Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • Some of the Worst Things about the Election

    There are many potentially ominous consequences of Trump’s defeat of Clinton last night. Many opponents of President-elect Trump are particularly worried about the safety and inclusion of people of color, women, and religious minorities; the GOP’s legislative agenda; and the future of U.S. foreign policy. Here is a short list of three other contenders, from the perspective of political science.

    Dynamic Information Effects

    As Przeworski argues in “Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense,” one of the key strengths of democratic elections is that they convey information. This is how strong I am. This is how strong you are. We learned this morning that the white nationalist, patriarchal vote bloc is large enough to decide an election. Heretofore, it was not clear how large that bloc was, and whether or not it could swing an election. Now it is clear that this is a winning strategy for national political office. Future candidates will be more likely to campaign in this way simply because they now know that it is a winning strategy. This his how strong I am. This is how strong you are.

    Back to the Drawing Board with Polling and Aggregates

    Until about 8:30 EST the smart money was not on following polls, but rather on following polling aggregates like 538, PredictWise, Votamatic, Princeton Election Consortium, and others. There will be postmortems about which one of these was best, and the instinct is to defend 538 because it only gave Clinton a 71% chance of winning vis-a-vis others in the 80 – 99% range, but if you conclude anything other than they were all fatally flawed you have not drawn the right inference. The reason why they were all fatally flawed is that they all drew on the same information: polls, sometimes augmented by a “fundamentals” model (Votamatic), sometimes with prediction markets (PredictWise). It is a clear instance of Garbage In, Garbage Out.

    Here is what is more worrisome. Future aggregates for future elections by sites like 538 are going to use historical performance (i.e., prediction error today) to weight or “adjust” future polls. It is possible that some polls were more accurate than others because they had better models of turnout and voter intentions. It is also possible that all polls were just off (“correlated errors,” in the lingo), and some of these randomly happened to be less off than others. If the latter is true, then adjustments in the future will be worse than useless—they will be chasing noise. Forget polling aggregates then. The strategy now is to identify the good polls in a world in which (1) almost every one failed and (2) we don’t know why.

    Ratchet Effects and the Devastating Failure of Ground Game

    “Ground Game,” the Clinton campaign’s mobilizational capacity, get out the vote efforts, and others methods to help get voters to the polls, was supposed to be her singular advantage over Trump. It has obviously failed. Either the Democrats’ ground game was not as strong as observers believed, or it did not matter in the context of media saturation and the other advantages that Trump voters had (shorter lines, less voter suppression, more enthusiasm, whatever).

    What comes next will be efforts that counteract the kinds of advantages that ground game can bring to relatively disenfranchised voters even in the best of times. Decisions taken by state legislatures, the Congress, and a Supreme Court with new justice nominated by a president whose party holds all branches of government will further stack the deck against voters in urban areas, from poorer backgrounds, and visible minorities. These could have a ratchet effect, leading to a sharp and discontinuous decrease in the ability of mobilization to bring people to the polls who already face higher costs for voting. Such effects could be visible for a generation or more. Voting may be habit forming. So is hopelessness.

  • Race, Class, Money, Identity

    I tweeted this last night.

    What did I mean?

    I was responding narrowly to two current events. One is the upcoming U.S. election, and the contrast that I see between (a) the contemporary literature in American politics (e.g. Gilens and Page 2014, PDF) that has considered the economic policy preferences of wealthy elites as window into the functioning of American democracy (b) an election that is not about marginal tax rates but about fear, race, and identity, partisan or otherwise.

    The second event is yesterday’s Islamist demonstration in Jakarta against Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a.k.a. Ahok, an ethnic Chinese Christian leader of the capital city of the world’s largest Muslim country. It is easy to focus on the “surface” politics of Muslims acting in perceived defense of a perceived insult of Islam, but there is a “deep” politics to this as well in which Ahok’s decisive moves against squatters have made him unpopular among the city’s poor, who are now mobilizing under the banner of Islam.

    There is a parallel here. In both Indonesia and the U.S., it is possible to identity at least two interpretations of what motivates public anger. Is it money and class and the feeling of being left behind or excluded? Or is it race and identity, seen to be at risk?

    I have long viewed things through the former lens rather than the latter. I come to this view from my reading of political economy, both classical and modern, from Marx to Iannaccone. Where some might identify, say, sexism and leave it at that, I tend also to look for the division of labor and the public policies and welfare regimes that support it. Where others see Confucian or Buddhist culture, I see vested interests who construct political traditions. I am currently in the early stages of a book-length project on the political economy of identity, in which I identify the concrete material incentives and power relations that have led to the construction of a particular notion of what it means to be Malay in Malaysia. I teach my students to do this, to “think like political economists.”

    When Marx wrote (PDF) that

    Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    he was making a similar claim in his advocacy for a materialist reading of history. Not just about liberating “the people,” but also liberating the scholar and the activist. Since then, there has been an irresolvable debate (in particular among the left, but elsewhere as well) about the extent to which we ought to take identity politics seriously. This is a question about the deep structure of society, and whether beliefs and ideas about identity are fundamental causal forces, or merely a product of an even deeper structure of material interests, or class relations. If your view is to dismiss the latter view tout court—of course ideas and beliefs and race and religion matter, how could it be otherwise?—then you have not wrestled with the terms of the materialist critiques that stretch from Marxism to modern public choice. This is a reasonable debate. I cannot resolve it. You can see it right now, in the alt-left and the alt-right alike, in their joint critique of identitarianism.

    But right now, I have come to the view that beliefs and identity lie at the very core of both current events. To view race, religion, and identity more broadly as somehow analytically secondary when grasping contemporary events is to misunderstand fundamentally what is happening right now, both in the U.S. and Indonesia. So in that sense, and that sense alone, race and identity > money and class.