Category: Political Science

This topic does not die easily:

Dr Wilson and Dr Storm restricted their study to white, Protestant
teenagers, in order to eliminate confounding variables. However, their
volunteers came from two different traditions–Pentecostal, which tends
to the conservative, and Episcopalian, which tends to the liberal.

The researchers conducted the study by giving each volunteer a
beeper that went off every two hours or so. When it beeped, the
volunteer answered a questionnaire about what he was doing at that
moment, and how he felt about it.

Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the
groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives,
but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves
whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not
change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending
a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a
sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals
were equally bored by their own company and that of others.
Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also
preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were
indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal
teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents
with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.

Here is Storm’s doctoral thesis, a source for some of the material.  This Wilson blog post is a useful summary; nonetheless it emphasizes the weaker part of the results, namely the claim that conservatives are more conformist.

Surely someday we will make progress on this question; it is unlikely that any two non-random groups will have exactly the same personality traits.  But what is the correct comparison?  By looking only at religious Protestants, we are holding some factors constant, but perhaps choosing atypical members of each political ideology.  For instance maybe all we are doing is comparing Pentecostals to Episcopalians.

That’s the title they gave my latest NYT column.  Excerpt:

To put it simply, the public this year will probably not vote itself
into a much better or even much different economic policy. To be sure,
the next president – whoever he or she may be – may well extend health
care coverage to more Americans. But most of the country’s economic
problems won’t be solved at the voting booth. It is already too late to
stop an economic downturn. Health care costs will keep rising, no
matter who becomes president or which party controls Congress. China is
now a bigger carbon polluter than the United States, so don’t expect a
tax or cap-and-trade rules to solve global warming,
even if American measures are very stringent – and they probably won’t
be, because higher home heating bills are not a vote winner. A
Democratic president may propose more spending on social services, but
most of the federal budget
is on automatic pilot. Furthermore, even if a Republican president
wanted to cut back on such mandates, the bulk of them are here to stay.

Yes, the election does matter. Even small differences on
economic issues affect millions of Americans. But the record of the
Bush administration should prove sobering to all those who expect the
American political economy to turn around in the next four years.

Many
conservative and libertarian economists supported President Bush,
thinking they would be getting policy drawn from the work of Milton Friedman
and Martin Feldstein, two respected market-oriented economists.
Instead, in economics, the Bush years have brought an increase in
domestic government spending, and some poorly-thought-out privatization
plans. For all the talk of an extreme right-wing revolution, government
transfer programs like Social Security and Medicare have continued to grow. And despite big mistakes involving the Iraq war, Mr. Bush wasn’t punished by voters in 2004.

There is much more, and it is a more political column than I usually write.  My final conclusions:

And if you’re still worrying about how to vote, I have two pieces of
advice. First, spend your time studying foreign policy, where the
president has more direct power, and the choice of a candidate makes a
much bigger difference. Second, stop worrying and get back to work.

And there are points I could not cover for reasons of space, such as the constraining need to provide an AMT fix, or the ability of a party to sound more intelligent when it is out of power.

Addendum: Here is coverage from Mark Thoma and commentators; do they support or contradict Mark’s last sentence?  And here is commentary from John V.

Edge: John McCain, as scored by Ben Muse.  Ben has now moved all of his trade posts to a new blog, The Custom-House, recommended.  And here’s Virginia Postrel, with some negative comments on McCain.

You should be.  Right here.  C’mon people, turn your TVs off and go crash the InTrade servers, making sure you pay homage to Hayek and Robin Hanson along the way.

Mark Thoma writes: "I’m getting pretty tired of Democrats caving in on important issues rather than standing up and fighting for their core principles…"  The lesson is that politicians’ core principle is reelection and pandering, not promoting the ideas of Mark Thoma or Paul Krugman or for that matter Milton Friedman or Tyler Cowen. 

I find the (former) support for John Edwards to be one of the most striking features of the primary season.  Although Edwards ran an explicitly progressive campaign, a great deal of his (meager) support came from Democrats in lower socioeconomic strata.  They were voting their demographic, or perhaps their feelings of victimization, rather than their ideology.  (Here is Chris Hayes on John Edwards, worth reading.)  There is no large-scale progressive movement coalescing around stagnant median wages and the inequities of skill-based technical change.  Instead we have Hillary Clinton insulting Barack Obama, and maybe it is working. 

The lesson is this: democracy is a very blunt instrument.  Especially as it is found in the United States, democracy just isn’t that smart or that finely honed or that closely geared toward truth or "progressive" values.  (NB: Democracy in smaller, better educated, ethnically homogeneous nations is, sometimes, another story.)

But unlike one of my esteemed colleagues, I believe that we should revere democracy as one of the modern world’s greatest achievements.  We should step off a British Airways flight with a tear in our eye, in appreciation for all that country has done to promote democratic government (sorry, former colonies, but perhaps you are democratic today).  This is no exaggeration or blog tease: I want to see you crying at Heathrow.  The future is far more likely to have "too little democracy" than "too much democracy."  I do believe in checks and balances, but within a broadly democratic framework, such as we have in the United States.

That all said, we should not demand from democracy what democracy cannot provide.  Democracy is pretty good at pushing scoundrels out of office, or checking them once they are in office.  Democracy is also good at making sure enough interest groups are bought off so that social order may continue and that a broad if sometimes inane social consensus can be manufactured and maintained.  We should expect all those things of democracy and indeed democracy can, for the most part, deliver them.

But democracy is very bad at fine-tuning the details of economic policy.  Democracy is very bad at bringing about political solutions which are not congruent with the other sources of economic and social influence in a country.  The solution is not to be less democratic, but rather to appreciate democracy for what it is good for.  And the excesses of democracy should be fought with ideas, albeit with the realization that not everyone will be convinced.  Those are the breaks, as democracy needs all the friends it can get.

Just as I love democracy, so do I love Chiles in Nogada.  But I do not ask that Chiles in Nogada can solve most of the world’s problems or for that matter get me to work in the morning.  Social democrats and progressives often view democracy as a potential instrument of control, and as a way of giving us "the best policies."  I do not, and that includes for my own economic views as well.

Here is Matt Yglesias on libertarianism and democracy.  Here is a Hilton Root review of the new Michael Mandelbaum book praising democracy.

Matt Yglesias writes:

…these would be my sober-minded, non-psychic points about John McCain and the economy:

• He’s not good at projecting empathy.
• His major political theme about the need to "serve a cause greater than self-interest" is not well-suited to projecting empathy.
• McCain’s background is in the military, his first political work was military-related, and his strong political issues involve national security.
• McCain says he doesn’t understand economics.
• McCain really doesn’t appear to understand economics:
  • He thinks interest rates should be zero (but why?)
  • He thinks spending cuts will stimulate the economy.
• He has a tendency to flip-flop not on specific economic policies, but on broad economic themes like whether or not inequality is a problem.
• His constituents in the elite press are weirdly obsessed with the idea that public policy should force average people to endure economic pain.

All of this leads me to conclude that John McCain would not govern very well on economic policy issues…

On policy, I am heartened if he realizes he does not understand economics.  Are the other Republican candidates equally self-aware? 

I don’t put much weight on what the Republican candidates say about economics one way or the other.  In the current situation a Republican should favor whichever candidate would be most popular in office.  That candidate would have the best chance to check a Democratic Congress or perhaps put forward some alternative agenda.  Furthermore national interest-minded Presidents tend to favor better economic policies than does Congress, especially if that President is of your party persuasion.  A Democrat should favor, on economic issues at least, whichever Republican is most vain and most likely to seek fame in office.  That means lots of legislation passed and working with a Democratic Congress on issues such as health care. 

Two points: a) I don’t have strong views on which particular candidates fit these descriptions, and b) foreign policy is in any case more important for evaluating a candidate overall. 

Here Matt discusses McCain’s economic advisors.  Here is Dave Leonhardt on McCain and the economy.  I assume, by the way, that McCain’s invocation of Kemp and Gramm is an attempt to build a right-wing coalition, not an actual statement of his preferences.

Harald, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:

What would happen if some famous rich person walked into a presidential prediction market and said: "Hello, I’m selling shorts for candidate A, to the value of a hundred million dollars if he should win. I’m not doing this because I don’t believe candidate A will win, indeed, I want her to win. I hope everyone who can help candidate A win, by campaigning, talking to friends, or even just voting, will buy a short from me (I’m practically giving them away!) and go out and do it with a healthy economic self-interest in their hearts!"

Regulators aside, could such a scheme work?  It is best done as a contingent claims market, rather than in the InTrade format.  You buy insurance for a penny, and you get a payout of a thousand dollars if candidate X wins.  Claim holders may then support and talk up candidate X.  Of course people who won’t change their votes for a thousand dollars also will try to buy up the contingent claims.  So the sponsor might restrict purchases to people who live in swing states or who can prove independent voting affiliation or an absence of previous campaign donations [TC: I’ve edited this section a bit for clarity]. 

How about giving away assets that pay off if some important social problem is solved?  How much would it cost to mobilize a strong enough army of voters to oppose farm subsidies?   

Nine-party coalitions are fragile, and Italy’s 61st postwar cabinet was no exception.

Here are related articles, I cannot find this caption on-line but it is in the print NYT. 

Elsewhere in the Times today, David Brooks has an excellent column on Wall Street and the recent financial mess.  Scream it from the rooftops, as they say.

A very good post.  On the specifics: relative to most libertarian economists, I am more likely to think — or should I say admit — that human beings are irrational, even when the stakes are high (see the self-deception chapter in Discover Your Inner Economist).  But, relative to social democrats, I tend to think that politicians are irrational actors trying to pander to irrational voters and that it can’t be any other way.  I am much less optimistic about democracy as an instrument for fine-tuning good policy or for that matter as a medium for enforcing progressive sentiments.  On health care I don’t think the solution is to strip away insurance, a’la HSAs, so I agree with Ezra’s paragraph more than not.  On The Wire, the defect is fully mine.  I’ve watched seven or eight episodes, from seasons one and three, and I thought: this is fantastic.  But I never really looked forward to the next episode and eventually I stopped watching.  I have an inability to appreciate all things gritty, regardless of medium.  I don’t enjoy Grapes of Wrath either, or for that matter Goodfellas.  I wonder if needing a tinge of romanticism isn’t some kind of character weakness of mine.

Addendum: Kevin Drum comments on the last round.

Returning to last week, Ezra Klein (the real one) wrote:

Tyler Cowen is a libertarian economist with a wildly different set of
assumptions about human behavior, the policy process, and political
change [than I, Ezra, have].

I was surprised to read this.  Let’s imagine that we asked a very smart person, but one who disagreed politically with both Ezra and me, to pinpoint how Ezra and I differ.  I believe that person would see the two of us as having very different blind spots, in both moral and positive terms, but not holding fundamentally different assumptions about human behavior.  If Ezra and I chatted about which are the most insightful movies, whether the Washington Wizards should trade Gilbert Arenas, or the best way to get magazine contributors to deliver their essays on time, I don’t know how much we would agree.  (I almost always agree with Matt Yglesias about TV shows and movies, it turns out, although I don’t love The Wire as he does.)  But I’d be surprised if we disagreed any more than I would with the average libertarian, or than he would with the average social democrat.

Of course there is a lesson here, namely that our political views don’t stem from our positive views about human nature as much as we might like to think.

I have some tips for keeping track of who is most likely to win a presidential election.  You all know about the prediction markets, here are a few other mental categories which I find useful.  There is real evidence for them, but I can’t pretend they all command a consensus in the political science literature.  I do, however, think they are true, in part because they are consistent with my underlying views of human behavior:

1. People tend to overreact to the news of the moment in predicting a winner, don’t make this mistake.  Ultimately election outcomes are determined by the fundamentals of the comparison.  For instance if you wish to argue that Hillary Clinton will still be the Democratic nominee, just ponder all those Latinos and blue collar workers out there.  They’re not responding to most of the cues analyzed by the net roots bloggers.  For any forecast you make, imagine yourself telling it to the guy sitting next to you at the West Virginia K-Mart, and see if it passes his laugh test.

2. Party disunity predicts an electoral loss; if you are a Democrat you should worry about this.  It remains to be seen how deep the Republican squabbles will run.  Read the work on Martin P. Wattenberg on this question, of course party disunity can either be a cause of loss or a symptom of other problems.  The state of the party (just like market prices) also aggregates information.

3. The swing voters in the American citizenry don’t really trust the Democrats with foreign policy and won’t anytime soon, whether this is rational or not.  Signs that the election will center around the economy help the Democrats.  Signs that the economy will focus on foreign policy help the Republicans.

4. When a woman or an African-American or a former first Lady is running for President, that is a huge issue in the minds of voters, whether anyone admits it or not.

There is reasonable though not decisive academic evidence for points #2 and #3.  #4 is of course a wildcard, and #1 I have never seen tested; a study might find mean-reversion in the betting markets, I do not know.  Based on this list, I am still thinking that most people are underestimating the chances of a Republican President (the ascendancy of John McCain is starting to reverse this tendency), noting that #2 and #4 are working for my view, but #3 is working against it, at least at the moment.

Virginia Postrel directs us to this more-revealing-than-you-might-think question.  Look here.  But I cannot fathom their decision to rank the Gambian flag number one.  My personal favorites have long been Brazil ("Order and Progress", maybe you have to have been there) and Haiti, in part for the story of how they took out the white from the flag of France.  Japan and Switzerland are good too, iconic you might say.  The moon and star in the Turkish flag for a long time seemed cool to me.

Here are the losers, they are the most fun to look at.  The flag of Mozambique, with its AK-47, might come in last place.  The Falkland Islands flag is another lemon.

Here are the research papers of the Otago guy who evaluated the flags.  Here’s the guy’s grading system for the flags.