Category: Politics

The New Yorker magazine a couple months ago had an article about what political science can tell us about politics.  Turns out, for people interested in voter turnout, it can tell us quite a bit.  The classic study is called The American Voter, reissued every couple years since its original publication in 1960.  It’s a must-have for every grad student who studies American politics and every political consultant.  I bet Karl Rove has a dog-eared copy by his bedside.  I don’t study American politics, so I don’t really know anything more than most of the rest of you do about this election.  I’m particularly bad at elections.  Whenever I try to think about voting, I keep coming across the question of why anyone would ever vote.  The probability that your vote actually is the decisive vote is so small, and the opportunity cost is so high.  But nevertheless, we vote.

Despite my own ignorance, I do happen to know several students of American politics of varying ideological persuasions, and I have been fortunate to receive emails from a bunch of them regarding the recent election, and what we do and do not know about it.  There has been some discussion about whether or not Bush’s electoral victory can be attributed to the existence of anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in 11 of the states.  This seems to have been a big idea among various liberal groups who seem to believe that homophobic red-staters carried Bush to victory.  Several of them raised the point that if this were true, then you’d expect the change in Bush’s percentage of the two-party vote from 2000 to 2004 to be higher in states with the ballot initiative than in other states.  This is not the case.  In fact, Bush experienced, on average, a bigger vote rise in states without the ballot initiative, although the statistical significance of this change is probably  low.  What this means practically, for all you liberals out there fussing about anti-gay marriage amendments, is that you need to look a little harder to find out why Kerry was less popular than Bush.  More precisely, another friend has noted, this does not mean that anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were not the reason that Bush fared so well, because indeed Bush may have gained a ton of votes for this reason and lost a ton of votes (but not so many) for some other reason like the economy.  This case may become more plausible when you take into account that turnout increased 1.4% since 2000 in non-initiative states, but increased 6.14% since 2000 in states with the initiative. All that this means is that liberals should not fall into the trap that David Brooks has pointed out of trying to find some simplistic scapegoat for why the Democratic Party did relatively more poorly this election than last time.  It’s very easy to blame someone you think you can feel morally superior to–remember, as Brooks does, "Willie Horton-bashing racists"–and ignore what the true reasons for electoral defeat are.

The other subject, which has had less discussion but which I believe to be fairly important, is why the exit polls were so wrong.  A friend who has an ear to the American Association of Public Opinion Research has reported that the short answer is that no one really knows, but they really want to know why.  Another friend has raised the point that disparities may arise even if the exit polls are unbiased because people vote at different times in the day.  The 2pm polls measured people who tend to vote early in the day, which include both women voters and so-called "angry voters," the former of which have been proven, and the latter of which are believed, to vote earlier in the day.

So, the answer to the question of what political science tells us is not so much that is not available to anyone else in this case, but political scientists are good for synthesizing information and pointing out what is wrong with other arguments.

From what we can tell, it looks like W has won with a fairly overwhelming popular mandate, if not quite an overwhelming electoral victory. This, of course, was not the outcome we had hoped for. Like everyone else who has a blog, we are going to blog about it.

First, I think that we’re going to find two kinds of reactions from the pundits. The first is the reaction from the Republican camp, which will argue that Americans just love W, that Americans are happy with his government, his record at home and abroad, and want four more years. The second is the likely reaction from Democrats, which is that the election campaign was run poorly, that Kerry didn’t push his message far enough or hard enough (or create one at all), or something like that.

Our view is that the former is probably right. Despite the fact that people spend a lot of money on polling and campaigning and all that jazz, when voters have a clear preference, they act on that preference. What is depressing to us is not that Bush gets to be president some more (we pretty much thought so anyway) but rather that, under this view, it is pretty clear that we simply do not have preferences that are in line with most Americans. We believe in meaningful international alliances. We believe that stem cell research should be encouraged, as should sex education. We believe that the government should stay out of our bedroom. We believe that the founding document of our nation should not be amended to include a ban on two loving individuals asking for the same rights from the state that everyone else has, and that no law should be passed to do otherwise. We believe that Gregory Mankiw’s textbook is right, not the policy that he has sponsored as a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. We believe that, indeed, no child should be left behind. We believe that creating a new bureaucracy with an apt title is itself not a solution to a problem. We believe that protectionism in the economy is a distortion that costs everyone in the long run. We believe in foreign policy accountability. We believe that the buck does not stop right below us, at the person we appointed. We believe that Islam is a religion of peace, and we acknowledge that the majority of Muslims are not Arabs. We believe that companies should have to bid on government contracts. We believe that separation of church and state is fundamental, period. We believe that companies should be accountable for their pension funds (that means you, financial services and airline industries!). We believe that Social Security should be protected. We believe that countercyclical fiscal and monetary policy should involve planning for both the good times and the bad.

Our views are not the same as the American people. The Democratic Party fielded a candidate whose preferences clearly line closer to ours than those of the incumbent Republican, and the public chose otherwise. That little snot Tucker Carlson is going to accuse that slimy creep Paul Begala of being out of touch with America. We, it seems, are too.

For all of you who watched election projections online, let us close with the only really good one, created by an economist, Ray Fair. We have not talked about it because we thought it was bad luck, because he always had Bush winning. Well, it’s too late now, so here it is.