Romney’s Candidacy has Piqued Curiosity about Mormons: Evidence from Google Searches

by John Sides on October 1, 2012 · 2 comments

in Campaigns and elections,IT and politics

This is a guest post from political scientists Donald Green and Daniel Butler.

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Throughout most of American history, the major parties’ presidential nominees have been belonged to mainline Protestant denominations.  Only two Catholics – Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 – and one Greek Orthodox – Michael Dukakis in 1988 – have won their party’s nomination.  This year marks the first time a major political party has nominated a Mormon candidate, Mitt Romney.

Opinion polls conducted prior to 2012 suggest that the average American is unfamiliar with Mormons and the Mormon religion.  Last November, 50% of the adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that they did not personally know any Mormons, and 49% said they knew “nothing at all” or “not very much” about the Mormon religion.

Indeed, the fact that Romney himself is Mormon has only gradually seeped into the public’s consciousness during the past year.  Last November, only 39% of the public could correctly identify Mitt Romney’s religious affiliation as Mormon.  By the end of June, this number rose to 51%.

One interesting feature of the Romney candidacy is that it seems to be piquing voters’ curiosity about Mormons.  Consider, for example, the frequency with which the search term “Mormon” is plugged into the Google search engine.  Using Google Trends, we plotted the volume of weekly searches in the United States for the terms “Mormon” and “Romney” from 2004 to the present.[1] Searches for “Mormon” or “Romney” remained relatively constant from 2004 to 2007.  In late 2007 and early 2008, Romney campaigned in the GOP presidential primary, and both search terms enjoyed a brief upward bump.  When Romney dropped out of the race in early 2008, the use of these search terms subsided and remained flat until 2011.  When Romney declared his current bid for the presidency in June of 2011, searches for “Mormon” soared and remained high as he won the battle for nomination in the first half of 2012.  As we enter the fall of 2012, searches for “Mormon” have reached at an all-time high.  The search term is currently five times more popular than it was in 2010.

 

Might the surge in “Mormon” searches reflect something other than the Romney candidacy?  Perhaps people are looking for tickets to the Broadway show Book of Mormon?  It’s possible, but other evidence points to a link to the Romney candidacy.Let’s take a closer look at Google searches during the GOP nomination battle, focusing our attention on the period before April 10th, when Rick Santorum exited the race.   The Y-axis shows the volume of searches (weighted by each state’s population), and the X-axis shows how close a state is to holding its primary election.  The pattern shows that as Election Day nears, residents of states holding elections become more likely to search for “Romney” and for “Mormon.”  After the election, searches subside.

The bottom line is that politics plays a pedagogic function.  It is sometimes quipped that foreign policy crises cause Americans to become acquainted with world geography.  In much the same vein, the nomination of a presidential candidate with a Mormon religious background has prompted vast numbers of Americans to seek out information about this religion and its adherents.

[1] One feature of the data from Google Trends is that the volume of searches is given in relative terms as scaled by Google. The scaled volume ranges between 0 and 100 with 100 representing the highest amount of search volume. The other values reflect the search volume relative to that high-water mark.  The scale used here is relative to searches for “Republican.”


2 comments

The narcissism of the narcissism of small differences

by Andrew Gelman on October 1, 2012 · 6 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Political science

In an otherwise reasonable article, Felix Salmon writes:

In America’s two-party system, you’re given a simple choice: this guy, or the other guy. If you find yourself in wholehearted agreement with one of the two, then the other one becomes the enemy, the obstacle standing in the path leading your guy to the White House. And under the rule of the narcissism of small differences, everything which separates your guy from the other guy becomes a monstrosity to be fought at every turn, and a grievance to be nursed and rehearsed ad nauseam. (Liberals, in truth, are even better than conservatives at this kind of thing: just remember what they thought of Reagan, whose policies were not particularly to the right of Obama.)

Huh? Ya gotta come up with a better example than that! Reagan wasn’t running against Obama, he was running against Carter and Mondale (and, in policy terms, against congressional Democrats such as Tip O’Neill). I think it’s safe to say that Reagan’s polices were to the right of Carter, Mondale, and Tip O’Neill.

This is not to say that all anti-Reagan sentiment was at the policy level, but the differences between Reagan and Mondale, or between Romney and Obama, are not so small. In a comparative study, my political science colleagues John Huber and Piero Stanig find the differences on economic policy between Democrats and Republicans to be relatively large (compared to left vs. right in other countries). And, indeed, the rich-poor gradient in vote preferences is larger in the U.S. than in most other countries too. (We also discuss this in chapter 7 of Red State Blue State.) And, sure, Carter was a moderately conservative Democrat, but Reagan was a far-right Republican for his time. So I don’t think “narcissism of small differences” is an appropriate description.

6 comments

Obamanomics: A Counter-counterhistory

by Andrew Gelman on October 1, 2012 · 3 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Political Economy

In a column entitled, “Obamanomics: A Counterhistory”, David Leonhardt makes the reasonable claim that (a) the Obama team could’ve done more to get the economy out of recession, and (b) they would’ve done so, had they only realized what was going on. Leonhardt writes:

After successfully preventing another depression, in 2009, they have spent much of the last three years underestimating the economy’s weakness. That weakness, in turn, has become Mr. Obama’s biggest vulnerability, helping cost Democrats control of the House in 2010 and endangering his accomplishments elsewhere. . . .

We can never know for sure what the past four years would have been like if the administration and the Fed had been more worried about the economy. But my reading of the evidence — and some former Obama aides agree — points strongly to the idea that the misjudging of the downturn did affect policy and ultimately the economy.

Mr. Obama’s biggest mistake as president has not been the story he told the country about the economy. It’s the story he and his advisers told themselves.

This could well be. But I’d like to offer another theory, a counter-counterhistory, if you will, based on some speculations I had the day Obama was elected (and which I wrote up after the 2010 midterm elections):

On not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past

Why didn’t Obama do a better job of leveling with the American people? In his first months in office, why didn’t he anticipate the example of the incoming British government and warn people of economic blood, sweat, and tears? Why did his economic team release overly-optimistic graphs such as shown here? Wouldn’t it have been better to have set low expectations and then exceed them, rather than the reverse?

I don’t know, but here’s my theory. When Obama came into office, I imagine one of his major goals was to avoid repeating the experiences of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in their first two years.

Clinton, you may recall, was elected with less then 50% of the vote, was never given the respect of a “mandate” by congressional Republicans, wasted political capital on peripheral issues such as gays in the military, spent much of his first two years on centrist, “responsible” politics (budgetary reform and NAFTA) which didn’t thrill his base, and then got rewarded with a smackdown on heath care and a Republican takeover of Congress. Clinton may have personally weathered the storm but he never had a chance to implement the liberal program.

Carter, of course, was the original Gloomy Gus, and his term saw the resurgence of the conservative movement in this country, with big tax revolts in 1978 and the Reagan landslide two years after that. It wasn’t all economics, of course: there were also the Russians, Iran, and Jerry Falwell pitching in.

Following Plan Reagan

From a political (but not a policy) perspective, my impression was that Obama’s model was not Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter but Ronald Reagan. Like Obama in 2008, Reagan came into office in 1980 in a bad economy and inheriting a discredited foreign policy. The economy got steadily worse in the next two years, the opposition party gained seats in the midterm election, but Reagan weathered the storm and came out better than ever.

If the goal was to imitate Reagan, what might Obama have done?

– Stick with the optimism and leave the gloom-and-doom to the other party. Check. – Stand fast in the face of a recession. Take the hit in the midterms with the goal of bouncing back in year 4. Check. – Keep ideological purity. Maintain a contrast with the opposition party and pass whatever you can in Congress. Check.

The Democrats got hit harder in 2010 than the Republicans in 1982, but the Democrats had further to fall. Obama and his party in Congress can still hope to bounce back in two years.

Avoiding the curse of Bartels

Political scientist Larry Bartels wrote an influential paper, later incorporated into his book, Unequal Democracy, presenting evidence that for the past several decades, the economy generally has done better under Democratic than Republican presidents. Why then, Bartels asked, have Republicans done so well in presidential elections? Bartels gives several answers, including different patterns at the low and high end of the income spectrum, but a key part of his story is timing: Democratic presidents tend to boost the economy when the enter office and then are stuck watching it rebound against them in year 4 (think Jimmy Carter), whereas Republicans come into office with contract-the-economy policies which hurt at first but tend to yield positive trends in time for reelection (again, think Ronald Reagan).

Overall, according to Bartels, the economy does better under Democratic administrations, but at election time, Republicans are better situated. And there’s general agreement among political scientists that voters respond to recent economic conditions, not to the entire previous four years. Bartels and others argue that the systematic differences between the two parties connect naturally to their key constituencies, with new Democratic administrations being under pressure to heat up the economy and improve conditions for wage-earners and incoming Republicans wanting to keep inflation down.

Some people agree with Bartels’s analysis, some don’t. But, from the point of Obama’s strategy, all that matters is that he and his advisers were familiar with the argument that previous Democrats had failed by being too aggressive with economic expansion. Again, it’s the Carter/Reagan example. Under this story, Obama didn’t want to peak too early. So, sure, he wanted a stimulus–he didn’t want the economy to collapse, but he didn’t want to turn the stove on too high and spark an unsustainable bubble of a recovery. In saying this, I’m not attributing any malign motives (any more than I’m casting aspersions of conservatives’ skepticism of unsustainable government-financed recovery). Rather, I’m putting the economic arguments in a political context to give a possible answer to the question of why Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t do things differently in 2009.

In short, Leonhardt’s counterhistory is that the Obama team would’ve been well advised to take out “insurance” against the possibility of a steep recession and slow recovery and presented Americans with a less optimistic attitude and written a more flexible stimulus bill. Fair enough. I defer to Leonhardt on questions of economic policy.

My counter-counterhistory, though, is that the Obama team was taking out insurance against the opposite possibility—the “President Carter scenario” of a fast recovery followed by recession. The one thing they didn’t want to happen was to see the economy decline during 2011-2012. So I wonder if, amid all their disappointment about the scaling back of the stimulus package, they were somewhat relieved because they didn’t want the recovery to happen too soon.

I have no idea what was going on in the conversations of the policy team, but it seems reasonable to me that my counter-counterhistory is part of the story, given the clear parallels with the Reagan presidency.

P.S. Just to be clear: I’m not saying that Obama and his team wanted a slow recovery. Rather, I’m speculating that they didn’t want a too-fast recovery, and that concern could well have affected their choices in policy and messaging.

3 comments

2012 Venezuelan Presidential Election: Pre-Election Report

by Joshua Tucker on October 1, 2012 · 3 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Comparative Politics,Election Reports

Continuing our series of election reports, the following pre-election report on the 2012 Venezuelan presidential elections is provided by political scientist  Jennifer Cyr of the University of Arizona.

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In little under a week, Venezuelans will head to the polls to vote for their country’s next president. For some, this will mean voting to re-elect Hugo Chávez for the fourth time (he was elected in 1998, 2000, and 2006, and also survived a recall referendum in 2004), extending his presidency to a full two decades (1998-2018). For others, this election represents the fourth constitutional attempt at removing him from office. In 2002, a failed coup sought to force him from office extra-constitutionally. Unlike past elections, this one is closely contested, and some polls have even predicted that Chavez’s opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, might win (but see here for an analysis that calls this prediction – or any prediction, really – into question).

Chávez came to power with the collapse of a two-party system that had dominated democratic politics in the country for forty years. If he wins again on October 7, Chávez would likely interpret this victory as a green light to deepen his control over Venezuelan politics. In practice, this would mean further centralizing power into the hands of the executive, harsher controls over the independent (read: opposition) media, and a greater capacity to provide selective benefits and incentives to chavistas through his myriad social programs.* It would also bolster Chavez’s claim that the “new,” revolutionary Venezuela, the so-called Fifth Republic, has been blessed by the Venezuelan citizenry. For him, an additional term would undoubtedly signal the country’s rejection of the pre-Chavez era – the “old,” Fourth Republic and the “squalid” individuals that ran the country to their exclusive benefit.

Capriles, a former mayor and current governor of the state of Miranda, stands as the anti-chavista camp’s greatest chance thus far of toppling the incumbent. Currently a member of the newly formed, center-right Primero Justicia (PJ) party, Capriles’ political career began with the now collapsed Christian Democratic party of the “Fourth Republic,” COPEI. Officially, he is the candidate of the entire institutionalized opposition movement (called the Democratic Unity Table, or MUD in Spanish), which includes and relies upon both new and old political parties alike. His political lineage is important because, no matter how fervently Capriles embraces politics in Chávez’s “new” Venezuela, he cannot fully distance himself from the much-maligned pre-Chávez past. Indeed, the 800-lb gorilla in the MUD is Acción Democrática (AD), Venezuela’s historic, labor-based party that, while no longer nationally competitive on its own, has become indispensable to the opposition behind the scenes, thanks to its organizational reach into the country’s “interior.”

Still, Capriles has made every effort to appeal to Chávez’s Venezuela. He has organized a grassroots campaign that rivals in many respects Chávez’s own, carefully crafted army of volunteers. He promises to preserve many of the social programs that Chávez implemented, even as he vows to make them better. His campaign success thus far, while due in part to the organizational resources and institutional legacies emanating from many players of the “Fourth Republic,” confirms the triumph of the “Fifth” as the new way of doing politics in Venezuela. If Capriles wins on 7 October, therefore, it will represent a blow to Chávez’s personal ambition to rule Venezuela for at least twenty years. Less clear, however, is the effect that it will or even can have on politics in the country. Chávez’s control over the state and its institutions will not go away, and millions of Venezuelans will continue to revere him. Even if Capriles wins this election, it is clear that the “new” Venezuela is here to stay. And that might be Chávez’s most important victory thus far.

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* Even though the opposition won a plurality of votes in the 2010 parliamentary election, its presence in the National Assembly (NA) is weak, thanks to electoral rules that strongly favor the president and his party – rules that Chávez put into place. Additionally, prior to the 2010 election, Chavez supporters in the NA passed a law endowing him with fast-track authority to bypass their institution when it came to policy-making on issues of national importance.

3 comments

The Right Perspective on Debates

by John Sides on September 29, 2012 · 15 comments

in Campaigns and elections

Gwen Ifill:

Gallup polls going back decades show precious little shift in established voter trends before and after debates.

Chris Cillizza:

…there are relatively few examples of times in which the general election presidential debates fundamentally altered the course of a race.

Miranda Green:

Presidential debates rarely have much effect on election outcomes.

It’s nice to see these, rather than hype about the debates as “game-changers.”  Maybe political science is “killing the campaign narrative” after all?

UPDATE: Add John Harwood to this list.

UPDATE #2: And Mark Barabak.

15 comments

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 2012 Georgian Parliamentary Elections Pre-Election Report

by Joshua Tucker on September 29, 2012 · 1 comment

in Campaigns and elections,Comparative Politics,Election Reports

Continuing our Election Reports series in conjunction with the journal Electoral Studies, the following pre-election report is provided by political scientist Sean Mueller, a PhD student at the University of Kent.

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On Monday 1 October the Republic of Georgia elects a new parliament. On the surface, 14 parties and two electoral blocs compete for 150 seats. But three more profound issues are at stake in this post-Soviet country that by 2013 will have switched from a president-parliamentary to a premier-presidential type, as Robert Elgie notes here and in reply to Matthew Shugart here. For an outside observer those issues are, in increasing order of importance, the credibility of the political system, the leadership of the country, and its future state of democracy. (For insiders the order might be reversed; see below.)

The Ugly: Georgia’s very own Abu Ghraib?

At the height of the electoral campaign, a major human rights scandal sent shockwaves through the Georgian society. On 18 September, the Interior Ministry announced the arrest of three guards in the infamous Gldani Prison No. 8, near Tbilisi, and released a video showing the beating of a prisoner. Shortly thereafter, opposition channel Maestro TV aired another footage, and the other opposition TV Channel 9 aired yet a third video in which prisoners were raped by their guards using a broomstick and rubber bat. The outcry of anger, fear and shame was huge. A crowd gathered the same evening in front of Philharmonic House, where President Saakashvili attended a show, demanding the resignation of one man: Bacho Akhalaia. Akhalaia, minister of Defence, was in charge of the penitentiary system between 2005 and 2008, but was allegedly still running Georgia’s prisons; he resigned on 20 September. But the political leadership continues to oscillate between promises to thoroughly and impartially investigate the abuse and accusing the opposition to fabricate the videos with the sole aim of winning the elections. We will never know what the full truth is. However, the Georgian Ombudsman has long been one of the few voices to draw attention to the “incredible silence in the Establishment in Gldani, with over 3500 persons” (p. 223 of the 2011 Annual Report). At least he now has the full attention of the country, if not the whole world, in trying to tackle this ugly business: President Saakalshvili put him in charge of overseeing the prison reform. It will also be very difficult to continue ignoring Georgia’s vibrant Human Rights activists.

The Bad: discrediting the contender

If one compares the election platforms of the two main contenders, one is struck by their similarities. The government party controls no less than 82 per cent of the seats, i.e. 112 (the total number of seats is 150, but the 13 seats attributed to Abhkhazia and Samachablo/South-Ossetia remain empty for as long these two territories are occupied by Russia).

The UNM under President Saakashvili promises to create jobs, provide free health care, and invest in agriculture, education and infrastructure. The main opposition, the “Georgian Dream” bloc led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, equally declares to combat unemployment, work on health care and education, and empower the village as a means to foster agriculture. This electoral contest is less one about policy-issues and the nitty-gritty of budgetary and technical details. What is at stake here, apart from re-establishing the credibility of the political system shattered by the prison scandal, is a principle decision on the future direction of the country: authoritarian post-Sovietism or Western freedom, clingy nationalism or global competition, relegation to Russia’s backyard or full NATO membership. At least this is what both sides try to make the electorate believe. Moreover, it is not entirely clear who is pulling in which direction. Saakashvili, who came to power through the Rose Revolution of 2003, has all but eradicated corruption, stimulated foreign investments, and even sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan in support of the US. But he also violently and repeatedly clamped down on opposition protests (in November 2007 and May 2008), led Georgia through the war with Russia in August 2008, and stripped Ivanishvili of his Georgian citizenship after the latter announced to run in the election. All that is known of Ivanishvili, on the other hand, is that he made his huge fortune in Russia, returned to Georgia to live a philanthropic but secluded life until last October and that he was able to at least partially unify the fragmented opposition forces. In this situation, many Georgians might prefer the evil they know over the one they don’t, for as a Georgian saying goes: “the accustomed ill is a better one”…

The Good: the state of Georgian democracy

In contrast to the recent elections in Belarus, Ukraine or Russia, and unlike the situation in neighboring Azerbaijan or Armenia, democracy overall is in quite a good shape in Georgia. Depending on your principle attitude, one might want to emphasize either the “quite” or the “good” in the previous sentence, for the following reasons. For 2012, Freedomhouse classifies Georgia as “partly free”, with an overall democracy score of 4.82: the same as in 2003, with some progress in terms of the judiciary and the media and significant improvements in fighting corruption. For the Economist Georgia has even “reinvented itself as the star of the Caucasus”. In view of the upcoming elections, the Georgian Parliament approved so-called “must-carry” rules, according to which the two opposition channels, which only broadcast over satellite, have to be taken onboard by all cable-TV providers on which the rural areas of Georgia rely. The Venice Commission and the OSCE/ODIHR attested to the overall positive features of the new electoral system in their joint report of last year. This system, last reformed in June 2012, provides for the election of 73 MPs in single-member constituencies and 77 MPs elected through a closed-list proportional system in a single, nation-wide constituency. Candidates need at least 30 per cent of the valid votes in the plurality tier, otherwise a run-off between two best-placed contenders takes place within two weeks. Only parties/electoral blocs that pass the five percent threshold are entitled to proportional seats; the two tiers are not connected (pp. 2-3 of the OSCE Interim Report no. 1). Finally, despite not being a Georgian citizen anymore, Ivanishvili can run both for MP and president, in October 2013, since parliament passed a tailor-made constitutional amendment to this effect. However, stories of the abuse of administrative resources for political purposes are numerous as well (see Transparency International Georgia’s pre-election analysis): Georgian Dream was fined 1.45 million USD for “accepting unlawful donations”; Ivanishvili himself was fined 45 million USD (that’s forty-five, yes) for “making illegal donations”, notably to his own party; over 130’000 satellite dishes that Georgian Dream distributed for free throughout the country were seized; Ivanishvili’s Cartu Bank was temporarily placed under state control; and even the company that rented out office space to Georgian Dream was fined ca. 300’000 USD. Finally while several teachers and school directors were dismissed because they became members of the opposition, local government officials who publicly encouraged residents to vote for the UNM remain in place. In sum, competition is free, but not fair; the media are allowed to say what they want, but only few will hear critical words; and the opposition hangs on the personal wealth of Ivanishvili. In a poll conducted in June 2012, 18 per cent of the respondents said they would vote for Georgian Dream, and 36 for the UNM (N=6229, 22 per cent undecided). The opposition is up from 10 per cent in February 2012, the latter down from 47 per cent. Because of the recent scandal, this race has probably become even tighter. But the question that Georgians might ask themselves is not whether the democratic glass is half full or half empty. The more pressing problems, such as the dire state of the economy, the occupied territories, the 270’000 Internally Displaced Persons (according to UNHCR) as well as dealing with the gross human violations in prisons and the judicial sector at large, require long-term plans which neither of two main contenders is able to offer. But will public outrage and Ivanishvili’s funds suffice to produce Georgia’s first ever cohabitation?

1 comment

Is India unique in having higher voter turnout among the poor than the middle class and rich?

by Andrew Gelman on September 28, 2012 · 5 comments

in Campaigns and elections

Perry Anderson writes of “a truly distinguishing feature of Indian democracy – one that sets it apart from any other society in the world”:

In India alone, the poor form not just the overwhelming majority of the electorate, but vote in larger numbers than the better-off. Everywhere else, without exception, the ratio of electoral participation is the reverse.

Is that true? I had no idea. I’ve looked at some statistics comparing votes for left and right by income in different countries, but I’ve never thought about comparative turnout.

Unlike in the U.S., political parties in India make strong direct appeals to poor voters. But I imagine this would be the case in many low-income societies, yet according to Anderson it is only in India that poor vote at higher rates than middle class and rich. I’m sure my comparativist colleagues understand this better…

Before posting, I ran this past Monkey Cage comparative politics expert Josh Tucker, who sent along sone references on the general topic (but not India in particular):

The idea that the rich vote at higher rates than the poor is consistent across a wide range of countries. The article that comes to mind is one by Bing Powell:

Powell, G. Bingham. 1986. “American Voting Turnout in Comparative Perspective.” American Political Science Review 80, no. 1 (March 1986): 17-43. (J)

But that is definitely OECD countries.

You might also take a look at:

Franklin, Mark, “Electoral Participation,” p.216-235, in LeDuc, Lawrence, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris. 1996. Comparing democracies : elections and voting in global perspective. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

although I’m sure there is some later edition of this.

The Russ Dalton “Citizen Politics” series would likely have something on this as well, although I’m guessing all of this is heavily slanted towards Europe.

5 comments

The Feminine Face of the GOP

by John Sides on September 28, 2012 · 1 comment

in Campaigns and elections

Among Republicans, but not Democrats,women were more feminine than men were masculine, and these very factors related to the accuracy of political party judgments.Moreover, the sex-typicality of facial cues mediated the effect of politician sex and party on perceivers’ judgments of political party affiliation. As predicted therefore, political affiliation was strongly related to gendered facial cues, and observers exploited this fact when providing judgments of politicians.

From a new article by Colleen Carpinella and Kerri Johnson. The press release is here.  There is also this finding, quoting from the press release:

In a finding that the researchers do not view as a particularly revealing, the faces of male Republicans, on average, scored as less masculine than the faces of their Democratic counterparts.  “It may be unnecessary for Republican men to exhibit masculinity through their appearance,” Carpinella said. “Their policy advocacy and leadership roles may already confer these characteristics on them.”

And if you want to Google some faces:

Among Republican representatives whose features ranked as highly feminine were Kay Granger (Texas–District 12), Cathy Rodgers McMorris (Washington–District 5) and Michele Bachmann (Minnesota–District 6). Among Democratic representatives whose features ranked as less gender-typical were Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (formerly at-large representative for South Dakota), Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut–District 3) and Anna G. Eshoo (California–District 14).

1 comment

A Non-random Walk Down Campaign Street

by Andrew Gelman on September 28, 2012 · 6 comments

in Campaigns and elections

Political campaigns are commonly understood as random walks, during which, at any point in time, the level of support for any party or candidate is equally likely to go up or down. Each shift in the polls is then interpreted as the result of some combination of news and campaign strategies.

A completely different story of campaigns is the mean reversion model in which the elections are determined by fundamental factors of the economy and partisanship; the role of the campaign is to give voters a chance to reach their predetermined positions.

The popularity of the random walk model for polls may be partially explained via analogy to the widespread idea that stock prices reflect all available information, as popularized in Burton Malkiel’s book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Once the idea has sunk in that short-term changes in the stock market are inherently unpredictable, it is natural for journalists to think the same of polls. For example, political analyst Nate Silver wrote in 2010:

In races with lots of polling, instead, the most robust assumption is usually that polling is essentially a random walk, i.e., that the polls are about equally likely to move toward one or another candidate, regardless of which way they have moved in the past.

But, as I discussed then in the context of remarks by Silver and Justin Wolfers, polls are not stock markets: for many races, a forecast from the fundamentals gives a pretty good idea about where the polls are going to end up. For example, in the 1988 presidential election campaign, even when Michael Dukakis was up 10 points in the polls, informed experts were pretty sure that George Bush was going to win. Congressional races can have predictable trends too. Political scientists Erikson, Bafumi, and Wlezien have found predictable changes in the generic opinion polls in the year leading up to an election, with different patterns in presidential years and off years. Individual polls are noisy, though, and predictability will generally only be detectable with a long enough series.

Noah Kaplan, David Park, and I have a paper on the topic (to appear in Presidential Studies Quarterly) reviewing the literature and analyzing data from polls during the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections. We show that, as the campaign progresses, vote preferences become more predictable based on fundamental variables such as political ideology and party identification. This is consistent with a “mean reversion” model in which the campaign serves to solidify latent preferences, but it is not consistent with a random walk model in which a campaign is an accretion of unpredictable shocks.

To many of the readers of this blog, the above is not news. Political scientists have been talking about “the fundamentals” for awhile, to the extent that journalists and other observers sometimes overestimate the importance of the economy in determining the election (for example, here’s a clueless history professor likening the predictability elections to “the law of gravity”). As John Sides explained reasonably, you have to be careful when translating economic numbers into vote predictions.

Still, a bit of old-fashioned random-walk thinking remains in the old-fashioned news media. For example, Michael Kinsley recently wrote:

In 1988, Michael Dukakis, who was ahead in the polls just after the Democratic convention, declared in his acceptance speech: “This election isn’t about ideology. It’s about competence.” Then he proceeded to blow a large lead and lose to George Bush the Elder, who turned out to be a tougher old bird than anyone suspected.

This sort of understanding of campaigns was pretty standard a few decades ago, back when Kinsley was editor of the New Republic, but nowadays we wouldn’t frame Dukakis as having “blown a large lead” but rather that he lost a lead that was effectively unsustainable, given the economic and political conditions of 1988. Nor would we need to characterize Bush Senior as a “tough old bird” for winning this election; it was more about being in the right place at the right time.

To say that Dukakis blew a lead is not quite to buy into a random-walk model, but I think it is close. Given what we know about elections, I think it would be more accurate to say that the 1988 election was Bush’s to lose (and he didn’t).

Anyway, that Kinsley quote is an example of why I think this blog post could be helpful. I’m hoping that, by explicitly stating the random-walk and mean-reversion scenarios, I can make people more aware of the implicit models that underly their stories about campaigns and elections.

6 comments

Does Campaign Spending Confuse Voters?

by John Sides on September 28, 2012 · 3 comments

in Campaigns and elections

This is a guest post from political scientist Sean Richey.

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What happens to voters when one candidate has more money to spend than another candidate? In a new article (gated, ungated), I show that skew in campaign spending—one side spending more than the other—has a troubling effect: it leads some voters to choose the candidate that least matches their views.

In every presidential election from 1972 to 2004, I drew on a large survey, the American National Election Study, that asks voters a wide range of questions about politics—demographics, party identification, views on issues, and the like.  Based on their answers and some statistical modeling, I can gauge who they are predicted to vote for and who they actually reported voting for—a technique developed by political scientists Richard Lau and David Redlawsk.  When there is a divergence from the actual and predicted vote, it suggests that voters are choosing the wrong candidate.

Voting for the wrong candidate systematically favors the better funded presidential candidate between 1972 and 2004. This tends to benefit Republican candidates: because they are generally better funded, they are able to gain about 4-5 percentage points more incorrect votes than Democratic candidates in that time, but with considerable variation between elections. I also show that the level of skew in incorrect voting has led to the incorrect candidate being elected in three out the last nine elections (or 2 of 9, if I do not include 2000).

This relationship between spending imbalances and voting behavior has important implications for campaign finance reform.  Various reforms, like the Comprehensive Clean Elections reforms that have been implemented at the state level, seek to equalize spending by candidates by matching funds throughout the campaign. If one candidate starts spending more, the other candidate gets more money from the state government. My research suggests that this might not only make elections more competitive, but enable voters to make choices more in line with their underlying values and beliefs.

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