With my mind on my money and my money on my mind

Thomas Edsall brings us this beautiful piece of microtargeting, showing the partisan breakdown of various alcohol choices:

Now, call me a cynic, but I'm just not sure how useful this information is to a political campaign. I mean, with a decent political list, you should be able to figure out my party ID, my age, my race, my marital status, my religion, my voter turnout history, and my area of residence. Just how useful is it to also know that I prefer scotch to bourbon?

That said, it's a fun chart. I would not have thought that cognac -- the drink of Louis XIV, Kim Jong Il, and Winston Churchill -- would be the furthest left, but there you are. I also like that Budweiser (which is union made) is to the left of Coors (which is not).

Political scientists, bloggers, and journalists

I'm just back from a truly delightful meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. Other than a creepy me-stalking meme and some underwhelming smelt at Miller's Pub, it was a big success both professionally and socially (as though I could still distinguish between the two).

I was invited to participate in a roundtable discussion called "Toward a Greater Dialogue: Political Scientists Meet Journalists," chaired by Lynn Vavreck. John Sides and I represented the world of political scientist-bloggers, while the journalists were Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and James Warren of the Chicago News Group. (Gilbert maintains the Wisconsin Voter Blog. And be sure to check out Warren's recaps of MPSA for The Atlantic, here and here.) The roundtable made for a really nice discussion (and should be available in podcast format soon), but I wanted to revise and extend my remarks a bit here.

Journalists-meet-political-scientists panels are becoming a regular feature at academic conferences, and I think this is a positive development. If I may draw an historically inspired (if probably inappropriate) analogy, journalism a few years ago was like Kate Winslet in Titanic -- lovely, enjoying first class, but lost in its own world and its own problems. It was largely oblivious to political science (Leonardo DiCaprio in this scenario) -- smart, wanting to impress journalism, but carrying a bit of a chip on its shoulder. In recent years, though, we've begun seeing each other, dancing to Irish music, enjoying the occasional hook-up in the jalopy, enriching both our lives.

Obviously I don't want to push this metaphor too far, since it results in political science frozen to death at the bottom of the North Atlantic. But I think one of the things that has brought us closer together in recent years (other than Billy Zane or sea ice) is blogging. Nyhan, Drezner, Bernstein, Putnam, Greene, Dionne, Glassman, the crews at the Monkey Cage and LGM, and many others have been working at making political science research more accessible to journalism and to political observers at large. (I've been trying to do my part, as well.) It was extremely heartening to read, for example, Mark Blumenthal's coverage of the early presidential primaries and caucuses, or this article from the Idaho Spokane Spokesman Review quoting four political scientists on the topic of Tea Party influence in state legislatures. I took these as evidence of the political science perspective working its way into mainstream political coverage, and while these things could have happened without blogs, I'm pretty sure blogs made them more likely.

While I believe this growing relationship between journalists and political scientists has helped to improve the quality of political coverage, it's clear we're not reaching everyone. I was curious if it was possible to measure political science's penetration of journalism. Below is one attempt: I used a Google News search to count the number of times the term "political scientist" appears in the text of New York Times and Washington Post articles annually. This is far from a perfect measure. Nonetheless, two trends emerge: we are quoted more in election years, and we are quoted with decreasing frequency.

Now, as Sides pointed out, if our perspective is being adopted by journalists, maybe they don't have to quote us at all. But it's also possible we're just reaching a small group of journalists, although perhaps they will influence their colleagues. I certainly don't expect us to reach everybody. I imagine the Chris Matthewses and Maureen Dowds of journalism will continue to claim that politics is driven by "narrative" and personality and manliness and tone and clothing and that elections are won by the taller candidate with the best smile whom you most want to have a beer with. But I still imagine we can reach more people. The question is how.

I was heartened during the roundtable to hear the journalists (including one in the audience) say that they actually want our input in their stories -- they seem to think we have something useful to say. One reason they don't always include us is because there are only so many hours in the day, and we have a penchant for droning on and on with caveats and jargon. I think many of us are guilty on this count, and it would frankly be good for us to learn how to describe our research, and that of our peers, with the journalistic audience in mind. Many of our schools offer media training, teaching us how to talk to reporters. We should do this training. Not to dumb down our work, but to learn how to describe it in a way that seems interesting to a broader audience than three reviewers for the American Political Science Review.

I'd also like to encourage more blogging by political scientists. The ability to boil down ongoing research into a few punchy paragraphs is a great skill to have, and not just for talking to reporters. Lynn Vavreck also suggested some sort of poli sci boot camp for journalists, where we spend a day talking to reporters and describing how we approach research questions. And as the reporters made clear, just getting into each others' Rolodexes is a great start. They'll call us if they know who we are, and we should feel free to call them if we have an idea for a story.

I left the roundtable feeling quite encouraged for the future of both political science and political journalism. I'm hoping this conversation is just getting started.

Politicians care about spelling and grammar

Last year, Dan Butler and David Broockman published an article showing that African American constituents who wrote to state legislators were less likely to receive a response than white constituents were. Jayme Neiman, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, has applied this same framework to a new idea -- the quality of written correspondence. She details the results in her MPSA paper "Does Quality Matter? State Legislative Response to Constituent Communication."

Basically, she sent out e-mails to a random selection of state legislators across the country. Half received a well-written request for information on registering to vote, and the other half received a poorly-worded, poorly-spelled piece of drivel on the same topic. Neiman reports than 62 percent of the well-written e-mails received a response, while only 45% of the poorly-written ones did. Legislators were also more likely to respond themselves (rather than refer the letter to a staffer for response) to the well-written ones.

From my own experiences answering mail for politicians, poorly-written letters are less of a concern than crazy ones -- aliens, fluoride conspiracies, etc. But I admit that's a lot harder to operationalize in a study.

The peculiar issue of medical marijuana

I'm teaching a bit about medical marijuana in my state & local politics class this week. It turns out it's a really useful issue for understanding not only the conflicts between state and federal governments, but also between state and county governments. For a really nice review of the issue, check out Sam Kamin's article on medical marijuana in Colorado. As Kamin writes,

[Medical marijuana use] is seen as a serious felony (albeit an under-enforced one) at the federal level, as something akin to a constitutional right at the state level, and as either a nuisance to be regulated or as a tax source to be exploited at the local level. No other issue of the day -- not abortion, not alcohol, not prostitution, not gambling, not health care -- is treated quite so disparately by those various government entities that regulate it.

Surfboard Cake

I made this for my daughter's Hawaiian-themed birthday party. I traced a hibiscus die cut onto fondant to make the flower shapes on the board. It went nicely with the shave ice.

Imagine no campaign donations. It's easy if you try.

Imagine, for a moment, that you didn't need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that help? Would it encourage more moderate candidates, who are usually pressured out of nomination contests by party money because they don't stand for anything? Or would it enable the extremists, whom are normally de-funded due to concerns about their toxic views?

Well, we actually don't need to imagine. Arizona and Maine had just such a system in place for state legislative elections during the last decade. So Michael Miller and I collected roll call votes from those states and compared those who first got elected through "clean" funding with those who achieved offices through traditional funding methods. We report the results in our new paper "Buying Extremists," which we're presenting next week at the meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Here's a summary of what we found:

• Clean-funded legislators were more ideologically extreme relative to their districts and parties than traditionally-funded legislators were.
• The extremism difference faded with time, with clean-funded legislators becoming socialized after several sessions to mirror the views of their traditionally-funded colleagues.

These findings suggest that it's the more ideologically extreme candidates who take advantage of clean funding to run for office. Under the traditional funding system, party donors function as gate-keepers, reducing the power of extreme candidates by channelling money away from them. Take away the gate-keepers, and it's the extremists who break through, contributing to the polarization of the legislature.

Really bad blogger

Apologies for the lack of posting lately. I've been unusually busy. Like really, crazy busy. And on top of that, I got sick and developed vertigo, which makes reading difficult and writing torturous. But I'm trying to get back in the game.