All Your Best Blog Posts On That Economic Policy Institute’s Study

Ezra Klein:

“Republicans say that public-sector employees have become a privileged class that overburdened taxpayers,” write Karen Tumulty and Brady Dennis. The question, of course, is whether it’s true. Consider this analysis the Economic Policy Institute conducted comparing total compensation — that is to say, wages and health-care benefits and pensions — among public and private workers in Wisconsin. To get an apples-to-apples comparison, the study’s author controlled for experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship and disability, and then sorted the results by education

[…]

If you prefer it in non-graph form: “Wisconsin public-sector workers face an annual compensation penalty of 11%. Adjusting for the slightly fewer hours worked per week on average, these public workers still face a compensation penalty of 5% for choosing to work in the public sector.”

Jim Manzi at The American Scene:

Klein links to an executive summary to support his claim, but reading the actual paper by Jeffrey H. Keefe is instructive. Keefe took a representative sample of Wisconsin workers, and built a regression model that relates “fundamental personal characteristics and labor market skills” to compensation, and then compared public to private sector employees, after “controlling” for these factors. As far as I can see, the factors adjusted for were: years of education; years of experience; gender; race; ethnicity; disability; size of organization where the employee works; and, hours worked per year. Stripped of jargon, what Keefe asserts is that, on average, any two individuals with identical scores on each of these listed characteristics “should” be paid the same amount.

But consider Bob and Joe, two hypothetical non-disabled white males, each of whom went to work at Kohl’s Wisconsin headquarters in the summer of 2000, immediately after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. They have both remained there ever since, and each works about 50 hours per week. Bob makes $65,000 per year, and Joe makes $62,000 per year. Could you conclude that Joe is undercompensated versus Bob? Do you have enough information to know the “fundamental personal characteristics and labor market skills” of each to that degree of precision? Suppose I told you that Bob is an accountant, and Joe is a merchandise buyer.

Even if Bob and Joe are illustrative stand-ins for large groups of employees for whom idiosyncratic differences should average out, if there are systematic differences in the market realities of the skills, talents, work orientation and the like demanded by accountants as compared to buyers, then I can’t assert that either group is underpaid or overpaid because the average salary is 5% different between these two groups.

And this hypothetical example considers people with a degree from the same school working in the same industry at the same company in the same town, just in different job classifications. Keefe is considering almost any full-time employee in Wisconsin with the identical years of education, race, gender, etc. as providing labor of equivalent market value, whether they are theoretical physicists, police officers, retail store managers, accountants, salespeople, or anything else. Whether they work in Milwaukee, Madison, or a small town with a much lower cost of living. Whether their job is high-stress or low-stress. Whether they face a constant, realistic risk of being laid off any given year, or close to lifetime employment. Whether their years of education for the job are in molecular biology, or the sociology of dance. Whether they do unpredictable shift work in a factory, or 9 – 5 desk work in an office with the option to telecommute one day per week.

Keefe claims – without adjusting for an all-but infinite number of such relevant potential differences between the weight-average public sector worker and the weight-average private sector worker – that his analysis is precise enough to ascribe a 5% difference in compensation to a public sector compensation “penalty.”

And his use of the statistical tests that he claims show that the total public-private compensation gap is “statistically significant” are worse than useless; they are misleading. The whole question – as is obvious even to untrained observers – is whether or not there are material systematic differences between the public and private employee that are not captured by the list of coefficients in his regression model. His statistical tests simply assume that there are not.

I don’t know if Wisconsin’s public employees are underpaid, overpaid, or paid just right. But this study sure doesn’t answer the question.

Jason Richwine at Heritage:

Manzi is referring to “the human capital model,” which holds that workers are paid according to their skills and personal characteristics, like education and experience. Most scholars—including Andrew, myself, and Heritage’s James Sherk—use it to compare the wages of the public and private sectors. If the public sector still earns more than the private after controlling for a variety of factors, then it is said to be “overpaid” in wages. But because we cannot control for everything, Manzi is saying, the technique is not very useful.

His critique is reasonable enough, but overwrought. The human capital model has been around for three decades, and it is unlikely that economists have failed to uncover important variables that would drastically change its results. Nevertheless, there are other techniques that address most of Manzi’s concerns. An upcoming Heritage Foundation report uses a “fixed effects” approach, which follows the same people over time as they switch between the private and federal sectors. By looking at how the same person’s wage changes when he moves between sectors, a lot of unobservable traits—intelligence, extroversion, etc.—are accounted for.

In order to capture fringe benefits as well as wages, economists have also used quit rates and job queues. If public workers quit less often than private workers, we can infer (with some qualifications, of course) that there are not better options available to them. Similarly, if many more applicants apply for government jobs than there are positions—creating a “queue”—then we know that government jobs are highly desirable. Of course no methodology is perfect, but the scholarly literature can tell us a lot about pay comparisons. Andrew and I discussed this work in detail in a recent Weekly Standard article.

John Sides:

From one perspective, sure, I agree that a statistical analysis of the sort described above based on observational data can never be a true direct comparison. (Not to mention the difficulty of classifying people like me who work in the quasi-public sector.) But if you take things from the other direction, this sort of study can be valuable.

What do I mean by “the other direction,” you might ask? I mean, suppose you start, as people do, with raw numbers: Salary plus benefits = X% of the state budget. The state has Y number of employees. Average income of all Wisconsinites is Z. Then you start adjusting for hours worked, ages of the employees, etc etc, and . . . you end up with Keefe’s analysis.

My point is, people are going to make some comparisons. Comparisons aren’t so dumb as long as you realize their limitations. And once you start to compare, it makes sense to try to compare comparable cases. Taking Manzi’s criticism too strongly would leave us in the position of allowing raw numbers, and allowing pure unblemished randomized experiments, but nothing in between.

In summary:

1. Manzi’s right to emphasize that a simplistic interpretation of regression results can be misleading.

2. Regressions of observational data can be a good way of going beyond raw comparisons and averages.

Some of this discussion reminds me of the literature on the wage premium for risk, where people run regressions on salaries for comparable jobs in order to estimate how much people need to be paid to risk death or injury.. Based on my reading is that these studies can’t be trusted: if you’re not careful, you can easily estimate the value of life to be negative–after all, the riskiest jobs (lumberjack, etc.) tend to pay poorly, while the best-paying jobs (being Bill Gates, etc.) are pretty safe gigs. With care, you can get those regressions to give reasonable coefficients in the range of $1 million per life, but I don’t really see these numbers as meaning anything at all; they’re just the results of fiddling with the models until something reasonable comes out. I’m not saying that the people who do these analyses are cheating, just that they want reasonable results but the models seem too open-ended to be a good measure of risk premiums.

Jonathan Cohn at TNR:

Am I certain Keefe is right? No. Having spent some time reporting on public and private sector compensation before, I can tell you that there is a lot of disagreement over the proper way to adjust the raw compensation figures to account for variables like age, education, and so on. (The debate is as much philosophical as methodological: Some conservatives argue that public employers put an artificial premium on graduate education, effectively paying more for degrees that don’t make workers better qualified.) I haven’t seen a specific refutation of Keefe’s report on Wisconsin, but if you want to read an analysis that suggests public workers, in general, are over-compensated, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute has done work along those lines–and has a new article in the Weekly Standard summarizing his views.

But I wonder if this whole debate misses the point. Suppose public workers really do make more than private sector workers. Who’s to say that the problem is public workers making too much, rather than private sector workers making too little?

Andrew Biggs at AEI:

While we’ll have a longer piece out on Wisconsin pay soon, I figured that in response to Cohn’s post I’d raise a couple issues regarding EPI’s report.

First, we’ve found a lower salary penalty for Wisconsin public employees than EPI did (around -5 percent versus -11 percent in EPI’s study). It’s not clear what’s driving the difference, since we’re using the same data, but that’s something to track down. It’s also worth noting that both our calculations and EPI’s control for firm size; this means that essentially we’re comparing Wisconsin public employees not to all private workers, but to employees at the very largest Wisconsin firms, who tend to pay more generous salaries and benefits. Whether to control for firm size is an open question, since if a given public employee didn’t work for the government there’s a good chance he wouldn’t work at a large private firm. But readers at least should be aware of the issue.

Second, the benefits shown in the EPI report aren’t actually for Wisconsin alone. They’re an average for the “East North Central Census Division,” which comprises Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t publish compensation data at the state level (due to small sample sizes) regional figures are the best we’ve got. The problem is, if Wisconsin government workers get relatively better benefits than public employees in other states—which seems to be part of the argument that Governor Walker is making—then these figures will understate true compensation. For instance, in practice Wisconsin public employees make essentially no contribution toward their pensions (formally they must contribute around 5 percent of pay, but their employers almost always cover it). Nationally, public employees contribute an average of around 5.7 percent of pay to their pensions.

Third, the benefit measures in the EPI study are based on what employers pay, not what employees actually receive. This matters for public-sector defined-benefit pensions, which use much more optimistic investment return assumptions than private pensions (a 7.8 percent assumed return in the Wisconsin Retirement System, versus around a 4 percent riskless return in U.S. Treasury securities) and fund their benefits accordingly. Most economists think public pensions are wrong to make these assumptions, but what matters is that employees effectively receive those higher returns whether the investments pan out or not. Adjusting for the differences in implicit returns to pensions would increase total Wisconsin compensation by around 4 percent.

Fourth, and related, is that the EPI study omits the value of retiree health benefits, which most public workers receive but most private employees don’t. (Some very large firms still offer retiree health benefits, but they’re increasingly rare and increasingly stingy.) The value of retiree healthcare can vary significantly. For instance, most run-of-the-mill Wisconsin state retirees are offered the right to buy into the employee plan. This provides an implicit subsidy, since they’re buying at rates calculated for the working-age population rather than their own health risk. The value of this is equal to a percent or so of extra pay every year. Other employees, such as Milwaukee teachers, have almost all their premiums paid for them. Actuarial reports list these protections as costing over 17 percent of salaries, meaning that for these workers EPI’s approach would miss a lot of benefit income. In addition, even these actuarial studies value retiree health coverage at employer cost, not the benefit to the employee. A retired 60-year-old purchasing coverage in the individual market would pay significantly more than the reported cost of his public-sector retiree health plan, because individual coverage costs more than group coverage. Some studies place the cost differential at around 25 percent; the Congressional Budget Office’s health insurance model appears to assume something larger: they say that “once differences in the characteristics of nongroup versus ESI [employer sponsored insurance] policyholders are considered and different loading costs are considered, a typical nongroup policy has roughly 60 percent of the relative plan value of an average ESI policy. That finding is supported by a recent survey of nongroup and ESI premiums and relative plan values in California.” So we know something is being missed and we have good reason to believe that even when we find actuarial reports calculating the cost of retiree health coverage, it’s still an underestimate. Unfortunately, there’s no central data source for retiree health benefits, meaning there’s a lot of digging to get a correct answer.

Fifth, the EPI report doesn’t calculate the value of public-sector job security. In a given year, a state/local worker has less than one-third the chance of being fired or laid off as a private worker. There’s a long history in economics (back to Adam Smith, actually) of thinking in terms of “compensating wage differentials,” although it’s only in the last 20 years or so that there’s been much progress in measuring them. We took a somewhat different approach, of using financial tools to calculate the price of an insurance policy that would protect against job loss and counting the value of that insurance toward public-sector pay. In theory each should produce the same answer, but as always things are messy. There may be a way of using CPS data to get on top of this, though.

At the end of the day, I just don’t think we can make any final conclusions on state/local pay because so much of the data, particularly on the benefits end, is still too loosey-goosey. There’s just more work to be done. (At the federal level, though, the measured overpayment is so large that I’m willing to say I’m convinced.)

Ezra Klein, responding to Manzi:

Jim Manzi has posted a critique of the Economic Policy Institute’s study (PDF) suggesting that Wisconsin’s public-sector workers are underpaid relative to their private-sector counterparts. It basically boils down to the argument that this sort of thing is hard to measure. The study controls for most every observable worker characteristic that we can imagine controlling for. But there are, Manzi says, an “all-but-infinite” number of differences beyond that. Perhaps going into the public sector says something about a person’s level of ambition, or ability to take risks and tolerate stress, or tendency to innovate — something that, in turn, makes the private-sector worker worth more or less to the economy.

And fair enough. Maybe there is some systemic difference between Hispanic women with bachelor’s degrees and 20 years of work experience who put in 52-hour weeks in the public sector and Hispanic women with bachelor’s degrees and 20 years of work experience who put in 52-hour weeks in the private sector. If anyone has some evidence for that, I’m open to hearing it. But the EPI study is aimed at a very specific and very influential claim: that Wisconsin’s state and local employees are clearly overpaid. It blows that claim up. Even in Manzi’s critique, there’s nothing left of it. So at this point, the burden of proof is on those who say Wisconsin’s public employees make too much money.

Reihan Salam on Klein’s response:

I was struck by this sentence: “Even in Manzi’s critique, there’s nothing left of it.” I’ve known Jim for many years and I’ve read just about everything he’s written, including a few things that haven’t been published. I have never seen Jim write that Wisconsin’s state and local employees are clearly overpaid, or indeed that any employees are clearly overpaid. There are many right-wingers who’ve said that, but it’s not the way Jim has ever thought about the issue as far as I know.

I don’t want to put words in Jim’s mouth, here’s what I consider a slightly more Manzian take: the problem with public sector compensation is that there is often very little clarity in terms of whether or not taxpayers are getting a good deal. One of the big reasons right-wingers are so hot for merit pay, based on my limited experience, is that they’re generally pretty comfortable with the idea of at least some public workers making much more than they are making now, provided other workers who’d be willing to work for less because they’re not likely to attract better offers are either paid less or fired.

Let me underline this point: Some public workers, like really great federal procurement officers, might very well be “underpaid,” in that they’re always on the verge of jumping ship to better opportunities, they’re stressed about money all the time when they could be using their awesome Jedi procurement skills to save taxpayers money, and we could attract other awesome people to do this job if only we weren’t such tightwads. Others might be “overpaid,” in that there are people who really like the stability of working for a “firm” that will, short of invasion and military conquest, probably exist for at least another ten years and would be open to working for a bit less money if they had no choice in the matter. Do you think we have more of the former than the latter? That’s where analyses like Keefe’s come in, to offer a rough guide to the conversation.

I would love for conservatives to do a better job of talking about public sector compensation. The basic conflict is whether we think of creating more jobs, work effort, etc., as our goal, or if our goal is to deliver a service. If the latter is our goal, we presumably want to do it in the most cost-effective way, so that we can devote our time, money, and energy to other things we like doing more. By extension, this suggests that we really do want to pay people as little as we can to get the things that we want. Or:

Reihan Salam says:

We really do want to pay people as little as we can to get the things that we want.

What a bozo!

This relentless process of delivering services and goods for less money really does destroy jobs, but, in theory at least, it allows us to create new ones. We happen to be living in a historical moment when there’s not a lot of faith in that idea, partly because we’ve seen a steady decline in labor force participation rates due to tangle of implicit marginal tax rates, an incarceration crisis, interrelated social pathologies, and much else. I’m biased in favor of believing that we will create new job opportunities because almost everyone I’m close to works in jobs that they could not have done in the way they do them now even ten years ago. The goal is to use good public policy to bridge over transitional periods, and, by the way, a dynamic market economy is always in a transitional period.

Manzi responds to Klein:

Klein is correct to say that my post “basically boils down to the argument that this sort of thing is hard to measure.” But he then argues that the purpose of the original study was not to demonstrate that public sector workers are underpaid, but rather to rebut the claim that they are overpaid:

[T]he EPI study is aimed at a very specific and very influential claim: that Wisconsin’s state and local employees are clearly overpaid. It blows that claim up.

That may have been the author’s motivation, but here is the final conclusion of the executive summary of the report:

[P]ublic sector workers in Wisconsin earn less in annual or hourly compensation than they would earn in the private sector.

The report makes a positive claim that it has determined a compensation “penalty” for working in the public sector, and repeats it many times. My argument was that this report does not establish whether or not this claim is true.

By the same logic, it also fails to “blow up” the claim that Wisconsin’s public workers are overpaid. The methodology is inadequate to the task of establishing whether these workers are overpaid, underpaid, or paid perfectly. As the last paragraph of my post put it:

I don’t know if Wisconsin’s public employees are underpaid, overpaid, or paid just right. But this study sure doesn’t answer the question.

Statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman has a very interesting response to my post, in which he agrees that this conclusion “sounds about right,” but cautions that the study is not “completely useless either” because this kind of adjusted comparison is better than simply comparing raw averages between public and private sector workers. I agree with that entirely. But that is, of course, a very different thing than saying that these adjustments create sufficient precision to support the bald statement, made in the report, that the author has analytically established that there is a “penalty” for working in the public sector.

Megan McArdle:

It’s obvious that this study doesn’t control for everything we can imagine, because it doesn’t even control for the matters that are of central dispute in Wisconsin: protection from being fired.  This is, as people on both sides keep noting, so extraordinarily valuable that workers are willing to give up quite a lot to get it.  And of course, a job that offers this sort of protection is likely to attract workers who especially value it.  All government jobs offer this perk, which is valuable to the workers and costly to the employers; ceteris paribus, I’d expect that other compensation would be lower to compensate.

Obviously, it also doesn’t control in any way for other job or worker characteristics that effect compensation; jobs working for state and local government are systematically different from other sorts of jobs, because so much of what the government does isn’t done by anyone else.  Though, oddly, for the teachers at the heart of this dispute, we do have a good comparison: private school teachers. And as I understand it, public school teachers have higher wages, and much better benefits, than private school teachers.

To which I expect the union’s boosters will say, “But jobs in private school are much more enjoyable–they don’t have to teach the difficult kids!”  Indeed, they’re right.  Which is exactly the point: there’s huge unobserved variable bias here.

There’s also the fact that the EPI study seems to be looking at means, which are going to be dragged upwards by a small number of highly compensated workers, particularly in the educated group.  But state and local wages are capped.  Meanwhile, some of the highest paid jobs in the private sector are in areas like commission sales, which have no counterpart in government. That means that the median worker is probably making much more than the median worker in the private sector.  This may not be true in some lucrative fields such as law and medicine–but even there, we tend to compare government lawyers to the highly paid people at white shoe firms or corporations, not the legions of struggling will-drafters and ambulance-chasers.

You can argue, of course, that this is an ideologically much more attractive income distribution.  Which highlights, I think, the core difference between the way people like Manzi and I look at this, and the way that progressives do.  I don’t think of state employment as a way to create, in miniature, my ideal labor utopia.  I think of it as a way to procure services.  I define people as being “overpaid” not if they are paid more than someone with a similar level of education, but if they are paid more than I need to entice to pay to attract adequate workers.  To analyze that, looking at medians is probably somewhat more instructive than looking at means.

Of course I agree with Manzi that this still doesn’t really tell us whether state workers are overpaid, underpaid, or just-right-paid.  I suspect that the answer is probably “both”–adjusting for worker quality, the median government worker is probably overpaid, while in skilled specialties, salaries are probably not attracting as much of the top-flight talent as we’d ideally like.  (This is why I have been advocating, futilely, that we make it possible to pay SEC employees multiples of what the President of the United States makes.)  But as Manzi, who does this stuff for a living, will undoubtedly tell you, setting compensation is a really hard problem that no one’s got a very good handle on.  So that’s just a suspicion, based on my experience of state bureaucracies, and my best guess at the incentive effects of the current structure.  I don’t have enough data to back me up.  And neither does EPI.

More Manzi:

Have I then set up a nihilistic position that we can never know anything tolerably well because I can just keep raising these points that might matter, but are not included in the model? In effect, have I put any analyst in the impossible position of proving a negative? Not really. Here’s how you measure the accuracy of a model like this without accepting its internal assumptions: use it to make predictions for future real world experiments, and then see if its predictions are right or not. The formal name for this is falsification testing. This is what’s lacking in all of the referenced arguments in support of these models.

Human capital models, fixed effects models, and other various pattern-finding analyses are useful to help build theories, but a metaphysical debate about the “worth” of various public versus private sector jobs based upon them is fundamentally unproductive. For one thing, it won’t ever end. And as Megan McArdle correctly put it, the practical question in front of us is whether we the taxpayers can procure the public work that we want at a lower cost (or more generally, though less euphoniously, whether we are at the practical optimum on the cost-quality trade-off). If you want an analytical answer to this question, here is what I would do: randomly select some jurisdictions, job classifications or other subsets of public workers, cut their compensation, and then see if we can observe a material reduction in net value of output in these areas versus the control areas. If not, cut deeper. And keep cutting deeper, until we find our indifference point.

There would be obvious limitations to this approach. First, generalizing the results of initial experiments is not straightforward. Second evaluating output is not straightforward for many areas of government. But at a minimum, and unlike the world of endlessly dueling regressions, this would at least let us see the real-world effects of various public compensation levels first-hand, and allow the public to make an informed decision about whether they prefer the net effect of a change to public sector compensation or not.

Felix Frankfurter, You Are Outta There!

H/T Jon Chait at TNR

James Fallows:

Lifetime tenure for Supreme Court Justices is another of the ideas from 200-plus years ago that might well be adjusted if Madison, Adams, et al had a chance to re-do the Constitution in light of current circumstances. It is inconceivable that people as practical-minded as they would have come up with today’s “two Senators for each state” model, California and Wyoming alike, which contributes to the paralysis of the Senate. (As argued here; main point is that when the Constitution was agreed to, the states were much closer in population size, rather than the 70-to-1 difference between today’s most and least populous states.) And they might well have rethought the wisdom of open-ended places on the Court.

Average life expectancy at birth during the late 1700s was 30-some years, versus 70-some now. Of course that figure is misleading, since so many people died very young — and those who reached age 50 often chugged along into their 80s. Still, circumstances have clearly changed. Part of the thick academic literature on the topic is a Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy article (PDF here), which points out that from the founding of the Republic until 1970, the average tenure of a Justice was under 15 years; since then, it’s over 26 years. As a result, actuarial considerations have become fundamental to the modern nominating process, to what the Founders would recognize as a distorting degree. It is a “wasted” appointment to choose someone over age 60, since a nominee in his or her 40s (Clarence Thomas, age 43 when chosen) or early 50s (Elena Kagan, 50) can likely cast that many more votes over the years.  The idea that we’re locking in policy for the next three or four decades makes the confirmation process all the more embittered and partisan — and dishonest, as nominees, whether John Roberts or Elena Kagan, pretend they have no settled views. Older and ailing Justices may hold onto their seats unnaturally long, too, if the “wrong” party controls the White House.

“We believe the American constitutional rule granting life tenure to Supreme Court Justices is fundamentally flawed, resulting now in Justices remaining on the Court for longer periods and to a later age than ever before in American history,” Stephen Calabresi and James Lindgren, authors of the Harvard Journal article, say. I agree with them too. This is not a new idea, and like many other Constitutional adjustments it’s probably not going to happen. But we’d be better off it if did.

More Fallows

John Sides:

This presents a nice opportunity to review some political science on this subject, in particular Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz’s article, “Where Have You Gone, Sherman Minton? The Decline of the Short-Term Supreme Court Justice” (gated; ungated).Crowe and Karpowitz make several important empirical points:

First, any changes in the tenure of justices over time is not due to an increase in the number of justices serving long terms. There have always been those justices on the Court. Instead, there has been a decrease in the number of short-term justices, as the title of the article suggests. This is what a measure like “average tenure” conceals. Crowe and Karpowitz write:

Our analysis suggests that mean tenure on the Court in any given period is substantially influenced by the presence or absence of the short-term justice. The long-term justice has always been—and will likely continue to be—a feature of our constitutional system. The short-term justice has been a consistent presence in every period except the most recent. When we take this development into account, we see that using measures of central tendency as evidence of an inexorable upward trend obscures the full picture. To be sure, we are currently at a historical peak in average service, though we should be careful not to over-interpret this statement about patterns of Court service. But for the absence of the short-term justice, all other trends are similar to other periods in American history

Second, justices tend to serve short terms because of illness and death in many cases but, in others, because of higher ambition (John Jay), dissatisfaction with the job (Jay again, also Minton), and occasionally scandal (Fortas).

Third, and consequently, the disappearance of the short-term justice is not just a function of better medical treatments and longer lifespans. (There were plenty of people living long lives and serving long terms on the Court, even in the early years of the United States.) It is also a function of this simple fact: serving on the Court is a much better job these days. Consider these changes, all quotes from Crowe and Karpowitz:

• …structural changes in the justices’ working conditions, such as the elimination of circuit-riding and the expansion of support staff (secretaries, marshals, and law clerks), as well as more favorable retirement provisions.

• …while the Court’s workload has decreased, the significant expansion of certiorari jurisdiction has meant that the justices’ control over it has increased, thereby allowing the Court to focus its attention on constitutional issues of broad national significance…the justices have assumed an increasingly prominent and meaningful role in core aspects of American political life.

• To the extent that these issues are controversial among the public and politicians alike, they are no less so among the justices. As a result, on a closely divided and ideologically polarized Court, one vote can mean the difference between upholding and striking down laws that implicate foundational constitutional and democratic values.

Simply put, justices have more power and prestige than they used to. No wonder few want to leave the bench quickly.

But is this really a problem? Crowe and Karpowitz find it hard to muster an easy case for term limits. On the one hand, more frequent rotation through the Court could make it more accountable — i.e., closer to the public. On the other hand, this presumes that the Court should hew toward the majority’s will, and that is a problematic criterion. And, in any case, the Court is often sensitive to public opinion, even when composed of long-serving justices.

Other advocates of term limits argue that they would reduce the divisive politics of Court appointments. This is the motivation for Fallows’ post. Crowe and Karpowitz are skeptical, and I tend to agree. I doubt that presidents, Senators, interest groups, and others would suddenly stop caring as much if justices served only 6 or 8 or 12 years. A lot of the divisiveness stems from party polarization in Congress, which is not likely to go away anytime soon. Under term limits, I would foresee an increasing number of equally divisive Court battles. Indeed, they might become even more divisive because leaders would know exactly when vacancies would arise, making them even more a dominant consideration in campaigns.

Andrew Gelman:

I tentatively disagree with John on this one. It’s not that I think any of his points are wrong, exactly, and I’m sure that John is much more knowledgeable about the political science literature than I am. It’s more a matter of emphasis. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that political scientists, at least those studying American politics, are often skeptical about proposed reforms, perhaps in reaction to the overselling of such proposals by activists.

In this case, John has a bunch of reasonable arguments but it seems to me that he’s spinning them in the skeptical direction, but they could just as well be spun in the direction of reform. Let me go through the arguments in turn:

1. Long-term and short-term judges. John writes:

Any changes in the tenure of justices over time is not due to an increase in the number of justices serving long terms. There have always been those justices on the Court. Instead, there has been a decrease in the number of short-term justices.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t at all counter the argument that term limits will reduce the long terms.

2. Changes in working conditions. John writes:

Justices have more power and prestige than they used to. No wonder few want to leave the bench quickly.

This makes sense to me, and it seems related to the general pattern in our society that life is getting better for people at the top. I agree with John that this is evidence neither in favor nor against judicial term limits.

3. Divisive politics. John writes:

Other advocates of term limits argue that they would reduce the divisive politics of Court appointments. . . . Crowe and Karpowitz are skeptical, and I tend to agree. I doubt that presidents, Senators, interest groups, and others would suddenly stop caring as much if justices served only 6 or 8 or 12 years.

John seems to be making a reasonable point here. With the current partisan polarization and the current huge power of the Supreme Court, it makes sense to see ideological battles over judicial nominees. The surprise, maybe, is that this hasn’t happened more already.

4. Age. John writes:

The last argument is that the Court would benefit from youthful vigor. Advocates of this argument also point to the decline in mental acuity that some older justices have faced. Crowe and Karpowitz note, however, that if acuity is the criterion, then term limits are a not an ideal solution, since mental decline could strike even at a younger age. Coming up with an acuity test for justices would be challenging, to say the least.

I don’t buy this argument at all. Yes, mental decline could strike even at a younger age. But there’s a correlation with age, no? It seems silly to dismiss this argument just because the correlation isn’t 100%.

Beyond this, one argument I’ve heard for term limits is that, under the current system, presidents are motivated to nominate youngsters because then they can be on the court forever. With a fixed term, this motivation would be reduced (even if not completely removed).

Matthew Yglesias:

Andrew Gelman and John Sides have an interesting exchange about the merits of creating fixed tenure for Supreme Court justices. I agree with Gelman that seems like a case where Sides is suffering a bit from an occupational hazard of political scientists confronted with proposals for reform—proponents oversell them, and political scientists become unreasonably skeptical in response.

At any rate, I’m a proponent of this reform. The strongest argument I can make in favor is that it would create a less-random relationship between election outcomes and the composition of the judiciary. Right now, if John Roberts and Samuel Alito decided to go out on a double-date with their wives, and a drunk driver hits their car killing all four passengers, Barack Obama would wind up reshaping the course of American law for decades. If instead he merely found himself appointing replacements to serve out their terms we’d much reduce this kind of arbitrariness.

Then there are two related points. One is that the current system creates too many incentives for a physically or mentally incapacitated justice to try to hang on to his seat until someone more ideologically congenial gets into the White House. Conversely, the current system causes the age of a nominee to loom too large in the decision-making calculus. In exchange, life tenure accomplishes basically nothing that a longish fixed term plus a pension wouldn’t accomplish. America makes it hard to tinker with the constitution (a mixed bag, in my view) so this almost certainly won’t happen unless some turn of events focuses national attention on the potential problems embedded in the current system. But I think making the point that this is a bad system is important anyway, since there’s always the risk that foreign countries engaged in democratic transitions will decide to emulate our model.

Jonathan Bernstein:

As I’ve said, I tend to be very conservative about institutional design.  I’m suspicious of Seligism — Bud Selig, the current baseball commissioner, is constantly supporting changing long-standing design because some minor flaw turned up, without stopping to consider how various portions of the design are interrelated, or that minor flaws are inevitable regardless of design.  I’m even more suspicious of those who turn frustrations with losing in a democracy into enthusiasm for changing the system.  On the other hand, I’m not against all reform.  Serious institutional breakdown, especially with a good case for inherent design flaws, should be met with reform — the current most obvious case within American politics is California, with its impossible budget politics and destructive initiative process.  Another reason to support reform is when the underlying reality that the rules are designed for changes, so that stable rules yield an unstable political system.

One can make a pretty good argument, I think, that lifetime appointments for Supreme Court Justices fit that last category.  As Linda Greenhouse reported back in 2007, the actual length of terms for Justices has gone up dramatically since 1970 (from an average of about 15 years before then to an average of about 26 years since).  Since life expectancy continues to grow, I expect that number to only continue to increase in the future.  And the longer each appointment lasts, the more valuable it becomes, which pushes presidents to choose younger and younger nominees (although I think we’re fairly close to the lower limit on that).  Elena Kagan, should she be confirmed, may well be on the court for forty years.  At some point, I think that’s a very different system than that the Constitution envisioned.

As far as the advantages and disadvantages of the present system, Yglesias identifies two problems.  The first one, which has to do with the process in which Justices are groomed and selected, doesn’t really bother me much; as far as I can tell, the most recent selections under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are all highly qualified and capable, so I’m not really worried about what they had to do to get there or about those who were blocked because the system works against them.  It is true, however, that the high value of each pick creates incentives to selected a certain kind of nominee: young, ideologically reliable, and ambitious enough for the Court that he or she has known from an early age to avoid saying potentially controversial things.

The second problem is that the system produces a lot of random results.  I do think is a serious flaw.  There’s no reason that the election of Jimmy Carter (who had no Court openings) should be worth less than George H.W. Bush.  Nor is it reasonable that a president can be far more influential because his nominee lives another forty years, while that of another drops dead after a decade.  Both of these always existed, but they matter far more when average tenure doubles.

The third problem is that it’s not exactly clear why the results of elections decades ago should have so much influence in governing us today.  Justice Stevens was nominated by President Ford (and for what it’s worth, that’s Unelected President Ford) and confirmed by an extremely liberal Senate.  And then Americans elected Carter, and then Reagan, and then Bush, Clinton, Bush…and still, the dead hand of the 1972 presidential electorate and the 1970, 1972 and 1974 electorates and the Senators they chose controlled 1/9th of one of three coequal branches.  Abortion is important, right?  Roe vs. Wade was decided after Nixon was reelected, and after two-thirds of the Senators who confirmed Stevens were chosen.  Of course, the nature of the Constitutional system, including not only lifetime judicial appointments but also long terms for the president and Senators, imply that the Framers intended at least some of our past decisions to govern the present and the future.  But again, at some point a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

More Sides:

After my post, Andy and then Matt Yglesias took issue. Let me respond briefly. (NB: All of this debate necessarily entails the willing suspension of disbelief: we’re not enacting term limits for Supreme Court justices any time soon. But it’s still fruitful to debate the idea on its merits.)

Andy’s got 4 points. The first is on the Crowe and Karpowitz finding that it’s the short-term justices who have disappeared. Andy writes:

That’s fine, but it doesn’t at all counter the argument that term limits will reduce the long terms.

Actually, it does counter the argument, if the proposal is rotating eighteen-year terms.

Only his fourth point really represents a disagreement with anything I wrote. Andy suggests that age could be a useful proxy for mental acuity:

Yes, mental decline could strike even at a younger age. But there’s a correlation with age, no? It seems silly to dismiss this argument just because the correlation isn’t 100%.

It just seems to me that term limits are a pretty blunt instrument for ensuring mental acuity. See also Frank Cross’s comment.

Yglesias suggests these reasons for supporting term limits:

…a less-random relationship between election outcomes and the composition of the judiciary.

…the current system creates too many incentives for a physically or mentally incapacitated justice to try to hang on to his seat until someone more ideologically congenial gets into the White House.

Conversely, the current system causes the age of a nominee to loom too large in the decision-making calculus.

Let’s tackle these in reverse order. This concern about the emphasis on young nominees is ubiquitous — see also Jon Bernstein and commenter Zorro for the Common Good. But the average age of the nominees isn’t really any different now than in the past. Go to p.801 of the Calabresi and Lindgren piece that James Fallows cites in his post on this subject. The average age of nominees was lower in the initial years of the Republic (about 48), but since then it’s varied between 52 and 57. The average in the period from 1971-2006 is 53 — down a little bit from the first half of the 20th century, but no different than it was for most of the 19th century. I doubt it can go much lower. It’s hard for potential nominees to be seen as sufficiently qualified for the Court otherwise.

Life tenure could create an incentive to nominate younger people, but it doesn’t seem to be happening in a real significant way. An average of 53 certainly doesn’t strike me as “too young.”

On the incentives for an incapacitated judge to hang on. It seems likely that this happens every once in a while. How serious a problem this is, I really don’t know.

More Gelman:

In my previous entry I framed John’s skepticism about term limits as an example of a more general pattern of political scientists being all too ready to dismiss proposed reforms, perhaps in reaction to the overselling of such proposals by activists. I see political scientists, as a group, as often being too committed to whatever the current system is, for example pooh-poohing campaign finance reform because it can be evaded or dismissing open primaries because there’s no convincing evidence that they will get rid of partisan polarization.

In contrast, I often feel that a reform can be a good idea, even if it doesn’t solve all the problems.it’s intended to address. For example, I think gerrymandering is way overrated as a political problem—in 1994, Gary and I even wrote a paper called Enhancing Democracy Through Legislative Redistricting in which we showed that existing redistricting (gerrymandering and all) led to more competitive elections—but I’d still support a move toward nonpartisan redistricting.

From the other direction, though, it can make sense to ask why a particular reform is being suggested at a particular time. In some cases, it’s clear: for example, the recent proposals to change Senate rules are a direct response to the sharp increase in the use of the filibuster in recent years. I’m not sure if there’s anything so topical motivating the Supreme Court discussion; maybe it’s just an issue that comes up from time to time. In any case, in response to my generic reaction that John is being a typical political scientist by reflexively dismissing a reform proposal, John might well respond that I am showing the generic reaction of naive reformers to give a default positive view to whatever flavor-of-the-month reform happens to be talked about by pundits right now.

As I noted above, my differences with John on this issue seem more of a matter of emphasis than anything else. Are lifetime appointments and long terms basically OK, given that this system has been in place for more than two centuries (as John says), or would it make sense to change the rules (as I’m inclined to think)? In any case, the data that John and others bring to the table help us to understand these arguments.

UPDATE: Andrew Gelman at FrumForum

Number 14… Number 14… Number 14

Heather Horn at The Atlantic with the round-up:

On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell became the latest Republican to call for a reexamination of the Fourteenth Amendment and the issue of “birthright citizenship.” Senators Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl have also recently spoken out against the policy of granting automatic citizenship to all born in the U.S., even if they are the children of illegal immigrants. The birthright citizenship issue, though, doesn’t split quite along party lines. In the ensuing debate, several conservatives have come out opposing the proposed revision. Some maintain, though, that the Republican senators have a point.

Alex Altman at Swampland at Time:

The relevant facet of the 14th Amendment, which ensures due process and equal protection, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” While proponents of repeal say the language–specifically the phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”–is ambiguous, judicial precedent is stacked against them. That’s one reason why the notion of revisiting the citizenship clause may be more of a political gambit than a realistic proposal. Bills challenging the citizenship provision have been proposed multiple times in recent years without success–former Rep. Nathan Deal, who’s running for governor of Georgia, submitted such an idea last year, and Rep. Ron Paul did so in 2007 without success. “Anchor babies,” as critics of birthright citizenship have dubbed children born to illegal immigrants, have long been a subject of scorn for conservatives. But a constitutional amendment requires the backing of two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by 38 states–which is highly unlikely, to say the least.

It’s unclear how far the party is willing to push the issue, or whether conference members are on the same page. A GOP aide told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that “nobody is talking about an all out repeal of the 14th Amendment,” and that McConnell merely supported holding hearings to revisit the concept of birthright citizenship. But the topic has sparked a pitched battle in the Senate, as The Hill reports, and Senators like Graham and James Inhofe seem to have their minds made up.

A majority of Americans support Arizona’s new law, and in the short term a hard-line stance on illegal immigration may give Republicans a boost. As a long-term political strategy, however, attacking birthright citizenship is an easy way to alienate the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority group. In one recent poll, 49% of respondents supported birthright citizenship, while 46% said the law should be tweaked. But that poll found nearly 80% of Latinos are in favor of the provision–a figure that’s surprising only because it wasn’t greater. Many conservatives have argued the GOP risks kneecapping itself with the Hispanic electorate. “If the Republican Party embraces ending birthright citizenship, then it will be assured losing Latino and ethnic voters — and presidential elections for the foreseeable future,” wrote Cesar Conda, former domestic policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mark Krikorian at The Corner:

Would it be cynical of me to think that McCain’s “little jerk” is just trying to burnish his tough-on-immigration bona fides?:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced Wednesday night that he is considering introducing a constitutional amendment that would change existing law to no longer grant citizenship to the children of immigrants born in the United States.

Yeah, right. So the guy doesn’t want to do what’s necessary to actually stop illegal immigration, but he wants to make sure that the children born to all the illegals he helps bring here become U.S.-born illegal aliens? I’m afraid, though, that his rationale, whether he actually believes it or not, is in fact one shared by a lot of immigration hawks:

“People come here to have babies,” he said. “They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave.’ To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child’s automatically an American citizen. That shouldn’t be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons.”

I don’t like illegals having U.S.-citizen kids any more than anyone else, but there’s no evidence suggesting that this “drop and leave” stuff is true — anything’s possible, I suppose, but it’s just an assertion at this point. My own sense is that most illegal alien women who have kids here (accounting for nearly 10 percent of all children born in the U.S. each year) didn’t come for that purpose; they came for jobs or to join relatives, and one thing led to another, birds-and-bees style, and they had kids. There are no doubt some people who dash across the border illegally to have kids, but they just can’t amount to a large share of the problem. Nor does the problem of “birth tourism” require a change in the Constitution — we just need to permit (and require) our consular officers to reject visa applications from pregnant women, inviting them to re-apply once they’ve given birth in their own countries.

The phenomenon of citizen-children of illegal aliens is a symptom of too much illegal immigration, not a cause. Comprehensive immigration enforcement — abroad, at the borders, and in the interior — plus deep, permanent cuts in future legal immigration (which is the catalyst for illegal immigration) are the solution, because when we have less illegal immigration, we’ll have fewer kids born to illegals and the problem goes away. I’m afraid that if the citizenship issue makes progress, the libertarians will co-opt us, backing the citizenship change as a way of diverting attention from real immigration control.

Krikorian responds to e-mails

Daniel Foster at The Corner:

When I first read this anonymous Huffington Post story suggesting that Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) had signed on to the wholesale repeal of the 14th Amendment, I thought it was a gross mis-characterization, sloppy at best, a bold-faced lie at worst:

On Sunday, Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) became the highest-ranking Republican to call for the repeal of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, Kyl said that he opposes allowing children of undocumented immigrants to be granted U.S. citizenship and wants Congress to hold hearings on the matter.

But it turns out the blogger was just aping CBS News’s write-up of Kyl’s appearance on Face the Nation. That post contains the same non-sense about Kyl wanting to repeal the 14th Amendment:

Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., said today that Congress should hold hearings to look into denying citizenship to illegal aliens’ children born in the United States, as the fight over immigration widens into the explosive “birthright” issue.

Kyl told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he supports a call by fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to introduce a new amendment to repeal the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

This is absurd. Here’s the text of the 14th Amendment, in full:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

[…]

What Kyl, Graham and others have tentatively embraced is an amendment that would clarify the first sentence of section 1 — and indeed, there is a credible argument that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” already excludes individuals who are here illegally, meaning that one might be able to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens by statutory as opposed to constitutional action.

Neither Kyl nor Graham,  nor any other elected Republican I know of, has talked about repealing the Due Process or Equal Protection clauses — which are prime constitutional underwriters of so much legislation favored by progressives. Nor, of course, has anybody talked about reestablishing the 3/5 Compromise or limiting suffrage for African-Americans.

Michael Brendan Dougherty at The American Conservative:

Of course, Graham was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2007. Back then dropped babies weren’t his concerns, rather he wanted to “tell the bigots to shut-up.”

There is no good reason for immigration restrictionists to soften up to Graham now. Overturning birthright citizenship doesn’t bring order or justice to America’s decades long problem of illegal immigration. There may be good reasons to think that overturning it would do little reverse illegal immigration, and much to prevent assimilation.

In any case, Graham’s re-framing of the immigration issue in one of the silliest and most counter-productive possible and his chosen method signals that he is not serious. Constitutional amendments are almost impossible to pass, especially in this age of gridlock and ideological sorting of parties. In other words, this is a stunt, just as his former denunciation of “bigots” was a stunt.

John Sides:

Everyone knows this controversy by now. Here is the bill. Here is Mitch McConnell yesterday. It’s highly unlikely that this push to end birthright citizenship will go anywhere, but it’s worth probing public opinion on this question and on an underlying question: what should be the boundaries of the American national community?

Some quick searching did not turn up many polls on birthright citizenship per se. Rasmussen recently asked whether children of illegal immigrants should be citizens. In their sample, 58% of respondents said no, and 33% said yes. It would be interesting to know whether this is an objection to birthright citizenship per se or essentially an objection to illegal immigration.

Now to the broader question. In 2004, the General Social Survey asked a battery of questions on potential qualifications for being American. This was the preamble:

Some people say the following things are important for being truly American. Others say they are not important. How important do you think each of the following is…

Here is the average importance that respondents accorded to each qualification.

On average, respondents saw all of these qualifications are more important than unimportant. However, they also saw some qualifications as more important than others. In general, the more important qualifications reflect things that an immigrant can achieve: speaking English, becoming naturalized, respecting American institutions and laws. More exclusive criteria, and ones that immigrants cannot change (or change easily), are less important: being born in America, being Christian, or having American ancestry.

How might we interpret these results in light of the debate over birthright citizenship? Here are two possibilities.

First, Lindsey Graham and other opponents of birthright citizenship could take heart. Look, they might say, the public doesn’t even think being born in America is as important as other things. Given the importance accorded to American citizenship, we could make native-born children of immigrants go through the naturalization process and Americans would still see them as American. No harm done.

Second, some might object to that interpretation as a violation of the “spirit” underlying American public opinion. Americans’ sense of their national community is more inclusive than exclusive. Shifting American law in a more exclusive direction is not in this spirit. Why not recognize that more important than birthplace is speaking English, loyalty to the United States, and respect for its laws? And why not take heart that immigrants do learn English and are no less patriotic than native-born Americans?

Jill Lawrence at Politics Daily:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is playing down his party’s new scrutiny of the 14th Amendment, which among other things confers U.S. citizenship on anyone born in the United States. McConnell on Thursday portrayed calls for hearings on the amendment as simply an attempt to examine what he calls the “unseemly” business of foreigners showing up just in time to have their babies, then going back home.

“I’m not aware of anybody who’s come out for altering the 14th Amendment,” McConnell said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. He said the push for hearings stems from a Washington Post story about foreign businesses that supply visas to expectant mothers. “This is the kind of thing that irritates Americans quite a lot,” he said. “I don’t think having hearings on an obvious unseemly business is a threat to the 14th Amendment. What’s wrong with looking into this? The Post did.”

McConnell added that “the remedy for it is not yet clear. But I am not advocating revisiting the 14th Amendment and I don’t think any others have. I think the view is, why don’t we take a look at this?”

UPDATE: Doug Mataconis

UPDATE #2: Via Andrew Sullivan,

Will Wilkinson

Tim Lee

More Wilkinson

John J. Miller at The Corner

What If Jazz Musicians, Botanists, And Sushi Chefs Wrote The News?

Christopher Beam at Slate:

A new article in the Columbia Journalism Review discusses the differences between political journalism and political science. What if academics started writing the news?

A powerful thunderstorm forced President Obama to cancel his Memorial Day speech near Chicago on Monday—an arbitrary event that had no affect on the trajectory of American politics.

Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.

Chief among the criticisms of Obama was his response to the spill. Pundits argued that he needed to show more emotion. Their analysis, however, should be viewed in light of the economic pressures on the journalism industry combined with a 24-hour news environment and a lack of new information about the spill itself.

Republicans, meanwhile, complained that the administration has not been sufficiently involved in the day-to-day cleanup. Their analysis, of course, is colored by their minority status in America’s two-party system, which creates a strong structural incentive to criticize the party in power, whatever the merits.

At the same time, Obama’s job approval rating fell to 48 percent. This isn’t really news, though. Studies have shown that the biggest factor in a president’s rating is economic performance. Connecting the minute blip in the polls with Obama’s reluctance to emote or alleged failure to send enough boom to the Gulf is, frankly, absurd.

Democrats have also slipped in their standing among “independent voters.” That phrase, by the way, is meaningless. Voters may self-identify as “independent” but in almost all cases they lean toward one party.

John Sides:

Brendan Nyhan and I supplied Beam some of our pet peeves — e.g., this one and this one — although the humor is all his.

Steven Taylor:

The Slate piece, penned by Christopher Beam, attempts to write a news story as if it was written from a polisci perspective.  The basic observations in the piece are fairly accurate, although the tone is hardly academic (which, for readability purposes, it probably a good thing!).

Some paragraphs that struck me:

Obama now faces some of the most difficult challenges of his young presidency: the ongoing oil spill, the Gaza flotilla disaster, and revelations about possibly inappropriate conversations between the White House and candidates for federal office. But while these narratives may affect fleeting public perceptions, Americans will ultimately judge Obama on the crude economic fundamentals of jobs numbers and GDP.

Indeed.  While many of these events are significant in and of themselves, the overall economy is far more likely to determine Obama’s electoral fate—but that is pretty boring to note over and over again.

Really, the piece is far more a critique of mass media than it is an exhortation of political science.

Jason Linkins at Huffington Post:

I’m loving this piece from Chris Beam in Slate entitled “The Only Politics Article You’ll Ever Have To Read.” It’s a rather brilliant and hilarious plumbing of the puddle-deep political tropes that the political media and political academics reflexively dials up, as if they were half-dissected frogs who occasionally get the twitchy benefit of an electric current.

Andrew Gelman:

In 1993, Gary King and I published an article, ” Why are American Presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable?”, in which we argued (with 10 figures and no tables (except for a brief summary of data sources in the appendix)) that short-term swings in public opinion during presidential election campaigns (for example, the predictable post-convention bounce) have little if any impact on the vote. The bit about elections being so predictable was not original to us—we leaned heavily on Steven Rosenstone’s 1984 book on forecasting presidential elections. What was new in our paper was to take that finding seriously and work through its implications for campaigns.

When we wrote the article, Gary and I wanted to make a difference, to elevate public discourse. It was so frustrating to see the news media focus on the horse race, especially given that there was no evidence that these horse-race stories made any difference. We thought our article might change things, because instead of the usual strategy—criticizing the media for distorting politics with endless stories on the horse race—we were taking the opposite tack, essentially mocking the media for running story after story about campaign gaffes etc. that had no effect. If it’s really true (as we found from our analysis) that what’s most important are the so-called fundamentals (political ideology, party identification, and the economy), then the way the media could have the most influence would be to report on the fundamentals—report what’s happening in the economy and report the candidates’ positions on major issues—rather than the trivialities.

We really hoped that, if our goal was to change how campaigns were reported, we’d do better to portray the standard media practices as ineffectual, rather than as harmful. If you want someone to change, it’s better to describe him as a loser than as a bad boy.

I was frustrated for many years at how little difference our argument seemed to have made. But, if Beam’s article is any evidence, maybe our message really has been getting through!

Matthew Yglesias:

Note that I think it would be a better world if that’s how political news was covered. The articles about horse-race politics would be boring—and rightly so—which means that if you wanted readers for your articles about politics, you’d have to try to find a way to make policy writing engaging. It’s a bit of a hard challenge because it doesn’t involve the same obvious level of human narrative drama, but at the end of the day superficially dry policy debates actually have massive consequences for very real human beings all around the country and the world, so it should hardly be impossible to bring this stuff down to earth

Ezra Klein

Conor Friedersdorf:

It’s a wonderful piece, but Mr. Beam frames it as if all academics are political scientists.

What if sociologists wrote the news instead?

Untangling Race & Gender from Catastrophic Incidences of Corporate Exploitation In Semi-Natural Ecosystems: A Case Study

by Tenure C. King, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tulane University

NEW ORLEANS — Absent from the dialogue surrounding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which began on April 20, 2010 following an explosion that killed eleven workers, are the roles of class, race and especially gender. Due to the environmental devastation wrought by the catastrophe, which is likely to fall heaviest on the working poor, it is understandable that attention is largely focused on efforts to plug the oil well undertaken by British Petroleum, a corporation founded in imperial Britain to exploit the oil resources of people of color.

It is not insignificant to cleanup efforts, however, that even today BP’s leadership lacks adequate gender diversity, its board of directors being made up of fourteen persons, only one of them who self-identifies as a female, and all of whom earn significantly more than the median income in Louisiana, Alabama, and even the relatively privileged residents of coastal Florida.

Among other things, this raises important questions as to whether Gulf Coast populations most affected by the spill will see mitigation efforts as legitimate. Asked about this issue, Mijntje Lückerath-Rovers, a legal researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, noted that “any comprehensive investigation of the impact of providing legitimacy by female board members on corporate performance should not be limited to profitability (which is mostly concerned with shareholders profit), but should include, for example, social and market performance and the satisfaction of relevant stakeholders.”

Thus far, however, neither a protocol for evaluating the satisfaction of stakeholders nor a safe space where they might be interviewed has been established by the disproportionately white, male pubic servants with a responsibility to respond..

Despite the fact that the United States has institutional frameworks insufficient to adequately safeguard environmental assets through federal intervention, other observers are calling for President Barack Obama to assume a greater role over efforts to stop the spill. While his participation would certainly improve upon the actual and perceived diversity of oil mitigation efforts, a long pattern of institutional racism in American history and the resulting exclusion of African Americans and other people of color from the Oval Office means that scholarly data cannot predict how an increase in racial diversity would impact performance in mitigating the environmental impacts of an oil spill.

Jonathan Chait at TNR:

I foresee a progressively less-amusing internet trope. By the time this devolves into “What if biologists wrote the news?,” we’re all going to want to kill ourselves. In the meantime, Friedersdorf’s piece is pretty darn good.

The Magical Mystery Senate Candidate

Suzy Khimm at Mother Jones:

An unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website shocked South Carolina on Tuesday night by winning the Democratic Senate primary to oppose Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Alvin Greene, who currently lives in his family’s home, defeated Vic Rawl, a former judge and state legislator who had a $186,000 campaign warchest and had already planned his next fundraising event. Despite the odds, Greene, who has been unemployed for the past nine months, said that he wasn’t surprised by his victory. “I wasn’t surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much. I knew I was on top of my campaign, and just stayed on top of everything, I just—I wasn’t surprised that much, just a little. I knew that I worked hard and did,” Greene said in an interview.

Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. “It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed,” said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.

“It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much,” he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren’t relevant. “I’m not concentrating on how I was elected—it’s history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what’s going on, in America.”

The oddity of Greene’s candidacy has already prompted speculation from local media about whether he might be a Republican plant. But Greene denies that Republicans or anyone else had approached him about running. “No, no—no one approached me. This is my decision,” he said. A 13-year military veteran, he says he had originally gotten the idea in 2008 when he was serving in Korea. “I just saw the country was in bad shape two years ago…the country was declining,” he says. “I wanted to make sure we continue to go up on the right track.” But when asked whether there was a specific person or circumstance that precipitated his decision to jump into politics, Greene simply replied: “nothing in particular…it’s just, uh, nothing in particular.” South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated that Greene won because his name appeared first on the ballot, and voters unfamiliar with both candidates chose alphabetically.

Haley Cohen at Vanity Fair:

After his shocking win, the Huffington Post had to solicit its readers for any tidbits about Greene, pleading: “Do YOU know anything about Alvin Greene? Do you have any photos of him?” The unemployed 32-year-old Army veteran lives with his parents and barely campaigned at all: he had no yard sign and no Web site, and he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses out of his own pocket. According to Mother Jones, he didn’t show up to the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in April or file any of the mandatory paperwork for candidates with the state or the Federal Election Commission. The kicker? Charleston’s Live5news.com reported today that Greene is actually facing a pending felony charge for showing lewd Internet photos to a University of South Carolina student and suggesting they go to her dorm room.

So how the heck did this man beat out 64-year-old former four-term state lawmaker Vic Rawl, who ran a $186,000 campaign? State Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler offered an uber-scientific reason, speculating that voters unfamiliar with either candidate may have voted for Greene because his name appeared first alphabetically. (Note: This theory may also account for how Bush won twice.)

Jim Geraghty at National Review Online:

If you read this in a novel, you would dismiss it as too outlandish.

David Weigel:

You’d think the local Democratic Party would avoid a disaster like that this year. Vic Rawl, a former state legislator, was not the party’s first choice — he raised about $230,452 and looked set to be the party’s sacrificial lamb against Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). He just went down by a 16-point margin to Alvin Greene. Who is Alvin Greene? A 32-year-old unemployed army veteran who paid the filing fee to run then promptly disappeared. When reached by Corey Hutchins to talk about his campaign, on the suspicion that he was a Republican plant, Greene was incoherent.

Asked if he thought it was a good investment to spend so much of his own money in a two-way Democratic primary to run against a popular Republican with millions in campaign cash, Greene replied: “Rather than just save the $10,000 and just go and buy gasoline with it, just take [it] and just be unemployed for [an] even longer period of time, I mean, that wouldn’t make any sense, um, just, um, but, uh, yes, uh … lowering these gas prices … that will create jobs, too. Anything that will lower the gasoline prices. Offshore drilling, the energy package, all that.”

And so Democrats face Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the political leaders of the tea party movement, with a wholly unserious candidate.

Ed Morrissey:

Um … wow.  Just … wow.  The Associated Press had better be sure of its reporting, because if this turns out to be another Alvin Greene, they’ll have to have their checkbooks handy.  They did call and ask for a response, but Greene told them he had no comment.

I guess this eliminates the whole family-values campaign, then?

Assuming this is true, Greene hasn’t yet been charged, but he had to put up a bond to get his release after the arrest.  Didn’t the state Democratic party do any sort of background check on their candidates?  This is exactly the kind of scandal that can not only eliminate any chance of beating DeMint but will also resonate through the down-ticket races as well.

Again, assuming this is true, does the party have any way to get Greene off of the ballot?  He won an open primary, which unlike conventions, are usually the final word in nominations.  I’m sure that South Carolina Democrats are frantically checking the answer to that question right now.

Moe Lane at Redstate:

No, I don’t know why anybody would bother further ensuring DeMint’s re-election: this goes far beyond ‘belt-and-suspenders’ and well into ‘plate armor’ territory.  But, seriously: where did this guy come from, where did he get the money to run…  and why has all of this been done for this race?  Is this some form of bizarre political performance art?

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

Back in March he walked into the state Democratic headquarters with a personal check for $10,400. That’s the filing fee. The party people said they weren’t allowed to take a personal check. It had to come from a campaign account. So a few hours later he came back with a check from a campaign account. And he signed up to run.

And that was it. He held no events. He never campaigned. He didn’t go to the convention. He never filed any money filings. He never raised any money. He didn’t even have a website. In other words, by every conceivable measure he never actually mounted a campaign. When Mother Jones called him shortly after his victory and asked him what was up, he seemed hard pressed to explain why he had run or really anything about what was going on other than to insist that the ten grand was his money.

Now, if Rawl, the other guy, had had much hope of beating DeMint there would be a much more logical argument about why someone would want to put Greene up to this as some sort of dirty trick. But that’s not really true. Rawl seemed like a real, real longshot.

But still. I know people don’t have to be professional politicians to run for office. They don’t have to have conventional political ideas — to put it mildly. But when an out-of-work guy with no political background at all and no stated reason why he chose to run puts up ten grand to run in an election I’d really expect him to have some reason for running — some strong political beliefs, maybe some crankish political beliefs, the desire for exposure or self-promotion, something. But here, nothing. None of those seem to apply. That doesn’t make sense to me.

UPI:

South Carolina’s Democratic Party has asked the winner of the state’s U.S. Senate primary to drop out because of a reported felony charge, party officials said.

Alvin Greene, 32, is unemployed and living with his parents in Manning, ABC News reported. He was asked to leave the military last year after 13 years.

State Democratic Chairwoman Carol Fowler asked Greene to leave the race Wednesday, the party said in a message posted on its Web site, citing media reports Greene was recently charged with “disseminating, procuring or promoting obscenity” by showing obscene photos to a University of South Carolina student.

“Today I spoke with Alvin Greene, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, and asked him to withdraw from the race,” Fowler said in a statement. “I did not do this lightly, as I believe strongly that the Democratic voters of this state have the right to select our nominee.”

Fowler said “the decisions of many of those voters” would have been affected if the report had come out before the election.

Wonkette:

If the whole thing wasn’t so shoddy and mean, it would almost seem like a Wonkette joke brought to life. “We need to get talking about America back to work, what’s going on, in America.” Uhh …. thanks for exceeding expectations, South Carolina!

UPDATE: John Sides

Rachel Slajda at TPM

Tom Schaller

Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s place

Doug Mataconis

UPDATE #2: Ed Pilkington at The Guardian

Wonkette

UPDATE #3: Jessica Taylor at Politico

Allah Pundit

Jon Bershad at Mediaite

The Liberal Blogosphere Vs. Matt Bai: Ezra Klein Collecting Social Security Edition

Matt Bai at NYT:

Americans have been cursing their incumbents — and periodically rising up to eject them from office — since angry Bostonians took a bucket of tar and some feathers to their customs commissioner in 1774. Such uprisings have become an almost cyclical occurrence in Washington, and after this week’s primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, 2010 seems destined to be one of those years.

Word has reached Washington that an anti-incumbent tsunami is roaring its way, and frightened politicians are already trying, sometimes comically, to put some distance between themselves and the tide. “My gosh, these people in Washington are running the country right into the ground,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, lamented this week, despite having lived and worked there for the last 34 years.

But to suggest that this week’s primaries are just part of the latest revolt against incumbency, brought on by pervasive economic angst, is to miss some deeper trends in the electorate that are more consequential — trends that have brought us to an unprecedented disconnect between, on one side, the traditional shapers of our politics in Washington and, on the other, the voters who actually make the choices.

The old laws of politics have been losing their relevance as attitudes and technology evolve, creating a kind of endemic instability that probably is not going away just because housing prices rebound. Nor is that instability any longer driven only by ideological mini-movements like MoveOn.org or the tea parties, as some commentators suggest. Voter insurrection has gone as mainstream as Miley Cyrus, and to the extent that the parties in Washington take comfort in the false notion that all this chaos is fleeting, they will fail to internalize the more enduring lessons of Tuesday’s elections.

The first is that this age-old idea of “clearing the field” for a preferred candidate, so as to avoid divisive primaries, is now, much like the old party clubhouse, a historical relic. This should have been clear to everyone after 2008, when Barack Obama, shunned by most of his party’s major contributors and its Washington establishment, simply shrugged off endorsements and raised more than half a billion dollars from his own constituencies.

Now the Obama effect has trickled down to the likes of Rand Paul, who beat his party’s preferred Senate candidate in Kentucky, and Joe Sestak, who toppled the new-and-improved Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. (It makes you wonder whether Mr. Obama and his aides really thought they could “clear the field” for Mr. Specter, as they suggested, or whether they knew from their own experience how wishful that was and were just bent on to luring him across the aisle.)

[…]

What all this probably means is that we are living in the era of the upstart. Thirty years ago, when you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office, taking it to the establishment was a quixotic venture undertaken on the national level, where a Jesse Jackson or a Pat Buchanan could at least make a powerful statement along the road to obliteration. (Recall Jimmy Carter’s indictment of Jerry Brown in 1976: “Don’t send them a message, send them a president.”)

Those days are gone. The intraparty rebellions now will be increasingly local, sufficiently financed and built around credible candidates — the kind of campaigns that made Barack Obama president and that may yet give us Senator Paul or Senator Sestak. My gosh, these people in Washington are in for it now.

Jonathan Bernstein:

It seems that Bai has heard of Jimmy Carter.  That’s good!  Now, my assignment for Matt Bai: go back and read about Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign.  And then try to argue that Barack Obama, backed by Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy (and established party insiders such as David Axelrod and David Plouffe) was anything like Carter in ’76.  What you’re going to find is that “thirty years ago” was the era of the upstart, not now.  Citing Jimmy Carter to make a point that thirty years ago “you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office” is like citing Spiro Agnew to make the point that at forty years ago, only seriously accomplished politicians with a deserved reputation for personal integrity were considered for the Vice Presidency.

Might as well do the last paragraph…

Those days are gone. The intraparty rebellions now will be increasingly local, sufficiently financed and built around credible candidates — the kind of campaigns that made Barack Obama president and that may yet give us Senator Paul or Senator Sestak. My gosh, these people in Washington are in for it now.

Here’s the thing: there’s nothing “increasingly local” at all about Rand Paul or Joe Sestak.  I really don’t want to read much into a couple of results, but if they symbolize anything, it’s national influence on state and local elections.  Paul is all about national Republicans — Palin and DeMint and his father — reaching in and influencing a state primary.

There is something different about contemporary parties than older parties, which is that national element.  If I had to generalize — and as with all generalizations, there are numerous exceptions — what I’d say is this.  In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, local parties were able to control their nominations.  Over the course of the twentieth century, and probably bottoming out sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, those parties lost control of nominations to candidates, who formed their own personal organizations…at the extremes, parties were relatively empty labels that independent candidates battled over.  Over the last thirty or forty years, however, parties have evolved, developing strong national components that never existed in previous strong-party eras, and once again parties generally control their nominations.  I certainly don’t see anything in any of the cases this year (not just Sestak and Paul, but also Rubio, and the NY-23 special, and others) that seem to be about parties losing control over their own nominations, as opposed to party groups battling over those nominations.

Of course, no matter how strong parties get, as long as they are permeable and not strictly hierarchical they will still feature internal clashes, which will often play out in nomination fights.  To the extent that independent candidates are also strong, they will sometimes clash with party choices.  Really, I think that’s the best way of looking at Arlen Specter.  He obviously wasn’t a creature of the Democratic Party establishment; he was, in many ways, a great example of the strong, independent candidates of an earlier era in American politics.  The political system can still produce such creatures, but we’re in a more partisan era now, and if it symbolizes anything, the demise of Arlen Specter is probably best seen as a sign of the strength of the new parties.

Jonathan Chait at TNR:

Institutions like the New York Times provide enormous value in their reporting. But the tossed-off analysis has always been a soft spot, and the blogs have really helped expose that.

Kevin Drum:

Speaking of volatility, how about Matt Bai? He seems to swing between genuinely keen insights and the laziest of conventional wisdom on almost a weekly basis. Today, unfortunately, is the latter: Tuesday’s election results, says Bai, demonstrate an anti-incumbent wave, a new era of divisive primaries, the loss of party power, and the end of issues-based politics. I’m pretty sure I’ve been hearing about all four of those things since at least the mid-70s, but this in particular was gobsmacking:

What all this probably means is that we are living in the era of the upstart. Thirty years ago, when you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office, taking it to the establishment was a quixotic venture undertaken on the national level, where a Jesse Jackson or a Pat Buchanan could at least make a powerful statement along the road to obliteration. (Recall Jimmy Carter’s indictment of Jerry Brown in 1976: “Don’t send them a message, send them a president.”)

Jonathan Bernstein comments acerbically:

It seems that Bai has heard of Jimmy Carter. That’s good! Now, my assignment for Matt Bai: go back and read about Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign….Citing Jimmy Carter to make a point that thirty years ago “you needed a party infrastructure to make a serious run for higher office” is like citing Spiro Agnew to make the point that at forty years ago, only seriously accomplished politicians with a deserved reputation for personal integrity were considered for the Vice Presidency.

The rest is an epic takedown of the entire piece. Read it. Reporters really, really need to stop drawing monumental conclusions from a few tiny data points. Especially when they have to twist even the few data points they have in order to do it.

Mori Dinauer at Tapped:

It’s amazing that such groundless political “analysis” continues to be produced by the New York Times. Does Matt Bai simply not understand the fundamentals of American politics, or is he just giving his readers what they want? Skimming the comments section of his think piece on the “meaning” of Tuesday’s elections, there is an overwhelming agreement that the early primaries of 2010 forebode a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment. Bai’s motives are a mystery. But he’s definitely telling his readers (or at least, many of them) what they want to hear.

John Sides:

I went easy on Matt Bai in my earlier post. Jon Bernstein does not.

More Bernstein:

By the way: when I was looking into the Matt Bai article earlier today, I wound up running into a terrific reported piece by Cokie and Steven Roberts on voter unrest.  In 1980; mid-June, 1980, actually, post-primaries, pre-conventions.  It’s from the NYT Magazine (pdf), and I enjoyed reading it quite a bit.  Lots of interviews with lifelong Dems, many 2nd and 3rd generation Dems, ready to jump, as of course many of them would later that year.  Also, it’s fun to read quotations from early-career Barbara Mikulski and Chris Dodd, plus a bonus appearance by a certain Baltimore pol who is mostly known to us now for his daughter, not his own career.

Oh, and you’ll be glad to know that without an internet to blame for everything, it’s that newfangled television that’s disrupting traditional ties, including party ties.  Yup, at least as late as 1980, TV was still the newish thing that was destroying traditional politics.  Which means that we’ll be seeing “the internet is changing everything” stories until Ezra Klein is drawing social security.  At least.

By Doing This Blog Post, We’re Expecting To Get Carl Kassell’s Voice On Our Home Answering Machine

Jon Peltier:

Let’s compare the audience sizes. In this line chart we can tell at a glance that NPR as increased greatly, while TV and newspapers have gone down.

This stacked bar doesn’t show the relative audience sizes as clearly, but it shows that the overall audience has declined a bit, and we can still tell that NPR’s audience has nearly doubled.

Anya Kamenetz:

In one of the great under-told media success stories of the past decade, NPR has emerged not as the bespectacled schoolmarm of our imagination but as a massive news machine poised for what Dick Meyer, editorial director for digital media, half-jokingly calls “world domination.” NPR’s listenership has nearly doubled since 1999, even as newspaper circulation dropped off a cliff. Its programming now reaches 26.4 million listeners weekly — far more than USA Today‘s 2.3 million daily circ or Fox News’ 2.8 million prime-time audience. When newspapers were closing bureaus, NPR was opening them, and now runs 38 around the world, better than CNN. It has 860 member stations — “boots on the ground in every town” that no newspaper or TV network can claim. It has moved boldly into new media as well: 14 million monthly podcast downloads, 8 million Web visitors, NPR Mobile, an open platform, a social network, even crowdsourcing. And although the nonprofit has been hit by the downturn like everyone else, its multiple revenue streams look far healthier long term than the ad-driven model of commercial media. (In 2003, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray, gave a $200 million endowment to NPR, the largest gift ever to an American cultural institution. She must have gotten one hell of a tote bag.)

John Sides:

Douthat argues that CNN’s ratings decline can be fixed with “conversations that are lengthy, respectful and often riveting” and that eschew standard red-blue binaries and give “free rein to eccentricity and unpredictability.”

I rarely watch cable news, but that plan sounds plausible enough. Indeed, it actually sounds a lot like NPR, although NPR’s eccentricities are fairly muted, at least relative to Glenn Beck’s (Douthat’s exemplar of eccentricity and unpredictability). Of course, we should distinguish between NPR’s news programming and their entertainment programming. Perhaps the news programming is too stultifying to meet Douthat’s standard. I would describe it as “lengthy” and “respectful.” Certain stories can be “riveting.” But your mileage may vary.

[…]

Something in their business model is working. And I have a hard time imagining that NPR listeners won’t watch televised news programming as a matter of principle.

So where is the NPR of cable news?

Kevin Drum:

A common question on the left is, “Why is there no liberal talk radio?” That is, no wildly popular liberal version of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Laura Schlesinger. And the answer is: there is. It’s called NPR. When lefties listen to the radio, that’s what they listen to.

Now, NPR is obviously not any kind of direct analog to Rush. It’s not a one-man talk show. It has a generally liberal worldview, but it doesn’t traffic in the kind of in-your-face partisanship that Rush does. It has an eclectic variety of shows. And its audience comes from all over the ideological spectrum.

Still: when people wonder why lefties won’t listen to talk radio, they’re wondering the wrong thing. Lefties do listen to the radio, they just prefer listening to a different kind of radio than conservatives. But why? I’m thinking about a piece for the magazine right now that hasn’t really taken form yet, but as I noodle about it this is one of the questions that I keep coming back to: when it comes to radio listening, why do conservatives prefer the style of Rush/Sean/Laura/etc. while liberals tend to prefer the style of NPR? Is it just a historical accident or is there something more to it?

Matthew Yglesias:

I have a few thoughts on this. One is just to note that in a market with relatively few firms and relatively high barriers to entry, you should probably just expect conservative decision-making and bad business practices. If there were 1,000 different companies running cable channels and starting a news station were easy, everyone would try everything and we’d see what works. But cable isn’t like that. After all, it seemed obvious to me and to many liberals for years that the lesson MSNBC should learn from Fox News is that it would make more money by offering a liberal counterpoint network. But MSNBC executives initially drew the opposite lesson and tried to run a second conservative network. Recently, they’ve shifted in the more sensible direction, but only quite slowly and still with more airtime given to former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough than to Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman combined.

The other is that CNN actually does produce a more NPR-esque network in the form of CNN International. I have no idea how many people would watch this if it were widely available in the United States, but a definitely prefer it’s calmer, more relaxed tone to the extremely busy and panic-inducing style of US cable networks. I’m not deeply familiar with the economics of cable providers, but it seems to me that with hundreds of channels now available, it shouldn’t be so hard for CNN to get content that it’s already producing anyway out to a larger number of people.

Last, in response to Kevin Drum I’m not really sure what’s so liberal about NPR except by wingnut rules whereby anything that isn’t an organ of the conservative movement is per se liberal. Morning Edition seems like very normal “Democrats say x, but Republicans say y” news coverage, and Marketplace is kind of Economist-style highbrow center-right. Other shows may tilt the other way, but I take it that NPR has a large audience precisely because it doesn’t narrowcast to an ideological niche market.

Doug J.:

I’m not a big fan of NPR news. I find it weasely and annoying, though I do like the stuff from the BBC they run. But it is what lefties listen to.

I wonder if it would be better if NPR broke free of the government and supported itself entirely through private donation. If they fired Juan Williams, Ken Rudin, and Mara Liasson, I’d be happy to start giving them money again.

Jonathan Chait at TNR

Andrew Sullivan

Julianne Dalcanton at Discover:

To me, the reason seems dead obvious. Radio is the only delivery mechanism that you can absorb while doing something else. Driving? Check. Cooking? Check. Reading email? Check. Lingering in bed after the alarm goes off? Check.

I don’t have a “principle” against watching televised news. I just don’t have time. You could have Ira Glass and Carl Kassell doing the Hustle surrounded by frolicking puppies and I still wouldn’t make the time to sit down and watch.

Ezra Klein:

I’ve been thinking a bit about this NPR graph that’s been floating around. I wish it included another data point: The Economist magazine. Their explosive growth over the last decade is well known, but consider that the publication had a record year in 2009. Would that we all enjoyed circulation booms amidst crippling global recessions.

So what do NPR and The Economist have in common? Two things jump to mind.

The first is that they both situate themselves firmly between news and opinion, in that netherworld I think of as analysis. This is a hobbyhorse for me, but my grand theory of the media right now is that the rise of online media made newsgathering an extremely crowded and quick marketplace. That’s left a lot of publications that either aren’t used to the competition (think newspapers) or aren’t suited to the pace (think newsweeklies) a bit confused about their identity.

Some of them have responded by embracing opinion. That’s also a bad move. The opinion marketplace is, if anything, more crowded than the news marketplace, and it’s hard to really break through in it unless you’re willing to travel pretty far along the partisan continuum. But because news stories move so much faster and opinion is so much louder, there’s actually more demand for media that explains what those fast-moving stories are actually about. This is a need that is going largely unmet. Both the Economist and NPR are imperfect products, but that’s fundamentally what they’re doing. It’s not quite newsgathering, and it’s not straight opinion, though there’s occasionally opinion in there. It’s analysis. It’s how to understand the stuff that other people are reporting and opining.

A Million Charts And Graphics To Say The Same Thing: Americans Don’t Like Foreign Aid

DiA at The Economist:

SOME highlights from this week’s Economist/YouGov poll:

• Little has changed when it comes to the health-care reform bill. Public opinion about the overall reform remains just about evenly divided, as it has for months. More than twice as many Americans think that their care will worsen under the bill than say it will improve, and more than half still expect to pay more because of it.

• Barack Obama’s overall rating remains below 50%. In this week’s poll, 46% approve of the way he is handling his job, while 47% disapprove.

• When asked which party would do a better job handling the budget deficit, Americans divide fairly evenly: 35% name the Democrats, 30% the Republicans, and 35% think they are about the same.

• When it comes to decreasing the deficit, cutting spending is a more popular approach than raising taxes, by a margin of 62% to 5%. And here’s what the public is willing to cut:

• Foreign aid makes up less than 1% of America’s total spending.

Annie Lowrey at The Washington Independent:

Today, an Economist/YouGov poll making the rounds shows that Americans would vastly prefer budget cuts to new taxes — by 62 percent to 5 percent. The poll goes on to ask Americans which government spending programs they would choose to cut: “If government spending is reduced in order to balance the budget, which of the following government programs should receive lower federal funding than they currently do?” (Respondents could pick more than one thing to axe.)

Here is how they responded:

The most expendable programs, according to poll takers, were mass transit, housing, agriculture, environment and foreign aid, the runaway winner at 71 percent. The problem? These programs together barely comprise 3 percent of the federal budget. Even if the programs were entirely eliminated, the cuts would do nothing to solve the United States’ long-term entitlement program.  Indeed, the responses had no obvious correlation with spending size.

The red bars in this graph indicate expenditures in the various areas:

The poll highlights the conundrum: Americans want to solve the long-term deficit program and want the federal government to run a balanced budget. They are willing to make budget cuts. But the government cannot cut enough from discretionary programs to bring the budget into check and ultimately to reduce the deficit. (Half of Americans still believe the government can.)

Ezra Klein:

The only program that more than a third of the public wants to see cut is foreign aid. Bummer, then, that it accounts for less than a single percent of the budget.

But the fact that people want a smaller budget deficit but no reductions in actual spending is old news, and well accounted for in Congress. What’s interesting about this chart, however, is that a sizable minority of the population wants to cut defense spending. In fact, defense spending’s size of the budget and the number of people who want to cut it match up much more closely than most of the other two bars on the graph.

You can make too much of this, of course. Only about a quarter of the population wants defense spending cut. But given how terrified politicians are to touch defense spending — we even invented a category called “non-defense discretionary spending” in order to protect it — maybe it’s time to take another look. Washington may consider defense spending sacred, but the country doesn’t — at least not more than anything else.

Kevin Drum:

Ah, the American public. God love ’em. The Economist asked if they’d rather tackle the federal deficit by cutting spending or raising taxes, and the runaway winner was cutting spending, by a margin of 62% to 5%. So what are we willing to cut? Answer: pretty much nothing.

[…]

there were only four areas that even a quarter of the population was willing to cut: mass transit, agriculture, housing, and the environment. At a rough guess, these areas account for about 3% of the federal budget. You could slash their budgets by a third and still barely make a dent in federal spending.

I suppose one of these days everyone’s going to have to figure this out. Apparently no time soon, though.

Jon Bernstein:

Just to pile on a bit, however: it’s even worse!  Not just because it turns out that the ideal point people pick for foreign aid turns out to be (if I remember correctly) something like 3% of the budget, which is far higher than the US actually spends.  But because if you break the category down, the same thing happens: the overall category (foreign aid) is unpopular, but the specifics are generally popular.  By far the biggest item is Israel, and Americans most love Israel, and think that the US should send them aid (the only poll I could find — bottom of the page — on this showed about half of respondents approved of current levels of military and economic aid, with a somewhat larger minority approving of cuts than the minority supporting increased levels).  I do suspect that voters probably would support cuts in aid to Egypt and Jordan, but the big increase in foreign aid in recent years is for fighting HIV in Africa, and (while I don’t have any numbers on it) I’m confident that voters are all for that spending.

I think the same is true in other categories, as well…”defense spending” is relatively less popular, but at least when I’ve asked students about it the only subcategory that wasn’t popular was new high-tech weapons, and that’s been fairly mixed.

Of course, a lot of this is incredibly soft, and so the results can be easily manipulated by changing question wording.  What’s more, when public opinion is inconsistent like this both sides are going to say that the public “really” supports them, but in fact what’s probably more accurate is to say that the public just doesn’t have rational opinions about a lot of things.  At any rate, anyone looking for logical consistency from voters on budget items is going to be very disappointed.

John Sides:

I want to suggest that the problem goes even deeper. The programs that make up the largest share of the federal budget are typically the ones that the fewest people want to cut. Consider this graph, in which I attempted to match most of the YouGov categories to a plausible counterpart in Obama’s FY 2010 budget proposal. (I drew on additional stories for information about the budgets for health research and highways. Foreign aid is estimated at 0.5% of the budget.)

[…]

As you move downward, into categories of spending that are increasingly popular, you get to the largest federal programs, particularly entitlement spending. Really, there is only one area of federal spending — national defense — that is sizable and that even a modest fraction (22%) is willing to cut.

In fact, there is a negative relationship between the budgetary share allocated to a policy area and the fraction who want to cut it. The correlation coefficient between the poll percentages and the budget percentages is -.33 (with or without the obvious potential outlier, foreign aid, included).

If Americans are forced to be specific, their recipe for cutting federal spending would do little to reduce spending.

Stan Collender:

There’s nothing new about this situation, of course,  Bruce reported remarkably similar results last December and it’s long been the case that the typical voter wants the deficit reduced without cutting spending or increasing taxes.  This latest poll shows that even the higher deficits of the past few years, which almost 60 percent of those responding said would be of great or some importance to them when they voted, hasn’t changed the situation at all.

Megan McArdle:

What I’d really like to see is a poll which reads off a list of the major areas in the federal budget, names the percent of the federal budget they compose, and then asks people which of these areas they think should be cut in order to close the deficit. Obviously, you couldn’t get too deep with this, since people can’t remember more than five or six numbers at a time. But the answer would be more interesting than noting that people with a poor command of the federal budget think we should cut the enormous fantasy programs they think are wasting all of our tax dollars.

Even more interesting would be if you paired this with some realistic tax math–if you made it clear to them that the budget gap also cannot be closed simply by raising taxes on “the rich”, but rather that it probably involves a broad-based regressive tax like the VAT.

But this would be very complicated, which is, I presume, why it hasn’t been done.

Josh Barro

What We’ll Never Know We’ll Never Know

Max Fisher at The Atlantic with the round-up:

The longest-running political battle of 2008, the Democratic presidential primary fight between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, cemented Obama’s more sweeping presidential victory that November. But what if it had worked out differently, with Clinton defeating Obama in the primary and, quite possibly, going on to win the presidency? There are many ways that a President Hillary Clinton might have governed differently, but writers are focusing on health care reform. How would Clinton’s second stab at reforming the health care system have gone as president?

Bruce Bartlett in Forbes:

I wrote a couple of columns in 2007 telling conservatives that they really should consider lending some support to Clinton if they believed, as I did, that Obama was much more liberal than her and that whoever won the Democratic primary would probably win the general election (see here and here). After the first one, Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth (and now Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania) said publicly that I was crazy.

Let’s fast-forward. Obama won the Democratic nomination over Clinton, easily beat Republican John McCain in the general election and has indeed governed as a liberal in office–at least on domestic issues. Clinton became his secretary of State.

Interestingly, contrary to the expectations of most conservatives and liberals, Obama’s foreign policy has been very consistent with that of George W. Bush‘s. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still being prosecuted–the latter with even more vigor than under Bush; the prison at Guantanamo Bay is still open for business; the Patriot Act has been renewed by Congress with White House support; and Obama is regularly berated by left-wing bloggers for failing to implement a more liberal foreign policy agenda and essentially fulfilling Bush’s third term.

Many conservatives credit Secretary of State Clinton for this favorable (from their point of view) state of affairs. Right-wing foreign policy experts like Robert Kagan publicly praise the bipartisanship of Obama’s foreign policy. And James A. Baker, who served as secretary of State for George H.W. Bush, recently said that he agreed with the overwhelming majority of what the Obama administration is doing in foreign affairs.

So would conservatives have been better off following my advice and helping Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic nomination, rather than futilely wasting their efforts on McCain, Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates who could not win and were considered far from ideal from a conservative point of view anyway? (McCain was always sticking his finger in the eye of conservatives before 2008, and Romney imposed a health care reform in Massachusetts almost identical to the one later adopted by Obama.)

I think the evidence suggests that Hillary Clinton could have won the Democratic nomination with just a little bit more support, and probably would be governing significantly more conservatively than Obama. For one thing, given her disastrous experience with health care reform in 1993-1994, it’s reasonable to assume that she would have stayed away from that issue at all costs.

Kevin Drum:

Well, we’ll never know, will we? But my guess is just the opposite. I think Hillary was, if anything, more dedicated to healthcare reform than Obama, and I think she would have taken it on more vigorously than he did. What’s more, my guess is that her better feel for the Senate and past failure with healthcare reform would have made her more effective at getting a package passed. It probably would have looked about the same as what we got (her position during the campaign was similar to Obama’s and most of the work was done by Congress anyway), but I suspect that she would have been a little more aggressive about pushing it through more quickly. Contra Bruce, we might have gotten healthcare reform last fall instead of last month.

But! Who knows? Maybe the economy would have spooked her. Maybe Bill would have convinced her to wait until 2011. Maybe the townhall madness of summer would have stopped her short. But I think the conservative myth of the allegedly principle-less, endlessly calculating Hillary has led Bruce astray here.

Jonathan Chait at TNR:

I’m not sure Clinton would have “stayed away” from health care reform — the issue was the centerpiece of her domestic platform, and it would have been costly to simply abandon it from the outset. I do believe, though, that any significant adversity would probably have caused her to retreat. In the wake of Scott Brown’s victory, her chief political strategist, Mark Penn, urged Democrats to abandon health care reform. (“Break it down and start with the easy stuff like electronic medical records first and work up to the harder parts year after year.”) That’s probably the sort of strategy Clinton would have followed if she had won.

Greg Marx at Columbia Journalism Review:

Bartlett’s claims about Clinton’s relative conservatism aren’t limited to health care. But his assertion that she wouldn’t have pushed forward on that issue in particular is off base for a number of reasons. The first, as Drum points out, is that it rests on a view of her as uniquely “principle-less [and] endlessly calculating” that is basically a conservative myth. There’s not really any reason to think that she, personally, would not have been just as committed to reform as Obama—or, for that matter, any number of other politicians.

But there’s another factor here, one that’s unrelated to assessing anyone’s moral character. During the 2008 primary, the Democratic Party was strikingly united on policy issues, and one of the issues that united the party was the need to push for health care reform. The candidates produced lengthy plans to demonstrate their commitment to the issue, and the details became the subject of some fairly substantial debate—for awhile, whether or not an “individual mandate” was necessary was actually a running topic. (Clinton’s plan had one; Obama’s—at the time—didn’t.) Having thus promised a broad coalition of supporters that health care would be a top priority—and enjoying, after the election, large congressional majorities with which to press the issue—they couldn’t very well have backed down, even if they wanted to.

Matthew Yglesias:

Of course we’ll never know. But I think the fact that we’re having this conversation at all is an illustration of how bad a job primary campaigns do of accomplishing what activists want them to do. Back during the primary, absolutely everyone I know regarded Clinton as the candidate more committed to health reform. Heck, one of the reasons I voted for Obama is that I thought she was the candidate more committed to health reform—I wanted someone who’d make energy and climate his top domestic priority.

But it turns out that whatever you say about Clinton, Obama was actually really really really really committed to getting a health care bill done. What’s more, the bill he was so committed to getting done was closer to Clinton’s proposal than to his own. So what was accomplished by all those Clinton-Obama debate exchanges? Not much. And it turns out that the main questions that have divided progressives—how important is a public option in the scheme of things and what are the merits of high-stakes brinksmanship as a legislative tactic—are things that weren’t talked about at all over the course of a very long nominating process.

UPDATE: John Sides

Andrew Gelman at Salon

The Bleeding And Leading Leads To Perceiving Things Not In Line With Reality

John Sides at The Monkey Cage:

Do perceptions meet reality? Gallup says:

“Whether there actually has been an increase in crime this year is hard to substantiate at this point, since official crime statistics for 2009 will not be released until next year. The most recent statistics, for the year 2008, show that crime in the U.S. decreased last year from 2007. Consistent with that change, Gallup’s 2008 measurement also showed a decline in the percentage of Americans perceiving more crime in the United States, from 71% in 2007 to 67% in 2008.”

This misses the most important finding, however. Since 2001, perceptions of crime have become far worse even as the actual crime rate has remained stable. I took FBI’s violent crime rate from 1989-2008 and matched it up as best as possible to Gallup poll numbers for each year (eyeballing the graph above to determine the year in which each poll was conducted).

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

One can speculate about the reasons. September 11th seems an unlikely cause, especially of the increase since 2005. Local television news consumption affects certain beliefs about crime, according to this research by Frank Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar. But I don’t really think there’s been a massive uptick in local news consumption, or local news coverage of crime (which seems a perennial staple — if it bleeds it leads, etc.).

More Sides with more charts.

Ryan Sager:

With the exception of 2001 and 2002 (9/11 effect?), between 52% and 89% of Americans every year since 1990 have thought that crime is on the rise. That’s a pretty remarkable statistic, given that crime declined steadily nationally throughout the 1990s and has remained essentially level in the 2000s. Whatever the year-to-year correspondence is, we know that people have gotten the big picture wildly wrong, year after year.

That is, people pretty much always seem to think that this year is worse than last, regardless of the actual trends.

Does this sound like anything else to you? How about: This generation is so much stupider/lazier/ruder than the last; politics is so much dirtier these days; the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

For whatever reason, this seems to be the default human predisposition. Is it availability bias? You hear about some terrible things happening during the course of every year, and — slowly forgetting all the terrible things that happened the year before and the year before that and so on — you assume that this year must be the worst ever?

Matthew Yglesias:

Speculating . . . speculating . . . I feel that since the end of the 1990s, crime has really fallen off the map as an official topic of public and political concern. That could mean that people are seeing less reporting of actual facts about the crime rate and coming to be more influenced by the “if it bleeds it leads” phenomenon. But I don’t know how you would test that hypothesis.

Andrew Sullivan:

He wonders if this is a consequence of the perennial suspicion that this “generation is so much stupider/lazier/ruder than the last; politics is so much dirtier these days; the world is going to hell in a hand basket.” The trouble is: crime always makes the local news. Non-crime almost never does.

Doug J. on that generational thing, responding to Sager:

A friend of mine once pointed out that, while each generation is thought to be dumber than the last, the people of a thousand years ago are thought to be dumber than people today (single digit literacy rates, burning of witches, etc.). So generational intelligence is a function that increases despite being everywhere locally decreasing.