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 the book and probably about the 2008 election as well.
Add comment | August 28th, 2008, by Andrew
Today R.G. Ratcliffe from the Houston Chronicle devotes a few paragraphs to talk about the seating arrangements of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. I got curious and decided to check out the Delegate seating for the Pepsi Center. A quick analysis suggests that most of Clinton’s Delagates got the Second row. Only 7 or 5 (depending on how you count ) out of the 22 States in which Clinton won got “floor level” seats (PA, MI*, FL*, NM, IN, NV, NH). However, almost all of these states but Indiana are considered as potential “swing” states.
McCain’s home state (AZ) it’s at the very back, but probably its delegates have a better view than some of their Texas counterparts whose view is being blocked by a network television interview platform… but McCanin is not doing great in AZ where almost 30% of the registered voters surveyed are undecided!! wouldn’t be more important to have AZ on the floor than AK and Guam?… Just asking.
1 comment | August 26th, 2008, by Jeronimo
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.
P.S. According to Wikipedia, the current population of South Ossetia is 70,000.
Add comment | August 25th, 2008, by Andrew
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. . . (Click here for full review.)
Add comment | August 22nd, 2008, by Andrew
Political conventions may not be as exciting as they once were, but they but they still give nominees a jump of about 5 percentage points. The bounce varies from election to election but it is nearly always positive, typically between 0 and 10% in the polls:
Let’s break down the bounce to see what’s happening among self-declared Democrats, Independents, and Republicans in each year. Gallup has data before and after every convention since 1984 broken down by the partisanship of the people polled.
On average, the bounce is positive among all groups, but the largest changes occur among Independents. This makes sense: the 20% or so of voters who identify with neither party are least likely to have already made up their mind and most likely to change their opinions. What is perhaps more of a surprise is that the bounces are, on average, of comparable size for both conventions: we do not see Democratic voters moving more to their party during the Democratic convention, or the Republicans shifting more during their party’s. The conventions are part of a larger campaigning process by which voters learn about the ideological and policy positions of the candidates. What is relevant is the information conveyed rather than the momentary positions of the polls.
Add comment | August 22nd, 2008, by Andrew
A reporter asked me the other day why political scientists are so sure that people vote based on the economy. I told him there are three big pieces of evidence:
1. Comparing elections. As Doug Hibbs and others have shown, there’s a strong correlation between the incumbent party’s share of the vote and economic conditions in the year preceding the election.
2. Comparing voters within an election. As Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder, and others have shown, individuals’ views of the national economy are a good predictor of their votes.
3. Voters’ stated concerns. When asked what are the most important issues, voters lead with “job creation/economic growth” (23%) and “energy/gas prices” (20%), with, in total, 59% of voters identifying economic issues as most important, as compared to 16% mentioning Iraq, 8% mentioning terrorism, 8% immigration, and 5% environment. The economy isn’t the only issue, but it’s central.
If there’s a factor that predicts elections, individual votes, and it’s what people say that it matters to them–then we’re inclined to believe them.
4 comments | August 21st, 2008, by Andrew
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.
Add comment | August 20th, 2008, by Andrew
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.
Add comment | August 18th, 2008, by Andrew
If anyone has any thoughts or questions about the book, feel free to post them in comments below.
I’ll be on vacation for a week, so no more pretty pictures here for awhile (unless my coauthors want to post anything).
2 comments | August 7th, 2008, by Andrew
Here’s a picture from my paper with Jonathan and Gary a few years ago that appeared in the volume Rethinking the Vote, but it’s actually a graph that Gary and I made around 1994 or so. The graph shows the share of the two-party popular vote that the Democrats needed to have a 5%, 50%, or 95% chance of winning the electoral college in each year:
In most years, things were pretty balanced (each party has some close states and some not-so-close states, each party wins some big states and some small states). We haven’t done 2008 but I suspect it would be similar. That’s the conclusion of this paper by Phillip Ardoin and Bryan Parsons:
Our [Ardoin and Parsons's] research provides a direct analysis of the multiple sources of bias within the electoral college and examines their individual impact on each party’s electoral fortunes over the last eleven elections (1964-2004) with particular attention on the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Our results are in line with previous analyses indicating no significant bias within the electoral college.
1 comment | August 7th, 2008, by Andrew
"I enjoyed reading this book. I learned a lot about political misconceptions and counterintuitive properties of elections--my view of political data will never be the same."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"This book will help people on all sides to see politics more clearly, and it will require all of us to toss many pieces of conventional wisdom into the dustbin."
E. J. Dionne Jr