The Monkey Cage

Political Science is Not Alone

by Henry Farrell on April 25, 2013 · 7 comments

Via Scott Aaronson, Congressional pushback against NSF funding has expanded past the social sciences.

Yesterday, over the course of two contentious hearings, the new chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology floated the idea of having every NSF grant application include a statement of how the research, if funded, “would directly benefit the American people.” Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) said that he was not trying to “micromanage” the $7 billion agency but that NSF needs to do a better job of deciding what to fund given the low success rates for grant applicants and a shrinking federal budget. … The morning hearing examined the president’s overall 2014 budget request for science and featured presidential science adviser John Holdren. The afternoon hearing focused on NSF’s 2014 budget request. The timing gave Republican legislators the chance to level a double-barreled attack on several grants in the social sciences that NSF has awarded in recent years. … Instead of confining himself to social science research, as he and his Republican colleagues had done during the morning hearing with Holdren, Smith focused on NSF’s entire portfolio in his afternoon comments to acting NSF Director Cora Marrett and Dan Arvizu, chair of the National Science Board that oversees NSF. … Later in the hearing, Smith made the case for a new yardstick with which to measure an NSF grant that would focus on its likely contribution to “the national interest.” … Smith has a ready vehicle for implementing his suggestions. Committee staff members are already working on legislation that “authorizes”—or creates a legal framework—for NSF’s programs.

7 comments

Contextualizing Religious Profiling in Dagestan: Tsarnaev and the Kotrova Mosque

by Joshua Tucker on April 25, 2013 · 1 comment

in Comparative Politics,Violence

The following is the second of two guest posts today on the relationship between the Boston marathon bombers, radical Islam, and the Russian Caucuses. Both urge caution in the continuing rush to link the bombers to radical Islamic terrorist movements. This post is written by political scientist Jean-Francois Ratelle, a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. As part of his recently completed doctoral research, Ratelle conducted six months of field work in the North Caucasus (Dagestan, Chechnya, and Kabardino-Balkaria).

*****

In the last 24 hours, several media agencies have reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev has regularly visited the Kotrova Mosque in Makhachkala. In Dagestan this Mosque is known to be associated with radical Islam and Salafism. It was reported by the media that local sources, probably linked with the security services, have identified Tamerlan Tsarnaev as a regular at the Mosque in 2011 and 2012. According to these sources, the 26-year old man was identified and put on a list of potential Salafists and supporters of the insurgency. Following this labelling as a potential threat for Dagestan’s security, the Federal Security Service apparently tipped off the American government and the FBI about Tsarnaev’s potential radicalisation.

One has to take this analysis about Tsarnaev’s radicalisation and his potential to engage in the insurgency with certain caution. It is well known by many who lived or studied in the North Caucasus and particularly in Dagestan, that the local security services list all the individuals that attend radical Mosques (Salafi), such as the Kotrova Mosque. In other words, this religious profiling seeks to identify any individuals with potential ties to radical Islam in order to control them more efficiently. These lists are used by local police forces to conduct crackdowns and brutal interrogations following insurgent or terrorist attacks in Dagestan. However, being placed on the list is not proof that anyone is or is close to being involved with insurgent groups. To the contrary, this religious profiling has been abused by local forces in order to harass radical Muslims in Dagestan. As radical Islam, vaguely defined as Wahhabism by local authorities, has been outlawed in Dagestan after the Chechen invasion in 1999 and any potential signs linked to radical Islam (clothes, long beard, and a trimmed mustache) were used as an excuse by local police to stop and interrogate ordinary Muslims.

While I was living in Dagestan, I was regularly stopped, controlled, and searched by police on the streets of Makhachkala simply because I had a beard which was seen as a sign of being a Salafist. Not to mention that these illiberal searches were conducted with a minimum level of courtesy. This religious profiling, which occurs on a daily basis, has pushed many Dagestanis to protest in the streets in 2011 and 2012. It is also identified by several academic studies as one of the main reasons why young people turn to insurgent groups in order to confront security forces in Dagestan.

In the case of Tsarnaev, if the only proof of his potential radicalisation lies in the list produced by security services in Dagestan, one should be extremely cautious in considering this information as valid and truthful. In fact, one should probably ask if Tsarnaev’s radicalisation was not the product of witnessing police abuse in Dagestan. If the latter was true, it would be possible to postulate that Tsarnaev perceived the FBI and the American government as an extension of Muslim oppression as they were increasingly putting pressure on him through several interrogations and controls. This process of radicalisation could be analysed following two well known mechanisms: one of personal victimization and one of reaction against the oppression committed against Islam. Reinforced by videos about the atrocities committed by Russian forces in Chechnya, Tsarnaev could have associated these actions with the American presence in Afghanistan. The crucial question remains however, why would Tsarnaev choose to return to America in order to engage in his jihad quest? Many answers are possible, such as the will to include his younger brother in the United States in his holy task, or simply to protect his relatives in Dagestan against the persecution and repression of the local government against the family of known terrorists. Indeed, having a member as part of the insurgency often means putting his entire family under imminent threats from the FSB and local police.

Tsarnaev’s trajectory in terrorism should thus be seen in the political and security context of Dagestan. By contextualizing the events leading to his participation in the Boston bombings, one can better understand the reasons behind his radicalisation and his choice to return to America and to engage into his quest of jihad.

1 comment

The evidence suggests that the conflict in Chechnya was not a major factor in the motivation of the Boston bombers

by Joshua Tucker on April 25, 2013 · 1 comment

in Comparative Politics,International Security,Violence

The following is the first of two guest posts today on the relationship between the Boston marathon bombers, radical Islam, and the Russian Caucuses. Both urge caution in the continuing rush to link the bombers to radical Islamic terrorist movements. This post originally appeared on London School of Economic’s EUROPP blog and is authored by political scientist Jim Hughes, the author of Chechnya from Nationalism to Jihad (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). [h/t to Simon Hix].

*****

Can the Boston bombings be explained by throwing the spotlight on the Caucasus, or do the answers lie closer to home in the United States? Much of the commentary on the bombings carried out on 15 April has focused on the two young men’s ethnic Chechen origins as a way of explaining their motivations. Many of the media reports have described the bombers as “Chechen militants”. We can be fairly certain that if these men had been “Chechen militants”, then the bombings would most likely have been suicide attacks, conducted with high explosives, and that the deaths and destruction would have been massive. The bombers have no direct connection with Chechnya, having been born in Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan (in Russia). However, they are part of the Chechen diaspora and would not have been unaffected by the trauma and brutalisation of the Russian-Chechen wars of 1994-2004, and their overspill into Dagestan, and the very negative routine treatment that is meted out to Chechens in Russia. However, they never lived in Chechnya, and both left the Caucasus region more than ten years ago to emigrate to the United States. Of course it is not unusual for members of diasporas to be inspired by a narrative of homeland struggle.

The evidence suggests, however, that the conflict in Chechnya is not a major factor in their motivations. This atrocity was not about “doing something for Chechnya”. One intriguing fact that supports the conclusion that Chechnya was peripheral to their motivations, is that 21 April, just a few days later, would have been a highly symbolic date for politicised Chechens interested in their homeland struggle – for on this date in 1996 the president of Chechnya Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed in a Russian airstrike. The youngest of the two bombers was born in 1993 and possibly named after the Chechen president.

Yet, the conflict in Chechnya is not wholly peripheral, in so far as this struggle has been absorbed since the late 1990s into the global jihad associated with Al Qa’ida. It has become one of a number of conflicts world-wide where muslims are being “massacred” by non-muslims, as Osama Bin Laden put it. The most likely pathway for their radicalisation is internet Islamist politicisation. But this still raises questions as to the precise mechanisms of politicisation, and the reasons why the radicalisation occurred. That the bombers used home made bombs, and US sourced guns, seemingly acted alone, with little attempt to disguise themselves in the act, and had no thought out exit strategy, strongly suggests that we are dealing with radicalised amateurs unconnected to any organisation, but inspired by the ideas and values of Al Qa’ida. This amateurishness also partly explains why they slipped under the radar of the FBI. Attention was drawn to the elder brother, but it seemed so trivial that the FBI let the case drop.

What this atrocity also demonstrates is the immense resonance of terrorism in the collective psyche of Americans. For the cost of a few tens of dollars in materials, a couple of terrorists succeeded in closing down one of America’s major cities for several days, at a cost no doubt of many tens of millions of dollars. Horrific as this episode was and is for the victims, it has completely overshadowed other equally horrific events in the US that week.

[click to continue…]

1 comment

William Julius Wilson on Poverty and Employment

by John Sides on April 24, 2013 · 0 comments

in Public Events

Starting this year, the Academy is inviting Moynihan Prize recipients to deliver a major public policy address on a topic of their choosing.

We are proud to announce that William Julius Wilson, the 2013 Moynihan Prize winner and Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University will give the first such lecture.

Wilson’s inaugural Daniel Patrick Moynihan Lecture will focus on the critical disconnect between the poor and gainful employment. Wilson argues that the changes in the structure of the U.S. labor market mainly hits people living in neighborhoods with weak institutional resources and holding jobs in the most vulnerable economic sectors. This is particularly true for disadvantaged black and Latino workers, because of these groups’ concentration in neighborhoods with insufficient infrastructures and enrollment in failing schools. The plight of these workers, says Wilson, calls for a comprehensive policy initiative that addresses all these problems and appreciates how they are inextricably connected.

This sponsored by the American Academy for Political and Social Science, and will be held on May 9 at 3:30 at the National Press Club here in DC. More information here.

0 comments

Grading the Senate

by Sarah Binder on April 24, 2013 · 3 comments

in Senate procedure

In a thoughtful post, Jon Bernstein hands out a tentative report card on Senate reform, suggesting that the Senate deserves a passing grade based on its performance so far this year. Jon suggests that the intent of the reforms—to streamline some of the delays endemic in the 60-vote Senate—might be taking root. But I’m not yet convinced. I think senators need more time to finish the test.

Jon’s key piece of evidence are the swift confirmations of four appellate court nominees to the federal bench (five if we count the nomination to the limited jurisdiction Federal Circuit), progress on a range of executive branch nominees, and handling of the gun control measure (securing cloture to debate the bill and consideration of both parties’ amendments). I agree that partisan fires have cooled a bit in the Senate, but I’m not so sure we should attribute these changes to the adoption of reforms this past winter. Those reforms allowed for expedited motions to proceed, a streamlined process for getting to conference, and expedited votes after cloture on nominations to the federal district courts.

So why am I skeptical?

First, reform left untouched confirmation procedures for appellate court nominees. The only reforms applied to judicial nominations were reserved for confirmation votes on district court nominees. I suspect that swift action on these four appellate nominees more likely stemmed from the passing of the presidential election, making moot the GOP’s reliance on the so-called Thurmond Rule (a practice that GOP senators had used last summer to justify the blocking of Court of Appeals nominees in the run up to the presidential election). Moreover, three of the four nominees came with strong support from their Republican home state senators. By lifting the Thurmond Rule, GOP senators were deferring to the preferences of their own GOP colleagues—not necessarily to concerns about abiding with the spirit of reforms to speed up the Senate’s practice of advice and consent. At one point last year, it was Sen. Coburn (R-Oklahoma) who had called out his GOP colleagues for their obstruction of the 10th Circuit nominee. The Senate, Coburn charged (without a hint of irony), was a kindergarten playground. And keep in mind that just weeks before, Reid threatened to go nuclear “if the Republicans in the Senate don’t start approving some judges and don’t start helping get some of these nominations done.” Idle threat? Perhaps, but suggestive that this winter’s reforms might not be responsible for instilling more cooperative behavior in the GOP conference.

Second, Majority leader Reid this week stopped short of taking full advantage of the new procedure for getting to conference. In attempting to go to conference with the House over the budget resolution, Reid availed himself of the new Senate’s new mega motion to get the Senate to conference—eliminating the need to go through three separate motions that had previously been required to get to conference. But Reid did so by seeking—unsuccessfully— unanimous consent to pass the super-sized conference motion. Reid might have gone a step farther to seek cloture on the mega motion, given that the new rule brings the Senate to a cloture vote after just two hours and eliminates post-cloture debate on the motion. But Reid had little need to attempt cloture: He couldn’t count on 60 votes and he had already made his point—blaming the GOP for inaction on finalizing a budget. This doesn’t mean that the Senate fails the test of reform; I just don’t think they’ve finished taking the test.

Surely, the Senate deserves some credit for the cooling of partisan fires—as evidenced as well by the chamber’s completion of a fully amended and debated budget resolution (though don’t forget the Senate needed cloture to debate the CR!). But whether the reforms have helped to instill better behavior probably remains to be seen.

3 comments

Bullied Pulpit

by Andrew Rudalevige on April 24, 2013 · 0 comments

in Legislative Politics,Presidency

Most denizens of the political science blogosphere will know by now of the recent punditry doing violence to what political science knows about presidential success in Congress. First CQ’s David Hawkins, in his usually astute blog, declaimed that “the Obama charm offensive is starting to pay legislative dividends,” citing the 68 Senators who voted to vote on gun control – alas, before they voted (more meaningfully) against it. Then Maureen Dowd caused me to splutter coffee over my Sunday cereal: if only President Obama had watched The American President more closely, she suggested, he would easily have twisted enough arms to win Senate approval of universal background checks. Then yesterday’s NYT piece more or less repeated her claim but with Lyndon Johnson in place of President Shepherd. (Et vos, Michael Shear and Peter Baker?)

My point here is not to respond substantively (which I’ve done on similar occasions (see here and here)), except perhaps to put in a plug for Air Force One, which introduced the masses to the disability provisions of the 25th amendment long before The West Wing. Rather, I wanted to pay tribute to the impressive and sometimes impassioned response of a variety of commentators. As Dan Drezner summed up in an April 21 tweet: “MSM reaction to MoDo op-ed: tough questions asked. Political scientists’ reaction: a steaming pile of…” (well, there is a word there at the end, but this is a family-friendly blog.)

Indeed, Seth Masket, Jonathan Bernstein (with good additional links; and also here, re LBJ), Charlie Pierce (not, last I checked, a political scientist) and many others did a great job of pointing out the errors in Dowd et al.’s accounts. I am particularly partial to Brendan Nyhan’s take, actually, in comparing the causal logic of these arguments to that of South Park’s underpants gnomes. (You may remember those gnomes’ business strategy. Phase One: collect underwear. Phase Three: profit. In between, a big “???”) And, while not a direct response to the Dowd et al claims, Ezra Klein had written shortly before to advocate narratives of presidential success with Congress along the lines political scientists’ research agenda has suggested are plausible.

In short: it was heartening to see the quick, broad pushback on this front.

0 comments

The Tweets-Votes Curve

by Andrew Gelman on April 24, 2013 · 12 comments

in Data,Media

Fabio Rojas points me to this excellently-titled working paper by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, and himself:

Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this ques- tion using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composi- tion. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit.

One charming thing about this paper—-and I know this is going to sound patronizing but I don’t mean it to be—-is that the authors (or, at least, whatever subset of the authors who did the statistical work) are amateurs. They analyze the outcome in terms of total votes rather than vote proportion, even while coding the predictor as a proportion. They present regression coefficients to 7 significant figures. They report that they have data from two different election cycles but present only one in the paper (but they do have the other in their blog post).

But that’s all ok. They pulled out some interesting data. And, as I often say, the most important aspect of a statistical analysis is not what you do with the data, it’s what data you use.

Tweets and votes

As to the result itself, I’m not quite sure what to do with it. Here’s the key graph:

tweet1

More tweets, more votes, indeed.
Of course most congressional elections are predictable. But the elections that are between 40-60 and 60-40, maybe not so much. So let’s look at the data there . . . Not such a strong pattern (and for the 2012 data in the 40-60% range it looks even worse; any correlation is swamped by the noise). That’s fine, and it’s not unexpected, it’s not a criticism of the paper but it indicates that the real gain in this analysis is not for predicting votes.

I’m not so convinced that tweets will be so useful in predicting votes—-most congressional elections are predictable, but perhaps the prediction tool could be more relevant in low-information or multicandidate elections where prediction is not so easy.

Instead, it might make sense to flip it around and predict twitter mentions given candidate popularity. That is, rotate the graph 90 degrees, and see how much variation there is in tweet shares for elections of different degrees of closeness. Also, while you’re at it, re-express vote share as vote proportion. And scale the size of each dot to the total number of tweets for the two candidates in the election.

Move away from trying to predict votes and move toward trying to understand tweets. DiGrazia et al. write, “the models show that social media matters . . .” No, not at all. They find a correlation between candidate popularity and social media mentions. No-name and fringe candidates get fewer mentions (on average) than competitive and dominant candidates. That’s fine, you can go with that.

Again, I fear the above sounds patronizing, but I don’t mean it to be. You gotta start somewhere, and you’re nowhwere without the data. As someone who was (originally) an outsider to the field of political science, I do think that researchers coming from other fields can offer valuable perspectives.

Sharing the data

What I want to know is, is this dataset publicly available? What would really make this go viral is if DiGrazia et al. post the data online. Then everyone will take a hack at it, and each of those people will cite them.

There’s been a lot of talk about reproducible research lately. In this case, they have a perfect incentive to make they data public: it will help them out, it will help out the research project, and it will be a great inspiration for others to follow in their footsteps. Releasing data as a publicity intensifier: that’s my new idea.

P.S. In the first version of this post I included a graph showing votes given tweet shares between 40% and 60%. I intended this to illustrate the difficulty of predicting close elections, but my graph really missed the point, because the x-axis represented close elections in tweet shares, not in votes. So I crossed that part out. If nothing else, I’ve demonstrated the difficulty of thinking about this sort of analysis!

12 comments

How Constituent Contact Can Matter: The Michigan Anti-Bullying Bill

by John Sides on April 24, 2013 · 2 comments

in Legislative Politics,Public opinion

Does contacting one’s legislator influence public policy? We answer this question with a field experiment in which Michigan state legislators are randomly assigned to be contacted by their constituents about a specific bill. The field experimental design allows us to produce internally and externally valid estimates of the influence of constituent contacts on legislative voting. The estimated effect is substantial: being contacted by constituents increases the probability of supporting the relevant legislation by about 12 percentage points.

From a working paper by Daniel Bergan and Richard Cole. It follows up on my earlier post and DL’s comment here, which links to a previous experiment that Dan conducted (and that I failed to remember!).

And while we’re on this subject, here’s another relevant piece by Daniel Butler, Christopher Karpowitz, and Jeremy Pope:

We conducted a field experiment involving roughly 1,000 letters sent by actual individuals to nearly 500 different legislative offices in order to test whether legislative offices prioritize service over policy in their home style. We find strong evidence that both state and federal legislative offices are more responsive to service requests than they are to policy requests. This pattern is consistent with the desire of legislators to gain leeway with their constituents in order to pursue their own policy goals. We also find that at the federal level Democrats prioritize service over policy more than Republicans and at the state level legislators who won by larger margins are more likely to prioritize service over policy. Finally, our results suggest that the decision to prioritize service occurs in how the office is structured. Among other things this suggests that legislators may be micro-targeting less than is often supposed.

And this by Daniel Butler and David Nickerson:

When legislators are uninformed about public opinion, does learning constituents’ opinion affect how legislators vote? We conducted a fully randomized field experiment to answer this question. We surveyed 10,690 New Mexicans about the Governor’s spending proposals for a special summer session held in the summer of 2008. District-specific survey results were then shared with a randomly selected half of the legislature. The legislators receiving their district-specific survey results were much more likely to vote in line with constituent opinion than those who did not. Our results suggest that legislators want to be more responsive to public opinion than they are in their natural state and can be if given solid information about constituent beliefs.

2 comments

← Previous Entries

The Monkey Cage

Political Science is Not Alone

Contextualizing Religious Profiling in Dagestan: Tsarnaev and the Kotrova Mosque

The evidence suggests that the conflict in Chechnya was not a major factor in the motivation of the Boston bombers

William Julius Wilson on Poverty and Employment

Grading the Senate

Bullied Pulpit

The Tweets-Votes Curve

How Constituent Contact Can Matter: The Michigan Anti-Bullying Bill

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