Category: Political Science
How politically segregated are the networks of the internet?
For all the complaints you hear, internet reading is much less segregated than the networks of our work, family, and friends (all given formal measurements in the paper). Jesse Shapiro and Matt Gentzkow report:
We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.
Here are some details:
The average Internet news consumer’s exposure to conservatives is 57 percent, slightly to the left of the US adult population. The average conservative’s exposure is 60.6 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from usatoday.com. The average liberal’s exposure is 53.1 percent, similar to a person who gets all her news from cnn.com. The isolation index for the Internet is 7.5 percentage points, the difference between the average conservative’s exposure and the average liberal’s exposure.
News consumers with extremely high or low exposure are rare. A consumer who got news exclusively from nytimes.com would have a more liberal news diet than 95 percent of Internet news users, and a consumer who got news exclusively from foxnews.com would have a more conservative news diet than 99 percent of Internet news users.
…Visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited nytimes.com.
This is one of the best papers on on-line media.
Is there a flypaper effect for public health-based foreign aid?
If you give people, or a government, money to do one thing, they might reallocate some of those funds to their preferred marginal expenditures. A recent study published in Lancet, co-authored by Christopher Murray and Chunling Lu, suggests this is what happens with many instances of foreign aid:
"For every $1 of DAH [development assistance for health] given to government, the ministry of finance reduces the amount of government expenditures allocated to the ministry of health and other government agencies that engage in health spending by about $0.43 to $1.14," they write. "From the global health community's perspective, this means that to increase government health spending by $1, global health funders need to provide at least $1.75 of DAH."
Furthermore debt relief does not increase domestic government health care spending but grants to NGOs, unlike direct foreign aid to governments, do increase such spending. A summary of the study is here. Here is an abstract and a gated link.
Is the conservative mind more closed?
Julian Sanchez writes:
I’ve written a bit lately about what I see as a systematic trend toward “epistemic closure” in the modern conservative movement. As commenters have been quick to point out, of course, groupthink and confirmation bias are cognitive failings that we’re all susceptible to as human beings, and scarcely the exclusive province of the right …Yet I can’t pretend that, on net, I really see an equivalence at present: As of 2010, the right really does seem to be substantially further down the rabbit hole.
Andrew Sullivan offers up some related links and commentary. I tend to agree with Sanchez and Sullivan, but I thought you all would be a good group to poll. Please offer up your opinion in the comments.
Do black mayors improve black employment outcomes?
My colleagues John Nye, Ilia Rainer, and Thomas Stratmann say maybe so:
To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities’ mayors between 1971 and 2003. We find that black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors both in absolute terms and relative to whites. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particular large, which suggests that our results capture the causal effects of black mayors. We also find that the effect of black mayors on black employment outcomes is stronger in cities that have a large black community. This suggests that electoral incentives may be an important determinant of racial favoritism. Finally, we also find that, corresponding to increases in employment, black income is higher after black mayors take office. Again, this effect is pronounced in cities with a large black population.
Politics isn’t about policy, installment #734
Matt Yglesias writes:
To borrow an idea from Robin Hanson, I think it’s useful to think about political conflict in terms of valorized figures. On the right, you see a lot of valorization of businessmen. On the left, you see a lot of valorization of pushy activists who want to do something businessmen don’t like. Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se. Consequently, on the left people sometimes fall into the trap of being patsies for rent-seeking mom & pop operators when poor people would benefit more from competition from a corporate bohemoth.
*Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent*
I very much enjoyed reading this now-dated (1989) but still insightful volume of country-specific essays by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany's leading public intellectuals. The chapter on Sweden was my favorite. Here is one good bit:
The "motley feudal ties" to which Marx alludes in the Communist Manifesto were torn asunder here earlier than anywhere else, to be replaced by a strictly organized centralized state. Oxenstierna, an administrative genius, invented the prefectorial system two hundred years before Napoleon. He sent governors armed with executive powers into all the regions of the kingdom. They even had military means at their disposal to enforce the king's policies against the interests of the provinces. He created the first national atlas and the first central bank in the world. And so on. Does all this have no implications for the present condition of the country and for the problems of its institutions?
Enzensberger also refers to Sweden as a country which has liquidated its own history in a bout of extreme forgetfulness. I also liked this bit on Italy:
The great strength of this system is that it works not only from the top down but also from the bottom up — because even the poor, the "underprivileged," have their privileges, their consolations, and prerogatives. The concierge apportions his favors and his punishments as he pleases, and the doorkeeper enjoys a mysterious power, of which his boss, the minister, is quite ignorant.
You can buy the book here.
Colombia (China) estimate of the day
"It costs me as much to ship goods from China to Colombia's main Pacific port, as it does from the Pacific coast up to Bogotá," says one businessman.
The article is interesting throughout, for instance:
Until five years ago, only 15 per cent of Colombia's roads were paved, most of them single lane. In a country where some 70 per cent of cargo is hauled by truck, that made high transport costs a regular burden.
Do daughters make you more conservative?
Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher report:
Washington (2008) finds that, controlling for total number of children, each additional daughter makes a member of Congress more likely to vote liberally and attributes this finding to socialization. However, daughters’ influence could manifest differently for elite politicians and the general citizenry, thanks to the selection gradient particular to the political process. This study asks whether the proportion of female biological offspring affects political party identification. Using nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey, we find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.
I don't yet see an ungated copy, do you? By the way, I applaud the authors for their "stones" in writing the last paragraph of the paper, such as:
The conservative emphasis on family, traditional values and gender roles, and prolife anti-abortion sentiments all stress investment in children – for both men and women. Conservative policies mirror the genetic interests of women, writ large. They attempt to promote paternal investment in offspring. Further, they stress investment in conceived offspring – “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” In short, Conservative policies support the genetic fitness of women by capitalizing on each pregnancy, reducing male promiscuity, and increasing paternal investment in children. Such policies may impinge on the freedom of parents’ immediate offspring, but they increase the expected number of grandchildren via daughters.
I'm not sure that's true as stated, but it does deserve further debate.
“Alternatively, thoughts on Margaret Atwood or Arundhati Roy.”
That was a reader request. My thoughts are simple:
I am a fan of Atwood's Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale, both of which are well constructed and compelling on virtually every page. Many of her other books seem meritorious to me (The Blind Assassin, Robber's Bride), but I don't enjoy finishing them and my attention ends up wandering. The failing may be mine. I don't think I would find her non-fiction book on debt very interesting but I haven't tried it.
Roy's The God of Small Things impressed me as I was reading it, but since then it has vanished from my mind. Her musings on economics, or for that matter politics, are under-informed to say the least. I view her as a "one hit wonder" and I am not even sure the one hit stands up. I admire Atwood's humanity and universality and scope of vision, even when I think her work is failing to connect; I don't have a similar response to Roy.
Plain speaking
The oddest thing about the health care debate, at least in my view, is that Republicans basically did not engage on the actual substance of the bill. Lots of stuff about death panels, and lots of stuff about procedure, lots of stuff about backroom deals (most of which will be gone after reconciliation) but shockingly little about the individual mandate — or, as Tim Noah points out, about the actual taxes that really are being raised for this. The only real substantive complaint they highlighted was Medicare, where they argued against their own position.
That's from Jonathan Bernstein. David Frum is also right on the mark.
Mistakes in Grenada
After Hurricane Ivan, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) paid for the new $40 million national stadium, and provided the aid of over 300 labourers to build and repair it. During the opening ceremony, the anthem of the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) was accidentally played instead of the PRC's anthem, leading to the firing of top officials.
That's from Wikipedia.
Ezra Klein interviews Paul Ryan
EK: And since then, the Congress has stopped it from cutting doctor payments seven times since then. I went back through the record, and you voted for five of those delays.
PR: Oh, yeah! I think we should fix the thing. Don't get me wrong.
That has to do with the Medicare payments "fix," which Congress keeps postponing, often with Ryan's support. There is much more here. Cutting spending is hard!
Here are recent developments on cost containment in the health care bill.
Sentences to ponder
The insurance commissioners in 11 states are elected. Under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, insurers will now be able to finance the election campaigns of those who will be their regulators. Among other powers these state insurance regulators have authority over rates and policy forms.
That's a letter to The New York Times.
Addendum: See the comment by Michael Yuri.
This is Chile, not Haiti
"There is a certain lawlessness in this country that the government enabled," he said in Spanish. "They don't protect people and people don't respect them and criminal elements get out of control. People also have a high sense of entitlement. They expected the government to have water and power and things under control."
There is much more at the link or try this tweet: "The situation in Concepción is deteriorating. Citizens have taken up arms to defend themselves and their stores. 8 PM to 12 PM Army curfew." By no means is it just a bunch of people trying to feed themselves: "…many residents in the most damaged areas have not only taken food from supermarkets, but also robbed banks, set fires and engaged in other forms of lawlessness."
Haiti, on the other hand, remains fairly orderly and there have been reports that police corruption has gone down significantly.
One implication here is that I fundamentally distrust the use of "social trust" or "social capital" indicators in cross-country growth regressions. Repeat three times after me: context-dependence, context-dependence, context-dependence. The lessons for social science run deep.
My deeper worry is that this event will change Chile and set it back more than the damage alone would indicate. It will alter their self-image and national unity could decline. An alternative story is that Chile will become more progressive, as there will be greater common knowledge of income divisions and it will be harder to pretend everything is just fine.
Maybe it is a sign of social health to have some looting after an earthquake. In this part of blogland we do not dismiss the counterintuitive conclusion out of hand. For instance perhaps Haiti is so orderly because a) looters would be killed on the spot, and b) the entire fate of the nation is at stake and thus every small event is taken very seriously. Neither factor is exactly good news.
How have previous currency unions dissolved?
Marc Flandreau writes:
This paper examines the historical record of the Austro-Hungarian monetary union, focusing on its bargaining dimension. As a result of the 1867 Compromise, Austria and Hungary shared a common currency, although they were fiscally sovereign and independent entities. By using repeated threats to quit, Hungary succeeded in obtaining more than proportional control and forcing the common central bank into a policy that was very favourable to it. Using insights from public economics, this paper explains the reasons for this outcome. Because Hungary would have been able to secure quite good conditions for itself had it broken apart, Austria had to provide its counterpart with incentives to stay on board. I conclude that the eventual split of Hungary after WWI was therefore not written on the wall in 1914, since the Austro-Hungarian monetary union was quite profitable to Hungarians.
Other gated versions you'll find here. The bottom line is that collapse of the currency union stemmed from political factors, not economics. Contra the author, I would say it was written on the wall.
I found this 1920 Economic Journal article, "The Disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Currency," useful on the details of the transition. The different parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire moved to different currencies by imposing capital controls and by stamping domestic currency to make it worth less. That limits the bank run problem since moving into currency has no advantage and funds cannot be easily transferred in an advantageous manner. Once all the money is stamped the currency has in effect been devalued.
Here is a paper on the collapse of the ruble zone, though it doesn't have much on transition dynamics. I suspect the transition is much easier in the absence of free capital movements.
There is a Peter Garber IMF Working Paper on the economics of the Austro-Hungarian dissolution – apparently not on-line — which I am still trying to get my hands on. Do any of you have a pdf? At that previous link you'll find other references and links as well.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias covers the former Czechslovakia.