Andrew is skeptical about “balancing” arguments in explaining why Chambliss won the Georgia Senate runoff election so easily, favoring a low-turnout explanation. Nolan looks at data and finds, as suspected, that parties not in the White House tend to win such special elections.

I’m not sure why Andrew finds it difficult to believe in balancing, at least on the margin. After all, we’re not too surprised when partisan tides or “coattails” happen, as we’ve just seen in 2006 and 2008. Even long serving incumbents get the boot if they’re the unfavored party. But the key is that people don’t really understand the aggregate consequences of the partisan tide. That is, the complete results of their independent decisionmaking at the ballot box aren’t available until after the election is over.

Once that happens, the uncertainty is over. People can clearly see who’s in power. And if the people are moderate, which they are, when they look at the newly unified government which is highly polarized to their left or right, balancing should look a lot more enticing.

In other words, what I’m arguing is that, if we believe partisan tides happen, we should also believe in balancing. In fact, the low-turnout argument boosts the balancing story, as we’d expect the people who do turn out to be more politically knowledgeable and to better understand the consequences of their choice.

One more thing. In other single-member-district democracies, if I’m not mistaken, special elections (more typically called by-elections) are often seen as a strong signal to the governing party, especially in the negative direction. I think local and regional elections do the same thing for parliamentary democracies.

Nolan McCarty writes:

Saxby Chambliss won reelection in the Georgia Senate run-off by a somewhat surprising margin 57-43% margin over Democrat Jim Martin. . . . there seems to be an emerging pattern of the newly elected president’s party losing in run-off elections. Of course, the closest parallel was in Georgia in 1992 when republican Paul Coverdell beat incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler following Bill Clinton’s presidential victory. . . . Political scientists and economists such as Alberto Alesina, Howard Rosenthal, and Mo Fiorina have offered a “balancing” explanation as to why the new president’s party performs poorly in these special elections and in midterm elections generally. The basic idea is that most voters are more ideological moderate than the two parties and therefore would like to balance them through divided government. . . . in a special or midterm election, voters have a clear opportunity to promote balance by voting against the president’s party.

Isn’t there a simpler explanation? Runoff elections generally have lower turnout than general elections (especially if the general election has the president on the ballot). Lower-turnout elections generally favor Republicans and conservatives. Chambliss won a plurality in the primary election, then you go to a lower-turnout runoff and you’d expect him to do even better, which he did. (Similarly for Republican candidate Coverdell in 1992.)

Is “balancing” really needed to explain this at all?

P.S. I agree with McCarty that the whole 60 votes thing has been overemphasized. Realistically there’s a limit to how many times the minority will want to filibuster against legislation that is popular enough to be passed by a majority in the House and Senate.

Political scientist (and coauthor) Nolan McCarty at Princeton nails the Senate cloture vote on the nose on his new blog. only 52 aye votes. His prediction is based on the highly ideological character of these types of bailout votes: liberals are far more likely to vote yes, conservatives are far more likely to vote no. While there are some exceptions, these appear to be the function of idiosyncratic factors like lame duck status and home state. In fact, the key difference between the House and Senate votes (apart from the failure of the cloture vote) is the geographic concentration of the big 3. In the House, Midwestern Republicans voted in favor of the bailout — but there aren’t that many Midwestern Republicans in the Senate; each state gets just two, after all. It can’t have helped, for example, for Mitch McConnell, a Republican from a very weak union state, to oppose the bailout.

The larger lesson here, however, is the power of ideology in explaining voting outcomes. Good thing I’m teaching a class on ideology in the spring!

Lane Kenworthy writes (link from here and here):

The notion that political parties are a key determinant of income inequality has been around for a long time. I suspect many non-academics take its truth for granted. Among American scholars, the notion is perhaps most closely associated with Douglas Hibbs . . .

[In his recent book, Unequal Democracy], Larry Bartels suggests that a key part of the story is different policies pursued by Democratic and Republican presidents. . . . Bartels’ argument, while by no means novel, is very much a fresh one. It is based on extensive empirical analysis of the post-World War II period. Is he correct? I think Bartels probably has it right for part of this period, but I’m not convinced that his hypothesis holds up for the other part. . . .

This relates to some ideas I had after seeing Bartels speak on his work at Columbia a couple of years ago; see here and here. In particular, in that last link, I wrote the following:

After seeing Larry Bartels present his findings on how the economy has done better, for the poor and middle class, under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents, I was puzzled. Not that it couldn’t be true, but it seemed a little mysterious, given the general sense that presidents don’t have much control over the econony–business cycles just seem to happen sometime.

Attitudes about what presidents can do for the economy

But the general perceptions about Presidents and the economy have changed over time.

I might be wrong here, not having lived through the entire postwar period, but my perception is that, during most of this time, “competence” was not an issue; rather, there was a general belief that the president could do some things, most notably help labor (for the Democrats) or business (for the Republicans).

The exception here was the 1976-1996 period, during which there was a real sense of economic incompetence or powerlessness of some presidents (Ford with his Whip Inflation Now, Carter with stagflation, the residual view of Democrats being incompetent for the economy, George H.W. Bush with the deficit and the regression, perhaps extending to Dole in 1996). Then, since 2000, we’ve returned to the general attitude that both parties have essential competence but have different goals. (Not that everyone agrees on the “competence” issue, but it seems to me that the battle is more being fought on priorities than competence–in contrast to 1992, for example.)

Back to Larry’s paper

So, the conventional wisdom based on the 1976-1996 period is that presidents can’t do much, they’re at the mercy of the business cycle, etc., which makes Bartels’s results seem like some sort of fluke, or a perhaps meaningless juxtaposition of one-off results. But taking the 1948-1972 and 2000-2004 perspectives, Bartels’s graph makes a lot of sense. From this perspective, the Democrats did their thing, and the Republicans did theirs, and you’d expect to see a big difference at the low end of the income scale. (Again, this is inherently short-term reasoning, not long-term, but as Larry pointed out in his talk, the evidence is that voters are susceptible to short-term inferences.)

In summary: we’re used to thinking of presidents as fairly powerless surfers on the global economy, able to tinker with tax rates but not much more–but thinking about the entire postwar period, there’s certainly been at least the perception that presidents can deliver the economic goods to their constituencies. So from that perspective, Larry’s curves should not be much of a surprise–at least in that the slope for Democrats goes down (i.e., poor people do better under Democratic presidents) and the slope for Republicans goes up (i.e., rich people do better under Republican presidents). The relative positions of the lines is another story, which perhaps corresponds to random alignments of the business cycle.

Perhaps Kenworthy can connect this thinking more directly to his arguments. My time frames don’t quite align with his, but it’s a similar idea of breaking the period into smaller segments.

And, to comment on my comments . . . when posting the above in 2006, I wrote, “since 2000, we’ve returned to the general attitude that both parties have essential competence but have different goals. . . . we’re used to thinking of presidents as fairly powerless surfers on the global economy, able to tinker with tax rates but not much more. . .” Things sure have changed in 2 1/2 years!

Today brings news of the arrest and indictment of Rod Blagojevich, Democratic governor of my home state of Illinois. What does this mean for the appointment of a candidate to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat?

Since Blagojevich is still the governor, he still has the right by state law to make the appointment. Remember, Ted Stevens ran for re-election even after being convicted on corruption charges (though he lost, despite being a mythic figure in Alaskan political history). Indeed, the prosecution and trial of Blagojevich is likely to take a long time. And state law imposes no deadline on the appointment, unlike other states. So he could just proclaim his innocence and wait it out. But it is difficult to imagine who would want the job if it meant being appointed by Blagojevich now.

What’s interesting is the role of ideology in the appointment process. My research on state legislative ideology revealed how remarkable Blagojevich was in the context of the Illinois Democratic Party. Given his Congressional and state legislative voting record, he ranks in the more conservative third of his party. See here for more details. (Of course, he’s no Lisa Madigan, who is one of the most conservative Democrats in the party.)

If the Governor resigns or is impeached, Lt. Governor Pat Quinn will be elevated to the governorship and acquire the right to make the appointment. This is potentially consequential because of two factors. First, according to the indictment, Blagojevich was considering nominating himself if others wouldn’t “play ball” and give him or his wife some plums in return for the pick. Given that nobody would be stupid enough to make a deal with a governor that has been under investigation for years, and combine that with a governor crazy enough to believe he could make a run for President in 2016 (!), that self-pick was indeed a possibility.

So Blagojevich’s indictment prevents his elevation of himself (or anyone else), clearing the way for a more liberal pick by Pat Quinn. Quinn does not have a voting record, so we can not (yet) be sure of his ideological leanings. But making the “conservative” prediction that (s)he will be about as liberal as a median Democrat indicates that his pick, if made on ideological grounds, would more conservative than the pick Blagojevich would have made were the choice his.

There are two aspects of a presidential election that can be predicted: the national popular vote and the relative positions of the states. The national popular vote can be forecasted months ahead of time given the economy and other predictors. for example using Doug Hibbs’s model:

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(As I wrote a few months ago, “the incumbent party sometimes loses but they never have gotten really slaughtered. In periods of low economic growth, the incumbent party can lose, but a 53-47 margin would be typical; you wouldn’t expect the challenger to get much more than that.”)

The relative positions of the states don’t actually change much from election to election:

You can do slightly better by using polls. As Matthew Yglesias puts it, “the large number of public polls on something like a presidential election makes the outcomes quite easy to forecast based on crude measures. What’s more, even absent polling, Presidential election outcomes seem to be pretty predictable based on nothing more than macroeconomic variables.”

Actually, even the February polls turn out to be pretty good–when combined with previous election results–to pin down the relative positions of the states.

Bayesian combination of state polls and election forecasts

Here’s the revised version of my article with Kari Lock in which we forecast the election using Hibbs for the national popular vote, and a weighted average of last election (corrected for incumbency) and the February polls to get the relative positions of the states.

Lots fo fun stuff there, including this prediction (based on February Clinton-McCain and Obama-McCain polls) of which states Clinton or Obama were expected to win in November:

Following a suggestion of Hober Short, I replotted the voting-by-age data with time on the x-axis. I also took this opportunity to go back to 1988 (the earliest for which I could effortlessly pull exit poll data off the web). Here’s what happened:

Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 did well among young voters–like Barack Obama, he was a young Democrat facing older Republican opponents–but not so well as Obama in 2008.

As in many political settings, the largest gains in the graph come from incorporating additional data–in this case, the comparison of 2008 with earlier years, the comparison on young voters with those of other ages, and the comparison of the three other age groups with each other (with the lack of variation in this last comparison being a motivation to focus on trends among young voters in particular).