Political Behavior Blog

Indefinite Hiatus

2006-05-18T13:46:44Z

It is with some regret that the Political Behavior Blog comes to an end. We have enjoyed our year-long experiment in blogging about political behavior research. Among other things we have learned that maintaining a blog requires both hard work and skill. This blog has generated a surprising amount of readers in a short period of time, but with summer coming and my departure for the University of Wisconsin imminent, it is time to push the pause button. Enjoy the warm weather and thanks for your contributions!

Although this blog is done, IQSS continues to support other social science blogs, and I hear that more are on the way. Fortunately, the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop will continue next year under the direction of Claudine Gay and Sunshine Hillygus.

Democracy, Divided Government, and Split-Ticket Voting

2006-05-01T14:01:42Z

The academic year will end with a CAPS-funded conference entield "Democracy, Divided Government, and Split-Ticket Voting." The meeting brings together American and comparative politics scholars to examine the causes and consequences of ticket splitting cross-nationally. Issues to be considered include theories of strategic voting, political competition, partisanship, uncertainty, and institutional constraints. Look for more details soon.

MPSA Buzz?

2006-04-24T15:01:05Z

Here's a space for those of you who attended this Midwest meeting last week to chime in about what grabbed your attention. What was the buzz in panels or hallway conversation about the political behavior field? Any new topics out there? Controversies? Dead lines of inquiry? Post your thoughts in the comment section.

PPBW: Burch on Felon Voting and Partisanship

2006-04-24T14:09:13Z

The final Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop paper of the academic year comes this Friday in the form of Traci Burch's "Estimating Voter Registration, Turnout, and Party ID among Current and Former Felons in North Carolina." Felon disenfranchisment is obviously a timely issue. It has been the source of inaccuracy in voter turnout statistics and a possible contributor to the 2000 election outcome in Florida. To give away the punchline, here is Burch's conclusion:

This analysis attempts to estimate the political participation of felons and ex-felons in one state, North Carolina, in an effort to see the extent and causes of felon participation. The findings indicate that even former felons in North Carolina have low rates of current voter registration (13.8 percent); the lack of registration in large part reflects the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage and legal disenfranchisement policies. Among comparable groups such as misdemeanants and felons prior to the start of their last sentence, registration levels are about 30 percent, suggesting that in the absence of felon disenfranchisement policies, felon political participation would have been much higher. Moreover, older felons and felons with a high school education are much more likely to be registered to vote.

Harding and Alexander on Beliefs About Terrorism

2006-04-15T17:40:43Z

Marcus Alexander and Matthew Harding recently presented "Beliefs Over the Unknown: Understanding The Threat of Terrorism" at the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop. The authors argue that extant models describing how rational actors forecast the future are inadequate for explaining the way humans think about terrorist attacks. Alexander and Harding propose an ingenious new model, which allows actors to carry out a series of counterfactual thought experiments in order to place a non-zero probability on yet unrealized events occurring. They concluded their paper by arguing that democratic deliberation results in groups placing insufficient weight over the unknown. The implication suggested is that classic results about the efficiency of aggregating decision-making (i.e. Condorcet Jury Theorem) do not apply in the case of envisioning the future.

]]> Studies examining the roles of terrorist attacks in shaping American political behavior represents a new literature with both theoretical and policy implications. One theory is that the public, while frightened from a terrorist attack, will cede civil liberties for a heightened sense of security. For example, Darren Davis and Brian Silver in “Civil Liberties vs Security: Public Opinion in the Context of Terrorist Attacks on America�? show that commitment to Democratic norms is highly contingent on the perceived threat from terrorism. Alexander and Harding’s model shows that immediately after a terrorist attack, individuals may overweight the probability of an attack in the future, particularly while engaging in democratic deliberation. Subsequently, one could easily imagine the dire consequences for a democratic society.

EPOVB News: MPSA Edition

2006-04-14T17:42:08Z

The latest newsletter of the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior (EPOVB) section is out. In addition to looking for committee and award nominations, there's news of a competition to produce the best forecast of this year's congressional elections. There are also some great panels at MPSA next week.

PPBW: Alexander and Harding on Terrorism

2006-04-12T23:31:08Z

This week's Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop features a paper by Marcus Alexander and Matthew Harding titled "Beliefs over the Unknown: Understanding the Threat of Terrorism." Rose McDermott of UCSB is serving as discussant. We hope to the paper posted soon. The abstract says that democracy might have liabilities when it comes to beliefs about threats:

When faced with the imminent threat of terrorism, people draw on their own experience and imagination to assess the security risk. We develop a behavioral economic model of belief formation under the threat of terrorism, and explore how economic forecasting, assesment of terrorist threats, and democratic concensus are shaped by the people’s ability to combine rationality and immagination to understand the previously unknown. Due to the behavioral biases that arise in this process, the main implication of our findings on democratic politics is that free deliberation may lead to public concensus that further inflates biases, presenting a problem for decisions under the shadow of terrorism.

Fear and Loathing on the Italian Campaign Trail: Election Debriefing

2006-04-12T01:31:12Z

There is, indeed, such a thing as being too smart for your own good. Yesterday's Italian elections, in spite of an amazing, improbable comeback engineered by Berlusconi in the last few weeks of the campaign, gave the Center Left coalition a victory that far exceeds, in seats, the infinitesimal margin of votes by which it edged the Center-Right. For the Left, the sweetest of ironies is that its majority in both chambers was manufactured by the features of the new electoral law that were designed to inflict the most damage to it. When a rambling Romano Prodi emerged from his trailor at 3 o'clock in the morning - after already having cancelled two victory speeches - he said, rather crudely, "they even changed the electoral law to make us lose, but we won anyway." Quite so.

]]> In the Chamber of Deputies, the new law turned a 25,000 vote (or 0.07%) margin into a 340-277 seat majority. Berlusconi's people expected a close result all along, but were banking on the expectation that they would edge the opposition - if narrowly - and could then profit unduly from the majority premium that confers upon the largest coalition 55% of the seats. They gambled and it blew right in their faces. In the Senate, the victory of the Left was engineered, in another ironic twist, by a post-fascist - Mirko Tremaglia - who after years of lobbying finally found someone foolish enough to listen to his argument that Italians abroad should be able to vote, in no small part because they are widely believed to be more right-wing than the Italians living in Italy. The result? At the end of the night, when only the seats within the national territory had been assigned, the Right led by one seat: 155-154; the next morning, when the votes from all over the world had been counted, the Right had won only 1 of the 6 outstanding seats reserved for Italians abroad. Tremaglia's cleverness gave away the majority to a blundering Left that ran an entire campaign on the catchy slogan "seriousness in government". Had Berlusconi only given the Left enough rope with which to hang itself, he would have found them to be only too happy to oblige. But Berlusconi, who could have had a victory or at the very least a tie if he had only played it straight, couldn't resist the temptation of tricking his way back into the premiership.

For the country, the distorsion introduced by the majority premium is quite possibly a blessing. After this kind of a campaign, a tie in seat shares would have in all lilelihood failed to produce any workable government. For months, Left and Right exchanged the most brutal and grotesque of insults. Along the way, Berlusconi has called Romano Prodi "a useful idiot," leftist politicians the heirs of the Chinese cultural revolution - during which, he added, "children were boiled to make fertilizer" - and leftist voters "coglioni" (important components of the male anatomy). For good measure, during a televised debate with a homosexual, leftist politician, the reliably classy Alessandra Mussolini cried: "I'd rather be fascist than gay." And the Left's ad hominems weren't that much more restrained. Prodi compared Berlusconi to a drunk and defined his government's economic policy "criminal." A Communist politician even went on record to spout that the 20 Italian servicemen killed by Iraqi insurgents in Nassiriyah "had gotten what they deserved." Indeed, this is hardly fertile soil for a grand coalition of the kind that the far more civilized German parties have recently put together. Not that we should put jumping the fence - always a popular sport among Italian politicians - beyond anyone, especially Christian Democratic politicians that still harbor the not-so--secret dream of piecing together the shards of the Democrazia Cristiana, shattered by corruption scandals in 1992.

Whatever the case may be, the Left must figure out what to do with Berlusconi's gift, now that it has won the election in spite of its own best efforts. Again, a babbling Romano Prodi offered some disturbing insight into the state of the soon to be governing coalition during his barely more than half-hearted victory speech last night. He announced that after winning national and local elections, the Left will now turn to stopping the constitutional reforms introduced by the Right in the last two years. Only then, he said, "will our work be done." Done? Prodi's gaffe might well have been due to exhaustion, but it is quite indicative of the fact that the only goal the Left could agree on was to get rid of Berlusconi and whatever he happens to stand for. Now that this objective has been accomplished, it remains to be seen, in the first place, how long a coalition "uniting" the clerical with the anti-clerical, Communists with Catholics, the Greens with the business community, the Euro-enthusiasts with the Euro-skeptics, and the Kennedy left with the street fighters of the anti-globalization movement can stay together. Even more uncertain is whether they will waste their time - and ours - hanging on and muddling through, or whether they will really get to work to implement the reforms of which the Italian economy, government, and educational system are so desperately in need.

Fear and Loathing on the Italian Campaign Trail: Total Coverage of the Results

2006-04-10T13:48:46Z

Tuesday, 14:45 (Italian time)
It's over! The Center-Left scores an amazing 5-1 victory on the Senate seats elected by Italians abroad. It therefore wins a 159-156 majority in the Senate.

03:17
Final results for the Chamber: Center-Left 49.80%, Center-Right 49.73%. Turnout is 83.6%. The Left wins 340 seats; the Right 277. The margin of victory is just 25,224 votes out of about 40 million cast. Here's a list of parties that will receive seats, as well as their vote shares:

CASA DELLE LIBERTA' (Right): FORZA ITALIA 23.71; ALLEANZA NAZIONALE 12.34; UDC 6.76; LEGA NORD 4.58.
UNIONE (Left): L'ULIVO 31.26; RIFONDAZIONE COMUNISTA 5.84; LA ROSA NEL PUGNO 2.6; COMUNISTI ITALIANI 2.32; ITALIA DEI VALORI 2.3; VERDI 2.05.

]]> 03:02
The Center-Right announces that a full, nationwide recount will be demanded. Where have I seen this before?

02:47
"Abbiamo vinto!" The Center-Left leaders come out to declare victory, claiming that the margin for the Chamber is now large enough. Oddly enough, Prodi is improvising the most incoherent of victory speeches. Hard to believe he didn't have one ready after waiting 12 hours for the results to be tallied.

02:39
Final Senate results: Right 50.2%, Left 49%. As anticipated, the Right has a 1 seat majority: 155-154. The 6 seats reserved for Italians abroad are still to be allocated.

02:28
The Chamber elections get closer by the minute. With 60792 precincts reporting out of 60828, the Left leads by 49.80-49.73%. The margin is now 26,000 votes. Other than Florida 2000, I've never seen anything like this.

01:35
Chamber of Deputies: With 550 precincts still out, the two coalitions are separated by less than 40,000 votes nationwide; the Left leads 49.82%-49.71%. Unbelievable.

01:32
Senate: My numbers indicate that the Right is ahead in the Senate by 255-254 seats. There are still 6 seats elected by Italians abroad to be assigned; nobody quite knows which direction they will go. Those are the only results still out. The Senate also has 7 lifetime appointees, who will in all likelihood be critical.

01:00
Romano Prodi comes out for the delayed victory speech but tells everyone to have more patience.

00:54
The Political Behavior Blog is now ready to call the regions of Campania (Center-Left) and Piedmont (Center-Right). Lazio probably goes Right too.

22:56
Fear and Loathing at the Northern League: the secessionist wing of the party occupies national headquarters. Federalists and separatists exchange insults and shoves. This is the most entertaining election ever held in Italy.

22:50
The latest projections for the Chamber of Deputies: Center-Right 49.8%-Center-Left 49.7%. That fraction is profoundly consequential because whoever gets the most votes wins 340 seats out of 630.
In the Senate, it remains too close to call. The result hinges on 3 regions: Piedmont, Lazio, and Campania. In each of these, official results have margins of less than 30,000 votes with about 90% of the precincts reporting.

21:41
Nobody seems to be able to make sense of what's going on. In the Senate, it looks like the Center-Left has more votes but less seats. In the Chamber, the difference between the two coalitions is about .4%. Prominent politicians are already talking about the possibility of holding new elections soon. Others sound open to jumping the fence; of course, in the interest of preserving the country's governability. What a mess...

20:42
New projections give the Center-Right ahead by 49.9-49.6 in the lower house. The Center-Right is now ahead by 7 seats in the Senate, too. Looks more and more confused by the second.

19:30
Romano Prodi cancels his victory speech in light of the latest results.

18:33
Do we have a tie? The Center-Left appears to have won a wide majority in the Chamber (thanks to the majority premium operating at the national level). In the Senate, however, their lead is only 7 seats. The difference is due to the fact 1) At the Senate, majority premiums are given at the regional level; 2) Some regions that exit polls gave to the Center-Left have either flipped or remain too close to call.

17:09
Turnout is projected to be an astounding 85%; about a 5% increase since 2001. The Center-Left is now projected to receive 340 lower house seats; 277 for the Center-Right. For the first time in the history of the country, the Left seems to have recived an absolute majority of the votes (52.2).

16:08
One thing that seems to be certain in that Berlusconi's Forza Italia took a big hit: exit polls give it 20-22.5%. If the results hold up, that's a loss of 8-10% compared to the 2001 elections. Some of these votes seem to have gone to coalition partner UDC (Union of Centrist Democrats), which might have received as much as 7% (doubling its 2001 votes), but the other parties in the Center-Right are very close to their 2001 vote shares.

15:47
The polls have closed 45 minutes ago; the first exit polls give the Center-Left 50-54%; the Center-Right 45-49. As usual, at this point this doesn't mean a thing.

Berinsky on Group Attachments and War

2006-04-03T03:30:42Z

During the spring break edition of PPBW, Adam Berinsky of MIT presented a paper entitled "Group Attachments and Public Support for War." That voters use group attachments to structure their political attitudes has a long history in political science. Converse found that while the mass public did not exhibit any ideological sophistication, group attachments could be used as a proxy to guide voters when making decisions. Although this idea has been applied to areas of domestic policy, Berinsky argues that it may be also useful in explaining public opinion about foreign affairs, specifically attitudes toward World War II.

]]> According to the paper, dislike of German and Italian citizens was clearly associated with increased support for pro-intervention policies. Similarly, respondents whose parents were born in Axis countries were less likely to support helping England during 1940 and 1941. Moreover, Berinsky finds that these ethnic differences in attitudes persist even after Pearl Harbor - those of German and Italian descent continued to trust England and Russia less than those whose parents were born in Allied countries. He also presents evidence that group attachments might help explain attitudes on foreign policy matters other than war. Attitudes toward blacks were an important predictor of support for sanctions against South Africa during apartheid, and attitudes toward Asians were an important predictor of whether respondents blamed Japan for economic difficulties in the early 1990s.

The paper responds to several literatures - including those who argue that foreign policy attitudes are shaped largely by events (such as battlefield causalities). Some questions were raised about whether events might structure attitudes towards groups rather than the other way around. For example, it is possible that the dislike of Mussolini led to anti-Italian sentiment, but Berinsky shows that such feelings existed even during the 1920s. Many suggestions were offered about additional cases to help solidify the argument. One obivous case - attitudes towards Arab Americans shaping public opinion about the war on terrorism - seems to suffer from lack of adequate data, as most relevant questions were asked post 9/11, making it difficult to separate the theory of group attachments from the event-driven hypothesis. Nevertheless, there are other cases where group attachments seem promising in explaining attitudes toward foreign policy.

PPBW: Berinsky on Groups and War

2006-03-31T13:43:42Z

Unlike those slackers at the Social Science Statistics blog, we political behavior types foolishly keep motoring on through spring break at Harvard. This week's PPBW paper by Adam Berinsky of MIT is titled "Group Attachments and Public Support for War." Berinsky suggests that group identifications are important determinants of attitudes toward American foreign policy, particularly during WWII but also in selected cases after the war.

Fear and Loathing on the (Italian) Campaign Trail: Episode One

2006-03-24T03:45:46Z

These days, Italians don't get to vote quite as often as they used to. For the first time in the country's postwar history, we are being called to the polls on April 9 to vote on a government that has accomplished the extraordinary feat of serving a full legislative term. Critics may say it is the only accomplishment the Berlusconi government is legitimately entitled to claim. And, indeed, holding together - for a full five years - a ragtag coalition of know nothings, post-socialists, post-fascists, libertarians, and prudish altar boys - joined in the occasion of the upcoming elections by the real fascists led by Alessandra Mussolini in persona - was no cupcake. It may not have been an endeavor worthy of Winston Churchill, Napoleon, or Jesus Christ - to whom Berlusconi humbly compared himself over the course of a single week - but it's not a bad thing to have on your cv if you are looking for a job in management. Certainly, it remains to be seen whether the center-left will be able to claim so impressive a success, should it fail to once again snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. As it turns out, the Ulivo is itself a motley crew of anti-globalization activists, squatters, anarchists, communists, post-communists, and post-Christian Democrats scotch-taped together by the strange cult of personality of a career bureaucrat - aptly nicknamed "Mortadella" after the cheapest of Italian cured meats - who was once in charge of the government holdings company during the lost days of the Italian mixed economy. Italians better hold a wet handkerchief to their mouths and noses when they walk into those polling stations. The stench will be unbearable.

]]> An interesting by-product of the increasing africanization of Italian politics is the increased malleability of the rules of the game, which now seem to have lost so much of their proverbial stickiness that even the most brazen of manipulations goes almost unnoticed. Armed with opinion polls demonstrating the growing collective queasiness over the Berlusconi government's redecoration of the country's legal code and its inability to defibrillate an economy with no pulse, the "governing" coalition used a little muscle this winter and dug deep into the endless reserve of Italian creativity to swiftly push through an electoral reform. The majoritarian component of the Italian mixed system - once the subject of a hard-fought campaign that won the support of 85% of the voters in a 1993 referendum - was summarily cashiered, as the government triumphally announced the improbable return of proportional representation. No one even bothered to cook up an excuse to justify the return to a system once held responsible for each and every evil of the First Republic. "Technical problems," Berlusconi says.

But as the eternal Giovanni Sartori was quick to point out, the new "proportional" system is not all that proportional.

In the Chamber of Deputies, the new law makes sure that the "winning" coalition - even if it fails to win an actual majority - will take home at least 55% of the seats (340 out of 630) thanks to a majority premium. The loot is then shared by the coalition's parties that received more than 2% of the vote, this time in actual proportion to their vote shares. This makes governing easier, Berlusconi has claimed. And one can't really argue with that, nor fail to appreciate the candor exhibited by our savior the "Jesus Christ of politics" (his words, not mine). The rest of the seats are given to the other, sub-plurality coalitions with more than 10%, to unaffiliated parties with more than 4% nationally, and to parties representing officially recognized linguistic minorities that received more than 20% of the vote in their constituency.

In the Senate, the law is even more complicated. This time, the majority premium is assigned within each region to the coalition with the largest number of votes locally. The rest of the seats, in each region, goes to coalitions with more than 20% of the votes and to unaffiliated parties that received at least 8% of the vote. In this case, the "it makes governing easier" explanation doesn't make as much sense. The law simply makes red regions redder and blue regions bluer.

Lau on Voter Decision Making

2006-03-20T05:48:09Z

Last Friday at PPBW, Richard Lau of Rutgers University presented a paper co-authored with David Redlawsk entitled "How Voters Decide: Four Strategies of Voter Decision Making, and Their Consequences," which is part of a larger book project on the topic. The authors present four models of voter decision making: 1.) the rational choice approach, where voters gather as much information as possible about all the candidates; 2.) the confirmatory approach, where voters rely on longstanding predispositions like party ID; 3.) a "fast and frugal" approach, where voters gather information about all candidates but on just a few relevant dimensions, and finally 4.) the "intuitive" decision making approach, where voters start their search with one candidate chosen at random and then keep searching until an acceptable alternative is found. Somewhat unexpectedly, the rational choice approach seemed to fare the worse in helping voters make "correct" decisions.

]]> The authors designed experiments in which they could monitor how voters picked their candidates in mock presidential primary and general elections. Voting "correctly" was defined as when voters chose candidates that were aligned with their pre-experiment policy predispositions. Models 3 and 4 - which the authors classify as "boundedly rational" approaches - seem to fare the best in the four candidate primary experiment. Model 2 - in which voters rely on party ID - also did quite well in the general election. Model 1, however, did poorly, which seems to suggest that more information is not always better.

Questions were raised about whether these four models are mutually exclusive, whether voters might use different strategies at different times, and also how voting "correctly" can be defined outside of the policy predisposition context. Nevertheless, these results are sure to cause debate, particularly among those who view the rational choice model of voting more favorably.

Gilens on inequality and representation

2006-03-20T02:35:59Z

Political scientists often try to assess how well the government responds to public policy preferences. Friday's CAPS lecture by Martin Gilens of Princeton University pushes this research in a new direction - asking who the American government is most likely to respond to.

Gilens matches public opinion regarding proposed policy changes to whether these were actually enacted. As we might expect given the structure of American government, the status quo tends to win out and few potential changes that surveys ask about are implemented. Fundamental notions of equal representation, however, fare less well in the empirical analysis. As the abstract of Gilens' recent POQ article says,

When Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans.

While understandably concerned with the normative implications of these findings, the audience responded positively. My major question about this research concerns the "black box" mechanism which translates the preferences of the rich into the policies the government enacts. Is it because they participate more in politics? (Bartels says not). Is it because politicians themselves tend to be drawn from the higher end of the income distribution, and so personally hold the same opinions? Or because the wealthy fund parties and candidates, allowing them more influence than someone who only has the power of voting? I have no answers, but would love to see more research in this area.

NES Online Commons

2006-03-16T14:52:11Z

To help the scholarly community shape upcoming surveys, the (A)NES has launched the Online Commons. As the oveview puts it, "The goal of the Online Commons is to improve the quality and scientific value of each of our data collections, to encourage the submission of new ideas, and to make such experiences more beneficial to and enjoyable for individual investigators." Planning for the 2006 pilot study, 2007-2009 panel study, and 2008 general election study are underway. In the spirit of this and other blogs, the Online Commons experiment could turn out to be extremely useful in making those studies more effective.