Sharia gay marriage

At the APSA meeting in Seattle this year, the great Thad Hall stormed into a hotel bar demanding to know why conservatives were so convinced that the chief liberal goals were both Sharia and gay marriage. He couldn't understand why conservatives seemed to be so terrified of two things that were bound to annihilate each other. This prompted a lively conversation, and then a contest, and both Hans Noel and I subsequently managed to insert the term "Sharia gay marriage" into our paper presentations. We thought it was a joke.

Imagine our surprise when PolitiChicks, a conservative alternative to "The View" featuring Victoria Jackson and some of her slightly more stable friends, decided to have a long, uncomfortable conversation about the threat America faces from both Sharia and gay marriage. Folks, this is sincere.

(h/t Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Time out of power and ideological extremism

John Sides has the keys to 538 and has posted a nice piece suggesting that Republicans are more likely than not to nominate an ideological extremist for president. This analysis draws heavily on Cohen et al's The Party Decides and includes one of my favorite all time scatterplots:

The basic lesson above is that the longer a party has not controlled the White House, the more moderate a candidate it tends to nominate. The logic here is pretty intuitive. Just one term out of power, a party might see the most recent election as a fluke, the product of a bad candidate or bad times. "The White House is rightfully ours," they might think, "so there's no need to soften our stances. Just put up a less flawed candidate in a less crazy year and we're back in." Of course, that doesn't always work, so with each subsequent term out of power, they get hungrier for the White House and are willing to compromise more and more of their agenda to get it. At the extreme (five terms out of power), they're willing to nominate someone like Eisenhower, whose policy views and even party registration were a complete enigma until the summer of the convention. "Who cares what he stands for? He might win!"

There's evidence of this same trend in other countries and at the state level. Just think of the California Republican Party's backing of Schwarzenegger in the 2003 recall despite his being well to the left of most of the party regulars.

Anyway, if you're a betting person, the above history tends to point to a Perry candidacy rather than a Romney one.

The extremism of elected officials

Nate Silver has a nice post up in which he compares the ideological stances of current governors with those of the voters they represent. I don't know too much about the OnTheIssues website, which Silver uses to determine governors' moderation/extremism, but assuming they're unbiased with regards to party, the resulting analysis is quite interesting. Silver ends up producing the following scatterplot:

What this demonstrates is that Democratic governors are responsive to voters' ideology; the more conservative the state, the more conservative governors' stances. Conversely, Republican governors appear to be completely unresponsive. No matter how liberal or conservative their state, they are advocating a strict conservative doctrine on a broad range of issues.

This graph reminds me a great deal of one that I produced for my book, comparing the ideal points of California legislators with the partisanship of their districts:

There's an important distinction here, though: in the California scatterplot, it's the Democrats who appear to be totally unresponsive to district sentiment, while Republicans actually behave more moderately when they represent more moderate voters.

One of the things Hans Noel and I argued in a recent paper was that a majority party would tend to have elected officials that were more ideologically extreme relative to their voters than the minority party would. There is an incentive, we argued, for minorities to moderate in an effort to win back control, while majorities seek to push their advantages to achieve as many of their policy preferences as possible while they're in power. If this applies to governors, as well, that's pretty interesting. After all, governors aren't really part of a national legislative chamber, so sticking together doesn't really produce an obvious policy payoff.

There are a number of reasons why the current crop of Republican governors might be more extreme than their Democratic counterparts or than Republican governors in earlier years. 2010 really was an unusual election. But what the above graphs demonstrate pretty clearly is that while the parties may be equally extreme in the long run, this extremism varies significantly by party from year to year. Sometimes Democrats really are more liberal than Republicans are conservative. Right now, it looks like the Republicans are the more extreme party.

The persistence of ideology

Name the speaker:

[The President] has lost faith in the American people. Just look at the men surrounding him. They are cynics who scoff at our simple virtues. They think that the people are too dumb to understand democracy. Their idea is that they, the intelligentsia, can govern us with catch phrases and sleight-of-hand.... Give our country back to us. We want it. We love it.

Sarah Palin? Newt Gingrich? Michelle Bachmann? Good guesses. No, those words were spoken by Wendell Willkie during his 1940 run for president against Franklin Roosevelt.

I learned this gem from John Gerring's wonderful book Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996. Gerring demonstrates a remarkable stability in the language and imagery used by party orators over time. The themes that modern Republicans discuss in their speeches -- limited federal government, low taxes, the supremacy of small business, etc. -- were really developed back in the 1920s. Speeches delivered by George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan could just as easily have been delivered by Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge.

Gerring also finds some interesting turning points in the history of American ideologies. Whigs and Republicans in the 19th and early 20th century used to have a different set of beliefs, speaking of liberty as though it were inextricably linked to personal responsibilities, and seeing the government as the means to inculcate and enforce those responsibilities. The notion of "self-government" had two meanings in Lincoln's era, both choosing one's leaders and ruling one's own passions.

I'm still in the middle of this book, but I'm learning a ton from it. I hope to share more later.

DW-TWEETINATE

I saw some very good papers at MPSA this year, but one that struck me as simultaneously novel, fun, and useful was this one by Duke grad students Aaron King, Francis Orlando, and David Sparks. The authors are interested in figuring out just how much it helps to be ideologically extreme in a primary contest. Unfortunately, we don't have very good measures of candidate ideology, unless the candidates are incumbents (in which case we can approximate their ideology from their roll call voting records). We're mostly left with guessing at candidates' ideological positions from their speeches, donors, endorsees, etc.

King et al decided to look at candidates' Twitter accounts to see who was following them. In theory, the decision to follow or not follow someone on Twitter is in some ways analogous to the decision to vote/not vote for them or to donate/not donate to their campaign. (No, it's not exactly the same -- I follow Sarah Palin but wouldn't give her money or vote for her. But there are certainly similarities.)

The authors use social networks techniques to boil down the literally millions of connections between hundreds of candidates and other political elites to come up with something akin to ideal points for each person. You can see some lists of these ideal points for House and Senate incumbents and their primary opponents here. The authors also scaled some media figures just to see if the results would be credible. (It turns out that Brendan Nyhan is just to the right of Regis & Kelly but just to the left of Toby Keith.) It doesn't appear on the charts, but they scaled me, as well. I have an ideal point of -.077, putting me to Nyhan's left but to the right of Jesse Jackson. (This is believable.)

This is hardly a perfect measure of candidate ideology, as the decision to follow someone is often made for non-ideological reasons. But it works surprisingly well, confirming other studies' findings about ideology and primary elections. Their ideal points almost perfectly predict party for candidates, with the exception of Mickey Kaus. (Frankly, I'd have distrusted their method more if it had gotten Kaus correct.) Within party, the measures are a bit noisy. Interestingly, they have Andrew Romanoff to the right of Michael Bennet, although not by much. It would probably help if they could bootstrap some sort of standard error equivalent in there just so we could tell whether these differences matter.

One other praiseworthy item: the authors distributed a full-color handout during their presentation which contained a QR code, linking to the project's website. Very cool.

Anyway, this is a project worth watching.

Humor and ideology

Do conservatives and liberals have different senses of humor? Amanda Balzer points me to a telling article by Glenn Wilson called "Ideology and Humor Preferences" (gated), published in 1990 in the International Political Science Review, in which the author finds important differences in the appreciation of types of jokes by ideology. Important graph:

According to the study, conservatives love puns, while liberals don't seem to find them very funny. Conversely, liberals are much more likely than conservatives to find sexual jokes funny. It's not too surprising to find that liberals are more appreciative than conservatives of anti-authority jokes, but liberals, interestingly, really seem to like jokes that mock hippies.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of these differences have changed over the past two decades. Wilson suggests in the text that younger liberals were becoming less tolerant of crude sexual jokes, while I'm thinking that younger conservatives have embraced them more.

I should mention that Amanda pointed this research out to me during a Twitter discussion about whether Victoria Jackson and Dennis Miller have become less funny over the years or whether they just seem less funny to me as our respective ideologies diverge. This could make for some great research designs.

The things Allen left behind

I just watched "Splash" (1984) with the kids today. I haven't seen it in years. I always enjoyed the rather unconventional (particularly for its time), un-Little-Mermaid plot resolution, in which the man abandons his world to be with the woman. But until I watched it today, I hadn't appreciated just how much Allen Bauer (Tom Hanks) left behind in order to be with Madison (Daryl Hannah).

Allen had it pretty good! He and his brother Freddie (an awesome John Candy) owned and ran a fruit company that seemed to have between 50 and 100 employees. (It was a union shop -- Freddie mentions Teamsters at one point.) He drove a BMW. He paid for a cab ride from Manhattan to Cape Cod in cash. He had a nice (upper East Side?) apartment with a doorman. He ate at expensive restaurants and wore decent suits. He attended a political fundraiser at which the President was the keynote speaker -- I'm guessing this event cost a minimum of $1,000 a plate. With the exception of his relationship woes, he had a rather nice life. All this is to say that he gave up quite a bit with his rather impulsive move to be with a woman he'd been dating for less than a week, which is pretty romantic.

I'm wondering whether Allen was a Democrat or a Republican. He ran a modest-sized business, and he reacted rather viscerally when he learned that Madison wasn't human, both of which suggest conservative tendencies. He also had a soft spot for underperforming employees, and he did ultimately decide to enter into a non-traditional marriage of sorts, which suggest liberalism. On the whole, he doesn't seem to be a particularly political guy, so it's not surprising his ideological predispositions would be a bit of a mish-mash.

Where does ideology come from?

Ideology remains one of the most difficult concepts in the study of political parties. We have a general sense that ideology is a way of sorting out "what goes with what." That way, people who want lower corporate taxes also tend to want more restrictions on abortions and fewer restrictions on handgun purchases, even though those three issues have essentially nothing to do with each other. But who decides what goes with what?

Hans Noel has come closer than anyone to answering this question. Be sure to check out this nice profile from Matt Yglesias of some of Hans' recent research, which looks at the role that pundits have played in organizing American ideologies since the 1850s. Hans finds evidence that public intellectuals basically built ideologies regarding slavery in the 1850s, civil rights in the 1960s, and abortion in the 1980s and constructed the debating spaces that the parties would occupy in the following years.

The use of the term "ideology"

Okay, thanks to John Sides for showing me Google's Ngram Viewer. I found this one interesting:

This supports a claim Frances Lee makes in Beyond Ideology that the concept of ideology is a relatively recent one.  It was invented, she argues, in the mid-20th century by journalists and political scientists as a way to explain the behavior of southern and northern Democrats, who seemed to vote differently once in a while despite being of the same party.  Prior to that time, we really had no concept of ideology as something distinct from party.

Pragmatism and Idealism

Is a political activist's job to advance an ideal or to advance the party that purportedly stands for that ideal?  If this question interests you at all, you should really listen to the first story in this episode of "This American Life." (Thanks to John Zaller for recommending it.)

The story follows two lifelong friends in northern Michigan who decide to form a Tea Party chapter.  After some initial successes in organizing the chapter, they find themselves divided over whether to back the Republican candidate in their congressional district or a Tea Party candidate.  The disagreement ends up destroying their friendship and promoting a difficult but important debate within the chapter about exactly what role activists should be playing.  The story is wonderful -- both funny and tragic, while respectful of all the players.  I plan to use this the next time I teach parties.

The story doesn't appear to be available for streaming anymore, but you can purchase it for $.99 on iTunes or Amazon.  It's worth it.

Drawing lines

Okay, you know what?  Forget what I just said.  I actually do have something to say about soccer.  Or at least about the conservative rejection of it.  What conservative rejection?  Don't conservative parents bring their kids to soccer practice all the time?  Well, yes, but I'm talking about the rejection by opinion-makers like Matthew Philbin, Dan Gainor, and, of course, Glenn Beck, who said (via Think Progress):

It doesn't matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn't matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn't matter how many bars open early, it doesn't matter how many beer commercials they run, we don't want the World Cup, we don't like the World Cup, we don't like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.

So where does this stuff come from?  Is it racism?  Is it just a right wing media outrage machine trying to find some talking point for the day?  Well, maybe, but I'm going to take the position that this is actual principled conservatism at work.

What do I mean?  Well, Bill Clinton gave a wonderful speech at the dedication of his presidential library in 2004, during which he tried to explain and validate both major American ideologies:

America has two great dominant strands of political thought... conservatism, which, at its very best, draws lines that should not be crossed; and progressivism, which, at its very best, breaks down barriers that are no longer needed or should never have been erected in the first place.

I think the soccer issue is one instance where conservative leaders are simply trying to draw a line.  They feel they've made enough accommodations to other countries and cultures.  They simply do not acknowledge soccer as an American pastime and feel they are justified in trying to exclude it from our main culture.  We cannot just keep adding things to our nation and assume that the nation will still stand for anything.  Lines must be drawn.  This far, no farther.

It actually reminds me of a story my grad school mentor John Zaller told me about a conversation he'd had with a conservative colleague back in 1982 after this person had seen "E.T."  Apparently, Zaller's colleague was furious with the movie because it represented Hollywood liberals admitting space aliens into the human family.  And yes, it kind of did that.  As Zaller summed up (and here I'm quoting from memory), "Leave it to liberals to admit space aliens into the human family, and leave it to conservatives to be offended by it."