Matt Yglesias

Political Journalism Just Can’t Quit the Ecological Fallacy

Many cars (cc photo by Sylvar)

One favorite trick of American political journalism is to notice that some states are liberal and some are conservative, then to notice that the liberal states have some characteristics, and then make inferences about the characteristics of individual liberals by attributing the qualities of the states in which they reside to them. For example, since wealthier states are more liberal, you can assert that liberal voters are richer than salt-of-the-earth conservative types. This mode of inference, though popular, is also mistaken. It’s known as the “ecological fallacy.” But that never seems to stop it. Thus, for example, there’s this from The Washington Times:

The Volvo-driving liberal and the redneck in a Chevy pickup are long-held stereotypes. But a map of car ownership – produced by R.L. Polk & Co. – overlaid on the electoral map reveals the surprising extent to which how we vote corresponds with what we drive.

Blue-staters on each coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle and from Boston to the District, are the most likely to drive foreign cars. Domestic brands have their highest levels of market share in the mostly conservative interior of the country.

Now as it happens, it does appear to be true that there are strong correlations out there between individual voting behavior and individual consumption patterns. So there’s probably some legitimate results to be found in this area if you really look into it. More enlightening than the “foreign vs domestic” issue would probably be to look at kinds of cars—who buys trucks and SUVs versus who buys conventional cars.

A Smart Take on Honduras

Manuel Zelaya

Brookings’ Kevin Casas-Zamora offers up the brief-but-informative take on what happened in Honduras that I’ve been waiting for:

As other Latin American leaders, President Zelaya fell victim to the virus of presidential reelection, an institution with questionable pedigree in a region that has paid a dear price for its fondness of caudillos. The real problem, however, was that by organizing a de facto referendum to test the popularity of his idea, Zelaya pursued his ambition with total disregard of his country’s constitution. The latter explicitly forbids holding referenda—let alone an unsanctioned “popular consultation”—to amend the constitution and, more specifically, to modify the presidential term. Unsurprisingly, the president’s idea met with the resistance of Congress, nearly all parties (including his own), the press, business, electoral authorities, and, crucially, the Supreme Court, that deemed the whole endeavor illegal. Last week, when the President demanded the Armed Forces’ support to distribute the electoral material to carry out his “opinion poll,” the military commander refused to comply with the order, was summarily dismissed for his refusal, and later reinstated by the Supreme Court. The president then cited the troubling history of military intervention in Honduran politics, a past that the country—under more prudent governments—had made great strides in leaving behind in the past two decades. He forgot to mention that the order that he issued was illegal. [...]

Now the Honduran military have responded in kind: an illegal referendum has met an illegal military intervention, with the avowed intention of protecting the constitution. Moreover, as has been so often the case, this intervention has been called for and celebrated by Zelaya’s civilian opponents. For the past week, the Honduran Congress has waxed lyrical about the armed forces as the guarantors of the constitution, a disturbing notion in Latin America. When we hear that, we can expect the worst. And the worst has happened. At the very least, we are witnessing in Honduras the return of the sad role of the military as the ultimate referee in the political conflicts amongst the civilian leadership, a huge step back in the consolidation of democracy.

His policy suggestion is that the United States and the Organization of American States should push for Zelaya to be reinstated. They point out that if Honduran civilians want to attempt to prosecute Zelaya through the civilian legal system, they can do that. One thing that I continue not to understand about this situation is does Honduras not have an impeachment mechanism through which congress can depose Zelaya? It seems to me that if the congress is inclined to go along with an anti-Zelaya military coup, there ought to have been some legal mechanism in place through which they could have changed presidents without subverting democracy.

As a more general point, my understanding of the evidence continues to be that parliamentary systems are less prone to constitutional crisis and breakdown. Latin America would do well to stop imitating us yankees and start imitating the vast majority of stable democracies. What’s more, for small countries like Honduras it seems to me that total demilitarization (à la Costa Rica) looks like a very attractive option.

The Limited Explanatory Power of the Median Voter Theorem

Tyler Cowen thinks people should talk more about the median voter theorem when trying to understand what’s happening in politics. I disagree. I mean, admitted the phrase “median voter theorem” is almost never used in newspapers, but I think the conventional political media wisdom tends to drastically overstate voter preferences as an explanatory variable. Andrew Gelman also has his doubts about the importance of the median voter theorem, citing data which indicates that a moderate voting record only modestly boosts your ability to win elections:

The United States Senate also provides a convenient test of this idea, since it offers up a series of pairs of politicians who are accountable to identical groups of voters. But when you look at opposite-party senate pairs, you don’t see a great deal of similarity in their voting records. Or to look at it another way, everyone knows that the voters in Louisiana are more liberal than the voters in Iowa. And this helps explain why Mary Landrieu is more conservative than Tom Harkin. But Mary Landrieu isn’t more conservative than Chuck Grassley. The ordering of those states’ four Senators, from left to right, is Harkin (D-IA) then Landrieu (D-LA) then Grassley (R-IA) then Vitter (R-LA) — the partisan affiliation of the senator tells you more about their voting behavior than does knowledge about the electorate they represent. Indeed, in terms of DW-NOMINATE exactly zero Senate Democrats in the 110th or 109th Senates compiled a voting record more conservative than that of the leftmost Republican (first Chaffee then Olympia Snowe) even though in both cases many Democrats represented states whose median voters are more conservative than the median voter in Maine or Rhode Island.

Part of the answer here is presumably that it’s relatively rare for an incumbent American politician to actually face a competitive re-election bid. Incumbent Senators do frequently form cross-party alliances to defend parochial local interests, for fairly obvious reasons, so it’s not as if people are behaving recklessly with their careers. Helping out local influentials is presumably not only (locally) popular, but actually helps ward off challengers. I would also note that it’s not obvious to me how an incumbent politicians would really go about assessing median voter sentiment—issue polling is legendarily unreliable and subject to massive framing bias.

Outlook is Murky on Bipartisanship/Stability Link

In a recapitulation of early talk of trying to write a stimulus bill that could secure eighty votes in the United States Senate, we’re now hearing things about Democratic Senators being eager to water down a health care reform bill in hopes of securing seventy votes to pass it. Brendan Nyhan observes that the most oft-stated rationale for the pursuit of this sort of majority is policy stability, bipartisan legislation is said to be more enduring and less subject to massive overall. He also observes that the evidence for this in the political science literature is pretty weak and ambiguous.

Any reasonable president or legislative leader should, I think, make a serious effort to bring as many people into the process who are genuinely interested in reform. And of course it makes sense to go the extra mile in terms of “courting” and so forth to try to get votes from across the aisle. But when you’re talking about a major policy concession like gutting a public option that could save the country hundreds of billions of dollars, then I think you ought to have a very good reason for making the concession. Speculative ideas about stability don’t, it seems to me, make the cut.

And of course it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that some people who are citing Republican opposition as the reason for opposition to a robust public option may be dissembling to some extent. Bold progressive reform like a robust public option tends to threaten powerful and well-heeled interests. Many legislators—from both parties—are not always eager to threaten those interests. But legislators are also not eager to be seen as caving to powerful interests. If you can do what the special interests want, like drop a public plan, but say that you only did it at the insistence of someone else (Republicans!) then you get to have your cake and eat it, too. You’re not opposed to a public plan, you can assure people, but you’re a pragmatist. Then behind closed doors you can remind the special interests that when the chips were down you saved them.

The Bad News About Correcting Myths

In light of Frank Gaffney’s latest efforts to hype up the “Obama is a secret Muslim” myth, Brendan Nyhan draws my attention to the fact that he and several collaborators have a working paper (PDF) that specifically looks at this myth to test some larger ideas about how to correct political misinformation. The conclusions, unfortunately, are not all that encouraging:

In this paper, we address the question of how to counter political misperceptions, which are often difficult or impossible to eradicate. One explanation for this difficulty is that corrections frequently take the form of a negation (i.e. “Tom is not sick”), a construction that may fail to reduce the association between the subject and the concept being negated (Mayo et al. 2004). We apply this approach to the persistent rumor from the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama is a Muslim, comparing the effectiveness of what we call a misperception negation (“I am not and never have been of the Muslim faith”) with what we call a corrective affirmation (“I am a Christian”), which should be more effective. As expected, we find that the misperception negation was ineffective. However, our hypothesis that the corrective affirmation would successfully reduce misperceptions was only supported when a non-white experimental administrator was present, suggesting a strong social desirability effect on the acceptance of corrective information. In addition, three-way interactions between the corrective affirmation, race of administrator, and party identification suggest that social desirability effects were more prevalent among Republicans. When nonwhite administrators were absent, the corrective affirmation not only failed to reduce Republican misperceptions but caused a backfire effect in which GOP identifiers became more likely to believe Obama is Muslim and less likely to believe he was being honest about his religion. We interpret this reaction as being driven by Obama’s embrace of Christianity, which may provoke cognitive dissonance among Republicans.

In other words, in politics getting your allies to lie about your opponents can be a very effective political tactic. Similarly, people who care about honesty ought to consider themselves very seriously obligated to reprimand people who are deliberately spreading misinformation. At the end of the day, it’s extremely difficult to actually counter misinformation, and so society needs there to be disincentives to spreading it.

Very Old Quote of the Day

Here’s a line allegedly from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws that I’ve only ever actually seen quoted in other works:

As Rome, Sparta, and Carthage have lost their liberty and perished, so the constitution of England will in time lose its liberty, will perish: it will perish, whenever the legislative power shall become more corrupt than the executive.

I’m not sure this means American liberty is doomed, but I think it would be hard to deny that the corrupting influence of special interest politics weighs heavier on the Hill than it does on the White House.

Meanwhile, I do think you can see an inkling of what Montesquieu is talking about in the fact that there’s a persistent impulse in the contemporary United States to say that if something is really important, we need to basically cut congress out of the loop. This probably happened first with the steady decline of congress’ war powers. But you also saw it in the way that the Treasury/Fed response to the financial crisis was shaped by an overwhelming desire to avoid the need to go back to congress, by the way that proposals for improving the operations of MedPAC all involve trying to circumvent congress, etc. Tellingly, the judgment that congress can’t handle these issues is a judgment largely shared by congress. In the England of Montesquieu’s day, of course, the “executive” was understood to mean the unelected King, so a shift in the balance of power from legislature to executive constituted the death of liberty. Here in the US, obviously, it’s a different situation.

Progressive Policy Helps “Red” States

Alec MacGillis had an interesting piece in The Washington Post over the weekend making the case that universal health care would constitute a net transfer of resources from blue America to red America. I think, however, that it’s best to think of this as part of a more general phenomenon. Democrats normally favor policies that shift resources from rich people, who tend to vote Republican, to people of more modest means, who tend to vote Democratic. But the more Republican-friendly states are poorer than the Democratic-friendly states. So Democrats who enact progressive redistributive policies tend to be shifting resources to Republican geographical areas. It’s important, however, to keep the people and the places separate. For example, here’s Andrew Gelman’s chart of the Bush-Kerry vote among people in the bottom third of the income distribution:

And here’s the top third:

MacGillis’s piece highlights the ways in which this aspect of American politics makes certain kinds of change difficult. In effect, there’s nobody in the Senate representing the specific interests of the large number of poor people in the deep south. Qua voters, those people are loyal Democrats, so the Republican politicians who represent those areas can comfortably write them off. But the Democrats are hopeless in the region.