The costliest vote revisited

Steve Greene and I have been working on our analysis of the effect of roll call votes on the electoral fortunes of Democratic House incumbents in 2010. (See this previous blog post for details.) We've put this research together into a paper that we're presenting this weekend at MPSA.

For the paper, we look at the impact of four roll call votes: health reform, the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and the TARP bailout from 2008. We find that a vote for health reform was very costly for Democrats, reducing reelection margins by six to eight percentage points. This cost at least thirteen House Democrats their jobs. We find a smaller, but still statistically significant, effect for supporting TARP. The stimulus has a mixed effect, harming Democrats in more conservative districts but possibly helping them in more liberal ones. We found no overall effect for cap-and-trade.

Here's my favorite graph from our paper, showing the estimated impact of the health reform vote on Democrats' likelihood of reelection. The patterns are generated by a logit equation and show how Democrats from a broad range of districts fared in 2010 based on this one roll call vote. For example, in a district where Obama got 40% of the vote in 2008, a Democratic representative would have a 54 51 percent chance of retaining her seat if she opposed health reform, but only a 19 an 18 percent chance if she supported it.

Steve and I are going to meet with Eric McGhee, John Sides, and Brendan Nyhan about their research on this topic to figure out where we agree and disagree. We'd talked about meeting for beers, but it's a morning meeting, so we'd best stick with wine.

Late update: A few folks noted a slight coding error in the original paper. We've updated the paper accordingly, and the results are substantively identical. I've corrected the above post as needed.

Red campus, blue (& gold) campus

The current issue of UC Berkeley's alumni magazine features a story on political psychology. The article starts off well enough, interviewing George Lakoff on conceptual frames and highlighting some other Cal scholars. But then the author interviews Stanford political psychologist Jon Krosnick.

Now, I certainly have no beef with Krosnick, who has done some very insightful and influential research in political psychology. But why oh why is the Cal alumni magazine promoting the work of a Stanford professor? It's not like Cal's poli sci department wants for faculty who can opine on the subjects of parties and mass opinions. They also have some excellent graduates who are happy to hold forth on these topics.

I suppose this all goes to the question of what exactly the purpose of an alumni magazine is. Is it to seek truth? To discuss important controversies? Well, maybe, but it's really to glorify the university, so that alumni feel good about donating more money to the school and maybe sending their kids there some day. And we glorify a university by doing two things: promoting the work of students and faculty at the university, and trashing the students and faculty of its rival school. This article failed on both counts.

Denver mayoral race poll

Via ColoradoPols, RBI Strategies has put out a poll in the Denver mayoral race, asking city residents their opinions about the many candidates. The results can probably be summed up by one of two questions: "Who?" and "There's an election this year?" With just three weeks remaining before the election, Denverites still don't have much of a sense of who these candidate are. The vote preferences, including leaners, are as follows:

• Romer (22)
• Mejia (10)
• Hancock (9)
• Linkhart (7)
• Boigon (5)
• Spahn (2)
• Other (5)
• DK/NA/Undec. (45)

So, not terribly surprisingly, Romer has the lead, based largely on his name-recognition (dad was governor). But still, he's only at 22 percent, with nearly half of respondents having no opinion. This is not necessarily a poor reflection on the candidates -- it's an off-year, off-season, non-partisan, municipal election involving candidates who are mostly city council members (Pop quiz: name yours!). No, three weeks isn't a long time for making a decision, but a lot of the advertising is just kicking in.

Compare this poll with one taken the week prior to the 2003 mayor's race. In that poll, Hickenlooper (whom no one had heard of a few months earlier) was already at 40%, and only 3% of respondents were undecided. I'm guessing we'll get to something close to that within the next two weeks. Some negative ads would really help.

Comparing Radiation

Via Steve Greene and xkcd, here's a chart depicting the radiation doses from various sources (click to enlarge). Of note: Spending a day in a town near one of Japan's troubled reactors gives you about a tenth the radiation that you'd get in a flight from New York to Los Angeles. And a day in Colorado gives you more radiation than an arm X-ray.

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.

What "Battle: Los Angeles" didn't do

I saw "Battle: Los Angeles" last night and really enjoyed. I was somewhat surprised to find that a lot of critics had kicked it for being derivative and cliché. Well, duh, it's a disaster movie. I don't care. But let me just compliment the film for not doing a number of things that are kind of expected in this genre:

• We did not see the destruction of New York City. No one even mentioned New York City. (This was my main objection to "Deep Impact," which I otherwise enjoyed. No characters lived in New York, no action took place there, but they still felt compelled to show it getting destroyed. Yet they didn't show the destruction of DC, where many of the characters lived. Weak.)
• The world was not saved by spunky kids or personal computers (see "V: The Final Battle," "Jurassic Park," "Independence Day," etc.).
• The president was not in the movie. I'm guessing he was not flying a fighter jet, wherever he was.
• The aliens did not offer critiques or praise of humanity in general (see "The Abyss," "Alien Nation," etc.)
• The world was not saved by nuclear weapons (see "Independence Day," "The Core," "Meteor," "Armageddon," etc.)
• It did not conflate a local, tactical victory with a win in the overall war (see "Independence Day," "Avatar," etc.).

Also, I actually identified with a character in the film, which is rare for this genre. Occasionally, the film would show a clip from a news show featuring an interview with some random professor (probably in a land-locked state) who was kind of guessing about the aliens' strategy and abilities. I could see myself in that situation. The news station would call and say, "Can you comment on the alien invasion? All our other experts are dead." I'd probably jump on that.

Update: On further reflection, while the depiction of the president was somewhat silly in "Independence Day," at least the film acknowledged civilian control of the military. Conversely, civilians in "Battle: LA" were simply things to be protected. All orders and strategy, as far as we could tell, came from the military itself.

Incumbents versus activists in California

I mentioned a while back the efforts by California Republicans to adapt to Proposition 14, the top-two primary system that voters approved last fall. The party had originally proposed conducting pre-primary endorsements of preferred candidates, so Republican voters would have an idea of whom the party preferred going into a primary election. This proposal, put forward by state party chair Ron Nehring, included a litmus test: the party would not endorse its own incumbents if they had supported a tax increase or if they had endorsed a candidate of another party in a general election.

Well, surprise surprise, the incumbents didn't like this plan. No, none of them plan to vote for a tax increase, but they don't like having their hands tied by the party and they don't like facing an automatic penalty for any future decision they might make. So incumbents on the party's rules committee recently amended the litmus test portion of the proposal to appear as follows:

Nine months prior to the close off filing, any incumbent legislator, statewide elected official, member of Congress, United States Senator, or member of the State Board of Equalization seeking re-election to the same office my request an early nomination. Any such request shall be conveyed to the Board of Directors. If no director objects within 30 days of receipt thereof, then such incumbent will be deemed the nominee. In the event of an objection, the Board of Directors shall vote on such nomination and may elect such incumbent as the nominee by majority vote. The Board of Directors may withdraw a nomination by a two thirds votes.

In other words, the re-nomination of the incumbents is automatic unless party officials take serious and rapid steps to stop it. This is, to my mind, a perfect manifestation of the traditional struggle between party activists and officeholders. You'd think they'd agree on just about all areas of substance, and they largely do, at least at first. Republican incumbents in California have largely been selected through the processes of socialization and nomination to be very conservative. Yes, occasionally a moderate like Abel Maldonado or Arnold Schwarzenegger will sneak through, but that's very rare. (Notably, Schwarzenegger only got in through the 2003 recall, which had no primary.)

So why would party activists be concerned about their ability to punish incumbents for un-Republican behavior? Because politicians are unreliable partisans once they're in office. They quickly learn that party activists are not the only people in their districts, and they figure they can increase their electoral safety margin by moderating somewhat. They also might get to know legislators in the other party and discover that they have good ideas once in a while. On top of that, many politicians have an innate desire to win the approval of others. Advancing an agenda is good, but being popular has its appeals, too.

If Republican party activists just elected good people and let them do their jobs, there's no telling what might happen. They could vote to balance the budget by raising taxes! They might be persuaded that public schools are underperforming and vote to raise teacher pay! They might decide that, as much as they personally despise abortion, it's not right to force poor women to carry a baby to term! Cats and dogs sleeping together! Mass hysteria!

So the party likes to keep the axe of de-nomination hanging precipitously and visibly over incumbents' heads. They don't use it that often because they don't have to; Republican incumbents know they'll be punished for going too moderate, so they stay conservative. The party keeps the skulls of apostates like Abel Maldonado on pikes atop the castle walls as reminders.

Update: The state GOP has also proposed conducting its own mail-in nomination contest among registered Republican voters.

(h/t Eric McGhee)