Happy Independence Day!

I am quoted in a recent article by the Courier on the Arkansas primary races. I talk about the headwind the Democrats face in Arkansas in 2010 and the fact that Boozeman is the clear favorite against either potential Democratic nominee. Lincoln of course ended up sqeeking out a win despite the fact that you can generally expect voters from other candidates to break against the incumbent in a runoff. I think part of Halter’s problem, as I’ve mentioned before, was the fact his run was so publicly financed by outside groups like SEIU (a public sector union). While Halter had 2 to 1 adds against Lincoln…that edge was provided by the outside groups. And while any ad helps with name recognition I felt that the strongly tilt-left outside ads actually worked against Halter. Generally speaking you don’t win in Arkansas by running to the Left and the ads Halter had on his behalf from the outside groups uniformly attacked Lincoln from the Left. Those ads are effective in California, New York, and Massachusetts…but not so much in the South.

I discussed cumulative voting as a potential alternative to FPTP, SMD’s with respect to congressional voting. We saw the Alabama Chilton county example in class, and now comes an example in New York. I had mentioned that we cannot ignore these alternatives because there has been a growing trend in judicial circles towards these kinds of solutions to percieved diviersity problems in representative bodies. Here we see just such an example, as this example of MMCV comes as a consequence of judicial fiat.

We talked about the Tragedy of the Commons in class. Here is a neat video from Reason.com that talks about this collective action problem and how a new government policy might be a solution to the ToC in ocean fisheries (hint: I talked about this solution as well):

Pictures and a thousand words.

Can be seen here.

Barry Friedman has written a book on the Supreme Court and the public called The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and shaped the Meaning of the Constitution. His argument is that the Court follows public opinion for the most part. However, the cases he looks at are limited to salient cases. A participant in a chat on Barry’s book raises the issue of selection bias:

[Comment From Adam Liptak, NYTAdam Liptak, NYT: ]
You say your claim is limited to “salient” issues and I wonder if you might say something about what you mean by the term. Does the principle of salience allow you to cherry pick examples that work for your theory?

Tuesday May 18, 2010 2:05 Adam Liptak, NYT
2:05 Barry: what good’s a theory, adam, if its author can’t cherry pick the cases?

Tuesday May 18, 2010 2:05 Barry
2:06 Barry: i think though that most salient examples fit the theory. but there are exceptions and the real value of the theory is figuring out what is different about them. so, the first amendment is an area in which the court often bucks the tide; think of school prayer, flag burning . . .

Barry’s answer isn’t particularly satisfactory. The problem with accepting his evidence on the Supreme Court and its sensititivity to public opinion is that he has selected cases that…he expects the public to be very sensitive to. IOW, he has selected his cases on his dependent variable. You aren’t supposed to select cases that “fit” your theory. Rather, you’re supposed to select cases *representative* of the population from which you are estimating parameters (or qualitiatively assessing select examples). Then that sample can serve as a database with which you can *test* your thesis to see if it *does* fit the selected cases. Choosing cases because you think they fit your thesis is classically bad research design. Confirmation bias in sampling. I haven’t read the book and so I can’t speak to the rest of it, but this is a fairly bad mistake to make in designing his inquiry, and hence I would hesitate to rely on his evidence as confirmation of his thesis…a thesis I am sympathetic to.

Awesome.

Errr…

Awww. Somebody needs a hug. Too bad trees aren’t very good at hugging.

Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy, his famous dissertation on political information consumption by citizens, argued that the median voter is the decisive actor in elections and thus rational political parties would locate their platforms at the median voter ‘ideal’ point in the policy space. Some have argued this bodes well for Charlie Crist’s imminent run as an independent, having abandoned the Republican party as a consequence of his failed bid for the Republican nomination. Rubio has run to the Right of Crist and has solid conservative credintials while Crist has always been a moderate Republican. His ideology is likely closer to the median Florida voter than either Rubio or Meeks.

On the other hand, Maurice Duverger, a French Sociologist, put forward the well-confirmed principle that plurality voting systems favor 2 party systems. A corollary of Duverger’s Law is that plurality systems are biased against independent runs – the logic of the 2 party system leads voters to rationally choose among the major party candidates given the low probability that an independent can win.

So we apparently have two mega-theories of political science at odds with one another on the viability of a Crist run. Which is more important? Crist’s proximity to the median Florida voter or his status as an independent? I will argue here that the simple MV interpretation has alot of problems as a model of a 3-way Florida senate race with Crist as an indepdent, and the DL implications for such a run suggest strongly Crist is a loser. Downs’ MVT model is useful for making predictions about how voters acquire political information, and it unquestionably identified an underlying centripital force in party politics that has a great deal of empirical support…but the Devil is in the Details. The parismonious predictions of Downs’ MVT didn’t hold up empirically. Since then, scholars have created more realistic and empirically-supported models of voting that do not dethrone the median voter, but certainly cast doubt on the efficicacy of using Down’s MVT to predict a specific race.

Here I will cover some of the basic modifications of Down’s model and show why MVT certainly does not predict a Crist victory and, in fact, might suggest he will be a loser under conditions we can reasonably forecast. I’ll also talk a bit about what Duverger has to say about Crist. Preview: it ain’t good for Crist.

1. Downs’ model assumes two parties and a unidimensional policy space. If the political compeititon over the senate seat from Florida is multidimensional, the median voter expectation breaks down (e.g. see McKelvey, Plott, Riker, etc. on the instability of social choice in a multidimensional space). For example, many scholars have identified a valence dimension (likeability) that is orthogonal to the unidimensional policy (or ideology) space that Downs relied upon. While Crist might be closer to the MV on the ideological dimension, his switch could seriously damage his likability. He may seem opportunistic and power-hungry…two characteristics voters rarely approve of in a candidate. Not to mention the hit his integrity takes, having disavowed an independent run just weeks ago on Fox News Sunday. Rubio already has a political ad lambasting Crist over his flip-flop. A low valence score by voters could render his position on the ideological dimension irrelevant.

2. In the work subsequent to Downs on voting behavior on the ideological dimension, the multidimensionality of ideology has been identified (Hinich & Munger, 1994) and the salience of issues has become….er, more salient (see Endersby & Gooch, 2010). Indeed, these factors explain why we don’t usually see parties converge to a single point in their policy platforms in real elections (along with incomplete information, uncertainty, abstention & alienation, etc.). It’s hard to predict what issues will be salient, but non-salient dimensions will play a small or non-existant role in voter decisions while salient dimensions will be weighted strongly in that calculus. Crist may be closer to the MV on some issues, but he may be quite distant on others….particularly those that will count in 2010. For example, Crist supported Obama’s stimuls plan, but that plan was quite unpopular with voters, as only 37% supported it weeks after passage and it has become increasingly unpopular since then. According to Pew, six out of ten (62%) say the economic stimulus package enacted by Congress last year has not helped the job situation. On social issues Crist might be closer to the MV in Florida than the other candidates, but if social issues have low-salience in the coming election, then that proximity he enjoys may have little or no weight in the voter calculus. Likewise, if Crist is viewed as ineffective or incompetent on the most salient issue dimension, economic performance, then Downsian (i.e. spatial) logic makes him as much a loser as Duverger does. So Crist could lose due to valence and salience factors, even if, in the aggregate, his ideological placement is closer to that of the MV. In the 2008 American National Election Survey (ANES), a larger percentage of respondents reported liking Obama (51.7%) than they did McCain (48.1%). Obama rated higher on the valence dimension, and that likely contributed greatly to his electoral victory.

3. We don’t know where the median voter is, but in 2010 she’s probably a Republican. It’s true that the median voter is more likely to be an ideological moderate even in a midterm election. But without knowing the composition of the electorate on November 2010 we can only guess at the MV location. Uncertainty as to the MV location is another reason why parties do not converge. So while it is true that Crist is a “moderate” and the MV is likely to be a “moderate” that doesn’t really tell us whether Crist is actually closer to the real MV than the other candidates. Furthermore, the median voter in FL 2010 will be more right-wing than the median voter in Crist’s two previous campaigns. This may be the most right-tilting electorate since 1994. Consider these Gallup numbers: there is a 20 point gap in partisan identification in favor of the Republicans in the “very enthusiastic” category of potential voters for November 2010 (57% R, 37% D). The “not enthusiastic” category has Democrats edging out Republicans by 4 points. Midterm elections are always a bit more Republican than presidential elections because of the differing turnout patterns of the two party constituencies…but this suggests that the electorate may be ALOT more Republican in 2010. That shifts the MV in the Republican direction…in Marc Rubio’s direction.

4. Downs’ model treats voters as exogenous. In other words, it assumes a distribution of voters and then allows the parties to move with respect to that distribution. But it is important to understand what that unidimensional space actually is or isn’t. What it is not is the ACTUAL policy or ideological positions of the candidates. It is the PERCIEVED policy / ideological positions of the candidates. So while Charlie Crist may be objectively more moderate than Rubio or Meeks, that doesn’t mean that voters will percieve him as such. Objectively speaking, John McCain was closer to the MV in 2008 than Obama was. Obama, for example, was at a -0.465 on the 1st dimension of the DW Nominate scores by Poole & Rosenthal (which estimate the ideological position of members of Congress). McCain on the other hand was at a 0.423. Obama was more extreme than McCain, based on his voting behavior in Congress. But that isn’t how voters percieved the two candidates. It is perceived distance…not actual distance that is the determinant of voter’s candidate preferences. 2008 voters may have percieved Obama as closer to the center than he actually is. The same might happen with 2010 voters and Rubio or any of the FL Senatorial candidates. They may be percieved as more extreme or more moderate than they actually are. If Crist isn’t percieved as the most proximate candidate to the MV, then he isn’t for the purposes of the voting calculus.

5. Finally, turning to Duvergar’s Law, Crist faces an enormous challenge running as an independent. Even if he is more proximate to the MV on the valence, ideological, and issue dimensions…we know voter’s factor in the likelihood that a candidate can win into their voting decisions. There’s a reason that most libertarians vote Republican and not for the Libertarian Party. In a plurality voting system, you get nothing for coming in second. It is a winner-take-all system. What this produces, as Duverger noted so long ago, is a two party system. Third parties cannot get traction, even if they have policies and issues a majority of voters prefer, because their expected vote total is nowhere near the threshold of competitiveness.

Now we have independents in Congress for sure (Sanders, Lieberman)…however successfull independent runs fall into two categories: a) the independent is endorsed by one of the major parties (Sanders has the Dems and Lieberman had the Reps behind him) or b) a narrow victory is won where both of the major party candidates were unpopular. In the first situation the “indpendent” is a de facto member of one of the major parties. The second scenario doesn’t seem to be in play here, as Rubio is a very popular Republican and it is a Republican year. Furthermore, the Dems are unlikely to endorse Crist with Meeks already a viable candidate.

Crist will lose financial support, endorsements, and staff as a consequence of leaving the Republicans. As Rich Lowry argues, channelling Duverger, Republican PID’rs will abandon Crist and as this happens his race will increasingly look like a spolier race. From spolier it is but a short stop to “can’t win” and then you run into strategic abandoment. As Nick Silver points out, Crist doesn’t have to slip far to get to “unviable” candidate. Whereas Rubio and Meeks have much higher floors given their regular party vote supporters. In this scenario, Crist supporters abandon his run to prevent either of the other two candidates (depending on whom they most prefer among the two) from winning a close election. Recall in the 2009 New Jersey governor’s race the third party candidate (Chris Dagget) polled into the upper teens and many speculated he might prove a spolier for Christie’s bid. For example, James Carville’s polling firm “Democracy Corps” had Daggett pulling in 15 points. In the end, he only secured 5.8% of the vote and Christie cruised to a 4 point win over Corzine. If voters don’t believe Crist will win, it won’t matter what his positions are or even his valence characteristics. He will lose a substantial number of supporters in running as an independent…and he simply cannot afford them. The best he has done in current polling is eek out a narrow victory in a 3-way race. But Duverger always wins in the end….which means Crist is likely doomed.

In the end, I think Crist is a loser in this race…and I doubt either Downs or Duverger would disagree. I put his vote total, should he stay in the race all the way to election day, at around 18% give or take a point or two…and even that might be high. Be sure to check back in November and see if I’m right.

Study hard! But not too hard!

Do you speak Klingon? Then Planet Earth needs you! I personally hope the universe is big enough for the both of us. But if not, we better hurry up and run into the Vulcans or we may find out just how futile resistance can be.

Further graphical evidence that the stimulus has done little (if anything) to affect the slope of the recessionary trough the economy has been in for well over a year. Twice as many unemployed workers currently have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more (44%) than were in 2008 (18%).

Hat tip to Mz. de Rugy over at the Corner.

A picture speaks…

Megan McCardle discusses the inherent problem of public pension politics, and her argument should remind you of a certain scholar of interest group politics (hint: his name starts with an “M” and ends with ” ancur Olson.”).

I’d guess that broad public sentiment runs in favor of cutting the pensions. But the most motivated sentiment belongs to the pensioners.

Which, given what we know about how interest group politics works (and particularly what ole E.E. had to say about the bias towards small, motivated homogenous groups versus large, diffuse and heterogenous groups), tells us that policy is likely to be skewed towards pensioners rather than the regulation-favoring mass public. Consequently, limiting public pensions is unlikely to be on the public agenda anytime soon in a meaningful way.

Identified by the smart fellows over at VC, how not to write a law school exam answer. The reccomendation here actually is pretty helpful with any essay answer to a an essay question.