.
Here are the swings broken up by region of the country for the past few elections. The left column shows 1996/2000, the middle column shows 2000/2004, and the right column shows 2004/2008.
What do we see?
1. The large-county/small-county differential in Obama's gains was particularly strong in the south and did not occur at all in the northeast. For example, Obama won 84% of the two-party vote in Philadelphia--but Kerry got 80% there four years ago. This 4% swing was about the same as Obama's swing nationally. Part of the issue here is that Obama had almost no room for improvement in these places.
2. The pattern of Democrats improving more in large-population counties is not unique to 2008. Gore did (relatively) well in big counties in all regions in 2000.
Posted by Andrew at 11:49 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
Vote swings in rich and poor counties
I got ahold of the county-level election returns from 2008 (as of a few days ago, so lots of precincts missing, but that's what I have to go with for now) and crosstabbed it with county income, dividing the counties into poorest, middle, and upper third, with cutpoints set so that approximately one-third of the U.S. population is in each category.
What happened in each lower, middle-income, and rich America?
Obama did better than Kerry in all three graphs, but he did most uniformly better in the rich counties. (In this and subsequent graphs, the area of the circle is proportional to the number of voters in that county in 2004. It turns out that Obama did the worst, compared to Kerry, in low-population poor counties, so the graphs actually look a bit different if you plot all counties with equal-sized circles.)
These patterns are new to 2008. Checking the corresponding plots from 2000/2004 and 1996/2000, we don't see much of anything different comparing poor, middle-income, and rich counties.
The next step is to break things up by region of the country. Here's what we see:
In the midwest and west, Obama outperformed Kerry in all sorts of counties. In the northeast, Obama did just a bit better than Kerry (who had that northeastern home-state advantage). In the south, Obama did almost uniformly better in rich counties, also did well in middle-income counties (although less so in Republican-leaning areas), and basically showed no improvement from Kerry in poor counties.
So, region and income are both part of the story here. As we already know from those maps of vote swing by county. These scatterplots are another way to look at it.
What happened in the two previous elections?
Let's take a look at the swings from 2000 to 2004:
Nothing much here. But what about the 1996/2000 swing?
This is interesting. Gore held performed about as well as Clinton in most of the middle-income and rich counties but he got nuked in poor counties in all regions of the country. Consistent with the David Brooks story about growing divisions between Red and Blue America.
P.S. Thanks for Cosma Shalizi, Yair Ghitza, and Boris Shor for grabbing and putting together the data.
P.P.S. Recall that the 2008 data are incomplete. Out of 3114 rows in the data, 23 rows have < 50%, 49 rows have 50-75%, 68 rows have 75-90%, 117 have 90-99%, and 2857 have 100% reporting. So at some point we'll need to redo these graphs.
P.P.P.S. Yes, I know that income isn't all. Feel free to take these data and run whatever regressions you want, including %black and anything else you're interested in. That said, I think the above plots are interesting--especially considering that the patterns in 1996/2000 and 2000/2004 were different.
Posted by Andrew at 9:25 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 6, 2008
They had an advertisement for horse feed
My post-election interview with Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio. It was fun. I blame Zacky for all my coughing.
Posted by Andrew at 10:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Affordable family formation
Steve Sailer writes:
Based on the extremely similar results in 2000 and 2004, I [Sailer] had invented a novel and ambitious theory explaining why American states vote in differing proportions for Republican or Democratic candidates. My Affordable Family Formation theory isn't about who wins nationally, it's about how, given a particular national level of support, which states will be solid blue (Democrat), which ones purple (mixed), and which ones solid red (Republican). . . .
My basic theory is that Democrats do best in states with metropolitan areas where land for homes is scarce because they are hedged in by oceans or Great Lakes; while Republicans do best in inland areas where homebuyers can look around for homes in a 360 degree radius around job sites. I call this the Dirt Gap: Republicans are found more in areas with more dirt and less water.This means that homes in inland areas tend to be cheaper because the supply of land within a certain commuting time is greater. In turn, cheaper homes mean that non-Hispanic whites tend to marry earlier and have more children, which means they attract family oriented people and their cultures tend to be more family-oriented, making Republican family values appeals more appealing there. . . .
Take a look at the Average Years Married between ages 18 and 44 among non-Hispanic white women in the 2000 Census. That's a statistic I invented to be the marital analog of the well-known total fertility rate measure (which estimates from the latest available year's birth behavior how many children a woman will have in her lifetime). Likewise, Average Years Married estimates how many years out of the 27 between 18 through 44 will a woman be married. The Average Years Married for non-Hispanic white women does a remarkably good job of predicting McCain's (or Obama's) share of the total vote across all races in the states.
Thus, McCain carried 19 of the top 20 states on Average Years Married among non-Hispanic whites, while Obama carried 18 of the 19 lowest states. The correlation coefficient was r=0.88 . . . By the way, this explains much of the Sarah Palin Hysteria: with her five children, she elicits the SWPL ["stuff white people like," although when I looked at that website, it didn't make any sense to me--maybe I'm not white enough??] whites' secret dread that they are being outbred by the non-SWPL whites.
My thoughts:
1. The affordable family formation story makes a lot of sense to me; as we discussed in Red State, Blue State, it's consistent with the red-state, blue-state distinction being more important among upper income voters (who are more likely to be buying houses and, I suspect, have more flexibility in deciding where to live) and it's also consistent with these changes arising in the past thirty years, during which time we've seen huge housing price increases in coastal cities.
2. As Sailer notes (see also my scatterplots here), 2008 at the state-by-state level wasn't much different from 2004, which in turn was nearly a replay of 2000.
3. I'm not so sure why he focuses on non-Hispanic whites, especially given that the Hispanic vote is increasingly important. I mean, I recognize that excluding minorities makes the statistical picture clearer, and so from a social-science perspective he's explaining the data. A 90% correlation is indeed impressive. But then at some point I'd think you'd want to go back and put the minority votes back in to complete the story.
4. I'm skeptical about Sailer's analysis of reactions to Sarah Palin. Why not the simpler story that she's on the far right, and liberals don't like that very much. Similar to the reaction that Republicans might have if Obama had chosen a running mate on the left wing of the Democratic party. I don't really see how the children fit into this--I'd guess that a childless Palin with the same positions and qualifications would evoke similar attitudes.
Comments 3 and 4 aside, I think this is interesting stuff. See here and here for my earlier thoughts.
Posted by Andrew at 9:50 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
What does non-uniform partisan swing look like?
I wrote here here that the red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.
In comment #39 to that entry, Scott de B. wrote: "How else would you define 'redrawing the red/blue map' other than 'a nationwide partisan swing'? By your definition, Reagan didn’t redraw the national map, but if Mondale’s lone state in 1984 had been Alabama instead of Minnesota, he would have."
My first response is that, yes, Obama's national swing was important, but it didn't much change the relative positions of the states. Let's see what happened in 1980/1984:
and in 1976/1980 (newly added):
These changes were indeed less uniform in their swings as compared to 2004/2008.
On his blog, Steve Sailer wrote: "If you drew up the equivalent graph for the 1952 and 1956, which featured Eisenhower and Stevenson running both times, it would look more like a random scatterplot. On a state-by-state basis, the political environment was a lot more dynamic in the 1950s than today."
OK, what did the 1950s look like?
Not exactly a random scatterplot but, again, more variation than we saw in 2000/2004 and 2004/2008. Actually, the variation from 1952 to 1956 and from 1980 to 1984 is more comparable to the variation in two recent elections, say from 2000 to 2008:
P.S. Above graphs fixed; thanks to commenters for pointing out the errors.
Posted by Andrew at 9:28 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
November 5, 2008
The stunning^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H slight increase in voter turnout
Henry posted some great links to voter turnout data and discussions of the topic by Michael McDonald. Henry's graph is here.
Just for fun, I decided to redisplay the information; here is my version:
I've updated it with the latest estimate as of 9 Nov 2008.
Key differences between my graph and Henry's:
1. I go back to 1948, Henry starts at 1980.
2. My y-range goes from 45% to 65%; Henry goes all the way from 0 to 100.
3. Henry's graph labels every election; I label every 20 years.
4. Henry's graph is in gray with many black horizontal lines and a blue line with data; mine is black and white with a line and with data points indicated by dots.
Items 1 and 2 above are the most important; I think: by showing a shorter time range and compressing the y range, Henry makes the changes look less impressive. I understand the rationale for including the whole y-range here, but in this case, since changes are being discussed, and a 5% change is, historically, a big deal, I prefer my graph. I did extend the y-scale out to the [45%,65%] range, though, because I wanted to give a little bit of perspective; it would somehow seem misleading for the data to cover the entire y-range in this case.
In any case, I'm not trying to criticize Henry here; making graphs is just something I like to do, and something I like to think about.
P.S. Below is my (updated) R code, for those of you who want to play at home:
# turnout time seriesturnout.year <- seq (1948,2008,4)
turnout.vap <- c(.511,.616,.593,.628,.619,.609,.552,.535,.528,.533,.503,.550,.489,.512,.553,NA)
turnout.VEP <- c(.522,.623,.602,.638,.628,.615,.562,.548,.547,.572,.542,.606,.526,.556,NA,.601)
turnout.VEP[turnout.year==2004] <- turnout.vap[turnout.year==2004] + (turnout.VEP[turnout.year==2000] - turnout.vap[turnout.year==2000])
n <- length (turnout.year)png ("turnout.png", height=300, width=400)
par (mar=c(4,4,2,0), tck=-.01, mgp=c(2,.5,0))
plot (turnout.year, turnout, type="l", xlab="Year", ylab="Percentage of voting-age\npopulation who turned out to vote", xaxt="n", yaxt="n", bty="l", ylim=c(.45,.65))
points (turnout.year[1:(n-1)], turnout[1:(n-1)], pch=20)
points (turnout.year[n], turnout[n], pch=21, cex=1.2)
axis (1, seq(1960,2000,20))
yticks <- seq (.45,.65,.05)
axis (2, yticks, paste(yticks*100,"%",sep=""))
mtext ("Voter turnout in postwar presidential elections", line=1)
dev.off()
Posted by Andrew at 12:36 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
Election 2008: what really happened
I was just in Grant Park . . . it was pretty cool but I couldn't actually hear anything. So I went back to my hotel room and crunched some numbers.
Here are the take-home points:
1. The election was pretty close.
2. As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor. But the pattern has changed among the highest-income categories.
3. The gap between young and old has increased–a lot. But there was no massive turnout among young voters.
4. Obama gained the most among ethnic minorities.
5. The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.
6. The pre-election polls did well, both for the national vote and for the states.
Here's the full story (with graphs!).
Posted by Andrew at 3:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
November 3, 2008
Play the 2008 election in the comfort of your living room
This is sort of silly but I couldn't resist doing a couple hours of programming today. . . . I took Nate Silver's latest simulations and computed the forecast of the national election (popular vote and electoral vote), conditional on various scenarios as of 7pm Eastern time.
The states whose polls close earliest are Virginia, Indiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Kentucky (and also Vermont, which I'll ignore because of its atypicality).
I worked out a few scenarios, such as the five early states going as expected, McCain doing 5 points better than expected in those states, Obama doing 5 points better in those states, McCain winning Virginia, etc. Also some pretty pictures. For next election I want an interactive widget so people can really play at home, but these offline calculations are a start.
See here for details, or here for the longer article.
Posted by Andrew at 11:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
2000/2004
I realized just realized that our maps of states won by Republicans and Democrats by income group (see here, for example, also recently posted by Matthew Yglesias) are from 2000, not from 2004. We also mislabeled these in Plate 3 of the Red State, Blue State book. My bad. Here are the maps and scatterplots based on exit polls in 2004:
Not so different from 2000 (especially when you look at the scatterplots), with the most notable difference being Kerry's strength in New England.
Posted by Andrew at 10:26 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 2, 2008
"The evidence of lived experience" vs. the statistics
John Kastellec sends in this blog entry by Jay Nordlinger, entitled "Dept. of Enduring Myths":
I’ve just come back from a weekend in Vermont — and here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich, and it still suffers from that label. Over and over, that which I was taught is contradicted by the evidence of my lived experience.
Here are the results from the 2000 and 2004 exit polls:
At a national level, Republicans did much better among the rich than the poor. In New England, the relation between income and voting is weak, with richer voters being slightly more likely to vote Republican. We'll have to see what happens in 2008.
P.S. As statisticians we're taught to rely less on our lived experience and on impressions from a weekend visit to Vermont, and more on random-sample survey data. And that's what I'm doing here. But I have to admit that in many areas of my professional life (for example, in considering strategies for teaching and for research), I rely pretty much only on my lived experience and on the research equivalents of weekend visits to Vermont. Somehow, for things that affect me directly, statistical principles become less important. So I can see how, for a political journalist such as Nordlinger, it can be difficult to discount one's personal impressions. Nonetheless, I hope he can do so.
Posted by Andrew at 9:46 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Are Republicans healthier than Democrats?
From S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins.
P.S. See John's comment below. He seems to have a good point. More here from Steve Kass.
My bad in not screening this more carefully before posting. In defense of Subramanian and Perkins, they sent me the paper and it was my idea to blog it. They were planning all along to do more systematic analysis of the raw data (which they haven't yet received).
Posted by Andrew at 8:03 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Millionaires for McCain, Billionaires for Obama . . . or maybe not
At Red State, Blue State it's about politics, here at Statistical Modeling it's about survey sampling. Was it all based on a sample of size 6?
Posted by Andrew at 9:32 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
November 1, 2008
Rationality of voting, again
Dear Mr. Leonard,
A colleague pointed me to your article about our paper on why it is rational to vote. I'm glad you think our article is "pretty funny." We try to be entertaining even in our most serious writings. I agree with your comment that "we don't need a rational choice framework to provide a reason for participating in the process." And, in a world where nobody was making rational choice arguments, our article might not be necessary. But with prominent economic writers such as Steven Levitt telling people that it's irrational to vote, we think our article offers a useful corrective.
Beyond this, we are making a point which I believe you overlooked, which is that if you _are_ voting for rational reasons, than what is rational is to be voting for (perceived) social benefits, not for your own pocketbook. It is indeed irrational to vote if the gain that you're expecting is a potential $300 tax cut or better health insurance for yourself or whatever. But it is _not_ necessarily irrational to vote if your goal is to help the country as a whole.
Yours,
Andrew Gelman
P.S. If you're interested, our longer research article on rational voting is here.
Posted by Andrew at 4:41 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 31, 2008
In 1920, the population of Nevada was only 77,000
Sure, I knew it was a desert. But I didn't realize that so few people lived there.
Posted by Andrew at 9:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Len "RSA" Adleman looks at the polls.
Here.
Posted by Andrew at 2:19 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 29, 2008
Multiply Pr(decisive vote) by 2, perhaps
After reading our article on the probability that your vote is decisive, James Fowler wrote:
Doesn't this estimate ignore David Nickerson's APSR paper that shows 60% of the effect of contact spreads to a second person in the household? If people are connected in networks that are correlated in preferences (e.g. most friends of Democrats are Democrats) and increase exponentially in network distance (we have many more friends of friends than friends), then one person's vote affects many more than just one person.... And hence ties are not the only outcomes that make a person pivotal.And an earlier paper I wrote with a conservative estimate of the multiplier that was based on a 10% effect transfer rather than a 60% effect transfer.
My reply: Sure, maybe you should multiply this number by 2 if you're married and can persuade your spouse. Or maybe multiply by 100,000 if you're Oprah.
Posted by Andrew at 3:55 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
October 28, 2008
2004/2008
How is the 2008 election different from 2004, beyond the (currently predicted) national swing of about 4 percentage points (enough to move from Kerry's 49% of the vote to 53% for Obama)?
Here's a graph of Obama's predicted share of the two-party vote in each state (based on Nate Silver's recent poll aggregation) compared to Kerry's in 2004:
I then fit a simple linear regression; here's a map of the residuals, showing where Obama is doing particularly well or poorly, compared to last time:
See here for further discussion and more graphs.
Posted by Andrew at 11:04 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
October 27, 2008
What is the probability your vote will make a difference?
See here for more (including the link to the article by Nate Silver, Aaron Edlin, and myself describing what we did).
[Typo in caption to figure 1 fixed, thanks to commenters.]
Posted by Andrew at 11:09 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack
October 26, 2008
Red State, Blue State this week
The New America Foundation in D.C. on Monday at noon.
The University of Chicago statistics department Tuesday at 4:30.
Posted by Andrew at 9:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Good Roads Everywhere
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October 23, 2008
Red State, Blue State at New America Foundation on Monday
The election is coming up so this is our last DC event . . . I'll be speaking on Red State, Blue State this Mon, 27 Oct, at the New America Foundation. The event will be from 12.15-1.45, and there will be a discussion by David Frum. Frank Micciche of the New America Foundation will moderate. Info is here.
Below is the description of the event. (My coauthors won't be present at the talk but they will be implicitly there, as I'm presenting our joint research.)
Rethinking Red and Blue
Myths, Perceptions, and the 2008 Vote
Monday, October 27, 2008
12:15 - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch will be provided.
New America Foundation
1630 Connecticut Ave, NW, 7th Floor
Washington, DC
In 2000, the poorest voters in Mississippi (50th in nation in per capita income), Ohio (middle of the pack) and Connecticut (1st in PCI) were equally likely to vote for George W. Bush. The richest residents of the same three states diverged sharply, with more than 3/4 of wealthy Mississippians voting Republican, 60 percent in Ohio and about half in Connecticut. This pattern held in 2004.
Dr. Andrew Gelman, co-author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State has analyzed voting patterns and found that the media have missed, and misstated, the real correlations between voting and income level. It turns out the mythical lower-income "Values Voter" who puts "God, guns and gays" before economic concerns is just that. The Republican edge in poorer states has little to do with the cultural concerns of lower-income voters, and far more to do with the intensity of GOP support among the wealthy in these states. In other words, we're not in Thomas Frank's Kansas any more.
Please join us to hear a revealing analysis of how and where income and other demographic trends actually affect voting patterns, and what it all means for the 2008 election. Following a presentation of Dr. Gelman's findings, we will hear from David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and author of a recent New York Times Magazine article on "The Vanishing Republican Voter."
Featured Speakers
Dr. Andrew Gelman
Professor of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University
Author, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State:
Why Americans Vote the Way They Do
David Frum
Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Former Economic Speechwriter, President George W. Bush
Moderator
Frank Micciche
Deputy Director, Next Social Contract Initiative
New America Foundation
What the Findings in Red State, Blue State Can Tell Us About the Presidential Race:
Q1.Why hasn't Barack Obama's edge in fundraising and intensity of support translated into a runaway election, and why is Obama now apparently pulling away?
A1: Because, until recently, the patterns that Gelman identified had held. For example, in early September, Pew Research had McCain leading Obama 53 to 39 among those making $75,000 or more. Their latest poll has Obama up 48 to 46 in this category. Pew's horserace poll has Obama gaining almost exactly the same magnitude in overall support nationally during this period. According to Pew, Obama has also gained 8 points in the last month among weekly churchgoing white mainline protestants and 9 points among Catholics who attend weekly mass.
Q2. Hasn't Obama "changed the map," particularly in poorer states with relatively large minority populations?
A2. No. Among the 10 lowest-income states, McCain leads by an average of 15 points, trailing only in New Mexico, a classic "battleground" state. Similarly, 8 of the 10 richest states remain firmly Democratic in 2008. Obama has swung Colorado and Virginia into his column. So, among the 10 richest and 10 poorest states, only three look to be moving away from the party they favored in previous elections. Of these, two are simply falling into line with their fellow wealthier states, and one is continuing a pattern of vacillation between parties (although looking solidly Democratic at this point).
Q3.With these patterns locked in, what will decide whether November 4 produces an Electoral College landslide, ala 1996, or another late night nailbiter?
A3. Real Clear Politics lists 142 electoral votes not solidly in the GOP or Democratic column (Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia). Gelman's so-called "supergraph" tracking partisan intensity in bellwether rich (Connecticut), median (Ohio) and poor (Mississippi) states indicates that the poorer a state, the more likely their wealthiest voters are to vote Republican. This is reflected in a steeper incline (toward the GOP) as you move up the income scale within Mississippi than within Ohio and steeper still between Mississippi and Connecticut. If Obama can smooth the curve in poorer toss-up states (Georgia and North Carolina), and reverse it in richer ones (building on his impressive gains in Colorado and Virginia), he may well get a landslide.
To RSVP for this event, go to the event page: http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/rethinking_red_and_blue
For questions, contact Cecille Isidro at (202) 986-2700 x 141 or isidro@newamerica.net
Posted by Andrew at 9:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 21, 2008
Roosevelt and Reagan as statisticians
Posted by Andrew at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 20, 2008
"Data Shows Nothing is the Matter with Kansas"
I've always wanted to write something for the Wichita Eagle . . .
P.S. My proposed title was, "What's the Matter with Kansas? Nothing--and the data prove it." I don't mind the revision but I would always always write "data" as plural!
Posted by Andrew at 11:52 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
October 19, 2008
My talks in Toronto
"Creating structured and flexible models: some open problems" at the Statistics Department, Monday 3pm in Room 1180 of the Bahen Centre, 40 St. George Street.
"Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way they Do" at the Martin Prosperity Insitute, Rotman School of Management, Tuesday 2pm in Room 108N of the Munk Center for International Studies, 1 Devonshire Place.
I hope to see you there!
Posted by Andrew at 5:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 16, 2008
Red State, Blue State on C-Span this weekend
Our Cato event from last month will be on Book TV on C-Span2 this Sat, 18 Oct, 7pm, and Mon, 20 Oct, 6am. My presentation has gotten a bit slicker since then, but it's still good stuff, and you also get interesting discussions by Brink Lindsey and Michael McDonald.
Posted by Andrew at 9:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 14, 2008
Allocating campaign resources and the reverse random walk model
Posted by Andrew at 10:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 13, 2008
Red Blue at NYU
I'll be speaking Tues 14 Oct (that's tomorrow) 10am on Red State, Blue State at NYU, at 802 Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South. Pat Egan will discuss, and then there will be time for discussion. The talk will be open to the public.
Posted by Andrew at 1:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 12, 2008
How the financial crisis could've been avoided!!
Posted by Andrew at 8:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 11, 2008
Feedback
Aleks sent along this article that suggests that debate-watchers are influenced by crowd noise and feedback graphics:
"We don't realize how much we are influenced by other people," said Steven Fein, a social psychology professor at Williams College who has used footage from presidential debates in experiments examining how voters might be swayed. "We can't ignore what we think other people think." . . .Two studies published in the last two years suggest continuous-reaction graphs can affect opinions -- at least in an experimental setting. In one, led by a researcher at Emory University, 253 college students evaluated "American Idol"-like performances with fake audience feedback superimposed on screen. Those who saw negative reactions themselves viewed the performances more negatively.
In a study conducted by Dr. Fein, 94 college students used dial-meters while watching a 10-minute excerpt of a 1984 debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale with on-screen feedback manipulated to favor one candidate or the other. Those who saw pro-Reagan feedback were 2.8 times more likely to say they would have voted for Mr. Reagan than those in the Mondale group; in the pro-Mondale group, participants were 1.8 times more likely to say they would have voted for Mr. Mondale.
But does this have any appreciable impact on the election. That, I don't know.
Posted by Andrew at 4:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 8, 2008
Whassup with the white working class?
A colleague asks,
How do you deal with the following from Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira's Brookings paper:Indeed, just how far the Democrat party fell in the white working class' eyes over this time period can be seen by comparing the average white working class (whites without a four year college degree) vote for the Democrats in 1960-64 (55 percent) to their average vote for the Democrats in 1968-72 (35 percent). That's a drop of 20 points. The Democrats were the party of the white working class no longer…… Al Gore….lost white working class voters in the 2000 election by 17 points. And the next Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, did even worse, losing these voters by a whopping 23 points in 2004. One could reasonably ascribe the worsening deficit for Democrats in 2004 to the role of national security and terrorism after 9/11 but the very sizeable 2000 deficit cannot be explained on that basis. Apparently, the successes of the Clinton years, which included a strong economy that delivered solid real wage growth for the first time since 1973, did not succeed in restoring the historic bond between the white working class and the Democrats.
My reply: When you slice things by income, you see a clear pattern of Republicans doing better among the rich of all races (except maybe Asians, but I don't particularly trust those numbers what with small sample size):
Compared to earlier years, Democrats have lost among less well-educated voters and gained among the more educated voters, but their income profile hasn't changed so much. As E.J. Dionne has noted, the Democrats' strength among well educated voters is strongest among those with household incomes below $75,000--"the incomes of teachers, social workers, nurses, and skilled technicians, not of Hollywood stars, bestselling authors, or television producers, let alone corporate executives."
So a quick answer is that I don't necessarily see a machinist, say, as having more street-cred than a social worker with a graduate degree who makes the same amount of money. As Larry Bartels has pointed out, it's not so easy to identify exactly what is meant by "working class." There have been changes, but remember that the difference in voting between rich and poor has been as large in the past 10 years as it's ever been; see page 47 of the red-blue book. Yes, it's different rich and poor people than before, but it's still there. It's a mistake to think there was a past golden era of class-based voting. Geographic factors were important in voting decades ago, and they are now as well.
See here for my earlier comments on the Teixeira and Abramowitz article.
Finally, David Park made this graph of the trend since the 1950s of the rich-poor voting gap (the difference between Republican vote share among the upper third of income, minus the Republican vote share among the lower third) in Presidential elections. The gray dots represent all voters, the black dots represent whites only (yes, I know, they should be white dots...).
The rich-poor voting gap among whites has in recent elections been a bit below its 1970s-1990s peak, but it's far from zero. And, what with increasing diversity in the minority population, it's not so clear that "whites" is as useful a category as it once was.
P.S. More here.
Posted by Andrew at 10:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 12:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 10:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 11:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 7:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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:
Posted by Andrew at 11:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Why do swing states matter?
Hey, I got quoted in the Weekly Reader! Much cooler than the Annals of Statistics.
Posted by Andrew at 6:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 9:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 26, 2008
Interactive graphs of polls
Posted by Andrew at 11:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 1:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 9:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 8:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 11:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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...
Posted by Andrew at 2:09 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
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).
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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.
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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.
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September 4, 2008
Popular governor of a small state
See here for discussion.
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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.
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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.
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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. . .
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The conventions: who's bouncin'?
From Gallup Polls. Some discussion is at the blog of our Red State, Blue State book:
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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.
Posted by Andrew at 1:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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.)
Posted by Andrew at 2:22 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 12:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 1, 2008
The nonpuzzle of the close opinion polls
Posted by Andrew at 2:52 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
July 30, 2008
Differences between researchers in psychology and political science
See here.
Posted by Andrew at 3:51 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 12:25 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 25, 2008
Question wording effects
Get Dr. Kahneman on the line . . .
Posted by Andrew at 12:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 2:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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
Posted by Andrew at 9:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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.
Posted by Andrew at 6:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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 reduce income differences, federal government should spend more on aid to mothers with young children, federal government should expend effort to eliminate many business regulations.
Social: federal government should give school vouchers, federal government should restrict abortion, federal government should ban abortion, favor death penalty, favor handgun licenses, federal government should expend effort to restrict gun purchases, are underpunished criminals a problem, is immigration a problem, favor gays in military, federal government should expend effort to stop job discrimination against gays, federal government should expend effort to stop job discrimination against blacks, federal government should expend effort to stop job discrimination against women, federal government should allow school prayer.
We recode each question so that lower numbers indicate liberal responses and higher numbers conservative ones. We then add the responses and rescale. Unfortunately, the 2004 version of this survey did not ask a full range of economic and social issue questions and so we were not able to construct good scales for that year.
Posted by Andrew at 12:48 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 5, 2008
Predicting death sentences--is predictability an indicator of aribitrariness?--and what does it mean for a statistical method to be called a "computer system"?
Andrew Sullivan links to this news article which links to this research article by Stamos Karamouzis and Dee Wood Harper called "An Artificial Intelligence System Suggests Arbitrariness of Death Penalty":
The arguments against the death penalty in the United States have centered on due process and fairness. Since the death penalty is so rarely rendered and subsequently applied, it appears on the surface to be arbitrary. Considering the potential utility of determining whether or not a death row inmate is actually executed along with the promising behavior of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as classifiers led us into the development, training, and testing of an ANN as a tool for predicting death penalty outcomes. For our ANN we reconstructed the profiles of 1,366 death row inmates by utilizing variables that are independent of the substantive characteristics of the crime for which they have been convicted. The ANN's successful performance in predicting executions has serious implications concerning the fairness of the justice system.
I don't really see why the predictability of death sentences--in their data set, they say they "successfully classified 147 out of 158 non-executed inmates (93.0%) and 130 out of 142 executed inmates (91.5%)"--is evidence that death sentencing is "arbitrary." Predictable seems like the opposite of arbitrary.
We do know, though, that most death sentences get reversed:
We collected data on the appeals process for all death sentences in U.S. states between 1973 and 1995. The reversal rate was high, with an estimated chance of at least two-thirds that any death sentence would be overturned by a state or federal appeals court. Multilevel regression models fit to the data by state and year indicate that high reversal rates are strongly associated with higher death-sentencing rates and lower rates of apprehending and imprisoning violent offenders. In light of our empirical findings, we discuss potential remedies including “streamlining” the appeals process and restricting the death penalty to the “worst of the worst” offenders.
P.S. To make a more parochial comment, I'm surprised the news article was headlined "Computer predicts . . . " as if somehow this was done by HAL rather than a human statistical analyst. I don't know how the neural network method of Karamouzis and Harper compares to BART or logistic regression--I'm willing to believe it's better--but it seems a little funny to me to refer to it as a "computer system" rather than a "prediction method" or a "statistical method" or a "prediction algorithm."
Posted by Andrew at 9:49 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
July 1, 2008
A legal mystery
Maybe someone can explain this to me?
Posted by Andrew at 2:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
We need cover ideas, and we need them now!
Our publisher is putting together our new book (no, not Red State, Blue State, I'm talking about our next book, A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences), and we need a cover design. Now. Any ideas? Free book to the person with the best idea. And anybody with a particularly good idea, I'll take to lunch. (Or maybe Jeronimo, my coeditor, will take you to lunch if you're in Houston...)
Some background: The book has sections on history, economics, sociology, political science, and psychology, and each section has a different author (or set of authors). It's not a statistics book; rather, it's a set of discussions and case studies, giving the reader (most likely a student of one of the social sciences) a sense of how to think like a historian, economict, sociologist, etc. It's based on a course I created for our Quantitative Methods in Social Science program at Columbia. Anyway, there will be plenty of time for book promotion later; now, I'm just trying to give you enough information to come up with a good cover design for us.
Here's the table of contents:
I. Models and Methods in the Social Sciences (Andrew Gelman)
1. Introduction and overview
2. What’s in a number? Definitions of fairness and political representation
3. The allure and limitations of mathematical modeling: Game theory and trench warfare
Further reading
Exercises
II. History (Herbert Klein and Charles Stockley)
1. Historical background of quantitative social science
2. Sources of historical data
3. Historical perspectives on international exchange rates
4. Historical data and demography in Europe and the Americas
Further reading
Exercises
III. Economics (Richard Clarida and Marta Noguer)
1. Learning from economic data
2. Econometric forecasting and the flow of information
3. Two studies of interest rates and monetary policy
Further reading
Exercises
IV. Sociology (Seymour Spilerman and Emanuele Gerratana)
1. Models and theories in sociology
2. Demographic explanations of social disturbances in the 1960s
3. Studying the time series of lynchings in the South
4. Attainment processes in a large organization
Further reading
Exercises
V. Political Science (Charles Cameron)
1. What is political science?
2. The politics of Supreme Court nominations: the critical role of the media environment
3. Modeling strategy in congressional hearings
Further reading
Exercises
VI. Psychology (E. Tory Higgins, Elke Weber, and Heidi Grant)
1. Formulating and testing theories in psychology
2. Some theories in cognitive and social psychology
3. Signal detection theory and models for tradeoffs in decision making
Further reading
Exercises
VII. To Treat or Not to Treat: Causal Inference in the Social Sciences (Jeronimo Cortina)
1. The potential-outcomes model of causation; propensity scores
2. Some statistical tools for causal inference with observational data
3. Migration and Solidarity
Further reading
Exercises
Posted by Andrew at 12:54 AM | Comments (21) | TrackBack
June 30, 2008
Ranking states by the liberalism/conservatism of their voters
Here's a graph of the 50 states (actually, I think Alaska and Hawaii are missing), showing the average economic and social ideology of adults within each state. Each of these is scaled so that negative numbers are liberal and positive are conservative; thus, people in Massachusetts are the most liberal on economic issues and people in Idaho are the most conservative:
West Virginians are on the liberal side economically but are extremely socially conservative, whereas Vermont is about the same as West Virginian on the economic dimension but is the most socially liberal of all the states. Coloradans are economically conservative (on average) but socially moderate (or, perhaps, socially divided; these are averages only).
How do these rankings fit with our usual rankings of states? Here's a plot showing average economic and social ideology for each state, plotted vs. George W. Bush's vote share in 2000:
Democrats and Republicans separately
The next step is to break these voters down into Democrats and Republicans (based on self-reported party identification and following the usual practice among political scientists of throwing the "leaners" into the regular party categories). In the graph below, each state is shown twice: the avg social and economic ideologies of Democrats in the state are shown in blue, the avgs for Republicans in red.
We made these graphs during the primary election season, and one thing we noticed was that South Carolina ("SC") is in the middle of the pack among Democrats and among Republicans, but it's one of the most conservative states overall. My take on this: South Carolina is a strongly Republican state, and the moderates in South Carolina are likely to identify as Republican. This pulls the Republican average to the left (as they includes the moderates) and also pulls the Democratic average to the left (as they are not including so many moderates).
But the big thing we see from the graph immediately above is that Democrats are much more liberal than Republicans on the economic dimension: Democrats in the most conservative states are still much more liberal than Republicans in even the most liberal states. On social issues there is more overlap (although in any given state, the average Republican is more conservative than the average Democrat).
Details on data
David Park and I made these graphs from the Annenberg pre-election survey from 2000 (with its huge sample size), creating indexes based on issue opinions, giving each respondent an economic and social ideology score. We scaled these so that each had a national average of 0 and standard deviation of 0.5. (We used these scales in our Red State, Blue State book, but these particular graphs never made it into the book.)
P.S.
Yes, I know the graphs could be better. We made them a few months ago and haven't organized them into any final form.
P.P.S. More info here.
Posted by Andrew at 12:53 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
June 27, 2008
An economic argument for why TV is full of loud, in-your-face journalists
Ubs writes:
A TV journalist's career success is strongly correlated to how well-known he is to the audience, which in turn is strongly correlated to how much face time he gets. When you watch an interview on TV, if most of what you see are is person being interviewed, you won't remember the journalist so much. If more of your time is devoted to watching and hearing the interviewer talk, he'll be more recognizable next time. The latter probably does not make for a better interview, but it does make for a better chance of the journalist getting more gigs.
Quite likely, some ambitious journalists are well aware of this and they make a concerted effort to maximize their face time in furtherance of their careers. But even if they don't do it on purpose, the result is the same. If some journalists tend to hog the screen just by natural inclination, those hogs are going to become better-known; that will get them more gigs, which will make them even more well-known, driving out the meeker journalists who prefer to let the interviewee do most of the talking.
Ubs continues:
This is why we have a news media full of obnoxious TV journalists who hound their guests with stupid and unanswerable "gotcha" questions. This is why, on the rare occasion that a guest actually tries to explain something with more than one sentence, the interviewer loudly interrupts, "Stop dodging the question, Senator. Give me an answer, yes or no!" This interruption is essential to the interviewer's viability as a journalist. Without it, the camera might stay off him for more than ten precious seconds.
His solution:
With that in mind, I want to make a deal with the journalists: Let's agree that from now on the TV cameras will always be pointed at the guy who isn't talking. I realize that's stupid. Obviously, I'd rather see the facial expression of the person who is saying something. But if that's the price we have to pay to get journalists to shut the hell up and let the guest talk, it would be worth it.
There's gotta be a better way . . .
Posted by Andrew at 2:13 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 25, 2008
"You change your mind so many times, I wonder if you have a mind at all."
Sunshine Hillygus and Todd Shields just came out with a book, "The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns," where they argue that "persuadable voters are not a homogeneous group of unsophisticated and indifferent policy moderates, as has often been believed. Rather, persuadable voters hold diverse policy preferences, making it less clear which candidate offers a better match." Hilligus and Shields point out that many many voters disagree with their party lines on important issues (see also my paper with Delia on this topic; correlations between party identification and individual issue attitudes have increased over the past few decades but are still only about 0.3 on a -1 to 1 scale).
The discussion of campaigns trying to exploit voters' cross-pressure reminds me of Dave Krantz's research on how people process information. Suppose you are evaluating hypotheses A and B, exactly one of which is true (for example, the suspect committed the crime or did not). You can imagine four kinds of evidence: (1) evidence supporting A, (2) evidence making A less likely, (3) evidence supporting B, and (4) evidence making B less likely. Dave et al. did some lab experiments manipulating these conditions, and found that people treat them differently: for example, people react differently if you give them evidence of the form (1)+(2), (1)+(3), or (2)+(4). Hillygus and Shields's work focuses this idea by considering an area--political campaigns--where there is a lot of effort being made on both sides to persuade people. Their recommendation to the news media is to look beyond broadcast ads and speeches, to monitor microtargeted messages and direct mail, to make it more difficult for a political campaign to send different messages to different audiences.
Posted by Andrew at 9:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Obama on rich liberal political donors
Boris forwarded to me this passage from The Audacity of Hope which was noted by Jim Geraghty:
Increasingly, I [Obama] found myself spending time with people of means - law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart,interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment...I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population - that is, the people I'd entered public life to serve.
Geraghty follows up with:
Amen, senator! I think the donors Obama describes are a bunch of arrogant snobs. But what does that make Obama, who listens to them offer their opinion and concludes they have a hard time imaging "that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score"?With Obama, it seems a $2,000 donation will get you his ear, but not his respect.
I don't quite agree with Geraghty here: It seems like he's putting Obama in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. If Obama says he agrees with his donors, he's a liberal elitist. If he disagrees with them, then he's being disrespectful to these innocent donors.
I think Geraghty would be on stronger ground to just take Obama at his word that he "became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray . . ." and make the point that this is an inherent contradiction within liberal politics, that there are templates for failure but not template for success (i.e., "selling out"). Or maybe not; I'm not familiar enough with Geraghty to really know where he's coming from.
Perceptions of red and blue voters
More to the point, as Boris notes, "Obama's quote directly relates to the themes of our Red State, Blue State book: the contradiction between economic and social views at the very top, the blue state lens he sees rich people through, etc. etc." To spell this out in a bit more detail: in rich, Democratic-leaning states such as Illinois, upper-income voters tend to be more economically conservative but more socially liberal than lower-income voters. (In poor, Republican-leaning states, upper-income voters are much more economically conservative than lower-income voters but about the same, on average, on social issues.) So Obama was observing a tension that's particularly relevant in rich, "blue" states.
Posted by Andrew at 12:40 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 20, 2008
Princes and princesses, kings and queens
Lots of stories for little kids have kings and queens, not many seem to have presidents, prime ministers, mayors, etc. I don't fully understand this. I mean, I see that these stories are traditional, or imitate traditional forms, and so it makes sense that you'd have a king or queen rather than a president. But there are lots of other traditional forms of government. You can see some examples in children's literature, but they're clearly exceptions. (For example, the wolves in The Jungle Book have a tribal council, and the animals in Winnie the Pooh don't have any government at all.) I guess what I'm asking is: How did the standard storybook world become codified, the world with a kingdom, a king and a queen living in a castle riding horses etc? Even in the late Middle Ages in Europe when, I suppose, such places really existed, there were lots of other, different, sorts of places nearby. How and when did the storybook kingdom became canonical? Maybe Jenny can answer this question--it seems to fall within her bailiwick.
P.S. More discussion in the comments to Mark Thoma's blog here. My favorite comment is the first one: "If Mr Gelman doesn't like kings and queens in childrens' stories maybe he should write some stories himself." You'd think that a commenter to an economics blog would've heard about the division of labor! I tell stories to kids, but I write for adults.
More to the point, there are lots and lots of stories without kings and queens, from "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" on down. What struck me, though, was how kingdoms are canonical. For example, Sesame Street is filled with original stories--not folktales or anything like that--and by default they are often set in kingdoms.
Posted by Andrew at 9:22 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
June 19, 2008
Income, education, and religion as "background variables" or "treatments"
The discussion here on the climate change attitude mystery reminded me of a funny thing about how we think when we classify people by education, or income, or religion.
The original question was to explain why college-educated Republicans are less likely (compared to non-college-educated Republicans) to believe in human-caused global warming, while, among Democrats, those with college education are more likely to believe in it. To me this was no surprise: college-educated people are more political polarized and are more likely to align their views with their political attitudes.
But many of Tyler Cowen's commenters had a different sort of explanation, along the lines of, Going to college makes Republicans more skeptical of scientific authority but convinces Democrats of these arguments.
Setting aside the specific issue of climate change, one interesting thing here is the way I, in common with most political scientists, think of education (and other variables such as income and religion) as traits, or background variables, or descriptors of people. Thus when we talk about how rich and poor people vote, or more and less educated, or Protestants and Catholics, or whatever, we think of these as different sorts of people. But you can also think of income, or education, or religious attendance, as "treatments" that affect people--for example, if you go to college and share a room with someone of a different ethnic or political group, you might become more tolerant. Or maybe if you are conservative and go to college, you'll be skeptical of what's taught in your physics class (or if you're liberal, maybe you'll be skeptical of what's covered in your econ class).
I don't really have much to add here . . . somehow it seems more reasonable to me to think of these as descriptors than as treatments, but I guess it depends on the person and on what issue is being considered.
Posted by Andrew at 12:17 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 18, 2008
VP
A reporter asked me, "Do people run for VP, who in the past, how, has it worked or failed?"
My reply: I haven't looked at this recently, but I recall when studying election forecasting 15 years ago, that the estimated effect of VP choice was something like +3 percentage points in the VP's home state, so nothing huge.
What about national effects? In 1988, I recall that polls found that Bush alone (in a Bush vs. Dukakis matchup) did about 2 points better than Bush-Quayle vs. Dukakis-Bentsen. But this is probably an upper bound:
- Quayle was a horrible candidate
- And probably, when it came down to the voting booth, it's my guess that less than 2% of people decided not to vote for Bush on the basis of Quayle.
So probably the biggest effect of VP is that this is a person who's likely to become president. (I don't have the stats on this, but the total probability must be pretty high.) If I were choosing, I'd pick the person I'd most like as a future president and probably not worry so much about electoral calculations, fun though they are to think about.
Posted by Andrew at 12:06 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 16, 2008
"Mean reversion" and "random walk" models of campaign effects
Seeing Nate's discussion here on random walks, bounces, and trends, I was reminded of a paper that Joe Bafumi, David Park, and I wrote a few years ago.
Basically, general election opinion polls can be modeled well with a "mean reversion" model, in which the outcome is predictable and the polls will eventually converge to this predictable outcome. But journalists and observers tend to implicitly assume a "random walk" model which starts at the current position of the polls and then moves from there. Here's the paper, here's the abstract:
Scholars disagree over the extent to which presidential campaigns activate predispositions in voters or create vote preferences that could not be predicted. When campaign related information flows activate predispositions, election results are largely predetermined given balanced resources. They can be accurately forecast well before a campaign has run its course. Alternatively, campaigns may change vote outcomes beyond forcing predispositions to some equilibrium level. We find most evidence for the former: opinion poll data are consistent with Presidential campaigns activating predispositions, with fundamental variables increasing in importance as a presidential election draws near.
And here is a key graph showing votes becoming more predictable during the election campaign:
Finally, here's my article with Gary from 1993, "Why are American Presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable?" This article gives lots of evidence supporting the idea that people ultimately decide how to vote based on their enlightened preferences.
Posted by Andrew at 8:55 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 13, 2008
"But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable"
David Runciman writes,
Followed day by day, the race for the Democratic nomination has been the most exciting election in living memory. But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable. All the twists and turns have been a function of the somewhat random sequencing of different state primaries, which taken individually have invariably conformed to type, with Obama winning where he was always likely to win (caucus states, among college-educated and black voters, in the cities), and Clinton winning where she was likely to win (big states with secret ballots, among less well-educated whites and Hispanics, in rural areas).
"Predictable in retrospect"?? This seems like a contradiction. I agree with Runciman that there are patterns in the election results, but I'd only call it "predictable" if you actually predict it ahead of time, which I certainly didn't! He continues:
The salient fact about this campaign is that demography trumps everything: people have been voting in fixed patterns set by age, race, gender, income and educational level . . .
Is that really true? My impression is that there are big differences between states, after controlling for demographics. See the New York Times animation here.
Finally, Runciman writes,
One of the amazing things about the business of American politics is that its polling industry is so primitive. . . . The recent New York Times poll that gave Obama a 12 per cent lead was based on interviews with just 283 people. For a country the size of the United States, this is the equivalent to stopping a few people at random in the street, or throwing darts at a board.
Hmmm . . . I wonder why they don't just throw darts at a board, then? This would save them lots of money! For n=283, sqrt(p(1-p)/n)=.03, so +/- 2 standard errors is +/- 6 percentage points in the vote share for one candidate, or +/- 12 percentage points in the vote differential between two candidates.
Is this as good as a "dartboard" (i.e., an estimate based on prior information)? Maybe. It depends how good the dartboard is. The best solution is probably a weighted average of the "dartboard" and the poll, maybe weighting the dartboard more than the poll if the sample size is that small. But the size of the U.S. is not the relevant issue here. (The relevant formula is "1/n - 1/N.")
The WSJ and the LRB; Yoo and Runciman
David Runciman teaches the history of political thought at Cambridge University. I'm surprised he didn't walk down the hall and show his article to one of his political science colleagues there--I assume there are some researchers in American politics and public opinion he could talk with. This reminds me of John Yoo's Wall Street Journal article which I discussed earlier. There's no way that these authors intend to make mistakes; apparently, they don't try a lot of fact checking. This seems funny to me--if I were writing for a such a large audience, I'd be petrified of making a mistake--but I guess that journalistic writing is a different world, even when done by academics.
P.S. I sent David Runciman an email asking for claification. If anyone here knows him (perhaps some U.K. political scientists read this blog) and could get him to explain what he was trying to say, I'd appreciate it.
Posted by Andrew at 3:09 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 10, 2008
When corrections fail: the persistence of political misperceptions
After seeing my note on education, partisanship, and views on climate change, Jason Reifler sent me this paper he wrote with Brendan Nyhan, which begins:
An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We [Nyhan and Reifler] conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire” effect in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.
That's scary stuff!
P.S. Nice graphs. Tables 1-4 could be made into graphs too (by adapting coefplot()), but, still, the displays are pretty good.
Posted by Andrew at 12:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 9, 2008
More on coalition dynamics
Catherine Farry writes,
I'm late to the party on this one, but as I was catching up on my blog reading I came across your 18 April post ("Coalition Dynamics") and was a bit surprised to see that nobody spoke up in the comments about the actual political issue (as opposed to the model) addressed in the paper you criticize.
I have no connection whatsoever to the authors of the paper but I have to say that I thought you were a bit too quick to criticize both their focus on "the number of countries in the European Union" and their "attempts to imply that their work is relevant to actual politics". I think you have missed the point of the paper, which to me at least does not appear at all to be about "Coalition Dynamics" (let alone whether "all voters are equal"), but rather about the impact of size on efficiency in group decisionmaking. Size, in the European Commission, is directly determined by the number of countries in the European Union. Moreover, the abstract makes clear that the authors are interested in this question because it has relevance for the debate (quite relevant, political, and current) about the size of the European Commission in the wake of the expansion of the European Union from 15 to 25 members (with possibly more to come).To make my case, I have resorted to copying and pasting from the Wikipedia entry on the European Commision since it's succinct and easy to find:
"There is one Commissioner per member state, however Commissioners are bound to represent the interests of the EU as a whole rather than their home state.... The proposed Lisbon Treaty, the details of which were agreed in June 2007... proposed a number of changes, notably the number of Commissioners would be reduced; from 2014 only two out of three member-states would have the right to representation. The representation would be rotated equally between all states and no state would have more than two in any single Commission."
My reply: There's nothing in the Klimek et al. paper (to which I link in my earlier blog entry) giving any evidence that there's anything special about a cabinet size of 20. Their graphs show various bad things being positively correlated with cabinet size, but they could've just as well drawn a cutoff at cabinets of size 10 or 30. Their model is mathematically pretty but as far as I can tell has no relevance to the political issues that you discuss.
Finally, I do think that equal representation for countries is a bad idea. I don't see why a country of 5 million should have any more representation than a province of 5 million within a larger country. But this last bit is really a separate issue from my statistical criticisms, which stand even if you would like countries to be equally represented.
Posted by Andrew at 1:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 6, 2008
Uggghhh! More on people overinterpreting opinion polls, shading inevitably into a into a sociological discussion
Um . . . no, "if the general election were held today" is not a particularly interesting question. The polls can move a lot in 5 months. Remember President Dukakis? See here (from our 1993 paper):
The triangles on the right side of each plot are the actual election outcomes, and the little arrows on each graph show the dates of the Democratic and Republican conventions in each year. As you can see, polls this early are in many cases not even close to the outcome.
I'm sure that Dr. Tyson means well, and I'm a big fan of Nova, but, really, he should talk with some political scientists before glibly writing about politics and concluding, "The political analysts need to take it from here." We've taken it pretty far already, dude! Tyson has every right to speculate about politics--I wouldn't claim that you need some sort of political science affiliation as a "union card" to do political science research--but it would make sense to ask around a bit, right? I mean, if a couple of political scientists wrote a paper on astrophysics in a journal called Mathematical and Computer Modeling . . . well, before trumpeting it in the New York Times I'd first go up to the 10th floor and ask my friend David, the astronomer, whether it's for real.
Posted by Andrew at 3:04 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
June 5, 2008
Damn this is cool
Chris Zorn writes, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/politics/20080603_MARGINS_GRAPHIC/margins.swf
He's clearly a man of few words. I'll give it as a link. You can play with it, click on things, see all sorts of fun stuff.
What I'd really like to do is pipe this through a hierarchical model to smooth out the inevitable survey fluctuations. Also, it would be good to subtract off main effects. For example, in the graph below, are well-educated Arkansans particularly strong Clinton supporters, or is this just a combination of Arkansas being a Clinton state and small-sample fluctuation?
Anyway, I'm not complainin, just suggesting even more things that could be done with these data and this software. The first thing to do is to run it with the 2000 and 2004 exit polls. This app would go great with our Red State, Blue State book.
Posted by Andrew at 12:06 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 3, 2008
Non-strategic behavior of political parties when deciding when incumbents should retire
One thing I learned in econ class in 11th grade was that government policy should be counter-cyclical (spending more in recessions and cutting back in boom times), but that there’s a lot of pressure to be pro-cyclical, which will tend to exacerbate business cycles. (Except I suppose they didn’t say “exacerbate” in 11th grade.) At a personal level, too, it’s natural to spend more when we have more and cut back when we aren’t doing so well. Every now and then you hear about a “rainy day fund” but my general impression is that these are never big enough to counter the business cycle.
Political parties seem to apply a similar pro-cyclical behavior in their congressional election campaigns. Consider 2008. . .
It’s expected to be a good year for the Democrats, and so now should be the time for them to make some investments in new, young candidates. They should encourage lots of their incumbents to retire, because in 2008, they can win a lot of these districts without needing the incumbency advantage (estimated to be about 10% of the vote, i.e., enough to take you from 50% to 60%). Conversely, this is the time for the Republican Party to hold on to what it has, and to keep all their incumbents in, trying to hold out until 2010 when the pendulum might swing back in their favor. But we don’t see that—actually, something like 30 Republican House members are retiring this year. Republicans retiring, Democrats sticking around—that’s a recipe for big Democratic gains this year. But then in 2010, or 2014, or whatever year it is when the Democrats get wiped out—then a bunch of their incumbents will probably retire, and boy will the Democrats wished they had put in younger incumbents back in 2008 when they had a chance!
One of the difficulties here is that I’m talking about the long-term goals of the parties, but “the parties” are, to a large extent, simply their officeholders. And congressmembers’ incentives can be much different from those of the party as a whole. In particular, it makes sense that an incumbent congressmember will want to quit in a year when he or she would be facing a tough reelection battle, and when the prize for winning is to remain in the minority. Conversely, why step down when you’re facing an easy reelection and the prospect of some juicy committee assignments? So the individual officeholders have an incentive for pro-cyclical behavior, even if it harms their party’s long-term interest.
Beyond the benefits or lack thereof to the individual parties, pro-cyclical behavior would seem to increase the size of political changes, making the swings in congressional representation larger than would be expected simply based on swings in public opinion. Actually, many political scientists would consider this a good thing (an increased “swing ratio”); my point here is that some of this swing is “endogenous” in the sense of arising from pro-cyclical decisions of individual congressmembers deciding whether to run for reelection. It would be interesting to see if this happens with state legislatures as well.
We also see this in the Senate. For example, 84-year-old Frank Lautenberg is running for reelection in New Jersey. This is a Democratic year when the Democrats might do well with just about anybody. (Or maybe not; I don’t really follow New Jersey politics and am just extrapolating from national polls.) In 6 years, they’re going to need to find someone new, and at that point they might wish they had an incumbent already in the slot.
Posted by Andrew at 12:37 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 2, 2008
Men, women, and politics
Via Craig Newmark, I saw a column by John Lott summarizing his 1999 paper with Lawrence Kenny, "Did women's suffrage change the size and scope of government?" Lott and Kenny conclude Yes, by comparing the spending and revenue patterns of state governments before and after women were allowed to vote. I haven't looked at the analysis carefully and would need a little more convincing that it's not just a story of coinciding time trends (they have a little bit of leverage because women were given the vote sooner in some states than others), but the story is plausible, at least from the perspective of voting patterns nowadays.
On the other hand . . .
poll data appear to show that the gender gap in voting between men and women is relatively recent--if anything, women used to vote more Republican than men did--so it's not clear if the effect Lott seems to be finding is occurring from women actually voting for conservative candidates or from some indirect effect of legislators trying to adapt to what they perceive as the preferences of women.
Different views of what is authoritative
I hadn't heard of Lott's journal article but it seems to be well-known, with over 100 citations on Google scholar. I'm actually surprised Lott didn't mention it in his Fox News column, instead only linking to his recent book. I guess that indicates the difference between an academic reader such as myself who is generally more persuaded by peer-reviewed articles (although not always!) rather than general readers who might feel that a book is more authoritative.
Beware the status-quo bias
Finally, I have a couple of comments on Lott's column. He writes, "it seems that the policies adopted are much more important than who puts them into action, and the evidence indicates that women have long gotten their way" regarding government spending. But I don't see how he can make this claim. Accepting his claim that women's suffrage has increased spending, this is still compared to an all-male electorate. This isn't the same as women "having long gotten their way." A more reasonable conclusion is that outcomes are somewhere in between what women want and what men want. In fact, before 1980, men turned out to vote at a higher rate than women did, and so it would be more natural to assume that outcomes were closer to men's preferences than women's. I think Lott is making a sort of status-quo bias here and perceiving any change from all-male voting as women "getting their way."
Finally, I think that numerical representation is a real issue. This is not a matter of discrimination, but just the simple fact that certain groups such as women are underrepresented in public office relative to their population. Currently, women are 16% of congressmembers and 24% of state legislators, so they still have a ways to go before they catch up.
P.S. Lott also writes, "without the women's vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004." Poll data show a pretty close race in 1996 among men (in the Gallup poll, Clinton led Dole by 1% among men); it's possible that with an electoral vote calculation, Dole was the clear winner in that group, but my guess is that polling uncertainty is large enough that we can't really know how the men's vote would've gone in that year.
P.P.S. To summarize: this is an interesting topic. I'd like to hear from Adam Berinksy and other experts on early-20th-century public opinion: what are their thoughts on the political opinions and voting patterns of men and women back then, and how do they interpret the fact that increases in government spending coincided with women's suffrage?
Posted by Andrew at 9:16 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 1, 2008
The Playing Field Shifts: Predicting the Seats-Votes Curve in the 2008 U.S. House Election
Here's the new paper by John Kastellec, Jamie Chander, and myself, and here's the abstract:
This paper predicts the seats-votes curve for the 2008 U.S House elections. We document how the electoral playing field has shifted from a Republican advantage between 1996 and 2004 to a Democratic tilt today. Due to the shift in incumbency advantage from the Republicans to the Democrats, compounded by a greater number of retirements among Republican members, we show that the Democrats now enjoy a partisan bias, and can expect to win more seats than votes for the first time since 1992. While this bias is not as large as the advantage the Republicans held in 2006, it is likely to help the Democrats win more seats than votes and thus expand their majority.
Here are our estimated seats-votes curves for 2006 and 2008:
As you can see, there used to be a strong Republican bias; now we estimate a Democratic bias. The change comes from the incumbency advantage (which we estimate to be about 8%, on average), which tends to lock in party control except in big swing years such as 1994 and 2006.
And here are some possibilities for 2008 in historical perspective:
The paper is a sequel to this article about the 2006 election.
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May 31, 2008
Shanto Iyengar's argument in favor of online experiments
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May 29, 2008
It's all about Missouri
This is funny. Ubs takes us from "Since 1916, no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia" to "No Democrat has won the White House without winning Missouri since 1824."
The sad thing is that I've seen reputable social scientists do analyses with data over several decades including "state effects," i.e., coefficients for states that don't vary over time. Going back to 1916 is sillier than most, but not all, such things I've seen. The trouble is that people have been brainwashed into thinking that something called "fixed effects" solves all their problems, so they turn their brains off.
Beyond this, predicting the winner doesn't make much sense, given that you're counting all the elections that have been essentially tied; see point 5 here.
Posted by Andrew at 2:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 28, 2008
Forecasting House seats from generic congressional polls
Here's Joe Bafumi's graph predicting House vote shares from pre-election polls in midterm elections:
(See here for the big version of the graph.)
I imagine there's something similar going on in presidential years.
Posted by Andrew at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2008
Jonathan Rodden's graphs of population density and Democratic vote
Commenting on our comparison of 1896 and 2000, Jonathan Rodden sent in this graph of Democratic vote share vs. population density in congressional districts from 1952-1996:
As Jonathan noted, the pattern of high-density areas voting strongly Democratic is relatively new. (But I don't buy the way his lines curve up on the left; I suspect that's an unfortunate artifact of using quadratic fits rather than something like lowess or spline.) Also there seems to be some weird discretization going on in the population densities for the early years in his data.
P.S. I don't like that the graphs go below 0 and above 1, but that's probably a Stata default. I don't hold it against Jonathan--after all, he made a graph for me for free--but I do think that better defaults are possible.
Posted by Andrew at 3:14 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
May 23, 2008
Voting patterns of Jews and other religious groups
John Sides has a graph showing that, for the past twenty years, Jews have been giving 70-80% of their votes to Democratic presidential candidates. From our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book, here are some data going back to 1968 (from the National Election Study):
Perhaps also of interest is how this relates to religious attendance. More frequent attenders are more likely to vote Republican, but the pattern varies by denomination. Here's what was happening in 2004 (as estimated from the Annenberg pre-election survey):
The graph for 2000 looks similar except that the line for Jews was flat in that year.
Why care about Jewish voters?
The underlying question, though, is why should we care about a voting bloc that represents only 2% of the population (and even if Jews turn out at a 50% higher rate than others, that would still be only 3% of the voters), most of whom are in non-battleground states such as New York, California, and New Jersey? Even in Florida, Jews are less than 4% of the population. I think a lot of this has to be about campaign contributions and news media influence. But, if so, the relevant questions have to do with intensity of opinions among elite Jews rather than aggregates.
P.S. This sort of concern is not restricted to Jews, of course. Different minority groups exercise political power in different ways. I just thought it was worth pointing out that this isn't a pure public opinion issue but rather something with more indirect pathways.
Posted by Andrew at 3:20 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 19, 2008
Planned missingness with multiple imputation: enabling the use of exit polls to reduce measurement error in surveys
Marco Morales sent me this paper of his with Rene Bautista:
Exit polls are seldom used for voting behavior research despite the advantages they have compared to pre and post-election surveys. Exit polls reduce potential biases and measurement errors on reported vote choice and other political attitudes related to the time in which measurements are taken. This is the result of collecting information from actual voters only minutes after the vote has been cast. Among the main reasons why exit polls are not frequently used by scholars it is the time constraints that must be placed on the interviews, i.e., short questionnaires, severely limiting the amount of information obtained from each respondent. This paper advances a combination of an appropriate data collection design along with adequate statistical techniques to allow exit polls to overcome such a restriction without jeopardizing data quality. This mechanism implies the use of Planned Missingness designs and Multiple Imputation techniques. The potential advantages of this design applied to voting behavior research are illustrated empirically with data from the 2006 Mexican election.
This sounds cool. I'd only add that all surveys are "planned missingness." That's what makes it a survey rather than a census. Also I want to take a look at their data and see if their results are consistent with what we found in our analysis of the 2006 Mexican presidential election.
(I'd also make some comments on the Tables, but I think you know what I'd say, so I won't say it, and I'd say that in Figure 3 they should remove the little numbers on the lines and just label the y-axis, and I'd say that in Figure 4 they should remove that second decimal place and compress the scale of the axes and give full names or party labels rather than abbreviations on top of the plots, and on figure 5 I'd recommend just displaying "positive minus negative" rather than separately showing both (and getting rid of those silly vertical lines at the ends of the error bars, and getting rid of the confusing labels at -0.3 and +0.3 that appear in part of the graph but not all of it), but that would be a distraction from the important contributions of the article, so I won't waste your time on that sort of picky comment, instead simply appreciating the effort that did go into this paper.)
Posted by Andrew at 10:08 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 15, 2008
Solving the climate change attitude mystery
Brandon Keim writes,
Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now. . . . The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.That strikes me [Keim] as deeply weird. I don't even have a snarky quip, much less an explanation.
This does seem a bit weird: you might think that college grads are more likely to go with the scientific consensus on global warming, or you might think that college grads would be more skeptical, but it seems funny that it would go one way for Democrats and the other for Republicans.
Things become clearer when I looked at the graph (which was thoughtfully presented next to Keim's article):
Among college grads, there is a big partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. Among non-graduates, the differences are smaller. This is completely consistent with research that shows that people with more education are on average more politically polarized (see, for example, figure 9a of my paper with Delia). Basically, higher educated Democrats are more partisan Democrats, and higher educated Republicans are more partisan Republicans. On average, educated people are more tuned in to politics and more likely to align their views with their political attitudes.
From this perspective, it's really not about the scientific community at all, it's just a special case of the general phenomenon of elites being more politically polarized (a phenomenon that we discuss in chapter 8 of our forthcoming book, and which is related to divisions between red and blue states).
P.S. I followed the link from Andrew Sullivan. And here's the detailed Pew report (and, remember, Pew gives out raw data!).
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May 10, 2008
Yeah, but what about Mr. Pibb?
You never know what you'll find in the Dining and Wine section nowadays.
Posted by Andrew at 10:39 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Partisans returning to the fold
John Sides posts these useful graphs:
As John writes, "The party loyalty of Democrats has been increasing over time and has essentially hovered at 90% since 1992. (And Republicans are similarly loyal to the Republican nominee.)" Here's the story from the 2000 election:
To which I'd also add this (from this paper with Joe Bafumi and David Park):
This shows the improvement in prediction given party ID and also demographics and political ideology.
The short story: voters are more predictable than they themselves realize.
P.S. John's graphs are fine, but the y-axis shouldn't go below 0 or above 100%.
Posted by Andrew at 9:41 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 9, 2008
Campaign contributions and policies
Michael Franc looked at Federal Election Commission data on campaign contributions and found some interesting things:
Through May 1, the Democratic presidential field has suctioned up a cool $5.7 million from the more than 4,000 donors who list their occupation as “CEO.” The Republicans’ take was only $2.3 million. Chief financial officers, general counsels, directors, and chief information officers also break the Democrats’ way by more than two-to-one margins. . . .
I'm not actually sure where these numbers come from. When I queried the FEC database (looking up "ceo" from 01/01/2008 to 05/01/2008), the total contributions (not just for presidential candidates) were only $45,124. So I must be doing something wrong here in my query. In any case, I guess it makes sense that most of the contributions have gone to Democrats so far, since (a) the Democratic primary has been much more competitive than the Republican, and (b) the Democrats are favored to win this year.
Franc continues:
In this upside-down campaign season when populist GOP campaigners like John McCain and Mike Huckabee surprised the pundits with their primary victories or, in the case of Ron Paul, their fundraising prowess, it almost makes sense that the party of the country club set has been winning the fundraising race among the common man. . . . This trend extends to the saloons, where the Democrats carry the bartenders and the Republicans the waitresses. . .
The bit about the bartenders and waitresses caught my eye. But when I looked it up, I found no contributions from either group this year. Going to the entire database, I did find some "waitress" contributions between 1998 and 2005, but they were mostly to Democrats. Also a few bartender contributions since 1998, again mostly to Democrats. So I'm not really sure about that. I emailed Franc to ask for his data source so I hope to learn more.
Setting aside the data difficulties, I think Franc makes an important point in the conclusion of his article:
National political parties, after all, reflect their supporters, and party leaders traditionally feel a responsibility to cater to their supporters’ whims. A party that receives overwhelming support from elite Wall Street investment firms, corporate bigwigs, and highly educated professionals may find it exceedingly difficult to raise their taxes or impose draconian new Big Government regulations on them. Similarly, a party that is losing well-educated suburban professionals and gaining support from blue-collar workers may find it more difficult to support free trade agreements and embrace globalization.Washington Democrats have already adapted their Big Government instincts to this new reality. They have designed government guarantees, subsidies or handouts to address the insecurities of middle- and upper-income American families. Think of the new subsidies proposed on Capitol Hill for higher education, more generous flood insurance for vacation homes, bailouts for homeowners with mortgages as high as $730,000 and welfare-style health coverage for kids in middle-income families, and you get the idea.
Their Republican counterparts, meanwhile, have struggled over how best to sell the benefits of limited government, lower taxes, and free markets to the elites who used to love them or their new, more populist constituent base. Addressing this new reality may be the most important challenge both major parties face in the months and years ahead.
I wonder, though, if he's confusing relative with absolute numbers. Even if the Republicans are doing better with waitresses etc. than they used to, they're still getting a lot more money from business. So, I agree with Franc about the tension within the Democratic and Republican parties, but I suspect that, to the extent that both parties are influenced by their contributors, they'll both be pulled in a pro-business direction.
Also, it's not clear that big business will always support free trade. As Thomas Ferguson reminded us, it was Franklin Roosevelt who implemented a free trade policy in the 1930s, during a period when the Democrats were supported by labor and the Republicans were supported by much (although not all) of big business. Ferguson discusses the idea that different industries have different policy goals.
Posted by Andrew at 9:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 3, 2008
Motivations for political contributions
I came across this paper by Sanford Gordon, Catherine Hafer, and Dimitri Landa, who write:
Do individuals give political contributions simply because they derive an expressive or other consumption benefit from doing so? Or are they attempting to influence policy outcomes? If the consumption view is correct, then political donations are just another means by which citizens participate in the political process (unequal to be sure), and need not imply improper or undemocratic influence. In contrast, donation decisions that are driven by an investment motivation, especially when they are made on behalf of small but economically powerful minority interests, naturally raise concerns about the possibility of an undemocratic exchange of policy for dollars.We [Gordon et al.] propose a strategy to distinguish investment and consumption motives for political contributions by examining the behavior of individual corporate executives. If executives expect contributions to yield policies beneficial to company interests, those whose compensation varies directly with corporate earnings should contribute more than those whose compensation comes largely from salary alone. We find a robust relationship between giving and the sensitivity of pay to company performance, and show that the intensity of this relationship varies across groups of executives in ways that are consistent with instrumental giving but not with alternative, taste-based, accounts. Together with earlier findings, our results suggest that contributions are often best understood as purchases of "good will" whose returns, while positive in expectation, are contingent and rare.
The empirical part of the paper looks cool--I have no experience looking at this sort of data and so can't really say anything beyond "it's cool." (Well, I will say that I'd like to see a scatterplot to make it clear at a glance what their data are saying.) But I do have some thoughts on the general framework. They consider political contributions as "consumption" or "investment"--which, as far as I know, follows the mainstream of the discipline, but I have a problem with this approach.
I just don't really see the clear distinction between "consumption" and "investment" in this context.
If someone is contributing from an "expressive or other consumption benefit," presumably this person is giving to the candidate whose policies he or she favors. (Perhaps there are some people who give to the other side for reputational reasons, for example an oil company executive who happens to be a Democrat might give to a Republican so he won't stand out in the crowd, or a college professor might donate to Obama to fit in, even if he's actually a McCain supporter. Or maybe it could go the other way too, that someone would donate $20 to the other side just to get a reputation for being unorthodox. But I imagine this sort of thing represents only a very tiny minority of contributions.) Conversely, someone who's donating as an investment probably thinks that his or her candidate is good for the country as a whole. As the authors note, the translation of unequal financial resources to unequal political resources is a potential distortion of the democratic process--I just don't understand this distinction, especially in light of the fact that voting and small-dollar political contributions are rational to the extent that the voter or contributor believes that his or her preferred candidate will benefit the general good.
Posted by Andrew at 9:31 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 2, 2008
Election as trial by combat?
The 2008 Democratic primary brings to mind a similar contest in 1972, where an experienced champion faced an exciting young challenger. I'm speaking, of course, of the world chess championship, where Bobby Fischer, down 2 games to zero, destroyed Boris Spassky and unequivocally established himself as the best player in the world.
The Clinton-Obama contest has led to confusion: Obama has basically won the election in the sense of being on track to get more than half of the delegates. In that case, how can Hillary Clinton retain the support of 40% of Democrats nationwide? And how did she manage to win Pennsylvania?
I think these questions represent a misunderstanding. The campaign has been viewed as a chess match or sporting contest in which Obama and Clinton, with their similar policy agendas, are viewed as competing on electability, with the idea being that candidates battle it out in the sequence of state primaries. The trouble with this story is that, first, it's hard to know about the candidates' relative electability (I'd actually argue that there isn't much difference in any case) and, second, voters do differ on which candidate they prefer.
After the World Championship, there weren't too many people around who thought Spassky was the better player. After an election, though, the supporters of the losing candidate don't suddenly decide they made a mistake. Even after Obama wins, Clinton's supporters are still allowed to prefer her.
P.S. I'm not saying that I predicted the outcomes in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, etc., or even that they were predictable. Rather, I'm saying that in light of what happened, the Pennsylvania vote shouldn't seem like a surprise, or something that needs additional explanation (Obama failing to connect with white voters, or whatever).
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May 1, 2008
Pretty polling plots
John Sides presents some data backing up the standard political science view that news blips are not so important in determining election outcomes in two-candidate races.
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Through the looking glass
Ubs links to a Wall Street Journal column by John Yoo on problems with the Democrats' presidential nominating procedure. Before going into the details of how Yoo makes a botch of election history, Ubs writes, "I'm not accusing Yoo of being ignorant of history. I know he's a well-educated man, and his words in this column strongly suggest he knows exactly what he's talking about. In spite of that, he somehow manages to turn history upside-down so that it seems to mean exactly the opposite. How one does that, other than out of ignorance, I don't know. Outright deceit? A lawyerly disregard for anything but advocacy? I'm definitely accusing him of something, I'm just not sure what."
My take on this is slightly different: I'm guessing that Yoo is like a lot of people who, once they take a side on an issue, quickly slip toward the assumption that all the facts automatically support their position. As a statistician, I'd like to think I'm particularly aware of the general issue of discordant evidence. (To take Yoo's example, just because a particular nominating system might be bad, you don't have to think that it's bad in all cases--this is what seems to have led him astray in his discussion of the 1824 election, as Ubs discusses in detail.) In contrast, a lawyer may be trained more to brush aside or not even notice details that contradict his main story. Perhaps this is even more true of a lawyer such as Yoo who is famous for writing opinions that are kept secret.
The unwillingness to accept discordant evidence is not unique to lawyers, of course. Hal Stern once telling me about how, in the classic book on racetrack betting, Dr. Z's examples were set up so his system always won. As Hal pointed out, no system will win all the time--all that's required is that it beat the track's 18% edge or whatever--but in a narrative it's disturbing to see counterexamples (unless they're clearly swallowed up into an "it's all right at the end" narrative).
Anyway, that's just a longwinded way of saying that I don't think Yoo was necessarily being deceptive or malicious here. First, I think he probably is somewhat ignorant of the details of elections from the early 1800s (after all, so am I, and I'm a political science professor specializing in American politics); second, he can be falling into the unfortunate but common habit of just assuming that his argument, if correct, must hold in 100% of cases.
But, why?
The more interesting question to me, though, is something that Ubs doesn't ask, which is why did Yoo write this Wall Street Journal column at all? With all his notoriety, wouldn't he be better off keeping his head down rather than writing partisan articles that bring his name further to attention? After all, he's not an expert on elections (at least, I can't find any research by him on the topic), so presumably he could've recommended that someone else write that article. Why would he stick his head up like this and make himself a target?
Here my theory is that Yoo has fully gone through the mirror at this point and has emerged as a political activist. As an academic researcher, you have to be careful of what you say, lest it affect the reputation of your scholarly efforts. Thus the endless qualifications that I and others resort to in all our published work.
To elaborate further: I'm not taking about mistakes. Researchers of all levels of ability make mistakes. Yoo's example seems different--the issue is not so much that he made some errors in his column, but that he stuck his neck out by writing a column on a topic where he's not an expert, and then made the mistakes. It just seems so unnecessary to me.
But, and here the metaphor of the "looking glass" comes in: All of us who are applied researchers have mirror images in the public sphere, where our work--or distorted versions of our work--become more widely known. Many of us want to publicize our work--to write Wall Street Journal op-eds, as it were--partly just to make our work more widely known, partly to present our work the way we think it should be presented, and partly to position ourselves to be more likely to promote our future work. But in doing that we have to protect our research reputations. At some point, though, the publicity or advocacy becomes the point, rather than the research itself. For Yoo, perhaps his reputation as a researcher is so politicized at this point that there's nothing left to protect. At this point, he might as well go for it and develop a name for himself as a freelance editorial-page writer?
As a researcher, I envy newspaper columnists' opportunity to have their writings immediately read by millions of people. At the same time, I assume they envy my ability to spend as much time on in-depth research projects as I would like. On the occasions that I try to write something for a broad readership, I'm careful to protect my viability (as Bill Clinton might say) as a researcher. I wonder if Yoo has decided that the choice has already been made for him.
Also
The other question, I suppose, is why the Wall Street Journal would publish this. It makes sense for them to publish Yoo's opinions on constitutional law (for example, Terrorists Have No Geneva Rights), but . . . his thoughts on the 1824 election?? Perhaps Yoo's notoriety generates buzz and sells papers? (After all, Ubs and then I commented on his column, which we might not have done had it been written by an equally distinguished but less controversial law professor.) Then again, Meet the Press had Doris Kearns Goodwin on as an expert on plagiarism, so maybe the real issue is that, once someone's connected, they tend to stay connected.
Posted by Andrew at 12:26 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 29, 2008
Congestion pricing
OK, here's a blind item . . . I was talking with a colleague about a certain academic journal, traditionally ranked #2 in a social science field that is associated with government and politics . . . my colleague told me that said journal had recently converted to electronic submissions and that the journal's editors, expressing concern about the increasing volumne of submissions, had decided to slow things down by deliberately sitting on each submission for a month. So, you send them a paper, they wait a month, then they send to reviewers. Reviewers send in their report, the editors wait a month, then they send you the report. You send in your revision, they wait a month, then they send back to reviewers. And so forth.
To me, this seems self-defeating--it would take me more trouble to keep track of the one-month delays than to just review the damn paper. Also, this is the first time I heard of a journal discouraging submissions. My impression is that even the top journals--and their #2 counterparts--find top-quality submissions to be few and far between. On the other hand, they must really be overwhelmed by the workload if they feel the need to resort to such wacky tactics.
Any suggestions? My thought would be to split the journal into 3 or 4 parts with separate editorial staffs for each.
P.S. I've been told that charging $ for submissions (as is done in economics) is a nonstarter--a lot of the people who might submit articles don't make a lot of money and can't easily spare a nonrefundable $50 or whatever to submit.
Posted by Andrew at 12:42 AM | Comments (23) | TrackBack
April 26, 2008
What would Rosenstone say?
I can understand Paul Krugman's frustration over the level of discourse in the Democratic primary election campaign, but I don't know of any evidence to support the implicit claim in his last sentence: "unless Democrats can get past this self-inflicted state of confusion, there’s a very good chance that they’ll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory this fall." I pretty much take the general view of political scientists that general election outcomes are pretty much determined by fundamentals--that the voters will get the information needed to realize roughly where Obama (or Clinton) and McCain stand on the key issues and vote accordingly. (See here and here for our evidence, including the picture below.)
Posted by Andrew at 3:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 25, 2008
70,000 Assyrians
One of my favorite instances of numeracy in literature is William Saroyan's story, "70,000 Assyrians," which I read in the collection, Bedside Tales. The story is typical charming early-Saroyan: it starts out with him down-and-out, waiting on line for a cheap haircut, then he converses with the barber, asking if he, like Saroyan, is Armenian. No, he replies, he's Assyrian. Saroyan says how sad it is that the Assyrians, like the Armenians, no longer have their own country, but that they can hope for better. The barber says, sadly, that the Assyrians cannot even hope, because they have been so depleted, there are only 70,000 of them left in the world.
This is the numeracy: 70,000 is a large number, a huge number of people. It's crowds and crowds and crowds--enough for an entire society, and then some. But not enough for a country, or not enough in a hostile part of the world where other people are busy trying to wipe you out. The idea that 70,000 is a lot, but not enough--that's numeracy. People can be numerate with dollars--for example, $70,000 is a lot of money but it can't buy you a nice apartment in Manhattan--but it's my impression and others' that people have more difficulty with other sorts of large numbers. That's why this Saroyan story made an impression on me.
Posted by Andrew at 12:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 24, 2008
The opiate of the elites
In case you didn't see our graph-laden Vox EU article, here it is. The Obama reference is already a bit stale but the content is still fresh, I hope . . .
Barack Obama attracted attention recently by describing small-town Americans who were “bitter” at economic prospects who “cling to guns or religion’’ in frustration. This statement, made during the height of the Democratic nomination battle, has received a lot of attention, but it represents a common view. For example, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia wrote, “Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of ‘God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag’ while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet.’’ And this perspective is not limited to Democrats. For example, conservative columnist David Brooks associates political preference with cultural values that are modern and upscale (“sun-dried tomato concoctions”) or more traditional (“meatloaf platters”).All these claims fit generally into the idea of religion as the opiate of the masses, the idea that social issues distract lower-income voters from their natural economic interests. But there is an opposite view, associated with political scientist Ronald Ingelhart, of post-materialism—the idea that, as people and societies get richer, their concerns shift from mundane bread-and-butter issues to cultural and spiritual concerns.
Which story better describes how Americans vote? Who are the values voters? Are they the poor (as implied by the “opiate of the masses’’ storyline) or the rich (as would be predicted by “post-materialism”)?
Case studies are interesting but do not resolve the question. Thomas Frank described how Kansas is full of socially conservative Republicans at all income levels. But then there is south Texas, whose low-income Latinos are socially conservative on many issues but vote for Democrats. Manhattan’s upper west side remains strongly Democratic despite its steadily increasing income level, but the suburbs of Dallas are full of high-income conservative Republicans.There are many ways of looking at social class, attitudes, and voting. We’ll take a demographic approach and compare religious to secular voters.
Regular churchgoers are about 15% more likely than non-attendees to vote Republican. Perhaps surprisingly, this big religion gap did not show up until 1992, when Bill Clinton ran against George H. W. Bush, as we show in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Difference in probability of voting for the Republican candidate for president, comparing people who went to church at least once per week to nonattenders. Nothing much was happening until 1992, when all of a sudden George H. W. Bush received 20% more of the vote among religious than among the nonreligious.
Back in 1980, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and other Religious Right organizations played a prominent role in rallying support for Ronald Reagan and other Republican candidates. But the gap between religious and non-religious in voting was actually less for Ronald Reagan—in both 1980 and 1984—than for Gerald Ford in 1976. As Glaeser and Ward (2006) point out, the recent political divisions associated with religious belief coincide with the geographic pattern of richer states supporting the Democrats and poorer states going Republican.So religion matters. For whom does it matter? Does it matter for the frustrated masses, seduced by emotional issues, or for the less economically-pressed elites? We can answer the question by measuring the religious/secular gap among voters at different income levels.
Figure 2. Support for George W. Bush, as a function of income, plotted separately for frequent church attenders, moderate attenders, and non-attenders. The difference between rich and poor is large for religious people but disappears among the non-religious.
The difference in Republican support, comparing regular religious attendees to non-attendees, is huge for rich voters but low among the poor; see Figure 2. This result—that church attendance predicts voting more for the rich than the poor—is consistent with the finding of Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder (2007) that “low-income Americans are significantly less inclined to vote based on moral values than are high-income groups.” They find the impact of economic issues on voting is larger for regular churchgoers, residents of Republican-leaning states, and rural voters than for non-churchgoers, residents of Democratic states, and urban or suburban voters.To connect to Figure 2: the line for regular churchgoers is steep, while the line for non-attenders is flat. Thus, income predicts how you vote—if you are religious. We had earlier found that income predicted voting more in poor states than in rich states (Gelman, Shor, Bafumi, and Park, 2007). This again fits the story of post-materialism, that economic concerns are more important in poorer areas, with social and religious issues mattering more among the rich.
The United States is far from unique in having religion as a political division. Religious and secular voters differ no more in America than in France, Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries, consistent with the post-materialist notion that people in richer countries have the luxury of voting on social issues. Figure 3 tells the story.
Figure 3. For each of thirty countries (ordered by per-capita GDP), estimated vote for conservative parties by income and religious attendance. In each plot, the solid, light, and dotted lines show the estimates for frequent religious attenders, occasional attenders, and nonattenders. With only a few exceptions, churchgoers and higher-income people are much more likely to vote for conservative parties. The curve show logistic regression fits, which can be misleading because the actual pattern is not always smooth; for example, in some countries, middle-income people vote more conservatively than the rich or the poor. The purpose of this figure is to quickly show overall patterns of richer or more religious people voting conservatively in different countries.
Huber and Stanig (2007) and Huber (2007) noted that, within each country, the differences between rich and poor voting tend to be larger among religious voters; however, the differences between rich and poor—both in their voting patterns and in the size of the religion gap—are larger here than in most other countries, a finding also consistent with post-materialism. Incomes are more unequal in the United States than in other rich countries today, and so it makes sense that rich and poor vote more differently. And, indeed, the Democratic and Republican parties are farther apart on issues of economic redistribution than are left and right parties in most European countries.Religious Americans are more Republican than secular Americans, but the difference between them is mostly among the middle class and rich—the “post-materialist” values voters. The evidence does not support the idea that lower-income Americans are voting based on “God, guns, and gays.”
ReferencesThis article is based on material in some of the material in chapters 6 and 7 of the forthcoming book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina. Related material appears at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/
Our analyses used U.S. poll data from the National Election Study and the Annenberg Election Survey and international data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Self-reports of religious attendance can not necessarily be trusted (see Haraway, Marler, and Chaves, 1993, along with the follow-ups cited here. Nonetheless, we follow the usual practice in social science and work with the survey responses, assuming that people who say they attend church weekly are more religious than those who say they do not attend, whatever their actual practices.
Here are the other references cited, in order of appearance:
Webb, Jim (2006). Class struggle: American workers have a chance to be heard. Wall Street Journal, 15 November.
Brooks, David (2001). One nation, slightly divisible. Atlantic Monthly, December.
Inglehart, Ronald (1971). The silent revolution in post-industrial societies. American Political Science Review 65, 991-1017.
Frank, Thomas (2005). What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Macmillan.
Shapiro, Walter (2005). What’s the matter with Central Park West? Atlantic Monthly, March.
Glaeser, Edward, and Ward, Bryce (2006). Myths and realities of American political geography. Unpublished paper.
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Rodden, Jonathan, and Snyder, James (2006). Purple America. Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, 97-118.
Gelman, Andrew, Shor, Boris, Bafumi, Joseph, and Park, David (2007). Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: what's the matter with Connecticut? Quarterly Journal of Political Science 2, 345-367.
Huber, John, and Stanig, Piero (2007). Why do the poor support right-wing parties? A cross-national analysis. Unpublished paper.
Huber, John (2007). Religious belief, religious participation, and social policy attitudes across countries. Unpublished paper.
Posted by Andrew at 12:37 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
April 18, 2008
Coalition dynamics
I hate to publicize this sort of thing, but two different people forwarded it to me, so I thought I should comment. It's a paper by Peter Klimek, Rudolf Hanel, and Stefan Thurner:
The quality of governance of institutions, corporations and countries depends on the ability of efficient decision making within the respective boards or cabinets. Opinion formation processes within groups are size dependent. It is often argued - as now e.g. in the discussion of the future size of the European Commission - that decision making bodies of a size beyond 20 become strongly inefficient. We report empirical evidence that the performance of national governments declines with increasing membership and undergoes a qualitative change in behavior at a particular group size.
I admire the goal of doing empirical analysis, and the graphs are great, but I agree with the Arxiv blogger that their mathematical model of "a critical value of around 19-20 members" is "somewhat unconvincing" (except that I'd remove the "somewhat"). Do people really believe this sort of thing? It seems like numerology to me.
The problem with counting countries
Another problem, to my mind, is the reference to the number of countries in the European Union. I understand that these are sovereign states, but I don't think it makes sense to count them equally. Applying a model in which all voters are equal doesn't make sense to me.
P.S.
I am unhappy with the authors' attempts to imply that their work is relevant to actual politics. That said, I like the rest of the paper--it's a fun model, and you have to start somewhere. After all, I wrote a paper on coalitions myself that had no empirical relevance. So I can hardly object to this sort of academic exercise.
Posted by Andrew at 9:53 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
Who are the "values voters"?
Larry Bartels wrote an excellent op-ed on rich and poor voters, ringing many of the bells that we strike in our forthcoming book. Bartels writes:
Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.
It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.
Well put, and nicely backed up by statistical evidence.
One little thing . . .
I don't, however, follow what Larry is saying in the conclusion of his op-ed:
John Kerry received a slender plurality of [rural, working-class] votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.Mr. Obama should do as well or better among these voters if he is the Democratic candidate in November. If he doesn’t, it won’t be because he has offended the tender sensitivities of small-town Americans. It will be because he has embraced a misleading stereotype of who they are and what they care about.
First, I don't see why Larry says that Obama "should do as well or better" among rural, working-class voters than Kerry. Unless he's just referring to the general expectation that Obama is predicted to do better than Kerry overall--Doug Hibbs predicts a 53-54% Democratic vote share in 2008 [typo fixed]. Second, I don't see why Larry says that, if Obama doesn't outperform Kerry among those voters, that "it will be because he has embraced a misleading stereotype..." My guess is, if Obama doesn't do well in this group, it'll be because the economy is going better than expected.
In any case, I don't see how Larry's last paragraph follows from everything that came before. Otherwise, though, I like the article a lot. Maybe there's just pressure in an op-ed to come to a ringing conclusion?
Posted by Andrew at 12:50 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 17, 2008
The rich-poor voting gap in rural areas
For some reason David posted this on his other blog rather than here . . .
David writes,
We can see a steady decline of Republican support among rural poor voters starting in 1972. Even with a big jump in 2000, support for the Republican presidential candidate was less than 50 percent. So, Obama, it looks like poor rural Americans have no problem voting for Democrats.
I'm not quite sure why 2004 isn't included here too, but in any case, the sample size of rural voters is pretty small in each year, so you don't want to over-interpret the jumps from year to year.
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April 15, 2008
Redundancy and efficiency
Walking through Penn Station in New York, I remembered how much I love its open structure. By "open," I don't mean bright and airy. I mean "open" in a topological sense. The station has three below-ground levels--the uppermost has ticket counters (and, what is more relevant nowadays, ticket machines), some crappy stores and restaurants, and a crappy waiting area. The middle level has Long Island Rail Road ticket counters, some more crappy stores and restaurants, and entrances to the 7th and 8th Avenue subway lines. The lower level has train tracks and platforms. There are stairs, escalators, and elevators going everywhere. As a result, it's easy to get around, there are lots of shortcuts, and the train loads fast--some people come down the escalators and elevators from the top level, others take the stairs from the middle level.
The powers-that-be keep threatening to spend a couple billion dollars upgrading the station. I hope that never happens, because I know that it will all become much more organized and airportlike, with "gates," long lines, and only one way to get from point A to point B. Something horrible like that new Chicago public library (not so new now, I guess--it was built around 1990) that was so pretty and so nonfunctional.
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April 11, 2008
The decline of the white working class and the rise of a mass upper middle class
Richard Florida links to this article by Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz:
Dramatic shifts have taken place in the American class structure since the World War II era. Consider education levels. Incredible as it may seem today, in 1940 three-quarters of adults 25 and over were high school dropouts (or never made it as far as high school), and just 5 percent had a four-year college degree or higher. . . . by 2007, it was down to only 14 percent. . . . In 1940, only about 32 percent of employed US workers held white collar jobs (professional, managerial, clerical, sales). By 2006, that proportion had almost doubled to 60 percent . . . we [Teixeira and Abramowitz] discuss these shifts in the class structure and analyze their political implications, primarily by focusing on the decline of the white working class.
Yu-Sung made some graphs (to appear in our book) that extend earlier estimates of Brooks and Manza show some of the trends in voting over the past fifty years:
Professionals (doctors, lawyers, and so forth) and routine white collar workers (clerks, etc.) used to support the Republicans more than the national average, but over the past half-century they have gradually moved through the center and now strongly support the Democrats. Business owners have moved in the opposite direction, from close to the national average to being staunch Republicans; and skilled and unskilled workers have moved from strong Democratic support to near the middle.
These shifts are consistent with the oft-noted cultural differences between Red and Blue America. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, and office workers seem today like prototypical liberal Democrats, while businessmen and hardhats seem like good representatives of the Republican party. The dividing points were different 50 years ago. The Republicans still have the support of most of the high-income voters, but these are conservatives of a different sort. As E. J. Dionne noted in analyzing poll data from 2004, the Democrats' strength among well-educated voters is strongest among those with household incomes under $75,000---"the incomes of teachers, social workers, nurses, and skilled technicians, not of Hollywood stars, bestselling authors, or television producers, let alone corporate executives."
We tried to take our analysis further by regressing on income within occupation groups, but we didn't find anything exciting; there wasn't much evidence of different rich/poor voting gaps in different occupation categories. The Teixeira and Abramowitz article adds something to this picture because they talk about how the relative sizes of these different groups are changing.
Posted by Andrew at 7:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 7, 2008
Faces and elections: an update
Matthew Atkinson, Ryan Enos, and Seth Hill sent along this paper:
Recent research finds that inferences from candidate faces predict aggregate vote margins. Many have concluded this to mean that voters choose the candidate with the better face. We implement a survey with participant evaluations of over 167,000 candidate face pairings. Through regression analysis using individual- and district-level vote data we find that the face-vote correlation is explained by a relationship between candidate faces, incumbency, and district partisanship. We argue that the face-vote correlation is not just the product of simple voter reactions to faces, but also of party and candidate behavior that affects which candidates compete in which contests.
This is great stuff. They're talking about a 2005 article by Alexander Todorov, Anesu Mandisodza, Amir Goren, and Crystal Hall which found that people thought the faces of winning congressional candidates looked more "competent" than faces of losing candidates. I wrote about this about a year ago and expressed skepticism about the interpretation of those findings . . .
It seemed likely that the more competent-looking candidates were more likely to be the ones that were more credible candidates for political reasons that were not directly related to looks (incumbency, ability to raise money, etc). In short, I suspected that, even if the voters had no idea what the candidates looked like, the Todorov et al. findings could still occur. Well, Atkinson et al. didn't just speculate, they went and did a bunch of analyses. They find,
Because many congressional contests in the United States are not competitive and because candidates with high competence are more likely to enter the contests in which they have a reasonable chance of success, we find high competence candidates defeating their usually low competence challengers in the majority of contests. This dynamic produces a high correlation between facial competence and election outcomes. That candidate faces are not distributed randomly across contests and that it is likely that parties and candidates are making decisions which affect the allocation of candidates to races suggests avenues for future research. . . . Some of the media attention surrounding the research by Todorov et al. (2005) was probably generated by the sense that the finding demonstrates that the voting public is uninformed. We have demonstrated that appearance plays a much smaller role in election outcomes than one might infer from a casual reading of Todorov et al. (2005) or its representation in the media.
I like the little things about the paper too, such as the graphical displays of inferences. (I don't like the tables so much--I write entire empirical research articles with no tables at all--but I guess that adding graphs is the first, key, step. Removing the tables can come later.) And they make a good choice by modeling incumbent vote share rather than simply modeling the binary win/lose outcome, which would discard information. I also like that the authors explicitly discuss the media reports of the Todorov et al. research.
Finally, I feel a little awkward saying this, but I think they should refer to my blog entry from last year, since it's the first publication that I know of that questioned the "faces decide elections" reasoning. Even though Atkinson, Enos, and Hill probably came up with their ideas on their own and only encountered my blog entry later (as noted above, they went far beyond my speculations and did actual research), it would still be appropriate to cite it as relevant early work.
More thoughts on the least-important part of what I wrote above
P.S. Henry Farrell linked to the above and pointed out, correctly in my opinion, that a typical blog entry such as mine (a link with some quick discussion and not much follow-through) falls somewhere between an offhand comment (which can be cited in acknowledgments) and a published article. Atkinson, Enos, and Hill were aware of my blog entry (that's why they sent me their article) but I don't really know how my thoughts fit into their work.
Let me emphasize that I liked the Atkinson, Enos, and Hill paper and very much appreciate that they sent it to me. If they want to cite my blog entry, that's fine, and if they don't, I bear them no ill-will. I agree with some of the commenters to Henry's blog post, who said that, if Atkinson et al.'s work preceded my blog entry, then it's a pretty minor point that somebody else (in this case, me) noted something similar. If Atkinson et al. came up with the idea independently and did all the work, then they clearly deserve all the credit.
I certainly wouldn't want for a blog entry to have any kind of intimidating effect, where I'm implying that so-and-so should definitely cite me. It's really up to the authors of the article to decide how a brief blog entry fits into the existing literature. To me it seemed relevant as the first "published" criticism of the Todorov et al. paper, but I'm completely ignorant of the literature so I'd trust Atkinson et al. much more than me on this point.
Posted by Andrew at 12:45 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 5, 2008
Comments on comments on "Voting as a rational decision"
After reading our article, "Voting as a rational decision," Mark Thoma asked,
If helping other people makes me happy, why would caring about other people be contrary to my own self-interest? This is essentially a question about the meaning of the term selfish. I [Mark] assume selfishness means maximizing my utility, which may or may not include the happiness of other people as an argument.
My reply:
The challenge in all such arguments is to avoid circularity. If selfishness means maximizing utility, and we always maximize utility (by definition, otherwise it isn't our utility, right?), then we're always selfish. But then that's like, if everything in the world is the color red, would we have a word for "red" at all? I'm using selfish in the more usual sense of giving instrumental benefits. For example, if I cut in front of someone in line, I'm being selfish. If I don't do it (because I get pleasure from being a nice guy and pain from being a jerk), then that's other-directed. I'm sacrificing something (my own time) in order to help others. Just because something is enjoyable it doesn't have to be selfish, I think.
To put it another way, if "selfish" means utility-maximization, which by definition is always being done (possibly to the extent of being second-order rational by rationally deciding not to spend the time to exactly optimize our utility function), then everything is selfish. Then let's define a new term, "selfish2," to represent behavior that benefits ourselves instrumentally without concern for the happiness of others. Then our point is that rationality is not the same as selfish2.
Also, some of his commenters questioned whether a single vote could be decisive, what with recounts etc. The answer is, yes, it can, because there is ultimately some threshold (even if unobservable) as to whether the recount occurs. And even if this threshold is itself probabilistic, the probabilities can be added. We demonstrate this mathematically in the Appendix to the 2004 Gelman, Katz, and Bafumi article in the British Journal of Political Science; see page 674 here.
P.S. Mark has further remarks here. Those are his comments on my comments on his comments on my article which, when you come down to it, was basically a comment on some of the political science literature. That should be enough, I think.
Posted by Andrew at 11:13 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
That chasm
Charlie Williams asks if I have any comment on this. I'll refer you to Brendan Nyhan's discussion here. Brendan seems to have done everything that I was thinking of doing here.
Posted by Andrew at 10:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 4, 2008
Networks of political donations
Henry Farrell writes:
Via Cosma Shalizi, this is a nice tool for mapping the relationship between donations from energy companies and politicians in Presidential, House and Senatorial elections. . . . Why is it that there appears to be so little literature out there on this kind of network? Is it the difficulty of establishing causal relationships (although surely this would invalidate whole swathes of US political science if this standard were applied rigorously)? Is it difficulties in gathering the relevant data (Cosma notes that gathering it and cleaning it up is surprisingly hard)? The perceived publication practices of major US journals? I'm genuinely puzzled as to the reason why there's this gap in the literature. Both comparativists (Jerry Easter) and international relations scholars (Charli Carpenter) have published well regarded articles in the major journals of their field on the importance of networks in domestic and international settings. So why not Americanist political scientists?
In trying to answer this question, I think it's important to separate two aspects of the above research: network analysis as a general statistical/social-science research method as applied to Americna politics, and the analysis of political contributions in particular.
In social science as a whole, networks have become very trendy--and I pretty much think that's a good trend. There are some roadblocks in applying these ideas to the study of public opinion and voting, however, since we're talking about a network of 250 million adults where the average person knows only 750 other Americans. You can get this sort of data from surveys but it's hard to know what to make of it. Tian Zheng, Tom DiPrete, Julien Teitler, and I have been involved in a research project estimating the segregation of Democrats and Republicans in social networks, and we collected data specially for our study. Still, the analysis is difficult, just at the technical level of building a statistical model for what we've got. It's no surprise that a lot more work has been done on networks in Congress. This isn't the part of American politics that I study but it counts, right? But, getting back to public opinion and voting: networks are clearly important but they're hard to study given the inherent sparseness of the data.
Moving to research on political contribution networks, I wonder if one reason you don't hear much about it is that this sort of work is politically marginalized, as it's associated with left-wing critiques of the political system, rather than more traditional representations of American politics as being generally representative of public opinion. For example, I don't know that Thomas Ferguson has formally used network analysis, but he and his collaborators have done lots of work tracking down campaign contributions (and I'm not talking about Vin Scully here). I agree with Henry that political donations would be a natural place for network analysis, since many of the major contributors have clear enough links that sparseness is less of an issue.
Posted by Andrew at 9:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Polls and elections
Richard Morey points us to this article. We posted Yair's take on the polling problems here.
But what really amused, or upset, me, was what I encountered when following the link on that page which read, "Smarter poll could call the closest races." That headline set off some warning bells--the closest races are the ones that can't be forecasted! I followed the link to an article that I couldn't read without a subscription, so I found it through our library and tracked down the original research article, "A new approach to estimating the probability of winning the presidency," by Edward Kaplan and Arnold Barnett, professors of management at Yale and MIT. The article appeared in 2003 in the journal Operations Research and is pretty misinformed. It's bad in so many ways, and the also, annoyingly, call their method Bayesian. Huge amounts of detail on essentially trivial algebra and a complete misunderstanding of elections. The sad thing is, there are excellent quantitative political scientists at both Yale and MIT--if these guys had just walked over a few buildings and asked for help, they could've been spared this embarrassment. Seeing this stuff just makes me want to barf: it's just not that hard to do something reasonable, and I hate the way they put in all this algebra for what are straightforward simulations of a probability distribution. (But ya gotta give the publicity office of Yale or MIT credit for getting this mentioned in the popular press.)
I hope the paper that Kari and I are writing will clear things up.
P.S. I have nothing against these guys personally. It's the kind of thing that can happen when you come into a field from the outside and don't know who are the right people to talk to. I'm sure if I tried to write a paper about business management, it would be equally silly.
Posted by Andrew at 12:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 3, 2008
A human rights statistician
Juli pointed me to this article about statistician Patrick Ball:
Since 1988, Ball has been "hacking code" – writing software – to unlock secrets from numbers. He taught himself computer programming so he could get a job that would cover expenses not included in his undergraduate scholarship to Columbia University. . . . He took a leave of absence and went to El Salvador with the Peace Brigades . . . Ball wrote software that allowed the commission to aggregate and analyze the human rights records of officers in the El Salvadoran Army. The results forced a quarter of the military leadership to retire. . . . Kosovo attracted international concern when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees fled to Albania. Amid what seemed little more than chaos, Ball saw dozens of data sources that, could point to the cause of the crisis: "Everything is data to us. A pile of scrungy paper from the border guards – 690 pages – that's data." He combined those scrungy papers, one for nearly every family that crossed the border, with crossing records kept by several international organizations; later, he brought in data from 11 sources on civilian deaths in the province. He analyzed the two separately, using one method for patterns of migration and another for mortality. . . .
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March 31, 2008
Disaster aid as vote buying?
Jowei Chen sent along this paper:
In the aftermath of the summer 2004 Florida hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed $1.2 billion in disaster aid to Florida residents. This research presents two empirical findings that collectively suggest the Bush administration engaged in vote buying behavior. First, by tracking the geographic location of each aid recipient, the data reveal that FEMA treated applicants from Republican neighborhoods much more favorably than those from Democratic or moderate neighborhoods, even conditioning on hurricane severity, home value, and demographic factors. Second, I compare precinct-level vote counts from the post-hurricane (November 2004) and pre-hurricane (November 2002) elections to measure the effect of FEMA aid on Bush's vote share. Using a two-stage least squares estimator, this analysis reveals that core Republican voters are easily swayed by FEMA aid - $16,800 buys one additional vote for Bush - while Democrats and moderates are not. Collectively, these results suggest the Bush administration maximized its 2004 vote share by concentrating FEMA disaster aid among core Republicans.
This is interesting. In many aspects of politics, it seems clear that politicians reward their supporters, but political scientists sometimes really resist this idea, arguing on logical grounds that candidates should be focusing their efforts on the median voter. It's interesting to see some clear evidence where supporters are getting rewarded--and it's also good to see someone getting down and dirty with the data, rather than just reanalyzing the same old datasets over and over (which is what I usually do...). Sure, it's ultimately an n=1 study, but I imagine it will add something useful to the literature on government spending
Also, my little thoughts:
1. Chen has a good description on page 2 of why the term "vote buying" might be appropriate here, but I don't think the word "bribery" is appropriate. Giving someone federal aid to motivate them to vote for you could be called "vote buying" but I don't see how it's a "bribe" in the usual sense of the word.
2. In the abstract, Chen writes, "core Republican voters are easily swayed by FEMA aid –
$16,800 buys one additional vote for Bush." Is that really "easily swayed"? $17,000 is a lot of money, no? To sway a million votes would take $17 billion, which can't quite be buried in the federal budget. I've heard it said that in typical election campaigns, it costs something like $40 to change a vote.
3. The usual comments about rounding, tabular displays, etc. In the abstract, $16,800 should be $17,000 (or even $20,000). The sort of precision implied by "$16,800" just isn't there, and can really never be there, given that conditions are always changing. And then on page 4 it says "$15,989"! I mean, really! Why not give the cents, too?
The tables should be graphs, and also the predictors should be rescaled so you're not in the awkward position of having to interpret a coefficient of 0.054 for wind speed in miles per hour. (One more mile per hour corresponds to a change of 0.054 . . . hmmm, what's that again?) Table 2 has meaningless numbers like 107.16 and house values to the nearest dollar . . . (Yeah, yeah, I've been an offender too; see Table 1 here. But that won't stop me from trying to get others to clean up their acts.) Other tables have the no-no of including interactions without first centering the predictors (see Chapter 3 for discussion of that point). Finally, Figure 1 has some nice features, but that business of adding 1 so you can take the log . . . that's ugly, man. I mean, why add $1, why not $100 or $1000 or whatever (maybe that's what was actually done). Also better to use log10 or, better still, to display dollar amounts.
4. Some of the labeling is confusing. Models (1), (2), (3), (4) on page 24 don't seem to be the same as models (1), (2), (3), (4) on page 27. This is a problem for readers like me who like to jump to the results right away when reading a paper.
5. I'm a little worried by the analysis associated with Figure 1. You shouldn't be taking 2004 vote minus 2002 vote; you should be regressing 2004 on 2002 [typo fixed] and looking at the residuals. Otherwise you can get the usual regression-to-the-mean artifacts. It's also sort of weird that, in the regressions, some variables are logged (household income) but others aren't (for example, house value). Probably no big deal but it looks funny somehow.
6. I noticed that a citation to a paper by someone named Sam Houston. Well, I suppose that sort of thing has to happen sometime.
7. On the bottom of page 1 there's a copright notice. I don't recall seeing that sort of thing before on a working paper. Is this a new trend?
P.S. John Sides has some comments here.
Posted by Andrew at 9:26 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 25, 2008
Incredible Illinois, or fun with percentages that can be larger than 100
Tyler Cowen links to a calculation by Tom Elia that "of Sen. Obama's 711,000 popular-vote lead, 650,000 -- or more than 90% of the total margin -- comes from Sen. Obama's home state of Illinois, with 429,000 of that lead coming from his home base of Cook County." This is interesting, but it's more a comment on how close the (meaningless) total popular vote count is, than a reflection of something funny going on in Cook County.
Put it another way. Suppose Obama's total margin was only 111,000 votes instead of 711,000. Then his 650,000 vote margin in Illinois would represent a whoppin 580% of the total margin, and Cook County would represent 390% of the total margin! But wait, how can a part be 390% of the whole??
What I'm sayin is, the "90%" and "60%" figures are misleading because, when written as "a percent of the total margin," it's natural to quickly envision them as percentages that are bounded by 100%. There is a total margin of victory that the individual state margins sum to, but some margins are positive and some are negative. If the total happens to be near zero, then the individual pieces can appear to be large fractions of the total, even possibly over 100%.
I'm not saying that Tom Elia made any mistakes, just that, in general, ratios can be tricky when the denominator is the sum of positive and negative parts. In this particular case, the margins were large but not quite over 100%, which somehow gives the comparison more punch than it deserves, I think.
P.S. Elia's comment that "Sen. Obama's 429,000-vote margin in Cook County alone is larger than the winning margin of either candidate in any state" is more directly interpretable because it's a difference, not a ratio. Obama won Illinois by a 32-percentage-point landslide. (By comparison, Clinton won New York with a 17-point margin and California [typo fixed] with a 9-point margin.)
Posted by Andrew at 2:59 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Peeking behind the curtain, or, What's (not) the matter with Portugal?
This is pretty embarrassing, but I think it's better to tell all, if for no other reason than to make others aware of the challenges of working with data . . .
OK, so we're reanalyzing some data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, basically replicating some findings of Huber and Stanig but including additional countries and with some slightly different coding of political parties.
We have two key graphs.
First, for each country, we compute the difference between rich and poor in voting for the conservative party or parties. This graph (not shown here) reveals that the rich-poor gap in the United States is larger than most of the other (mostly European) countries in the sample.
For our second graph, we fit a model predicting conservative vote given income and religious attendance. For each country, the three lines show estimated conservative vote (compared to the national average) as a function of individual income, among people who attend religious services frequently (solid line), occasionally (light line), and never (dashed line).
The countries are ordered by increasing per-capita GDP. On the bottom line is the United States, with its familiar pattern of religious attendance mattering more for the rich than the poor. As you can see, religious people vote for conservative parties in many countries--Americans are far from unique in that way.
Wha...?
But whassup with Portugal? The only country where the religious vote in a less conservative way than the secular--the lines go in the wrong order! We asked some experts what was going on, and we were told that the center-left Socialist Party and the center-right Social Democratic Party seem to be resistant to the direction or degree of religiosity, and that the party competition in Portugal is basically non-ideological.
But, then, why the big difference between religious and secular in our data? Well, we were also told that the data for Portugal are probably crappy. So we figured we'd just remove Portugal from our graph and add a note why we excluded it, based on concerns about data and some comments about the party structure there. Put then we looked at the data again . . .
It turned out the problem was in the name of one party (the Popular Party)--it had an extra comma in its name and when we read in the data, we mistakenly counted it as a different party. Whoops! (Or, as Mezzanine-era Nicholson Baker would say, Whoop!)
Here's the corrected figure:
Yeah, yeah, I know, we better check all the party names carefully now.
P.S. I guess we could make the case that we were being Bayesian, in checking the results that contradicted our prior distribution. In this case, the prior wasn't really that religion always is associated with conservative voting, but rather that the countries followed some smooth distribution. Actually, when I first noticed the problem with Portugal, I assumed the data were ok and that there was some Portugal-specific story, perhaps a left-wing church-based party. (Yes, I'm sure that comment reveals my ignorance of Portugal, but that's the point here.) I was looking for the magic x-variable that explained the unexplained variation. In this case, the x-factor was a coding error...
P.P.S. More here.
Posted by Andrew at 12:15 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
March 24, 2008
New faces in political methodology
Burt Monroe alerts me to this conference at Penn State on May 3. That bald guy looks pretty scary! New faces, indeed. Also, I'll have to find out from Eduardo what he's doing on “The Political Consequences of Malapportionment." It sounds like it might be related to our project on representation and spending in subnational units. (The short story: low-population areas are overrepresented in legislatures around the world--the U.S. Senate is not the only serious offender--and these areas also get more than their share of government spending.) The conference seems like a great idea.
Posted by Andrew at 8:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Social class and views of corporations
I was looking through the Pew surveys and they are just full of fascinating things. I actually hate to tell youall about this because I think I could just go through this report and pull out one table per day for months and impress you with my political knowledge . . .
Anyway, here's an interesting bit, having to do with how people view businesses in America: Nearly two-thirds of respondents say corporate profits are too high, but, "more than seven in ten agree that 'the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business' – an opinion that has changed very little over the past 20 years."
Everybody loves Citibank
People like business in general (except for those pesky corporate profits) but they love individual businesses, with 95% having a favorable view of Johnson and Johnson (among those willing to give a rating), 94% liking Google, 91% liking Microsoft, . . . I was surprised to find that 70% of the people were willing to rate Citibank, and of those people, 78% had a positive view. I mean, I don't have a view of Citibank one way or another, but it would seem to me to be the kind of company that people wouldn't like.
Professionals vs. working class
Now here's where it gets really interesting. The Pew report broke things down by party identification (Democrat or Republican) and by "those who describe their household as professional or business class; those who call themselves working class; and those who say their family or household is struggling."
Republicans tend to like corporations, with little difference between the views of professional-class and working-class Republicans. For Democrats, though, there's a big gap, with professionals having a generally more negative view, compared to the working class:
A puzzling pattern
There's a pretty consistent pattern across the entire table which I don't fully understand, that goes as follows:
- For some corporations (Halliburton, Walmart, Exxon, McDonald's, Pfizer, Coke), the working-class Democrats are much less supportive than the working-class Republicans. For these corporations, there is almost no difference between professional and working-class Republicans. The only exception is Coke, which was viewed much less favorably by professional-class than working-class Republicans.
- For the others (Citibank, GM, Coors, American Express, Target, Starbucks), working-class Democrats had views that were similar to or more favorable than their Republican counterparts. And for these, there was a consistent pattern of much stronger favorability by professional than working-class Republicans.
I can come up with a story in each individual case but I don't really have a good way of thinking about all these together. (Also, for some reason, the report doesn't give the responses for those who say their families are "struggling." Perhaps the sample sizes were too small.)
One more bit
Respondents were asked how concerned they were about business corporations and government "collecting too much personal information about people like them." In general, Democrats and Independents were more concerned about both.
80% of Democrats and Independents were concerned about business collecting personal information and 65% were concerned about government. Among Republicans, 60% were concerned about business collecting the information and only 40% concerned about government. The survey is from 2007; perhaps Republicans' views about government snooping will change if there is a Democratic administration.
Also, people with higher income and higher education have "less concern about government data collection, while lower income is associated with higher concern. Income and education did not affect opinions about businesses collecting data." The bit about higher status people trusting the government more makes sense and is consistent with other survey results I've seen, but I'm surprised that there isn't a similar pattern regarding concern about businesses. Perhaps there are different patterns among the parties. The data are downloadable from Pew's website so you can go crunch the numbers yourself it you'd like.
Posted by Andrew at 5:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
MPs for Sale?
Sarah Nequam sends along a link to this paper by Andrew Eggers and Jens Hainmueller:
While the role of money in policymaking is a central question in political economy research, surprisingly little attention has been given to the rents politicians actually derive from politics. We use both matching and a regression discontinuity design to analyze an original dataset on the estates of recently deceased British politicians. We find that serving in Parliament roughly doubled the wealth at death of Conservative MPs but had no discernible effect on the wealth of Labour MPs. We argue that Conservative MPs profited from office in a lax regulatory environment by using their political positions to obtain outside work as directors, consultants, and lobbyists, both while in office and after retirement. Our results are consistent with anecdotal evidence on MPs' outside financial dealings but suggest that the magnitude of Conservatives' financial gains from office was larger than has been appreciated.
I don't know enough to know what else has been done in this area but it looks interesting. I think that in political science we're usually more interested in politicians' funders than their personal finances--the usual view, which I assume is true, is that the amount of money a politician might personally derive from office is minor compared to the flow of government funds whose dispersal he controls. (Here I'm talking about typical elected politicians in developed countries, not politician-businessmen like Berlusconi or people like Mobuto or King Leopold who pretty much own entire countries.) So, my first inclination is to think of findings like those of Eggers and Hainmueller as interesting but not crucial to political understanding. But I could be wrong on this, and it certainly seems worth looking into. And the authors seem to have done an impressive amount of work here.
Some minor comments:
- I hate the term "rents" when it's not actually applied to rent. It just seems like a jargony thing to me, and I'd rather just say directly what's being studied.
- Doesn't their word processor have that "£" symbol? That seems cleaner than "GBP."
- Tables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 should be graphs. (Sorry, I had to say that. But I mean it.)
- Getting more specific on the tables: In table 8, they should rescale the predictors so the coefficients are directly interpretable (then you won't have numbers like "2e-4" to try to figure out). You could use coefplot() to display it and the other tables of regression coefficients. In table 7, are the mean values of age, years as MP, years as former MP all really integers to 2 decimal places? I guess it could happen, but maybe there was some rounding? I wouldn't mind except for those pesky ".00"'s.
- Figures 5 and 6 are nice. They tell the story right away. Only a couple things need to be done to make these better. First, I'd use smaller symbols (dots, rather than squares and circles) and remove the legend, instead labeling the x-axis appropriately so it's clear that everything below 0 is losing and everything above 0 is winning. (You don't need separate symbols--position tells all here--and if you use a dark color for your points, then little dots will be visible.) Second, I'd do it all in black and white. I mean, color is fine, keep it if you want, but it's not necessary. Third, do log-base-10 rather than log. log10 is more directly interpretable. Better still, just label the y-axis with actual money values (10 thousand, 100 thousand, etc); i.e., use a log scale but put unlogged round numbers on the axes). Finally, make the graph s a little more squat and then you can stack Figures 5 and 6 together as one figure that tells your whole story. (You can just put the word "Conservative" or "Labour" inside each graph on the upper left.)
Posted by Andrew at 12:40 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 21, 2008
Poll and survey faqs
From the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
Posted by Andrew at 3:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 14, 2008
The increasing importance of moral issues in American politics
From my paper with Delia:
Party identification and self-defined liberalism/conservatism are increasingly correlated with positions on specific issues. The increases in correlations have been highest for moral issues. Issue positions have also become increasingly correlated with each other--but the increases have been smaller than the increased correlations with party ID and liberal/conservative ideology. Correlations between pairs of issues have increased by about 2% per decade, on average, while correlations of issues with party or ideology have increased by about 5% per decade (again, on average). The data come from the National Election Study.
Our story: voters are sorting themselves into parties and ideologies based on their issue attitudes; having done this sorting, they are aligning themselves slightly with their new allies.
Posted by Andrew at 12:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 13, 2008
Doug Hibbs sez: It's a good year for the Democrats
Doug Hibbs writes:
Presidential election outcomes are well explained by just two objectively measured fundamental determinants: (1) weighted-average growth of per capita real personal disposable income over the term, and (2) cumulative US military fatalities owing to unprovoked, hostile deployments of American armed forces in foreign conflicts not sanctioned by a formal Congressional declaration of war. At the end of 2007 weighted-average growth of real incomes during Bush’s second term stood at 1.1 percent per annum. If the same performance were sustained for the rest of the term it might barely suffice to keep the Republicans in the White House, other things being equal. However the economy slid into recession at the beginning of the year and per capita real incomes will most likely decline throughout 2008. Moreover, by Election Day cumulative US military fatalities in Iraq will approach 4,500 and this will depress the incumbent vote by more than three-quarters of a percentage point. Given those fundamental conditions the Bread and Peace model predicts a Republican two-party vote share of 46-47% and therefore a comfortable victory for the Democrats in the 2008 presidential election.
Here are the basic data from Hibbs's bread-and-peace model:
or this:
See Hibbs's latest paper for details on his 2008 forecast.
Posted by Andrew at 1:54 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Who talks like a "townie"?
I asked,
I'm writing a book about rich and poor voters in red and blue states, and one thing we've found is that the political differences between so-called red and blue states are much larger among the rich than the poor (or, more precisely, comparing high and low income, since we don't really have measures of "rich" and "poor" in our surveys). Anyway, the point is that the famed Red America / Blue America distinction is among the rich, not the poor.But, in other ways, it's poorer people who are more localized: lower-income people generally travel less, are more likely to have local accents, and are less likely to know people in other parts of the country.
Well, that's what I think, but I don't really know. Do you happen to know if there have been studies supporting my claim that lower income people are more likely to have local accents?
Mark Liberman replied:
I've often read that "lower income people are more likely to have local accents", as you put it.For example, Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill, "Dialect and education in the United Kingdom", in Jenny Cheshire, ed., _Dialect and Education_ (1989), starts like this:
In Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as in many other countries, the relationship between social and regional language varieties is such that the greatest degree of regional differentiation is found among lower working-class speakers and the smallest degree at the other end of the social scale, among speakers from the upper middle class.However, I don't know any research that evaluates this generalization in quantitative terms. (That doesn't mean there isn't any.) And the situation in the United States is probably somewhat different in this respect from the situation in Great Britain, if only because African-American speakers are (I think) less geographically variable in accent than other groups, while also being disproportionately distributed towards the lower end of the S.E.S. scale.
With respect to the more general social-networking questions -- "lower-income people generally travel less, ... and are less likely to know people in other parts of the country" -- again, it seems to me that the historical situation in the U.S. is somewhat different from the British experience. When the draft was in effect, the army to some extent played the role among the poor that elite education playedamong the rich. And there have been large population movements in relatively recent times -- the general migration of farm labor to the cities, and specifically the movement of rural southern blacks; the Okie migration to California, Chicago etc.; the post-WWII migration from the rust belt to the sun belt -- that have involved poorer people at least as much as richer people.
I suspect that it remains true in the U.S. that on average, lower-income people are more likely to have local accents. They are certainly -- pretty much by definition -- more likely to have speech patterns that are perceived as in some way non-standard. But this is not always the same thing. Thus "g-dropping" is other things equal more common for lower-SES speakers -- however, this is true more or less all over the English-speaking world.
Thanks!
P.S. I wanted to call this "Will the real townies please stand up, stand up?" but I was afraid that Mark L. would accuse me of snowcloning.
Posted by Andrew at 12:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 12, 2008
The value of political connections in Nazi Germany
Thomas Ferguson and Hans-Joachim Voth write:
From Indonesia and Malaysia to Italy, politically connected firms are more valuable than their less fortunate competitors. Yet a key event in the history of the twentieth century has not been examined in terms of the value of political connections—the Nazi rise to power. We systematically assess the value of prior ties with the new regime in 1933. To do so, we [Ferguson and Voth] combine two new data series: A new series of monthly stock prices, collected from official publications of the Berlin stock exchange, and a second series that uses hitherto unused contemporary data sources, in combination with previous scholarship, to pin down ties between big business and the Nazis. . . .Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the biggest companies, had substantive links with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Firms supporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high returns, outperforming unconnected ones by 5% to 8% between January and March 1933. . . .
By international standards, the value of connections with the Nazi party was unusually high. Comparison with the results of Faccio (2006) suggests that in her sample of 47 countries from around the globe, only Third World countries with poor governance showed similarly high returns. Also, associations with the NSDAP were formed voluntarily, not through family links; also, they were not in place decades before their political value became apparent, as in many Third World countries. One question for future research is how many of these connections turned out to be valuable in the end and through which channels the party rewarded its supporters. Though some businessmen felt that the donations were large, their value was small compared to the rise in stock market value of connected firms. Interestingly, even recently formed affiliations such as those resulting from the fundraising party in Berlin on February 20, 1933, appear to have boosted firms’ fortunes on the stock market. Returns were not arbitraged away by many other firms entering the fray. This suggests that Hitler’s rise to power may have come as a genuine surprise to many, that an ideological distaste for his party kept numerous businessmen from contributing, or that NSDAP representatives deliberately focused their attention on a subgroup of sympathetic business contacts.
Interesting stuff. Certainly not what you usually see in the history books.
P.S. This reminds me of the question of the very high rate of return that seems to be available from political contributions in the U.S. I mean, I know that not every contribution brings a benefit, and many contributions are defensive, designed to stop legislation that would hurt a company. Nonetheless, the total amount of money spent on campaigns is so much less than the amount of the economy that is affected by government policy, that it still seems to me (without doing any calculations) that the returns to contributions must be something like 1000%. I don't know how much money the big agribusinesses give to Congressmembers, but it must be a small fraction of what they get back in government subsidies. (And ditto for universities: I don't know what Columbia spends on lobbyists, but I'm sure they get back much much more in student loans, government grants, etc.)
I saw Steve Ansolabehere give a talk where he claimed that contributors don't really get anything for their money, but I just found it hard to believe. As my friend Phil said when he heard that Kentucky legislators were getting busted for taking $400 bribes, "Hell, for that amount of money I could afford a legislator of my own!"
Posted by Andrew at 8:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2008
Square footage as a predictor of vote and party affiliation?
After reading Steve Sailer's discussion of unmarried Democrats living in crowded cities and Republicans with large families, we decide that the ultimate predictor of political leanings would be . . . square footage of your residence. It has all the right properties:
- Within any state, people in bigger houses vote more Republican. Check.
- Lower cost-of-living states, where houses are bigger (I assume), are more Republican. Check.
- In crowded coastal states, there is little difference in square footage between the houses of the rich and the poor; in less-crowded, poorer inland states, rich and poor differ more in house size. As a result, the "square footage" model predicts that the rich-poor gap in Republican voting should be larger in poor than in rich states. Check.
I don't know of any datasets that have voting or party ID along with square footage--although, with a large amount of effort it should be possible to put something together using public voter registration information. Also, I can't really see anything useful about the hypothesis (that square footage is an excellent predictor of who you vote for), even if it's true. Nonetheless, the idea amuses me.
P.S. Seeing as I live in a cramped NYC apartment with no understanding of square footage at all, so I'd appreciate others' input on this. (Also, I have no idea how this would work in other countries.)
Posted by Andrew at 9:01 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
March 8, 2008
Democrats know Democrats, Republicans know Republicans
From a survey of voters in the 2000 election, the estimated percentage of people they talk politics with who supported Bush for president:
Each respondent was asked to name up to four contacts. On average, each respondent discussed politics with 0.5 family members and 1.4 others. The two plots show separate estimates for the two groups. The top, middle, and bottom lines on each plot show the results for Gore and Bush voters in strongly Republican, battleground, and strongly Democratic states, respectively.
Unsurprisingly, Gore voters were much more likely to know Gore voters and the reverse for Bush voters. The differences between red, blue, and purple states are tiny among family members (about three-quarters of whom share the political affiliation of the survey respondent) but are larger for friends. On average, Bush voters perceived their non-family conversation partners to be more similar to themselves, compared to the perceptions of Gore voters.
(Thanks to Christian Logan for crunching the numbers from the National Election Study.)
Posted by Andrew at 8:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 6, 2008
Rich state vs. poor state, rich voter vs. poor voter, over time
Here's the graph that David made showing the Republican share of the two-party vote for president since 1940, for states in the upper third and lower third of per-capita income:
It used to be that rich states voted Republican, now they go for the Democrats (the famous red-blue map). The voting gap between rich and poor states has gradually widened since the early 1980s.
And here's the plot comparing upper and lower income voters:
Rich people are much more Republican than poor people. Differences in voting by income have returned to 1940s levels.
Pulling out the South
We also did separate analyses for southern and non-southern states, since the South is poorer than average and has also moved steadily from the Democrats to the Republicans over the decades. First, a plot showing the difference between rich and poor states over time, overall and in southern and non-southern states:
And now the differences each year between rich and poor voters in the country as a whole and in south and non-south:
Data issues
We used the Republican share of the two-party vote (for the state analysis in 1948, including Thurmond's votes as part of the Democrats'). The state election data are public information and easy to find, for example from David Leip's atlas.
For each election year, we defined rich and poor states in each election year as follows. We first sorted the states by per-capita income using data (from the Census, I think) that Justin Phillips gave us. We then aggregated by population from the top down and the bottom up, to construct a collection of states at the high end whose total population approximated 1/3 of the U.S. population in that year, and similarly for the low end. We rounded down to get rich state and poor state groupings that each had no more than 1/3 the population for that year.
When making the plots for states, we pooled the popular vote within each grouping (rich states and poor states) in each year. For individuals, we took the respondents from the National Election Study (since 1952) and data from Gallup polls prepared for us by Adam Berinsky and Tiffany Washburn (for 1940 and 1944). We don't have individual level data for 1948, since our National Election Study data didn't have state identifiers for respondents in that year.
Posted by Andrew at 8:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 4, 2008
The stir-fry/bbq index
Carp pointed me to this article by Mark Liberman. I'm more sympathetic to David Brooks than Mark is, but I have to say, I thought this was funny:
| stir-fry | BBQ | BBQ/stir-fry ratio | |
| pacifist | 1,770 | 19,400 | 11.0 |
| militarist | 182 | 28,100 | 154 |
| stir-fry | BBQ | BBQ/stir-fry ratio | |
| doctor | 121,000 | 424,000 | 3.5 |
| linguist | 15,400 | 151,000 | 9.8 |
| lawyer | 36,100 | 377,000 | 10.4 |
| commando | 5,550 | 178,000 |
32.1 |
P.S. I don't know why the tables came out so weird--I copied them straight from the html file of Mark's post.
Posted by Andrew at 4:03 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 3, 2008
Where the Starbucks and Walmarts are
P.S. The above graph is wrong (see comment by Alex F. below). Corrected graphs are here.
Posted by Andrew at 12:46 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
February 29, 2008
Give our book a title and win a free ice cream cone
What should we call our book? A possible title is:
"Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: How Americans are Polarized and How They're Not"
Or maybe,
"The Red State, Blue State Paradox: ..."
We've been told that a subtitle is a good idea, but it would be good for the main title to be crisp.
Perhaps we have to think outside the box and forget about the red/blue thing, I dunno.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance. We'll give a free ice cream cone to anybody who comes up with a good idea!
P.S. The book is intended for a general audience. It'll be coming out around Labor Day.
P.P.S. One concern is that I don't know of a lot of popularly successful books with 8-word titles (and that's not even counting the subtitle). One to three words would be best, I'd think.
Posted by Andrew at 12:44 AM | Comments (49) | TrackBack
February 24, 2008
Don't believe the hype (another reference to the "baby-faced politicians lose" study)
I was reading this otherwise-excellent article by Elizabeth Kolbert and came across this:
Like neoclassical economics, much democratic theory rests on the assumption that people are rational. Here, too, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Voters, it has been demonstrated, are influenced by factors ranging from how names are placed on a ballot to the jut of a politician’s jaw. . . . A 2005 study, conducted by psychologists at Princeton, showed that it was possible to predict the results of congressional contests by using photographs. Researchers presented subjects with fleeting images of candidates’ faces. Those candidates who, in the subjects’ opinion, looked more “competent” won about seventy per cent of the time.
I can't really comment on the bit about democratic theory, but I do want to put in a word about this study of candidates' faces. It's a funny result: at first it seems impressive--70% accuracy!--but then again it's not so impressive given that you can predict something on the order of 90% of races just based on incumbency and the partisan preferences of the voters in the states and districts. If 90% of the races are essentially decided a year ahead of time, what does it mean to say that voters are choosing 70% correct based on the candidates' looks.
I can't be sure what's happening here, but one possibility is that the more serious candidates (the ones we know are going to win anyway) are more attractive. Maybe you have some goofy-looking people who decide to run in districts where they don't have a chance, whereas the politicians who really have a shot at being in congress take the time to get their hair cut, etc. More discussion here (see also the comments).
Anyway, the point of this note is just that some skepticism is in order. It's fun to find some scientific finding that seems to show the shallowness of voters, but watch out! I guess it pleases the cognitive scientists to think that something as important and seemingly complicated as voting is just some simple first-impression process. Just as, at the next level, it pleases biologists to think that something as important and seemingly complicated as psychology is just some simple selfish-gene thing.
Posted by Andrew at 8:10 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
February 21, 2008
Confusion about the changing positions of political parties in the U.S.
In the article, "Activists and partisan realignment in the United States," published in 2003 in the American Political Science Review, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield point out that the states won by the Democrats and Republicans in recent elections are almost the opposite of the result of the election of 1896:
Miller and Schofield describe this as a complete reversal of the parties' positions. In their story, in 1896 the parties competed on social (racial) issues, with the Republicans on the left and the Democrats on the right. Then the parties gradually moved around in the two dimensional social/economic issue space, until from the 1930s through the 1960s, the parties primarily competed on economic issues. Since then, in the Miller/Schofield story, the parties continued to move until now they compete primarily on social issues, but now with the Democrats on the left and the Republicans on the right.
It's an interesting argument but I have some problems with it. First off, it was my impression that the 1896 election was all about economic issues, with the Democrats supporting cheap money and easy credit (W. J. Bryan's "cross of gold" speech) and the Republicans representing big business. At least in that election, it was the Democrats on the left on economic issues and the Republicans on the right.
Getting to recent elections, the evidence from surveys and from roll call votes is that the Democrats and Republicans are pretty far apart on economic issues, again with the D's on the left and the R's on the right. So, from that perspective, it's not the parties that have changed positions, it's the states that have moved. The industrial northeastern and midwestern states have moved from supporting conservative economic policies to a more redistributionist stance. Which indeed is something of a mystery, and it's related to attitudes on social issues, but I certainly wouldn't say that economic issues don't matter anymore. According to Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder, social issues are more important now in voting than they were 20 years ago, but economic issues are still voters' dominant concern.
1896 vs. 2000 by counties within each state
Here are some more pretty pictures. First, within 6 selected states, a scatterplot of Bush vote share in 2000 vs. McKinley vote share in 1896. There are completely different patterns in different states! Nothing like as clean a pattern as the statewide plot above.
And here's another plot, this time showing each county as an ellipse, with the size of the ellipse proportional to the population of the county (more precisely, the voter turnout) in the two elections.
Nowadays the Democrats clearly do better in the big cities (in these graphs, the large-population counties). In 1896 the pattern wasn't so clear. I'd be interested to know what Jonathan Rodden thinks of all this. . .
Posted by Andrew at 12:39 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
February 19, 2008
Tied presidential elections
Apropos of this discussion, here's a list of all the U.S. presidential elections that were decided by less than 1% of the vote:
1880
1884
1888
1960
1968
2000
Funny, huh? Other close ones were 1844 (decided by 1.5% of the vote), 1876 (3%), 1916 (3%), 1976 (2%), 2004 (2.5%).
Four straight close e