Giving money to senators not actually all that weird

The NYT had a front page story yesterday in which they suggest that financial firms are trying to buy off the support of the Senate Committee on Agriculture.

A main weapon being wielded to fight the battle, of course, is money. Agriculture Committee members have received $22.8 million in this election cycle from people and organizations affiliated with financial, insurance and real estate companies — two and a half times what they received from agricultural donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Much of that lobbying has centered on Senator Blanche Lincoln, the Arkansas Democrat who is the committee’s chairwoman and who last week introduced the bill that would prevent banks from trading derivatives directly.

The daughter of a sixth-generation rice farmer, she has found herself navigating a dangerous channel between Wall Street firms, which raised $60,000 at two fund-raisers for her re-election campaign so far this year, and her constituents, many of whom want a crackdown on the speculation that led to the financial crisis.

Other committee members, on both sides of the aisle, also have reaped donations from people and companies in the derivatives business, including Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, who is the committee’s ranking Republican member; Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat; and Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican.

Sounds curious, all right!  Except that Lincoln, Conrad, and Grassley also sit on the Senate Finance Committee.  The Times might have mentioned that.

(Thanks to Jennifer Victor for noticing.)

Simgov

I am in the middle of teaching an American government simulation course, or Simgov.  Every student is portraying a current member of the House of Representatives, with the exception of three students who comprise the executive branch.  We're about halfway through the quarter, but so far this is proving to be one of the most fascinating and useful courses I've ever taught.

The first few weeks were a bit of a slog, in which I lectured extensively on parliamentary procedure and a few basics of executive/legislation relations.  But as of last week, they've been meeting in committees.  Each student is required to author six pieces of legislation during the course, and the first bills have been working their way through the different committees.  I have never seen such buy-in from such a large percentage of students before.  I've observed several committee hearings and so far every student has been engaged in the work, participating in the discussions, and learning the material.  I only needed to assign reading material for the first few weeks -- a few classics like Mayhew's The Electoral Connection and Sinclair's Unorthodox Lawmaking.  The students are generating reading requirements on their own now by doing research on bills.

I've heard of several professors doing American politics courses that incorporate a week or two of congressional simulation (see this article by Sands and Shelton), but doing it for an entire course strikes me as novel.  Not that it was my invention.  I inherited this course from my former colleague Tom Knecht, who helped develop it in grad school based on the work of other professors going back to the early 80s.  I've been relying heavily on this earlier work.  One of the newer updates to the Simgov course is the addition of Blackboard, which allows students to post bills and communicate electronically.  I'm also using clickers to electronically record roll call votes.  If I get enough votes, I might try to calculate ideal points for the students.  (If I feel really geeky, I'll compare students' ideal points to those of the members they're portraying, and then deduct points if there's too big a difference.)

Anyway, one obviously can't teach every course this way.  It's a deeply atheoretical class.  Students are focused on very pragmatic issues, such as how to put a bill together, how to assemble a winning coalition, how to speed up or slow down legislative procedures, how to run a hearing, etc.  But the learning is dramatic and incredibly widespread.  I'd certainly make my course materials available to anyone who wants to adopt this class.

Regression on the iPhone

Ever been at a presentation and seen some data thrown up on the screen and wanted to analyze it yourself right there on the spot?  If you're as geeky as I am, and you own an iPhone, there's now an app for you.  I've been waiting for some decent statistics apps for a while, and it looks like a few have recently shown up on the market.

I downloaded one called Regression Calculator for $.99.  Unlike with spreadsheet apps, data entry is very easy.  You just enter the x variable, with all the numbers separated by a comma, and then enter the y variable.  It'll then give you a plot, R-squared, and even make a predicted y based on an inputted x.  You can do linear, logarithmic, exponential, or power regression.  The plot at left shows growth in real disposable income predicting the incumbent party's share of the presidential vote since 1948.  I inputted the data in about 3 minutes.

The program is very simple and could probably use a few features (adjusting the axis scale, saving data, etc.).  But for what it is, it works quite well.  I'm sure this will come in handy at MPSA next week.

The echoes of field organization

I did a post a while back on the power of field offices to affect elections.  Specifically, I showed that the presence of an Obama field office was associated with a modest but detectable bump in the Democratic vote share in the 2008 general presidential election.  (The results were published here.)  I also have a chapter coming out (hopefully) that shows the power of field offices to affect delegate selection during a party nomination campaign.  I'm now finding some evidence that such field offices have a persistent effect in later contests.

I've been looking at the results of the March 2010 Democratic caucuses in Colorado's U.S. Senate race.  Using a multi-variate analysis of the caucus-night vote, I find that Michael Bennet did, on average, twenty-one percentage points better than Andrew Romanoff in counties where Obama had a pre-caucus campaign office two years ago.  This is statistically significant (p ≤ .05), even after controlling for virtually every major demographic characteristic of the counties.

I don't fully understand the mechanism here.  It may be that the early Obama office counties just built strong organizations, which translated into strong OFA groups, which are active in the current Romanoff/Bennet contest.  Or it may be that the early Obama offices developed more lasting connections with active Democrats in those counties, so that the Obama endorsement of Bennet this year was more influential in those counties.

Another hypothesis might be that there is some peculiar facet of the Obama field office counties that causes them to prefer certain candidates in Democratic nominations contests but has nothing, in fact, to do with any effort exerted by those offices.  Obama put his offices in those counties, but the offices didn't change the vote -- they would have preferred him, and Bennet, anyway.

One way to test this hypothesis is to look at a Democratic statewide primary contest that occurred prior to the establishment of these field offices.  Probably the best one is the 2004 Senate contest between Mike Miles and Ken Salazar -- this was the last time there was a major Democratic nomination contest for statewide office in Colorado.  In fact, there was no relationship between that primary vote and the location of Obama's field offices.  Now, this isn't an overwhelming piece of evidence for my case -- it was six years ago, and people do move in and out of counties.  But, in theory, if there was something peculiar about the Obama field office counties in '08, we might have seen some evidence of it in '04, and we don't.  This is at least suggestive that the offices Obama built in '08 did cause the vote boost for him and are affecting the current Democratic Senate nomination contest.

More conservative counties voted for Ken Buck

This is a followup to my previous post analyzing the votes on caucus night in Colorado last month.  I'm still trying to gather results on the county assemblies, something that's proving very difficult to do (although thank you Dan Willis).  For now, though, some interesting patterns have emerged from the caucus votes.

One pattern, which is perhaps not so Earth-shattering, is that Ken Buck did better than Jane Norton in more conservative counties during the March caucuses.  McCain's presidential vote in 2008 is a reliable predictor of Buck's successes.  This result is statistically significant (p ≤ .05) and holds even with all the control variables I could throw at it.

Interestingly, county ideology played no role in the Democratic contest.  Liberal counties were just as likely to go for Romanoff as for Bennet.

Taibbi on Brooks

I'm pretty ambivalent on David Brooks these days.  I like that fact that he draws from actual social science research once in a while, and his columns are rarely dull.  But this latest bit about Duke winning the men's NCAA basketball playoffs was monstrous:

The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense. ...For the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?

I could go off on this for hours, but Matt Taibbi beat me to it:

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

Meanwhile, with regards to the NCAA series, does anyone have a sense of how Duke-Butler rooting broke down by party ID?  I found myself instinctively rooting for Butler, despite a) knowing nothing about the school; b) having never been to Indiana; c) having several friends on faculty at Duke; and d) caring very little about March Madness.  Is this a liberal preference for the underdog?

Timing

Did the Tea Partiers really pick April 19th, the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, as a date to gather in state capitals to inveigh against the federal government? Really? I hope they're just completely ignorant of the date's significance, because the alternative is far worse.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]