Archive
Adventures in Bad Chart Making
Andrew Gelman is much better at this than I am, but in light of recent events I thought I would bring the following bad chart to your attention. How many errors (factual or otherwise) can you find?
Yes, I realize that Yglasias is trying to be funny with the chart.
Your 112th Congress: Most. Polarized. Ever.
The DW-NOMINATE scores for the 112th Congress were released by VoteView yesterday (original post). The title of this post gives the punchline away, but according to the NOMINATE measure the 112th Congress was the most polarized since Reconstruction. Here’s the graph to go with it:
NOMINATE uses every vote cast during a congress to estimate the ideological positions of each member. Since membership overlaps and individual members’ ideologies do not change much over time, it is possible to compare comparing the ideology of members today with members from the past. The measure is scaled from -1 (the most liberal member) to +1 (the most conservative member). What you see above is the ideological distance between the average Republican and the average Democrat in the House and Senate over time.
Where does all that polarization come from? Mostly the Republican Party, though note that this is not anything new. The average Republican has been getting more conservative since the mid-1970′s.
Here’s VoteView’s statement:
The 112th Congress closed unceremoniously this month with a series of votes (by the House and Senate) to avert the “fiscal cliff”. With this data, we can now analyze roll call voting in the 112th Congress in its entirety and place the amount of Congressional polarization seen over the last two years in historical context. … And … this phenomenon has been asymmetric: contemporary polarization of the parties is almost entirely due to the movement of congressional Republicans to the right. Polarization is measured as the difference between the Republican and Democratic means on the first DW-NOMINATE dimension, which represents the ideological (liberal-conservative) scale.
Senate Rejects a Treaty Recognizing the Human Rights of People with Disabilities
A map of parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Parties in dark green, countries which have signed but not ratified in light green, non-members in grey. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On December 4, 2012, by a vote of 61-38 the United States Senate failed to consent to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It takes 66 votes to consent to a treaty, so at least for the time being the United States will not be a party to the latest global treaty extending international recognition of human rights.
The treaty, already signed by 155 nations and ratified by 126 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia, states that nations should strive to assure that the disabled enjoy the same rights and fundamental freedoms as their fellow citizens.
The vote was essentially partisan. Every Democratic Senator plus eight Republican Senators, including Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) who has arguably been the most important Senate Republican on foreign policy issues for decades, voted to consent to the treaty. For the record here are the 38 Senators who voted against the treaty:
Senator Cochran initially voted for the treaty, but changed his vote when it became clear that the treaty would fail.
Treaty supporters argued that the convention is based largely on the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. Negotiations for the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities were begun during President George W. Bush’s administration. It had the support of many prominent Republicans, including the first President Bush, former US Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, and one-time Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole, who watched the vote from his wheelchair parked on the Senate floor.
Those who voted against the treaty offered an interesting array of explanations for their votes. Several opponents argued that joining the treaty would make the US less sovereign in how it deal with disability rights policy. In some sense, this is true. Every time a country makes a treaty obligation it agrees to limit its sovereignty. The fact that the treaty is a UN-sponsored treaty was another objectionable point for some Senators. It is an article of faith for many conservatives that the UN is an evil institution that seeks to control the world and subvert the American way of life. This may not be a mainstream point of view, but it could be a factor in Republican primary elections when turnout is much smaller than in general elections and insurgent candidates representing the ideological extreme of the party have had considerable recent success defeating more moderate incumbents. After all, that is why Senator Lugar is leaving the Senate (and why the newly elected Senator from Indiana is a Democrat).
Opponents of the treaty also offered arguments based on what seem like narrowly tendentious interpretations of the treaty. Former Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum used his PAC to spread the fear that the treaty would give Geneva-based (that’s in Europe, so you know it’s really bad) UN bureaucrats the ability to dictate to the parents of children with disabilities how they should provide for those children. This was apparently very alarming to families that home school their children.
Abortion opponents also seized on language in the treaty guaranteeing the disabled equal rights to reproductive rights could lead to terminated pregnancies.
So what can we learn from this episode?
- The Republican party has generally repudiated the generations of internationalist foreign policy leaders who held sway from the Eisenhower administration. This Republican party internationalist tradition, which can even be traced to the 1920s and Herbert Hoover, has long been in tension with both an isolationist wing and an imperialist wing of the party. The potential power of Tea Party voters brimming with UN conspiracy theories has either driven out or silenced Republican internationalists, many of whom now find Democrats more reliable stewards of US foreign policy. They are reinforced by scholars and policy makers, often referred to as “New Sovereigntists” who fundamentally reject global governance. While foreign policy issues rarely determine national elections, the repudiation of a tradition embodied by Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Bush (both of them), Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger, Richard Lugar, and I could go on and on, will make it harder for Republicans to present themselves as reasonable potential presidents.
- President Obama and presidents who follow him will be more and more inclined to conduct diplomacy and reach agreement with other countries in ways that avoid the Senate.
- On the other hand, the inability of US presidents to deliver the Senate on practically any international treaty of consequence weakens the standing of the US in global affairs. Why, after all, should US preferences be treated seriously in the negotiation of international agreements if nobody believes the US will ultimately become a party to the agreement? The foundation of US foreign policy strategy since World War II has been the creation, articulation, and defense of a liberal international order based on institutions and rules that largely reflect US values and preferences. One of the most important values promoted by the US has been human rights. Even if US relative power in the world should decline, which really seems inevitable, a robust liberal international order would mean that the world would still be congenial for US interests and values. The failure to approve the Disability Convention and other agreements makes the US look like it has lost faith in the values it once asked the rest of the world to embrace. Not necessarily a death knell for the liberal international order, but not a sign of robustness either.
SMH.
Related articles
- Editorial: Treaty Rights for the Disabled (nytimes.com)
- UN disability law fails in Senate (bbc.co.uk)
- Despite Bob Dole’s Wish, Republicans Reject Disabilities Treaty (nytimes.com)
- Dysfunction and Lies: Senate Vote Beyond Shameful (themoderatevoice.com)
- U.S. Senate Rejects Treaty on the Rights of the Disabled – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
Vote by Mail and Election Results
An emerging theme from the 2012 elections is the impact of vote by mail (VBM) and other convenience voting reforms, such as provisional ballots, on the speed with which we know the results. John Wildermouth, for example, argued yesterday that the prevalence of n0-fault, permanent VBM and early voting in California means that it’s taking longer than it should to know who won on November 6. He writes:
It’s taking longer and longer to get a final count of a statewide election and the problem only is going to get worse.
The growing number of vote-by-mail ballots turned in at the polls, combined with more and more provisional ballots that need to be hand-checked, means that election night is becoming election week. Or election month.
The relationship between the use of VBM and other convenience voting reforms and the speed with which we know the results of an election is an interesting question, but it is one that we do not have a lot of data on at this point.
As the following graph shows, voters in California’s counties vary in their use of VBM. The graph shows the percentage of voters casting their ballot through the mail in the June 2012 election. I did a quick and dirty analysis exploiting this variation to see if there is a relationship between the prevalence of VBM in a county and whether or not we know its results by now. If greater VBM usage leads to less certainty about the election outcomes, then counties at the top of the chart should be done with their counts while counties at the bottom should still be counting. The analysis calls into question this emerging theme.
There are two dependent variables for the analysis: First, has a county sent in its county canvass complete (CCC) numbers to the state, thereby signaling it has counted all its ballots? Second, and conversely, has a county still just reported its final election night update (FENU)? The data for county reporting status come from here. Since these are binary outcomes (yes or no), logistic regression is appropriate here.
I use three independent variables in each model: (1) The percentage of VBM ballots in a county in the June 2012 election, (2) the total number of registered voters in a county, and (3) the total number of ballots cast in the county. I use the prevalence of VBM in a county from the June election as the numbers are not yet available for the November election. VBM usage is generally higher in the June election, however, so it should give us a good idea of how many people were likely to use VBM.
The results (shown in Table 1) are suggestive of a relationship but not encouraging for the VBM causes delay hypothesis. The coefficient for the percentage of voters using VBM in the CCC status model is -0.052 with a z of -0.97 (p=0.334). While the estimated effect is negative, meaning that the greater the percentage of VBM ballots the less likely it is a county will have moved to CCC status, given the z-score we cannot conclude that the results is due to anything other than random chance. The coefficient for the percent VBM in the FENU model is 0.023 with a z of 0.89 (p=0.373). Again, the estimated effect is in the right direction–greater VBM usage leads to a higher likelihood of a county still being in FENU status–but the z-score is too small to let us conclude the relationship is real. Substantively the signs are in the right direction, but statistically we can’t say there is a relationship on the basis of these results.
Caveats: (1) The data are for this year only. There may a change due to VBM over time. (2) The data are for California only. There may be differences due to VBM across states. (3) The data are only to date. There may be differences due to VBM that emerge once all of the counties have reported their final counts.
So, How Did the Minor Party and No Preference Candidates Do?
One consequence of Proposition 14 is that there were almost no legislative contests this year featuring minor-party candidates. As I previously argued, Proposition 14 combined with the legislature’s increase in filing fees essentially ended the idea of a third-party candidacy in California. As a result, just three minor-party candidates (all from the Peace and Freedom Party) and five No Party Preference (NPP) candidates appeared on the November ballot.
How did these eight candidates do against their major-party opposition? With two notable exceptions (discussed below), they performed as well as past candidates in similar situations– i.e., not well at all. Over the last five election cycles, there have been 31 contests where a major-party candidate (Democratic or Republican) faced just one independent or minor-party candidate. In every case, the major-party candidate won, usually by a lot. The following table shows the average vote share for the major-party candidate in these contests:
The average vote share for major-party candidates was a little lower in 2012 than in prior years. Whereas the average winning vote share was about 80% previously, in 2012 these candidates still averaged just 75% of the vote across the eight contests.
The following figure shows the average vote share for each of these 31 candidates by election cycle. The large standard deviations for 2008 and 2012 in Table 1 are the result of three contests, all against independent or NPP candidates. In 2008, Abel Maldonado (R), who was instrumental in giving California Proposition 14, faced a strong independent challenger, Jim Fitzgerald. Maldonado won with 63% of the vote. This year, Henry Waxman (D) beat Bill Bloomfield (NPP) with just 53% of the vote. Also in 2012, incumbent Democratic Assemblyman James Paul Fong beat Chad Walsh (NPP) with 62% of the vote. Pull these three contests out, and 2008 and 2012 look just like 2006 in Table 1.
So, to sum up. Did independents (NPP) and minor-party candidates do any better under the top two system than under California’s previous system? Not really. The Fong and Waxman contests are worth some additional exploration in this regard, but even with these contests the major party candidates won by quite a lot on average.
Update [11/16]: The above graph doesn’t appropriately convey the futility of candidates running against otherwise unopposed major-party candidates. Here’s another take:
Gay Marriage and the Supreme Court – How Will it Decide the Issue?
In my last blog, I discussed the question of whether the Supreme Court is more likely to grant certiorari to the various DOMA petitions that raise same sex marriage issues in relation to the distribution of federal benefits or to grant review to the Prop. 8 case that raises the substantive question of whether gay marriage is protected under the Constitution. The Court will meet in conference to review the gay rights petitions on November 20, and the electoral victories for gay marriage laws in Maine and Maryland will only elevate the prominence of the issue for the justices (Liptak 2012). Assuming the Supreme Court does grant cert to California’s Prop. 8 case, a more compelling question, at least from my perspective, is how the Supreme Court might rule on the substantive issue of gay marriage. In a couple of articles, Denniston suggests that the Court may end up simply deciding the case on the same narrow grounds as the Ninth Circuit Court did, namely that a state cannot take away a Constitutional right of homosexuals to marry once the Supreme Court had already recognized that right under the state Constitution (Denniston 2012a, Denniston 2012b). Although this outcome may indeed occur, judicial scholars and court watchers would be far more interested in trying to predict how the Supreme Court Justices would resolve the substantive question at hand: Do same sex couples have a Constitutional right to marry?
The attitudinal model of judicial behavior provides a method for answering this question. Over the past fifty years, the attitudinal model has dominated judicial scholarship in the United States as the leading explanation for how justices vote in specific cases. Indeed this model of judicial decision-making has gained such prominence, that in one of my articles I suggest that it has generated a “cottage industry of work assessing the validity of the attitudinal model across a wide range of … courts” (Wetstein and Ostberg 2005). Advocates of this theory, like Jeffrey Segal and Harold Spaeth (1993, 2002), argue that justices come to the Supreme Court with certain attitudes and values about various political, social, and economic issues. These attitudes and values, in turn, necessarily influence how they vote in specific cases across a wide spectrum of issues. These attitudes and values that the justice bring to the Court play the most important role in explaining judicial decision-making. Scholars, like Segal and Spaeth argue the values of a Supreme Court justice have a more pivotal role in determining how they vote than precedents, small group interaction, or whether they adhere to a philosophy of judicial activism or self-restraint. What this boils down to is that conservative justices vote conservatively and liberal justices vote liberally across a broad range of issues.
You might be saying to yourself — well of course this is true, but scholars are always looking for evidence to back up the theories they advocate. The Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), provides one of the best examples of attitudinal decision-making on the modern high Court, where the five most conservative justices ruled in favor of the Bush position on the recount of votes in Florida while the four most liberal justices sided with Gore’s position. Although they believe that attitudes play a role at all judicial levels, as Segal (2006) points out “it should be at its highest at the U.S. Supreme Court level.” Attitudinal arguments hold considerable weight in the realm of political science because these scholars have managed to show across hundreds of empirical studies the veracity of this claim.
If we apply this approach to the Prop. 8 issue, we find that the current Court is equally split 4 to 4 down liberal and conservative lines, with Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas found at the conservative end of the liberal-conservative spectrum, and Justice Breyer, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Kagan anchoring the liberal end. Ironically, the justice who is found in the middle on many Constitutional issues that wind their way to the Roberts Court is Justice Kennedy, who taught at Pacific McGeorge for over thirty years. For example, in the first term of the Roberts Court, Justice Kennedy joined the majority in 24 cases decided by a 5-4 margin, the most of any justice (SCOTUSblog). As in many other Constitutional cases, judicial scholars and lawyers alike believe he holds the pivotal vote in the gay marriage debate. Indeed, his vote is considered so important, that Theodore Olson and David Boies, who started the Prop. 8 lawsuit, carefully constructed their arguments in the case with Justice Kennedy in mind in the event this case actually reached the Supreme Court (Socarides 2012).
To understand how Justice Kennedy might decide the Prop. 8 issue one might turn to the stances he has taken in his prior rulings in the gay rights area for some evidence, especially those at the Supreme Court level. In 1980, when Justice Kennedy was on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, he joined the majority in upholding a policy that allowed the military to discharge homosexuals because of the additional security demands that must be maintained and enforced in the military context, but he acknowledged that in other situations such a policy might not be warranted (Beller v. Middendorf, 632 F.2d. 1388 (1980, 9th Cir.)). His stance on gay rights became more evident once he joined the Supreme Court, and is most readily found in his precedent setting ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (156 L. Ed. 2d. 508 (2003)). In that case, the Court struck down a Texas law criminalizing homosexual sodomy between consenting adults as a violation of their liberty interest under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority claimed, “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions” (Lawrence v. Texas, 156 L. Ed. 2d 508, at 562). This ruling overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), an earlier Rehnquist Court ruling which upheld a similar Georgia statute, and also underscored Justice Kennedy’s personal liberty and human dignity jurisprudence.
Justice Kennedy also demonstrated the ideals of personal and political liberty in his earlier majority opinion in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), where the Court struck down a voter adopted amendment to the Colorado Constitution that prevented state and local government from creating ordinances and statutes that barred homosexual discrimination. According to Justice Kennedy, this amendment must be struck down because it identified, isolated, and treated one group of citizens differently from all other citizens, and thus violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. At one point he stated, “Homosexuals, by state decree, are put in a solitary class with respect to transactions and relations in both the private and governmental spheres. The amendment withdraws from homosexuals, but not others, specific legal protections from the injuries caused by discrimination, and it forbid reinstatement of these laws and policies” (Ducat 2009, 1316). Taken together, Justice Kennedy’s prior rulings indicate that if the Court were to agree to hear the Prop. 8 case during the 2012 term, and decide the issue on its merits, the Supreme Court would probably hand down a 5-4 ruling in favor of same sex marriage. Such a decision would place the Court and Justice Kennedy on the “right” side of history as public opinion shifts increasingly toward support for gay marriage. This shift in public opinion is evident in the voter sentiment last week supporting gay rights in Maine and Maryland.
Despite this prediction, one must keep in mind that it is not easy to predict how the middle justice on the Supreme Court, in this case Justice Kennedy, will vote in a given dispute or issue area. This points to one of the limitations of the attitudinal model. Although scholarship has found that it is easy to predict the judicial voting behavior of judicial ideologues, or those that are found at the extreme end of the liberal-conservative spectrum, it is much harder for attitudinalists to predict how more pragmatic, centrist justices will rule on a controversial constitutional issue. Despite this underlying flaw in the attitudinal approach, the model provides one of the most powerful explanations for judicial decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court to date.
Works Cited
Beller v. Middendorf, 632 F.2d. 1388 (1980, 9th Cir.).
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).
Denniston, L. (2012a, August 22). Gay marriage cases: Now up to seven. Retrieved August 27, 2012, from SCOTUSblog: http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/08/gay-marriage-cases-now-up-to-seven.
Denniston, L. (2012b, August 10). Judge: No right to same-sex marriage. Retrieved August 27, 2012, from SCOTUSblog: http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/08/judge-blocks-same-sex-marriages.
Ducat, Craig R. 2012. Constitutional Interpretation, Ninth Edition. Boston: Wadsworth-Cengage.
Lawrence v. Texas, 156 L. Ed. 2d 508 (2003).
Liptak, Adam. 2012. States’ votes for gay marriage are timely, with justices ready to weigh cases. New York Times, November 8, 2012, P7.
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996).
SCOTUSblog. 2012. Statistics. Retrieved October 1, 2012 from SCOTUSblog: http://www.scotusblog.com/statistics.
Segal, Jeffrey A. 2006. The Attitudinal Model. Retrieved August 31, 2012, from Empirical Legal Studies Blog: http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2006/07/the_attitudinal.html.
Segal, Jeffrey A., and Harold J. Spaeth. 1993. The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
______. 2002. The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Socarides, Richard. 2012. Gay Marriage Battle Heads for the Supreme Court. Retrieved September 3, 2012 from Newyorker.com: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/06/gay-marriage-battle-surpeme-court.
Wetstein, Matthew E., and C.L. Ostberg. 2005. “Strategic Leadership and Political change on the Canadian Supreme Court: Analyzing the Transition to Chief Justice.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 38 (3): 653-73.
Did Outside Money Matter in House Races?
In our local congressional contest, Jerry McNerney’s campaign was not only out raised and out spent by Ricky Gill’s campaign (at least through the third quarter), but Republican aligned outside groups also spent far more money on behave of Gill than Democratic aligned groups spent on behalf of McNerney. The Center for Responsive Politics data show a nearly 5:1 advantage for Gill in outside spending. (Outside groups spent $4.80 on behalf of Gill for every $1 spent on behalf of McNerney.) Despite this imbalance, Gill lost.
What about other House contests? Did outside spending make a difference across the country? In a word, no. The result we saw here, according to an analysis by Lee Drutman, Alexander Furnas, Amy Cesal and Alex Engler at the Sunlight Foundation, was repeated in House races across the country.
They write:
One of the emerging post-campaign narratives is that all the outside money (more than $1.3 billion) that poured into the 2012 election didn’t buy much in the way of victories. And as we dig through the results in detail (our extensive data visualizations and analysis are below), the story holds up: we can find no statistically observable relationship between the outside spending and the likelihood of victory.
The kicker in the analysis is this chart:
The vertical axis is the Republican’s vote share. The horizontal axis is the Republican’s advantage in outside spending. Can you spot a relationship? I can’t.
So why didn’t outside spending matter much in 2012? Drutman and his colleagues offer a handful of explanations:
- National factors were more important.
- Outside spending produced a backlash.
- Money has diminishing marginal returns.
- Outside spending is more about offense.
- Candidate spending matters more.
I’m not sure which of these I agree with most. What about you?
[h/t the Monkey Cage]
More on McNerney v. Gill
In a previous post, I argued that Ricky Gill’s campaign made a strategic error in defining him as the San Joaquin candidate. (Here’s what I mean by that.) The argument got some blowback from Gill’s campaign consultant in the comments and Mike Fitzgerald at the Record. Since, admittedly, I oversold the argument in my first post I want to provide some context and elaborate on it a little more here.
It was always going to be hard for Ricky Gill to win his contest against Jerry McNerney. There were three primary strategic challenges facing Gill at the start of the contest:
1) Jerry McNerney was the incumbent. The maps below show McNerney’s old district (CD-11) and his new district (CD-9). Although the two differ in important ways, including the fact that McNerney’s old residence is not in CD-9, most of the new district overlaps the old one. Most voters in the new CD-9 previously saw McNerney’s name on their ballots.
McNerney’s old district, CD-11
McNerney’s new district (CD-9)
bklunk
citypolitics
costberg
darisylvester
irasia
Jeff Becker
Prof. Keith Smith
sgsample3195
y2katpacific
Recent Comments