NSF: An invitation for Jeff Flake

I'm one of the host co-chairs of the fifth annual Political Networks conference, being held next month in Boulder. Since this conference and the APSA section organizing it have received substantial support from NSF's Political Science program over the past five years, I thought it would make sense to invite Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to the conference. Rep. Flake, of course, recently authored an amendment to a House spending bill that would defund the Political Science program, and this bill recently passed the House. 

I know this is already beyond the House, but Flake currently seems to be the main purveyor of the argument that political science is unworthy of federal support. And in fairness, as Ezra Klein points out, political science is deserving of some criticism for using public money for our research and then hiding the results of that research behind paywalls and obscure jargon. So we invited Flake to the conference, in all sincerity and in the interests of transparency, so he could see what NSF funding has helped to produce. The text of our letter appears after the jump.

NSF

Over at the Monkey Cage, John Sides comments on the House of Representatives' recent vote to defund the Political Science program at the National Science Foundation, explaining the usefulness of his own recent NSF-funded research. While I am certainly not thrilled about this vote, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for scientists receiving government funds to occasionally explain to the public just what they're doing and why it might be valuable.

I should mention that I (along with Michael Heaney, Joanne Miller, and Dara Strolovitch) received a relatively small NSF grant (about $30,000) a few years ago to conduct a survey of activists and delegates at the 2008 Republican and Democratic national conventions. The bulk of that money went toward hiring a few dozen undergraduate and graduate students in Denver and Minneapolis to conduct the survey and training them in how to do survey research. I still hear back from some of those students, who tell me how valuable the training was and how memorable the whole experience was.

The research itself, meanwhile, has yielded one published paper, one that's under review, and another that's still being written. We've found, among other things, some cultural distinctions between the two parties in how they work with interest groups, some interesting evidence about how the Democratic party managed its divisions after the Clinton/Obama primary battle, and some notable differences in the evaluation of female candidates across both major parties. The research covers two main areas -- differences between the major parties and the use of convention caucuses -- which haven't received a lot of attention in previous research. While focused on parties, the research isn't advancing any agenda for one party or another; it's simply trying to better understand how they function and how people and groups interact with them. I don't know that this work is "transformative" (which apparently is a new standard for meriting government support), but it is interesting and useful, and it tells us some things we didn't know before. And the evidence was gathered by struggling students who ended up with some useful training and some extra spending money in their wallets.

I might also mention a small NSF grant ($12,000) I received in grad school, which allowed me and Jeff Lewis to compile a complete roll call vote record for the California Assembly going back to 1849. (You can download the resulting ideal points here at the bottom of the page.) This research was essential to my book and an AJPS article, and it has been used by several other scholars in related research.

Now, these aren't large grants by any means. But for a scholar located at a liberal arts school in a small department with no graduate students and paltry research funds, they make an enormous difference. It's the difference between conducting research and, well, not. Assuming the federal government has an interest in promoting research (I believe the Constitution mentions something about promoting the "progress of science and useful arts"), this strikes me as a very good investment.

Obamacare: The roll call and the damage done

It's become an article of faith that Democrats in Congress paid a price for having passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or ACA, or Obamacare) in 2010. I'm pleased to report the publication of a new paper that not only demonstrates that this price was real, but also shows just how it happened. The paper, "One Vote Out of Step: The Effects of Salient Roll Call Votes in the 2010 Elections" (ungated version here), just published in American Politics Research, is the product of some earlier research by Steve Greene and me and by Brendan Nyhan, Eric McGhee, and John Sides. We decided to join forces as an Asia-like supergroup to produce this new paper.

Consistent with the earlier research, we found that those House Democrats who voted in favor of ACA ran around six points behind those Democrats who voted against it in the 2010 midterms. We conducted thousands of simulations and found that, in the majority of simulations, Democrats retained at least 25 additional seats if they had all voted against ACA. That's enough for them to have held the majority.

Politicians and political observers often talk about the demands of party ("Sometimes party loyalty asks too much," said John Kennedy), but it's rare that we see such an explicit tradeoff. Nancy Pelosi actively pushed to pass this bill, achieving a goal that the Democratic Party had been pursuing for decades. And the price of the goal was that she lost her speakership and a few dozen of her colleagues lost their jobs.

Now, how exactly did this happen? Why did a vote for ACA cause a Democratic House members' voters to turn against her? We examine this at the level of the individual voter using a CCES survey. The findings suggest that voting for health reform caused voters to perceive a member as being more liberal, even controlling for the members' overall voting record. In the graph below, respondents were asked to evaluate the ideology of their member of Congress. The solid line represents voters in the districts of Democratic House members who voted against ACA; the dotted line represents those in the districts of ACA supporters:

That one yes vote had an enormous effect on voters, causing them to perceive their representative as being substantially further to the left. And as numerous studies have shown, being ideologically extreme tends to reduce one's vote share.

A final question, which goes somewhat beyond the paper, is whether the effect of ACA goes beyond the 2010 election. Will it hurt Democrats again this year? Some early polling suggests it might, although Bernstein is skeptical. John Sides gets into this issue in a recent op/ed. One reason ACA might not have much of an effect in Congressional elections this year is that all the vulnerable Democrats were kicked out in 2010. The ACA supporters who remain have relatively safe districts. It may be that a few senators who were not up in 2010 could still pay a price (this may be part of Ben Nelson's reason for retiring), but that's much harder to say. 

My co-authors are blogging on this issue, and I'll link as those posts become available. Here's what Sides had to say this morning, and here's a post from Nyhan on this topic. Greene had this to add. We got a bit of pushback from the likes of Jonathan Chait, so here's Sides' excellent followup.

Brinksmanship and the debt ceiling

One point I wouldn't mind hearing more of from the media in their coverage of debt ceiling negotiations: It is very, very hard to know who is "winning" and who is "losing" at any given point during a negotiation. In fact, those terms really aren't very meaningful until we know what the final agreement is. For example, I've heard some Democrats complain that Obama is getting rolled or that he's not "winning the argument," but it's really not clear what that means. If 60% of the American people primarily blamed Bush for the size of the debt, would that mean that Democrats had won the argument? 70% 100% And whatever that percentage is, does it have any bearing on the outcome of the negotiations?

Similarly, I'm pretty sure that John Boehner didn't want to reveal or exacerbate splits between business leaders and Tea Party activists within the GOP when he decided to go the brinksmanship route on the debt ceiling increase. But there's a tendency to treat that as a loss for Republicans, even though we have no idea whether it will impact the final agreement.

"Go ahead, blow it back to God."

Most of what we have right now are nothing more than tea leaves, offering small bits of insight as to just how serious each side is and whether or not it has the votes to get what it wants. My personal impression of Boehner is that he's kind of like Indiana Jones pointing a bazooka at the Ark of the Covenant; he's serious, and he really doesn't want the other people to control the Ark, but he's not actually willing to blow it up. But Eric Cantor just might be, and even if he's not, he just might have enough people in the GOP caucus who don't see a downside to blowing it up and can't tell when their leaders are bluffing. That's a precarious situation for negotiations. But again, these are just impressions.

The key point here is that no one knows who is winning or losing this thing. Horse race descriptions, while useful in campaigns, just really don't apply here.

Comparing Shutdowns

I haven't seen a whole lot of ink comparing the results of the 1995-96 government shutdown with those of last week's almost-shutdown, so I sought out the opinions of Jonathan Bernstein, Sarah Binder, and Peter Hanson. The following are some reflections, informed by their input, on two key questions I keep asking:

Why was Obama apparently so eager to make a deal?
The conventional about the 1995-96 shutdown is that the event helped Bill Clinton and hurt congressional Republicans. We can certainly understand the logic of that: the president has the bully pulpit, he is a single voice facing off against numerous congressional leaders who don't always agree, he was defending popular programs, etc. And yes, the Republicans made a number of policy concessions to Clinton to end the shutdown. And Hanson tells me that veteran Republicans staffers on Capitol Hill widely regard the 1995-96 shutdown as a colossal screwup on their part. So why wouldn't Obama see a shutdown as his best friend? Why didn't he say, like Josiah Bartlett, "Shut it down."?

Well, part of the answer is that the shutdown didn't necessarily help Clinton as much as is generally believed. As John Sides shows, Clinton's approval ratings dropped during the shutdown and did not improve until roughly two months after it ended. Maybe that later rise was the result of the public processing the details of the shutdown, or maybe it had nothing to do with the shutdown at all. Obama can read polls and might be aware of this.

Second, John Boehner is no Newt Gingrich. To the extent the earlier shutdown was considered a Clinton win, that may have been entirely the result of Newt's antics, in which he whined about his seating assignment on Air Force One on the way to Yitzhak Rabin's funeral and wore unforgivably awful sweaters. While I don't envy Boehner's position, he certainly has more discipline as a politician and seems to be a better negotiator than Newt.

Third, the economy in the winter of 1995 was on surer footing than that of spring 2011. A multi-week shutdown now could have a much bigger impact on economic growth next year than $40 billion or so in budget cuts. Obama understands the relationship between economic growth and presidential vote shares and took this seriously.

Fourth, somewhat surprisingly, Obama does not seem impressed with the power of his own oratory. As with the tax cut deal late last year, Obama eschewed bully pulpit tactics and engaged in a ton of inside negotiations with congressional Republicans. (Bill Clinton, conversely, was happy to demonize Republicans publicly while still negotiating more privately, presumably to "go public" and enhance his negotiating hand.) Why is Obama, of all people, not using the bully pulpit? Well, it might be because he knows how to read a poll and understands that going public doesn't necessarily work in such a simplistic fashion. We have a lot of beliefs about how the president can change the public's mind and thus force Congress to do what he wants, but it's hard to point to many examples of this actually happening. Speeches, as Obama will surely tell you, can inspire people to service, encourage them to vote, rally your base, and many other things. But can they actually change your mind? Can they change the mind of a member of Congress? Not often.

Did Obama get more or less than Bill Clinton did?
This is really hard to answer. In some sense, they had similar outcomes from their respective moments of budgetary brinksmanship: they accepted certain levels of spending cuts while still protecting key priorities (Medicare in Clinton's case, health reform funding in Obama's, etc.) and kept most policy riders off the budget bills. We still don't know the entirety of the deal Obama struck, and it hasn't been approved by all the key people yet, so it's hard to assess everything. It's also worth restating that the 1995-96 shutdown did not have much of an effect on Clinton's approval rating, and while he may have been publicly labeled the "winner" of that round, within a year he would sign welfare reform and adopt deficit elimination as a goal, both of which were Republican priorities at the time.

One key difference is that Republicans emerged from the 1995-96 showdown terrified of another one. That strengthened Clinton's hand in future budget negotiations. This doesn't seem to be the case this time around, although it's still early. Republicans could again threaten a shutdown and just keep using it as a negotiating tactic. Perhaps actually having a shutdown would force them to reconsider that strategy, but it's difficult to know how that would affect them.

Obama and the Inside Game

One of the recurrent liberal critiques I've heard of Obama's recent tax negotiation with Republicans is that he appears to not be a very tough negotiator.  The critique goes something like this: there are still a few weeks left in the lame duck session.  On the subjects of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and benefits for the unemployed, Obama's position was very popular; the Republican one was deeply unpopular.  Obama could have gone public and brought popular opinion to bear on the negotiations.  Or he could have let Republicans sweat it out a bit in the media.  Then he'd have been in a stronger negotiating position.

My impression of what actually happened is that Obama looked at the political scene and said, there are two real veto players here: me and Senate Republicans.  So let's cut a deal and not worry about everyone else.  He might well have looked back at the debate over health care reform and thought, wow, the entire nation debated this for over a year, and it didn't really move the issue at all.  The public option didn't get more or less popular -- it always looked pretty popular but probably not commanding the support of 60 Senators.  And the bill that he signed into law looked remarkably like what he'd originally outlined a year earlier.  So it strikes me as legitimate to ask what the value of all that debate was.

Now, there's certainly some democratic value in public engagement on an issue, but that's not likely to happen on a two-week tax debate.  It would mostly have involved a lot of he said/she said on the cable news shows and a lot of alternative policies discussed in the House that really wouldn't have gone anywhere, and we'd still have ended up roughly where we were at the beginning, with Republicans clinging to their number one priority (tax extensions for income over $250K), Democrats trying to eke out what they could before granting that to the GOP, and liberal activists feeling betrayed anyway.  Seen in that light, it's hard to see Obama getting a whole lot more out of the deal than he did.

Simgov - How are the students doing?

Loyal readers may recall that I've been running a simulation of American government class this quarter.  Basically, most of the students are portraying actual current members of Congress.  They author bills and try to push them through committees and get them passed by the full House.  With the help of clickers, I've been recording their roll call votes.  There are only 30 votes so far, but I've used them to generate ideal points using NOMINATE.  In theory, students can compare their own ideal point with that of the member they're portraying to see how they're doing.  The scatterplot below shows actual member ideal points on the horizontal axis and student ideal points on the vertical axis:

At one point, I thought it might be good to use this method as a grading tool -- maybe deducting points for the ideological distance between students and the members they're portraying.  However, the standard errors generated by only 30 roll call votes are huge, so I don't think it would be proper to base grades off these scores.  That said, the ideal points are suggestive.  For one thing, the students are doing a pretty good job; the scores correlate at .965.  But, of course, that's what you get when all the data are in the extremes, which points to a second inference: my class appears to be more polarized than the actual Congress.  

I'm not sure why they're so partisan.  I mean, the TAs and I try to instruct them in the importance of partisanship and issue warnings when they vote against their party (or district) too much.  But I'm not sure how much of this is us and how much of it is the dynamics of legislative life.  I give the parties time to caucus before floor sessions, and they actually use those times to develop strategies for screwing the other party. They're really quite crafty this way.  I sometimes worry I'm creating a small-scale Stanford prison experiment -- the students really do internalize their roles well -- except that they're still keeping it civil with each other in committee and on the floor and, as far as I can tell, they don't carry their partisan roles outside the classroom.  They're just voting against each other.