The Monkey Cage

Math, Senate Style

by Sarah Binder on March 13, 2012 · 0 comments

in Judicial,Legislative Politics,Senate procedure

Just in time for tomorrow’s celebration of Pi Day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has given the Senate its own special math problem.  Reid filed cloture motions yesterday on 17 nominees to the U.S. District Courts currently pending on the Senate’s Executive Calendar.  If Democrats secure sixty votes on each cloture vote, the Senate would be facing 510 (17×30) hours of “post-cloture” debate before reaching final confirmation votes on each of the nominees.  For a chamber that often starts the day with Morning Business at 2 pm, this could be a really long month for the most deliberative body in the world.  (Fortunately, the Senate doesn’t have much else on its plate this year.)

Reid is unlikely to secure sixty votes on each of the nominees, and it’s still possible that Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky)  reach an agreement to guarantee confirmation votes for a small handful of the pending nominees (although that might require a commitment from the president not to make any more contentious recess appointments).  Regardless of the immediate outcome, Reid’s move is noteworthy because it shines a light on a new feature of advice and consent: the spread of partisan conflict to the Senate’s consideration of federal trial court nominees.  For most of the Senate’s postwar history, nominees for vacancies on the district court have been immune from the ever-rising partisan heat over advice and consent for judicial nominations.  No longer.  Some recent Senates have shown only a bare difference in confirmation rates between appellate and trial court nominees:

This sea change has not gone unnoticed in the Senate, as Democrats have bemoaned Republicans’ more aggressive tactics against trial court nominees.  In their excellent piece on Obama’s judicial appointments in Judicature last spring, Sheldon Goldman, Elliot Slotnick, and Sara Schiavoni spoke with staff on both sides of the aisle about the increased scrutiny of trial court nominees.  One Democratic aide worried that:

They have approached district court nominees with the same exacting inquiry standards that used to be reserved for the Supreme Court and for controversial circuit court nominees, not even all circuit court nominees. But now it extends to every lifetime appointment….It used to be that district court nominees, unless quite extreme, quite unusual, were accorded a different path forward. And now, that’s changed.

Republican staff happily owned up to the new strategy, making plain the policy consequences of giving trial court judges a free pass to the bench:

Each nominee is assessed on his or her own merits regardless of the position in the court system to which they are nominated because this is a lifetime appointment…. They [district court judges] deal with serious issues. They deal with Proposition 8, they deal with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” they deal with terrorism cases, health care, and that’s my boss’s view of it….When President Bush was in power and you didn’t want to do this and you just rubber stamped District Court nominees, that’s your problem.

In some ways, the GOP strategy is just tit for tat—retaliating against Democrats for their foot dragging over Bush’s second term trial court nominees that began in 2005.  One Republican strategist has also suggested that Obama’s relatively moderate Court of Appeals nominees—and the White House’s sluggishness in sending nominations up to the Senate—leaves relatively few appellate targets for Republicans to oppose.   So to some degree, this year’s slowdown on district court nominees—and Reid’s salient push to confirm them—is situational.  But we shouldn’t expect the heat over the district courts to go down anytime soon, as both parties now realize the policy implications of every vacant judgeship.

Lessig, Klein, and the Economist on Polarization, Spending, and Gerrymandering

by Nolan McCarty on March 13, 2012 · 3 comments

in Campaigns and elections,Legislative Politics

Larry Lessig, Ezra Klein, and an anonymous Economist writer have been debating the relative importance of campaign spending and gerrymandering on partisan polarization.   Unfortunately, the exchange is fairly heavy on conjecture and lighter on evidence.  Because these are topics on which I have written a bit, I thought I might provide a few pieces of the missing data.

• Gerrymandering is not an important cause of polarization

The most important piece of evidence for this claim is that polarization in the United States Senate follows a very similar trajectory with polarization in the House, and the Senate has not been subject to gerrymandering since the Dakotas were split in the 1890s.  While some have suggested that gerrymandering-induced House polarization generated Senate polarization, the evidence is weak that House polarization causes Senate polarization or that gerrymandering has polarized the House.

I have written extensively on that last point.  The gist of the argument against gerrymandering is that polarization in its modern incarnation is primarily a result of the difference in the way Democrats and Republicans represent otherwise similar districts.  I call this the divergence effect.  For example, the gap between Democrats and Republicans who represent 50-50 partisan districts has grown. Polarization is not the result, as the gerrymandering hypothesis would have it, of Democrats representing increasingly liberal districts and Republicans representing conservative districts.  I call such an effect sorting.  The figures below drawn from my published work illustrate this feature.  The figures plot a common measure of congressional ideology (the DW-NOMINATE score) against the district vote for the Republican presidential candidate (a commonly used proxy for district partisanship).  As one can see, the main difference between the parties in the DW-NOMINATE scale is the gap between the parties at each value of the presidential vote (the distance between the smoothing lines).  This gap reflects divergence. Second, note that between 1970s and the 2000s, the divergence between the two lines has grown markedly.   The sorting effect is not as strong.  There has been an increase in Democrats representing very liberal districts, but this has been primarily confined to urban and majority-minority districts – those that are least susceptible to the partisan gerrymandering that is alleged to have caused polarization.   As Boris Shor and I have recently documented, divergence is a much more important source of polarization than is sorting within state legislatures as well.

More directly, Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, and I conducted a very large number of simulations where we constructed congressional districts under neutral districting procedures and predicted the level of polarization for each simulation.  These simulations produce polarization as larger or larger than that we observe in the real data without recourse to gerrymandering.  Once one accounts for the divergence effect and inter-state differences, there is almost nothing left to explain.

• The association between electoral security and extremism in Congress is surprisingly weak

This fact is also consistent with the figure from 2004 above.  Note that the estimated smoothing lines are reasonably flat.  So on average Republicans from districts with a 50% Bush vote are only slightly more moderate that those with a 70% Bush vote.  Yes, Democrats representing districts with 20% Bush vote are considerably more liberal than those with 50%, but again, the 20% districts are primarily minority districts.    A more reasonable comparison is 30% versus 50% districts where the average difference is quite small.  In sum, the effects of the competitiveness or the partisan composition on a member’s ideological position pale in comparison to the effect of the member’s party.

While these data show that over all extremists are only slight beneficiaries of safer, more partisan seats, Tom Brunell and Justin Buchler provide evidence for a stronger claim that members from competitive seats do not pursue positions closer to those of their constituents than do those from less competitive seats.

• Extreme Incumbents Do Not Raise More Money from Individuals or Groups

While the patterns may have changed slightly over the past couple of cycles, my work with Poole and Rosenthal did not uncover any substantial relationship between extremity and campaign fundraising.  The figures below are from 2002 and appear in our book.  The data clearly show that members with extreme DW-NOMINATE scores suffer a slight penalty in fundraising.  Even if there is now a stronger correlation between fundraising and extremism, I note simply that Congress was plenty polarized by 2002 without fundraising being an important source of it.  Moreover, in a recent paper, Bertram Johnson (cited by Lessig in Republic, Lost) does find that extreme candidates receive a greater proportion of their funds from individuals and from small donors.  But this paper reconfirms our finding that extremism does not raise the absolute level of contributions from individuals over all.  (And this suggests further evidence that large individual contributors and interest groups appear to shun the extremists.)

Summary: Gerrymandering, polarization, and the excesses of the campaign finance systems are clearly areas of concern for reformers.  But not all bad things gotogether.

(Thanks to Steve Rogers for helping me pull this post together)

Did George W. Bush Persuade the Public on the Iraq War?

by John Sides on March 13, 2012 · 3 comments

in Public opinion,War

Ezra Klein’s new piece on presidential persuasion is stimulating a lot of debate.  I’ll have more to say.  But let me make one small point in response to Kevin Drum’s critique.  Drum writes:

I also think that Ezra doesn’t really grapple with the strongest arguments on the other side. For one thing, although there are examples of presidential offensives that failed (George Bush on Social Security privatization), there are also example of presidential offensives that succeeded (George Bush on going to war with Iraq).

Drum doesn’t cite any public opinion data.  In this case, the data fails to support his argument.  In the run-up to the beginning of the Iraq War, public support for the war did not increase.  It polarized along party lines, just as happened with Social Security privatization.  Here is a graph from Gary Jacobson’s book:

Although there was a brief rally effect right at the war’s outset, support among both Democrats and independents actually decreased in the months preceding the war.  This is not a case where presidential rhetoric successfully persuaded the public.

Mapping Public Opinion

by Henry Farrell on March 13, 2012 · 3 comments

in Data,Public opinion

David Sparks has some very nice maps of public opinion data. What’s impressive is how they combine data sparsity (which also gives us a rough and ready estimate of how the population is distributed) with information on respondents’ party ID. Via Cosma Shalizi.

Un-Submerging the State with iGov

by John Sides on March 13, 2012 · 0 comments

in Public opinion

iGov would offer citizens an easy way to track their relationship with the federal government over their lifetimes. Each citizen would have his or her own iGov account, through which the federal government would be able to present the accumulation of the benefits that a person has ever received from across the government. A single click would reveal what the government has meant in a person’s life, in the most concrete terms.

Specifically, iGov would offer all Americans the chance to see their income, taxes paid on that income and personal benefits received. Costs, meanwhile, would be reflected via a longitudinal version of the taxpayer receipt we proposed in our earlier articles. For programs harder to quantify on a per-citizen basis, like roads and education, agencies could show costs and benefits via Google maps.

From a proposal by Ethan Porter and David Kendall (shorter version; longer version).  My quick-and-dirty analysis of the tax receipt is here, with further discussion here.  As someone interested in whether factual information about politics affects political attitudes, I’d like to see what effect iGov might have.

The Phantom Tax Hike

by Larry Bartels on March 12, 2012 · 4 comments

in Blogs,Campaigns and elections,Political Economy,Public opinion

President Obama is paying a significant political price for having increased the tax burden on middle-class Americans. Fair enough—except that he hasn’t.

My latest Model Politics post focuses on disparities in perceptions of national conditions and their political implications. One of the questions in a recent YouGov survey asked whether “the tax burden on middle-class Americans has increased or decreased since Barack Obama became president?” That seems like a pretty straightforward factual question, but Americans’ answers are all over the map: more than 40% of the respondents said that taxes have increased under Obama, about 20% said that they have decreased, and almost 40% said that the tax burden has remained unchanged.

Regular Monkey Cage readers (for example, here, here, and here) will not be surprised to learn that these disparate perceptions reflect a good deal of partisan bias. More than 70% of Republicans said that the tax burden has increased since Obama became president, while fewer than 20% of Democrats agreed. But what is more striking—and more consequential politically—is that most Americans, regardless of party, are simply wrong about what has happened to the tax burden over the past three years.

The fact is that the tax burden on middle-class Americans has decreased during Obama’s presidency. More than one-third of the 2009 stimulus bill consisted of tax cuts, including expanded tax credits for workers, people with children, college students, homebuyers, and the unemployed. In 2010, Obama proposed and Congress accepted a substantial temporary reduction in the payroll tax, which was recently extended through 2012. Meanwhile, the Bush-era income tax cuts were also extended through 2012. While one might quibble about whether all of this amounts to decreasing the tax burden on middle-class Americans by “a little” or “a lot,” only 20% of the public gave either of those answers.

How consequential is the American public’s phantom tax hike? The following graph shows how support for Obama in a trial heat with Mitt Romney varies with perceptions of change in the middle-class tax burden during Obama’s time as president (ranging from -100 for “decreased a lot” to +100 for “increased a lot”). The relationship is shown separately for Democrats (including “leaners”), pure Independents, and Republicans. In each case, statistical controls are included for strength of partisan identification, political ideology, education, race, and sex.

The large dot along each line shows the average perception of the tax burden and support for Obama in the corresponding partisan group. Democrats are just to the left of the zero point, indicating that they were slightly more likely to say that the tax burden went down than that it went up. However, even they are well to the right of the -50 point on the horizontal axis, which would reflect a uniform perception that the tax burden had declined “a little.” Independents are even further to the right, on average, with Republicans still further to the right.

If Obama could convince everyone in the country that the tax burden on middle-class Americans has decreased just a little, his prospects for reelection would improve significantly. Even leaving aside the unlikely steep gain among Republicans implied by the figure, my analysis suggests that simply getting Democrats and Independents to appreciate that taxes are lower now than they were under President Bush would increase Obama’s vote share by about two percentage points.

Of course, it would be rash to count on that happening. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said,“Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.” But Americans rely on their own facts all the time, including in the voting booth.

Internet Voting: How Awesome?

by John Sides on March 12, 2012 · 0 comments

in Campaigns and elections,IT and politics

But I suspect that most political scientists start these conversations the same way: the main barrier to participation in the United States is not technological, its attitudinal.  As long as most Americans don’t find politics and elections central to their daily lives, then even the simplest, most innovative, most socially networked elections system will not result in that much of a boost in participation.

Political scientist Paul Gronke, at the Election Updates blog.

The Political Consequences of Gas Prices

by John Sides on March 12, 2012 · 7 comments

in Political Economy,Public opinion