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. I’m looking forward to the discussion.

Turns out that as far Comedy Central goes, Democrats prefer the Colbert Report, while Republicans turn to South Park. Though they both agree that “The Next Food Network Star” is their favorite Food Network show. Not Iron Chef? Pah.

As David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers, mentioned to me, Ronald Reagan’s famous question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” echoes an earlier line from Franklin Roosevelt, from a 1934 radio address:

“But the simplest way for each of you to judge recovery lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation. Are you better off than you were last year?”

This reminds me of a point Aaron Edlin, Noah Kaplan, and I have made, which is that the evidence is (both from survey data and from theoretical considerations) that people vote based on what they think is good for the country, rather than what they think is their personal benefit. (This relates to the idea that it’s not rational to vote, with a probability of decisive vote being about 1 in 10 million, if your goal is to get a $300 tax cut or whatever, but it is rational to vote, with these same odds, if your goal is to make the country and world a much better place.)

Anyway, the Reagan quote is often taken as a symbol of selfishness, of people voting based on what makes themselves better off. But I’ve always taken Reagan’s statement as implicitly statistical or inferential: if your goal is to evaluate how the country is going, look to yourself and your neighbors and see how they are doing. “Are you better off than you were four years ago” is an estimate of “Is the country better off…”

This idea of personal-retrospection-as-inference is clearer in the original Roosevelt quote: “But the simplest way for each of you to judge recovery lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation…” As with Reagan, not an appeal to selfishness but rather an appeal to inference.

Two interesting articles in Newsweek:  Jon Meacham writes that “America remains a center-right nation,” and Jonathan Alter replies that “we’re heading left once again.” Here’s Meacham:

So are we a centrist country, or a right-of-center one? I think the latter, because the mean to which most Americans revert tends to be more conservative than liberal. . . . nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996). . . . In California, at least one poll suggests that social conservatives may pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot proposition next month . . .

And here’s Alter:

Jon Meacham is right that by the standards of a European-style welfare state, we will always be a relatively conservative country. But closer to home, the norm has not been consistently conservative over the course of the 20th century. If anything, the nation was more often center-left. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives—the “People’s House”—for six straight decades between 1930 and 1994 (with only a short exception). While many were Southern conservatives on race, the huge chunks of progressive legislation they swallowed over many years could choke an elephant. . . .

A methodological comment

And now here’s me. Before getting to the data on voters’ ideologies, let me make a brief methodological comment. Meacham’s point that Republicans have been winning presidential elections is relevant; in fact, before 1994 there was an ongoing discussion within political science as to how the Republicans were consistently winning the presidency while being in the minority in party identification and congressional voting. (From 1994-2004, the two parties split the congressional vote roughly evenly. From 1950-1992 and again in 2006 (and probably in 2008 as well), it’s been a pretty consistent 55% for Dems and 45% for Reps. See the lower graph at this link.) So, yes. But Meacham’s comparison is misleading in that he’s treating the election outcomes as yes/no measures of public opinion. But surely if the essentially-tied 1968, 1976, and 2000 elections tell us anything about public opinion, it is that it was evenly divided in these years, not that America was left or right. Counting the winner is a common mistake people make in studying elections. Yes, for policy concerns it is the winner that matters more than the vote margin, but for studying public opinion it is a different story.

A more important point, though, which both Meacham and Alter raise in different ways, is that ideology is relative to current standards; given that the parties can shift positions (if only gradually at times), it is no surprise that they find themselves not too far from current voters. For example, is it really a sign of conservatism that 50% of Californians think gay marriage is OK? Similarly, if Obama raises the tax rate on the top bracket to 40%, would this really represent a triumph of liberalism? The center has moved a lot, in different ways, over the past few decades.

And now for some data

From Michael Herron and Joe Bafumi (and in chapter 8 of our book), here are estimates of the distributions of voters, House members, and senators on a common scale:

House members and senators’ positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress. Voters’ positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress. As you can see, elected representatives are generally more extreme than voters. (See here for versions of the above graph broken down by red, purple, and blue states.)

In light of recent American politics, this pattern makes sense: congressmembers generally vote with their parties, very few conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans remain in the House or the Senate, and, as Delia and I have shown, voters’ positions on issues are much more of a mixed bag. Voters may be to the left of the Democratic party or to the right of the Republican party on specific issues, but, on the whole, most voters don’t have that sort of ideological consistency.

More data on voters’ ideologies, this time in comparison to how they perceive Bush and Kerry, is in chapter 9 of our book, originally from my paper with Jeff Cai. Here’s the graph showing how a random sample of a thousand or so Americans in October, 2004, perceived Bush, Kerry, and themselves on a set of economic and social issues (i.e., respondents were asked about particular issues, not about general “liberal” or “conservative” labels):

There was a lot of spread; on average, though, voters saw themselves as between the two candidates. (See the graph on the right, in which K and B represent respondents’ average assessments of where Bush and Kerry stood on these issues.)

At the beginning of the year I had an exchange with an economist who interpreted the polls to say that American opinion is to the left of the middle of the Democratic party. His point was that, although Americans are much more likely to label themselves as conservative than liberal, but they are more liberal when you look at particular issues such as health insurance and whether the rich pay too little in taxes. When you look at a large basket of issues, however, you find the voters to be between the two parties, as is indicated in our graphs above.

Voters and nonvoters

Finally, we should distinguish between political positions of voters and of Americans in general. As Nagler and Leighley have discussed, nonvoters differ systematically from voters:

The ideological distribution of voters and non-voters in 2004 is fairly similar to that in 1972: moderates are most under-represented, while conservatives are over-represented. Importantly, the magnitude of these differences increases between 1972 and 2004. . . . these differences on class-based issues are enduring and increasing.

For the question, What should President Obama (or McCain) do?, the opinions of nonvoters aren’t so relevant. But for statements about America, compared to other countries with higher voter turnout, it’s worth keeping these differences in mind.

In conclusion

Both Meacham and Alter have useful perspectives on recent American political history, and the data we’ve looked at don’t directly address the “center-right” vs. “center-left” controversy: these terms only make sense when compared to some contemporary standard. But the evidence, both from elections and from polls, supports the commonsensical idea that the two major parties are far enough apart that, at least in the short term, voters can move policy as far as they want to the left or to the right by consistently voting for Democrats or Republicans. Either party, when elected, has to balance its policy goals with its desire not to move too far away from the center.

That said, the success of an administrative policy depends on more than where it stands on a left-right scale. For example, when it came to implementing conservative policies, Reagan had more success with tax cuts than with budget cuts.

Book TV on C-Span 2.  Sat 18 Oct 7pm and Mon 20 Oct 6am.  It’s the video of our event at the Cato Institute last month:  Boris and me, introduced by Will Wilkinson and discussed by Michael McDonald and Brink Lindsey.  Here’s the link.

The New York Times ran a fascinating piece on ideology and theater. Turns out that, unlike literature where a couple of big names are right-leaning, (secular) theater is almost exclusively blue. David Mamet is one of the few exceptions. The article points to Saul Bellow, Mark Helprin, and V.S. Naipul as the literary rightists. I’ve only read the latter’s A House for Mr. Biswas, and it wasn’t particularly conservative.

I spoke on the book at NYU on Tuesday and used the line about religion as the “opiate of the elites,” showing this graph:

Pat Egan was my discussant and presented some data casting doubt on this story. He took poll data from 2004, I think it was, and fit logistic regressions to vote preference, given attitudes on three issues: taxes, abortion, and Iraq. He fit separate models to high, middle, and low-income voters. His hypothesis was, if social issues are truly the opiate of the elites, that the coefficient for attitude on abortion would be higher among the rich than the poor. But this didn’t happen: the coefficient for abortion was slightly higher among the poor–that is, social issues, by this measure, seemed to be more important among lower income voters.

What do I make of this? My quick response was that, in their Purple America paper, Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder put together pretty comprehensive measures of social and economic attitudes, and found social attitudes to be more important among the rich than the poor in predicting vote.

I was thinking more about this and have a few other thoughts. Perhaps Pat or someone else will be interested in looking in to this.

- Measurement is key. Responses to different issues have low correlations, so it can help to use multiple issue questions for each issue domain, rather than simply one question per domain.

- My impression is that, for richer voters, both economic and social issues are more closely tied to party preference and also more closely tied to each other. I’m not sure how this should come out in Pat’s multiple regression analysis. I’m still struggling to see how the “opiate of the elites” story fits in to this.

- Religious attendance, and even religious belief, isn’t the same as social attitudes. Not by a long shot. (Similarly, income is not so strongly correlated with economic ideology.) See the graphs on page 90. A challenge is to fit together our findings on income and religion with what we know about issue attitudes.

Aaron Strauss provides more evidence that, compared to forecasts based on fundamentals, early polls give almost no information about election outcomes. Strauss writes the following about allocation of campaign resources:

The key to a effective strategy is determining, ex ante, which states will be pivotal on Election Day. Existing Bayesian election models are inappropriate for this game, as they estimate the current standings of the candidates or states rather than the final outcomes. I [Strauss] develop a Bayesian dynamic linear forecasting model that incorporates informative priors from historical regressions, updates based on in-cycle state and national polls, and accounts for the uncertainty of events that take place between the polls’ issuance and Election Day. National and state shocks are modeled as a reverse random walk beginning with the final outcome and moving backwards through time. Uncertainty about the final outcome is calculated by combining the random walk’s linearly decreasing variance over time, natural poll measurement error, house effects of national polls, and historically stable trends of election results. Using the resulting estimates of the states’ standings relative to each other, I simulate electoral vote outcomes and determine the probability of each state being pivotal. I find that early polls can be misleading to such an extent that putting any weight on them produces worse forecasts than solely relying on historical trends.

Here are two things I kept saying a couple of months ago that I think don’t need to be said any more:

Evidence that the state of the economy is crucial to voters

The nonpuzzle of the close election polls

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.