Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Voting for Philippine Independence

    The Philippines used to be an American colony. Its main exports to the mainland–which were not subject to tariffs because, well, the Philippine islands weren’t a different country–were sugar and copra. Sugar (from sugarcane) was cheaper and of higher quality than domestically-produced sugar, which comes primarily from sugar beets. Copra is refined into coconut oil, which competed with other vegetable oils, animal oils and fats, and fish oils. In the 1930s, this especially meant cottonseed oil, which was turned into soaps. It also meant butter, because of recent innovations that meant that coconut oil could be partially hydrogenated and turned into margarine.

    Does the desire for protection from tariff-free sugar and copra imports explain the decision to grant the Philippines independence? The point is this: get the Philippines outside of our borders, and we can impose tariffs. Let’s look at cotton, sugar beet, and milk production across the states. Let’s also throw in sugar cane and the percentage of a state’s population that is of Filipino ancestry, and then compare that to Senate votes for independence in the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 (which granted the Philippines self-government, later to become independence). You could do this with House votes on that bill too, but absent data on milk, sugar cane, etc. by congressional district, the results will not be particularly helpful.

    I’ve transformed sugar beet/cane production, cotton production, and milk production to an approximately logarithmic scale. The maps show that sugar beet and cotton production, taken together, unite most of the West with the South, and this is where most of the votes in favor of independence come from.

    Let’s look at this more formally. The dependent variable is the number of Senate votes in a state (0, 1, or 2). The independent variables are the (transformed) variables above, along with a measure of partisanship in each state’s senate delegation. I estimate an ordered logistic regression, with the results below.

    DV: Senate Votes for Philippine Independence in 1934, by State

    Variable Estimate S.E. t value
    cotton 0.3725 0.2049 1.818
    sugar beets 0.3652 0.2071 1.763
    sugar cane 6.4251 2.410e-07 2.666e+07
    milk -0.1963 0.3147 -0.6237
    filipinos 1908.9278 6.972e-04 2.738e+06
    democrat 3.0975 1.231 2.516

    These results support the idea that cotton and sugar beet lobbies mattered; not so much support for the dairy lobby. The huge, highly statistically significant coefficients on “sugar cane” and “filipinos” represent the fact that Louisiana (which produced the overwhelming majority of sugar cane) and California (which had the overwhelming majority of Filipinos) voted for independence.

    The question that this does not answer is why the U.S. did not grant independence to Puerto Rico or Hawaii at the same time. Both of these territories exported tremendous amounts of sugar to the U.S., so my argument would expect that there would be a demand to get them out of the U.S. too. There was an attempt to do so with Puerto Rico in the late 1930s (led by many of the same people), but it seems to have failed, and there was no vote on it. I’m unaware of any similar move for Hawaii.

    Any thoughts on this would be welcome. My hunch is that it has to do with the interaction of the structure of the Filipino sugar industry and the addition of copra as a main export from the Philippines. Puerto Rican and Hawaiian sugar plantations were owned mainly by Americans (contrast that to the majority indigenous Filipino sugar industry) and the other export products produced in PR and Hawaii (coffee and pineapples, respectively) did not compete with anything produced in the U.S. mainland. Input from the world’s leading authority of the expansion of the states westward in the 1800s would be most appreciated.

  • Public Behavior and Compliance: Evidence from Jury Duty

    I was summoned for jury duty today, something that’s never happened to me before. Juries are interesting to social scientists because–at least at the summons stage–they are the closest thing that you get to a random sample of the people who live in your community. Jury duty in Tompkins County gave me a good snapshot of my fellow Tompkins County residents. 60 of us showed up. Out of those 60, they picked 14 at random for voir dire (this didn’t include me). Of those 14,

    • 13 were Caucasian
    • 1 was unemployed
    • 1 was a college professor (assistant prof at Ithaca College)
    • 5 lived in Ithaca, 2 lived in Newfield, 2 in T-burg
    • 7 were men
    • 8 were obviously liberal/progressive/etc.
    • 1 was obviously conservative

    So it sounds about right. But what interested me about this was a little natural experiment that I was able to observe about public behavior and social compliance among this nice random sample of jurors.

    So, some background. First off, let’s recognize that almost everyone wants to get out of jury duty. This was clear from the very beginning: in New York State, the first thing that happens when the jury pool shows up is the judge describes the case in a sentence or so (in our case, “Plaintiff X is suing defendant Y for negligence in eye surgery.” That’s literally all we heard). Then, the potential jurors are given the opportunity to come speak privately to the judge about why they believe that they should be excused from jury duty based on the identity of the plaintiff and defendant and the nature of the case. Well, when the judge announced this, I’d say that 55/60 people got in line to get off of jury duty. (Again, this did not include me.)

    Clearly, people just didn’t want to serve on the jury. And it turns out that due to the acoustics of the place, everyone could hear the private conversations between the jury pool and the judge. Things like “I have glasses so I couldn’t rule fairly on this case” or “my son has a soccer game next week and I don’t want to miss it.” Basically, the lamest excuses that you could imagine. To his credit, the judge only excused two candidates, both of whom were current patients of the doctor who were scheduled for eye surgery.

    What I conclude from this is that people want to get out of jury duty and they will offer incredibly tendentious excuses if they think that will work.

    So then, the clerk randomly chose 14 of the 60 of us for voir dire. What this meant is that all of us had to sit there while the two lawyers grilled these 14 for four hours. These questions went pretty deep. And critically, the questions and the responses were public, and very focused on each potential juror. So the lawyer would ask, “do you believe that a plaintiff has a right to a jury trial?” and “could you put own personal experiences aside to judge this case fairly?” Of the 14 potential jurors chosen, and the hundreds of questions put to them, every answer was what I would call “socially compliant,” by which I mean the juror responded in a way that made him or her seem fair, impartial, and competent. Not a single potential juror admitted, for example, that his or her family’s history of difficult relations with doctors would cloud his or her judgment.

    So, we have the observation that the same people who five minutes previously had tried their best to get out of jury duty were adamant that they would be completely fair and impartial jurors, even though even the slightest hint of partiality or bias would get them dismissed–excusing them from jury duty–immediately.

    It’s costless to tell a lawyer that you might not be completely impartial, and in fact it would be beneficial to do so if the goal is to get out of jury duty! We know that nearly all of these folks wanted out of jury duty. Yet when asked publicly if they were able to abide by the rules of the court, not one was willing to say that s/he could not, despite the obvious incentives to do so.

    (Full disclosure, I would have told the lawyers that I would have a tough time ruling in favor of a plaintiff in a malpractice suit given how much I talk about medical malpractice with my doctor in-laws.)

    So what’s the difference? I think that the reason why potential jurors were so willing to offer bogus excuses to get out of jury duty to the judge was that doing so was private, and faced no implicit social sanction. When given the same opportunity in front of their peers and when questioned by an authority figure, they would not do so. This resonates, I think, with a long line of research that shows that people will do lots of pretty shady things when they think that no one is listening or watching, but that they are remarkably compliant to instructions when they fear some sort of sanction from their peers and/or an authority figure.