Category Archives: Politics

The Political Uses of Fear

Politics, Social psychology, War and peace, , ,
Auschwitz

This post returns to a theme I’ve discussed before: Events that evoke fear in the population, and the publicity given to those events, can cause conservative shifts in public attitudes and work to the advantage of right-wing politicians. In previous posts, I’ve reported on the effects of terrorist attacks and the spread of the Ebola virus. A new study by a group of Israeli and American psychologists headed by Daphna Canetti looks at the effect of reminders of the Holocaust on Israeli public opinion. As they point out, in spite of the passage of over 70 years, the collective trauma of the Holocaust is still a central component of Jewish identity, and Israeli politicians often refer to alleged “lessons” of the Holocaust.

In the first of four studies, a community sample of 57 Jewish Israelis was asked to complete a packet of questionnaires. They were randomly assigned to the Holocaust-salience condition or or one of two control groups. The Holocaust salience group was given this instruction:

Please think about the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust. What thoughts do you have about the Holocaust? Please briefly describe the emotions that you have when you think about the murder of six million Jews during the holocaust.

In one control group, they were asked to think about “your personal death” rather than the Holocaust. In a second control group, the Holocaust was replace by “severe physical pain.” Subsequently, participants were asked to what extent they defined themselves as Zionists, and filled out an 11-item questionnaire measuring support for military rather than diplomatic solutions to Israel’s conflict with Iran, i.e., “Israeli Defense Forces should strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

The results showed that participants in the Holocaust-salience condition showed greater support for an aggressive foreign policy than participants in either the Death or Pain conditions, and that the effect of Holocaust salience on militancy was mediated by ideological support for Zionism. That is, Holocaust salience increased endorsement of Zionism, which in turn increased support for a militant foreign policy. (Please see this previous post for an explanation of how mediation is tested.)

Experiment 2 was designed to demonstrate that thinking about the Holocaust does not inevitably increase support for warlike solutions to problems. It depends on how the Holocaust is framed. Framing refers to the way in which information is presented. It involves selecting some aspects of a situation and making them more salient. For example, people are more likely to choose to have an operation if they are told that there is a 75% chance they will live than if they are told that there is a 25% chance they will die.

In this study, participants were assigned to either the Holocaust-Jewish condition, in which the Holocaust was framed as “a crime against the Jewish people,” the Holocaust-Human condition, in which it was described as “a crime against humanity,” or the Pain control group. In addition to the previous questions, participants were asked about their willingness to compromise in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians. The results showed that only the Holocaust-Jewish frame increased support for warlike policies toward the Iranians and the Palestinians, and once again, the effect was mediated by identification with Zionism.

The final two studies attempted to bring a touch of realism to the previous laboratory experiments. On January 27, Israel celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day. At midday, a siren goes off and everyone is asked to stop whatever they’re doing and think about the Holocaust for a minute. There are also Holocaust-themed events and programs in the mass media. In Study 3, 157 participants completed a questionnaire about their participation in Holocaust Day activities. As expected, the greater their personal participation in Holocaust Remembrance Day, the greater their support for Zionism and a militant foreign policy.

It should be noted that this study does not support the claim that participation in Holocaust Remembrance Day causes pro-war attitudes. It is equally possible that more conservative Israelis participated in more Holocaust Day activities.

Study 4 was a survey of a representative sample of 867 Israeli Jews. Although the first three studies involved temporary increases in the salience of the Holocaust, the authors were also interested in long-term exposure to Holocaust imagery. Holocaust survivors and their descendants can be expected to think about the Holocaust more often than average Israelis. Therefore, they compared a Holocaust group, consisting of Holocaust survivors, or the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, to a non-Holocaust group. The second variable was personal exposure to political violence. It was measured by asking participants whether they had suffered an injury to themselves, a family member or a friend as a result of a rocket or terror attack, or whether they had personally witnessed a terror attack or its immediate aftermath.

Neither Holocaust survival nor personal exposure to terrorism alone predicted attitudes toward war and peace, but those respondents who were both from Holocaust survivor families and had personal experience with political violence held Zionist attitudes, were more politically militant and were less willing to compromise for peace. The authors concluded that both short-term and long-term exposure to Holocaust imagery encouraged Israeli citizens to generalize from the Holocaust to Israel’s current conflicts with its neighbors, and to support aggressive military solutions to those conflicts.

It would be presumptuous of me to suggest what lessons Israelis should take from the Holocaust. However, it is not obvious that the only conclusion that follows from the Holocaust is that they should refuse to negotiate with their adversaries, or that they should engage in preemptive attacks on them. War crimes can sometimes be prevented by making peace.

In October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech that Adolf Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews, but that the idea had been personally suggested to him by a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. His comments were denounced by Israeli historians as a lie and a disgrace, but, given his current political stance, it’s easy to see why Netanyahu would want to encourage such a belief. If Canetti’s studies are widely publicized by the Israeli media, Israelis can be forewarned about the cynical misuse of Holocaust imagery for political advantage.

You may also be interested in reading:

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections?

Deep Background

Who Speaks for the Nones?

Politics, Religion

As the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians declines, the number of Christians in Congress continues to hold steady. In the new 115th Congress, 91% identify themselves as Christians, according to new research by the Pew Research Center. This is the same as the last Congress, and not much different from the 95% of Christians in 1960-61, the earliest years from which data are available.

Among 293 Republicans, 291 are Christians and 2 are Jews. The 242 Democrats are slightly more diverse, with 194 (80%) Christians, 28 Jews, three Buddhists, three Hindus, two Muslims, one Unitarian and one who is religiously unaffiliated (Arizona’s Rep. Kyrsten Sinema). There were also ten Democrats who declined to answer.

Protestants, Catholics and Jews are all overrepresented in Congress, compared to their percentage of the population. The only major group that is underrepresented is the “nones”—the religiously affiliated. As previously reported here, the nones went from 16% of the population in 2007 to 23% in 2014, while the number of Christians dropped from 78% to 71%. In Congress, 91% of members are Christians and .2% are nones, unless some of those ten Democrats who refused to answer are trying to hide their lack of religiosity.

It is likely that the same forces that result in minority rule by rural, small state Republicans—structural biases in the composition of the House, the Senate and the electoral college—also account for the overrepresentation of Christians.

In addition their differences on obvious culture war issues such abortion and gay rights, Christians are less likely than the religiously unaffiliated to favor government assistance for the poor and less likely to favor environmental protection. They are more likely to say that peace is best assured through military strength. In addition, religious people are more likely to be racially prejudiced.

You may also be interested in reading:

And Then There Were Nones

More Bad News for Religion

Why the Minority Rules

So Far, It Looks Like It Was the Racism

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology, , , ,

One question has dominated the conversation among political scientists attempting to explain the presidential election: Were Trump’s supporters motivated primarily by economic anxiety or racial resentment? So far, I’ve avoided weighing in on this question, hoping that the definitive study would appear. It hasn’t yet, but a new experiment by Michael Tesler is interesting enough to warrant giving you a progress report.

The corporate media narrative clearly favors the economic explanation. In a typical article, we are told (correctly) that the family incomes of working class families have been stagnant for 35 years, that trade agreements and the 2008 recession have caused widespread unemployment and underemployment, and that both political parties have ignored the plight of these Americans. This is followed by interviews with a couple of Trump supporters who express pain and anger over the way they have been treated. However, this is anecdotal evidence. The answers given by Trump supporters are partially driven by the questions they are asked. For the media, framing the election in terms of economic anxiety rather than racism avoids offending Trump and his supporters.

Much of the evidence available prior to the election failed to support the economic anxiety narrative. Surveys showed that racial attitudes predicted Trump support better than economic attitudes—for example, these two, and this one. This large sample Gallup poll also cast doubt on the economic explanation. The median household income of a Trump supporter in the primaries was $72,000, higher than the median income of Clinton supporters ($61,000) and the general population ($56,000). In addition, post-election analyses showed that Clinton received more votes in economically-distressed communities—those with a higher percentage of their population below the poverty line.

Michael Tesler has been studying the racialization of politics for over a decade. Racialization refers to the tendency of racial attitudes to influence opinions toward a variety of other issues not obviously related to race, such as health care or gay marriage. Tesler embedded an experiment within a YouGov/Huffington Post national survey of 1000 voters conducted on December 6 and 7. Half the participants were asked if they agreed with the following statement:

Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve.

Ths is an item from the Symbolic Racism Scale, which is used to measure racial resentment. The remaining respondents were presented with this statement.

Over the past few years, average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.

Most people assume an “average American” is White. In 2005, Devos and Banaji conducted a series of five studies showing that the category “American” is more strongly associated with the category “White” than either “African-American” or “Asian-American.” Based on this evidence, Tesler assumed that respondents would interpret the second statement as referring to Whites. He then compared the responses of people who reported that they had voted for Clinton and Trump to these two questions.

This study pits the economic anxiety and racial resentment explanations against one another. Would Trump voters be more likely than Clinton voters to agree that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve? Or would differences emerge only when the question referred to Black Americans?

The results on the left show a typical racial divide between Black and White respondents. White participants were more than twice as likely to think that average Americans had gotten less than they deserve than to think that Blacks had gotten less than they deserve. Black participants thought everyone had gotten less than they deserve. Since there were more White than Black participants, the averages for the full sample resembled those of Whites.

The data on the right address the research question. Clinton voters were almost as likely (57%) to say that average Americans have gotten less than they deserve as Trump voters (64%). Since this was a large sample, this 7% difference is probably statistically significant, but it is small in comparison to the difference on the racial resentment item. Only 12% of Trump supporters agreed that Blacks had gotten less than they deserved, compared to 57% of Clinton supporters—a difference of 45%. The data are more consistent with the racial resentment interpretation of Trump’s victory.

Tesler frames the responses of Trump supporters as an example of the ultimate attribution error. Attribution is the processes by which we infer the causes of behavior. The ultimate attribution error is the tendency to take personal credit for our own successful behavior and that of our in-group, and blaming our failures on environmental obstacles, while at the same time blaming members of out-groups for their failures, and attributing their successes to unfair advantages. Given this bias, it follows that Whites have gotten less than they deserve, while Blacks have gotten more.

Were the election results caused by economic anxiety or racism?  We still await a more definitive study. It will require a larger sample of voters and a valid measure of economic anxiety, with statistical controls for other variables known to influence voting decisions. If I see such a study, I’ll let you know.

You may also be interested in reading:

Trump’s Trump Card

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Framing the Debates

Did Ebola Influence the 2014 Elections?

Media, Politics, Social psychology, , ,

Republicans did very well on Election Day 2014, gaining control of the Senate for the first time in eight years and increasing their majority in the House of Representatives. Most pundits attributed these results to low turnout by Democrats in a non-presidential election year and to President Obama’s poor approval ratings, due primarily to the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act earlier that year. But a recent paper by Alec Beall and two other psychologists at the University of British Columbia suggests that breaking news about the Ebola epidemic also played a significant role in the election outcome.

Their paper contains two studies, both of which are interrupted time series designs. In this design, data that are routinely collected are examined to see if they change after a specific event. In the first study, they analyzed the aggregate results of all polls conducted between September 1 and November 1, 2014 that asked respondents whether they intended to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in their upcoming House election. The “interruption” occurred when Center for Disease Control announced the first Ebola case in the U. S. on September 30. The research question was whether the poll results changed from before to after that date.

The above results show support for the Republican candidate minus support for the Democratic candidate in the month and the week before and after the Ebola story broke. In both cases, the temporal trends were significantly different from before to after September 30. The before and after lines had different slopes, and the shift was in favor of the Republican candidates. The authors also collected data from Google on the daily search volume for the term “Ebola,” and found that it too was positively related to Republican voting intentions.

Beall and his colleagues examined two possible alternative explanations—concern about terrorism and the economy. They measured daily search volume for the term “ISIS,” and checked the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which was dropping at the time. Interest in ISIS was (surprisingly) negatively related to Republican voting intentions and the stock market had no significant effect.

In their second study, the authors looked at the 34 Senate races. They computed 34 state-specific polling averages by subtracting Democratic voting intentions from Republican intentions. Then they subtracted the September results from the October results. Thus, a higher number would indicate a shift toward the Republican candidate. The aggregate results showed a significant increase in Republican voting intentions after September 30.

However, not all states shifted in the same direction. Using Cook’s Partisan Voter Index, they determined whether each state had voted more for Republicans or Democrats in recent years. Then they analyzed the data separately for “red” and “blue” states. The results are shown below.

The changes were in the direction of the state’s dominant political party. In the red states, the Republican candidate did better after September 30. In the blue states, the Ebola scare seemed to help the Democrat, although the effect was smaller. This could also be interpreted as a shift toward the favorite, since candidates who were leading before September 30 tended to do even better after that date.

This study is part of a small but increasing body of research which shows that external threats that cause fear in the population seem to work to the advantage of conservative political candidates. In a previous post, I reported on a British study which indicated that the 2005 London bombings increased prejudice toward Muslims. More to the point is a 2004 study in which reminding participants of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center increased support for President George W. Bush in his campaign against John Kerry. These studies are consistent with older research suggesting that social threats are associated with an increase in authoritarianism in the U. S. population. Authoritarian attitudes are characterized by obedience to authority, hostility toward minority groups and a high degree of conformity to social norms.

Surprisingly, Beall and his colleagues did not mention terror management theory as a way of understanding their results. According to this theory, human awareness of the inevitability of death—called mortality salience—creates existential terror and the need to manage this terror. One way people manage terror is through defensive efforts to validate their own cultural world views—those attitudes that give their lives meaning and purpose. Previous research suggests that mortality salience results primarily in conservative shifts in attitudes, including support for harsher punishment for moral transgressors, increased attachment to charismatic leaders, and increases in religiosity and patriotism. (A charismatic leader is one whose influence depends on citizen identification with the leader or the nation-state, as in “Make America great again.”) The Bush v. Kerry study mentioned in the preceding paragraph was intended to be a test of terror management theory.

One of the effects of saturation coverage of the Ebola epidemic was to remind people of the possibility of their own death and that of loved ones. The results of the 2014 House elections are consistent with a terror management interpretation. The Senate results do not contradict the theory, since there was an overall shift in favor of Republican candidates, but they add an additional detail. In states that usually voted Democratic, the Ebola scare increased support for Democrats. If mortality salience causes people to reaffirm their cultural world views, this could have produced a shift toward liberalism in states in which the majority of citizens held progressive attitudes.

Research findings such as these suggest the possibility that political parties and the corporate media might strategically exaggerate threats in order to influence the outcomes of elections. Willer found that government-issued terror alerts between 2001 and 2004 were associated with stronger approval ratings of President Bush. Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security at the time, later admitted that he was pressured by the White House to increase the threat level before the 2004 election. Since that time, it has become routine for Republicans to emphasize threats to the public’s well-being more than Democrats, and evidence from the 2016 presidential debates suggests that the media gave greater attention to Republican issues.

Republicans made Ebola an issue in the 2014 election, claiming that President Obama was failing to adequately protect public health and arguing that he should close the borders and not allow Americans suffering from the virus back into the country for treatment. In retrospect, news coverage of the threat of Ebola appears to have created unnecessary panic. Analysis of the motives of the media decision makers is complicated by the knowledge that they also exaggerate threats because they believe that increasing public fear leads to higher ratings. Media Matters for America presented data showing that coverage of Ebola plummeted immediately after the 2014 election was over (see below). However, I know of no “smoking gun” showing that the corporate media deliberately created panic in order to help Republican candidates.

You may also be interested in reading:

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Framing the Debates

Trump’s Trump Card

Bullshit: A Footnote

Cognitive psychology, Media, Politics, ,

A year ago, I wrote a short piece entitled “Bullshit,” about research using Gordon Pennycook’s Bullshit Receptivity Scale (BSR). The BSR measures willingness to see as profound ten syntactically correct but meaningless statements, such as “Imagination is inside exponential space time events.” The scale also includes ten mundane but meaningful statements (“A wet person does not fear the rain”) to correct for the tendency to rate every statement as profound. Pennycook defines bullshit sensitivity as the difference between the ratings of the ten pseudo-profound bullshit statements and the ten mundane statements.

In January 2016, two German psychologists, Stefan Pfattheicher and Simon Schindler, asked 196 American volunteers recruited on the internet to complete the BSR. Participants also rated, on 5-point scales, their favorability toward six American presidential candidates: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders. Finally, they rated themselves on a 7-point scale of liberalism-conservatism.

Above are the correlations between scores on the BSR and the political attitude measures. The darker yellow bars are the most important, since they are the correlations with bullshit sensitivity, which control for agreement with the mundane statements. Favorable ratings of the three Republican candidates and of conservatism were all positively related to bullshit receptivity. In other words, conservatives appear to be more easily impressed by bullshit. Democratic partisans, on the other hand, were not as susceptible to bullshit.

These are correlations. They do not mean that conservatism causes bullshit receptivity, or vice versa. However, they do suggest that conservatives may be more likely to accept statements as profound without thinking carefully about what they actually mean.

The Need For Cognition Scale measures people’s tendency to engage in and enjoy critical thinking. (One of the items reads, “I only think as hard as I have to.”) In an interview, social psychologist John Jost reported the results of a not-yet-published review of 40 studies in which 25 of them found a significant tendency for conservatives to be lower in need for cognition.

To be fair, I should report that Dan Kahan, in a highly publicized study, found no differences between liberals and conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test, a measure of a person’s ability to resist seemingly obvious, but wrong, conclusions. (“If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long does it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” The answer is not 100 minutes.) However, Jost claims that 11 other studies showed that liberals outperform conservatives on the Cognitive Reflection Test.

These studies may be relevant to current concerns about Americans’ susceptibility to fake news and the possibility that we are living in a “post-truth” era. The Oxford Dictionary has chosen post-truth, defined as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” as its 2016 word of the year. Last week, a man blasted a Washington pizza shop with an assault rifle after reading a fake news story that the shop was the home of a child sex ring being run by Hillary Clinton.

The editors of BuzzFeed News analyzed 1,145 stories forwarded through Facebook but originating in three left-wing (Addicting Information, Occupy Democrats and The Other 98%), three right-wing (Eagle Rising, Freedom Daily and Right Wing News), and three mainstream (CNN, ABC and Politico) sources of political news. The fact that these stories were forwarded suggests that the person who did so was impressed by them. Two people independently rated each story as mostly true, mostly false, or a mixture of true and false statements. Differences of opinion were resolved by a third reader. The results showed more fake news at the right-wing sites.

The study is flawed. There is no assurance that the nine chosen sites are representative of all sites within the three categories, and the authors don’t say how they knew a story was true or false. Nevertheless, convergent evidence from different sources seems to points to the same conclusion: Conservatives are more willing consumers of bullshit, including fake news stories.

Most articles about fake news end with the recommendation that mainstream journalists be more aggressive in identifying false claims made by politicians and pundits. However, surveys show that conservatives are more likely than liberals to distrust mainstream news sources. Mr. Trump may have neutralized this approach by telling his followers that the mainstream media peddle bullshit—which, in fact, they sometimes do.

You may also be interested in reading:

Bullshit

Framing the Debates

Guarding the Hen House

What Does a Welfare Recipient Look Like?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, Social psychology,

Economic inequality in the United States is at record levels. In surveys, Americans say they would prefer a more equal distribution of wealth. However, the majority consistently votes against public assistance programs that redistribute wealth. Political scientist Martin Gilens, in his 1999 book Why Americans Hate Welfare, attributes this primarily to racial prejudice. Gilens examined the photographs that accompanied stories about poverty in the news magazines Time, Newsweek and U. S. News. African-Americans accounted for 62% of the poor people shown in the photos. On the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news programs, 65% of poor people shown in reports on poverty were Black. In reality, as of 2010, 32% of welfare recipients were Black, 32% were White and 30% were Hispanic.

Gilens also did an experiment in which a “welfare mother” was identified as either White or Black. Participants who read about a Black welfare recipient were more opposed to welfare than those reading of a White recipient. The implication of Gilens’ research is that White Americans’ disdain for welfare is explained in part by racial prejudice. Americans hate welfare because they overestimate the percentage of recipients who are African-Americans. However, there is a missing link in this analysis. Gilens implies, but does not show, that Americans are influenced by these misleading media reports—that is, that the average American’s mental image of a welfare recipient is a Black person.

A research team headed by Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi of the University of Kentucky sought to measure their participants’ mental representations of a typical welfare recipient using an unusual technique. I’m not sure I completely understand it without seeing a demonstration, but the image generation phase of their study goes something like this: First, they constructed a computer-generated “base face,” a composite of a Black man, a Black Woman, a White man and a White woman. Then, on each of 400 trials, the computer introduced noise which altered the base image in two opposite directions. The participants were asked to choose which of these two altered faces most resembled a welfare recipient and which one resembled a non-welfare recipient. (Race was never mentioned.) The computer then generated a composite image of a typical welfare recipient and a typical non-welfare recipient, based on all the responses of all the participants.

This was done twice, with 118 college students participating in Study 1 and 238 internet volunteers in Study 2. The composite faces from the two studies are similar and are shown below. Although the composite faces of the welfare recipients look like African-Americans, I presume this was less apparent to the participants as they made their 400 decisions.

During the second phase of these two studies, 90 different participants were shown one of the composite faces and were asked to rate the person on a number of different dimensions. No mention of welfare was made to these participants. The raters judged the welfare recipient composites as more likely to be African-American (rather than White) than the non-welfare recipient composites. The welfare recipients were also rated more negatively on 11 different traits, including lazier, more incompetent, more hostile, less likeable and less human(!). These studies fill in the missing link in Gilens’ research. The average person’s mental image of a typical welfare recipient is of an African-American.

Finally, Brown-Iannuzzi and her colleagues did a third study, an experiment in which 229 internet volunteers were shown one of the composite images—either a welfare recipient or a non-welfare recipient—and asked a number of questions. The critical items were whether they would support giving this person food stamps and cash assistance. The other questions repeated some of the ratings used in the previous studies. Here are the results. This study replicates the Gilens experiment mentioned in the second paragraph.

In summary, the first two studies showed that when asked to imagine a typical welfare recipient, people generate a mental image of an African-American, while their mental image of a non-welfare recipient is that of a White person. The third study demonstrated that when other people are shown these mental images, they were less supportive of giving welfare to the composite typical welfare recipients than the composite non-welfare recipients.

Finally, the authors did a mediational analysis to see which variables mediated between the composite images and the decision to support or not support giving welfare to that person. The data were consistent with the following causal chain (see below): The image leads first to an inference that the person is either Black or White. This, in turn, leads to a judgment of how deserving the person is. (Black people are less deserving.) Finally, the judgment of deservingness leads the decision of whether to support giving welfare to the person.

We are going through a period of extreme racialization of politics. Americans’ racial attitudes influence their opinions about other political issues that may or may not be related to race. In some cases, survey participants’ racial attitudes determine their attitude toward a policy merely because they believe President Obama does or does not support the policy. Not only do racial attitudes appear to have been the strongest predictor of support for Donald Trump, they mattered more in electing Trump than Obama.

Nowhere is racialization more evident than in attitudes toward financial relief for the poor. People support income redistribution in principle, but they overestimate the percentage of poor people who are Black. As a result, their racial prejudice discourages them from supporting income redistribution policies.

You may also be interested in reading:

Old-Fashioned Racism

The Singer, Not the Song

Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Why the Minority Rules

Politics, , ,

As Donald Trump forms a right-wing government with its sights trained on health care and workers’ rights, Americans are about to experience important policy changes they didn’t vote for and don’t want. On the morning after Election Day, Michael Moore pointed out:

You live in a country where a majority of citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position.

This year, 48% of voters belong to or lean toward the Democratic Party and 44% belong to or lean toward the Republicans. The Democratic candidate has won the popular vote for President in six of the last seven elections, but for the second time, has been denied the office. 42.5 millions Americans voted for a Democrat for the Senate in 2016, while 39.3 milllion voted for a Republican. In the House of Representatives, Republicans collected 49.7% of the votes to the Democrats’ 47.5%. Yet the Republicans will have a 52-48 advantage in the Senate and a 241-194 majority in the House. At all levels of government, Republicans typically wind up winning a percentage of elective offices that is greater than their percentage of the votes.

There are a variety of political and ideological reasons why the Republicans, the minority party for decades, do better than expected in elections, but this post will focus only on the structural reasons for minority rule. Our political system favors rural over urban areas, small states over larger ones, and conservatives over liberals, and this is by design. These structural biases have greater consequences now that rural and urban America have become more polarized.

The Senate

Of the branches of government, the Senate is the most structurally unequal. Every state gets two Senators regardless of its population. California has over 39 million residents, while Wyoming has just over 586,000, which means that a Wyoming resident’s Senate vote counts almost 67 times as much as a Californian’s. Today, states containing just 17% of the American population can theoretically elect a Senate majority. To make matters worse, even when the majority party controls the Senate, the filibuster rule requires a 60-vote majority to pass most legislation. Senators representing a very small percentage of the population can produce gridlock in the Senate.

The House of Representatives

In theory, House districts are approximately equal in population and are therefore “representative.” But there’s an exception, since every state gets at least one representative, and seven states have a smaller population than an average Congressional district—another small state advantage. There is also a built-in time lag, since redistricting occurs at the end of each decade’s census. Redistricting assumes the census is accurate, which of course it’s not. It is estimated that the census misses 2.1% of Black Americans and 1.5% of Hispanics. (Whites, not surprisingly, are overcounted.)

Two additional factors which account for most of the Republican advantage in the House.

Demography. Republican partisans are more evenly spread over the territories of most states, while Democratic partisans are concentrated in a smaller number of predominantly urban areas. This results in Democrats winning by large majorities in the districts they control, while Republicans win by smaller margins in a greater number of districts. This can be seen as unintentional gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering. Republicans control a greater number of state legislatures, especially after their victories in the 2010 (off-year, low turnout) election, and they have used this advantage to gerrymander Congressional districts. Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of district boundaries for political advantage. With the aid of computer programs, it can produce legislative districts that resemble salamanders crawling across the state map. (I live in Pennsylvania’s notorious 12th district.)

Gerrymandering is most effective when the minority party engages in “packing”—that is, concentrating the majority party members in a small number of districts. This results in many “wasted votes.” Wasted votes are either votes for the losing candidate, or votes for the winning candidate that exceed the number need to win, as when a House candidate in an urban area receives 85% of the votes.

This chart shows how gerrymandering works. In the example, 60% of the voters favor blue. But if the red party controls redistricting, by packing two of the five districts, they can produce an outcome such as the one on the right where they control 60% of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans controlled the 2010 redistricting. In 2012, Democrats received 51% of House votes, but won only 5 of 18 seats (28%).

Stephanopoulos and McGhee have proposed a mathematical formula for the efficiency gap, defined as the difference between the two parties’ wasted votes divided by the total votes cast. Ideally, it should be close to zero. When it’s not, it gives you a measure of a party’s undeserved vote share. This raises the possibility that the courts could rule that if the efficiency gap exceeds a certain percentage, the redistricting is unfair. A Wisconsin federal court recently struck down the Republicans’ 2010 redistricting, citing expert testimony about the state’s large efficiency gap.

The Electoral College

In the Electoral College, each state has a number of electors equal to its number of Senators plus Representatives—that is, a minimum of three. This produces a level of structural inequality that is intermediate between the more biased Senate and the (theoretically) less biased House. However, since the presidency is a winner-take-all event, it seems more unfair when Clinton, with 48.2% of the vote (as of this morning), loses to Trump, with 46.4%. Clinton’s large majorities in California and New York mean nothing in the Electoral College.

And it gets worse. In Wyoming there is an electoral vote for every 195,000 residents while in California there is one for every 711,000 residents. Merling and Baker point out that the states that are overrepresented are less diverse than the country as a whole. (Wyoming, for example, is 84% white; California, 38%.) Thus, the Electoral College amplifies the votes of White people. The chart below shows the underrepresentation of minorities in the Electoral College.

merling-baker-electoral-2016-11-fig-1

The States

These inequalities at the national level tend to be replicated in the states. As of January, Republicans will control both chambers of the state legislatures in 32 states, and the governor’s office as well as the legislature in either 24 or 25 states (depending on the outcome in North Carolina). Many states have geographically small urban areas that are traditionally outvoted by rural residents. (Lots of money for highways in rural areas, but little for mass transit.) When cities enact progressive changes, such as a minimum wage, they are sometimes preempted by more conservative state legislatures.

Why it is and won’t change

While some of our first political leaders, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, favored proportional representation, the small-state, rural bias was an intentional policy choice deliberately built into the Constitution. The Senate and the Electoral College were a result of the Connecticut Compromise of 1787 designed to allay the fears of the smaller states that, if decisions were made by popular vote, their interests would be ignored by the larger states. Later, the small-state bias served to maintain slavery at a time when it probably would have been abolished by popular vote. (The analogy to our present situation is obvious.)

Equal state representation in the Senate is the only part of the Constitution that cannot be amended. The Electoral College, however, could be abolished by Constitutional amendment. Amending the Constitution, as specified in Article Five, is a two-step process. First, the proposed amendment must pass with a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. Then it must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the 50 states. It is hard to imagine the smaller states agreeing to surrender so much power.

Conclusion

This post only begins to cover the many reasons for minority rule in this country. Here are some additional political and ideological reasons. To their credit, the Republicans have a higher turnout, especially in seemingly less important off-year elections, probably because Republicans are older than the average voter, and are more likely to see voting as a normative obligation. They have used their control of state legislatures to enact voter suppression laws that reduce turnout among traditional Democratic constituencies such as poor people and college students. 2016 was the first election in over 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and 14 states celebrated by enacting new voter restrictions such as requiring voter I.D., and reducing the time people could vote and the number of polling places.

Because they represent the interests of corporations and rich individuals, Republicans are able to raise more money to influence political campaigns and to lobby Congress. In recent decades, they have carefully developed a strategy of using religion and racial prejudice to persuade working class Americans to vote contrary to their economic self-interest. And so on.

But the structural advantages that favor the rural minority require Democrats to win by a landslide in order to have any real influence on social policy.

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Looking For an Exit

Counterfactual

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Looking For an Exit

Politics, ,

The news that Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in the popular vote by over two million votes (and counting) is no doubt one of many factors giving rise to demands for recounts in states where the vote totals are very close. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has raised over $3 million so far to finance recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, not to change her own outcomes but because “the unexpected results of the election and the anomolies that have been reported need to be investigated. We deserve elections we can trust.” The total cost of a recount in these three states is $6-7 million.

The unexpected results that require investigation are not the differences between pre-election polls and the outcome. There are many explanations for this discrepancy, including real changes in opinion in the last few days of the campaign and partisan differences in enthusiasm leading to differences in turnout. The real concern of experts in voter research is the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official vote counts.

Exit polls are interviews with voters conducted, usually by news organizations, as they are leaving the polling place. Representative polling places are chosen, and researchers are given quotas to fill broken down by age, race, gender, etc. These data are then weighted by their best approximation of the demographic composition of the actual voters. In some countries, exit polls results are considered more reliable than official vote totals, and international observers use them to detect voter fraud.

chart_1

Above are the exit poll-vote count comparisons in four states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in which the exit polls showed Clinton winning while the official totals gave the victory to Trump. Adding these two percentages together gives you the “red shift,” or the extent to which the official results unexpectedly favored the Republican candidate. In Michigan, the exit polls showed both Clinton and Trump at 46.8%, while the official totals stand at Trump 47.60% and Clinton 47.33%—a miniscule red shift, but worth recounting due to the vote’s closeness. Had Clinton won these three states, she would have won the Electoral College by 288 to 250.

If exit polls are subject only to random error, red and blue shifts should occur with equal frequency. Voting researcher Jonathan Simon, who compiled these data, has found a systematic tendency toward red shifts in all presidential elections since 2004. Blue shifts are almost nonexistent. However, a better name for these discrepancies might be a “conservative shift,” since in this year’s Democratic primaries, exit polls regularly showed higher percentages for Bernie Sanders than the official vote counts.

What, other than fraud, can account for these discrepancies? Here are the most likely suspects.

  • Early voting. Early voters are not exit polled. But if a recount is done, it should be easy to separate early voters from those who voted on Election Day.
  • Selection bias. The people interviewed may not be representative of the actual voters. This could occur if the interviewer chooses unrepresentative people, such as those who are smiling. A more likely possibility is that Republicans are more likely to refuse to answer. For example, if white male Republicans systematically decline to be interviewed, the white male quota will be filled by more Democrats. Neither the quotas given to the researchers nor the weighting formula totally correct for selection bias.
  • Response bias. Some of the respondents who voted for Trump may falsely claim to have voted for Clinton. This is a variation of the Bradley effect, named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, in which polls systematically overestimate support for Black candidates and underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudice. In this case, it would mean that some voters are embarrassed to admit to a stranger that they voted for Trump.

Of course, the existence of these possible sources of error doesn’t mean that a recount is not worth doing, only that Democrats should have a low expectation of success.

The main argument for doing these recounts is the apparent ease with which computerized voting systems can be hacked. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security, notes that, while he does not personally believe the outcome of the election was tainted by fraud, this year has seen an unprecedented number of cyberattacks apparently intended to influence the election. He explains that, prior to the election, hackers could probe election systems in various localities to see which ones can be hacked easily. Immediately before the election, they could select highly competitive districts and install malware designed to shift the vote totals by a couple of percentage points. The malware would erase itself after the election.

There’s no question that this is possible for technically sophisticated attackers. (If my Ph.D. students and I were criminals, I’m sure we could pull it off.) If anyone reasonably skilled is sufficiently motivated and willing to face the risk of getting caught, it’s happened already.

If the malware is self-erasing, tampering can only be detected when there are backup paper ballots. However, Halderman mentions the possibility that examining the voting equipment might produce evidence of some types of fraud.

Clearly paper ballots are the best technology for preventing and detecting computerized voter fraud. Optical scanning can be used to count the ballots quickly. But many districts, including some in Pennsylvania, continue to use computer systems known to be insecure with no paper ballots as backups. This is unacceptable in 2016.

The deadlines for filing for recounts are November 23 in Pennsylvania, November 25 in Wisconsin, and November 28 in Michigan. Contributions to the Green Party recount effort can be made at https://jillstein.nationbuilder.com/recount. It’s hard to believe the Democratic National Committee isn’t willing to finance this effort.

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Counterfactual

What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Framing the Debates

Counterfactual

Media, Politics,

The dictionary defines a counterfactual as “a conditional statement in which the first clause is a past tense subjunctive statement expressing something contrary to fact, as in: if she had hurried, she would have caught the bus.” In the aftermath of the Tuesday’s election, some progressives are suggesting this counterfactual: If the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders, he would have beaten Donald Trump in the presidential election.

This counterfactual can never be proven. The main evidence in its favor comes from the results of polling during the primaries which showed Sanders doing consistently better than Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical race against Trump. The chart below shows Real Clear Politics’ average of all polls pitting Sanders against Trump from January 1 until June 6, when pollsters stopped asking the question. The overall average is Sanders, 49.6%, and Trump, 39.3%. Clinton also had a slight lead over Trump during some (but not all) of this period, but Sanders’ advantage was, on average, more than twice as large.

sandersvstrump

Not only were these poll results seldom reported by the corporate media, who were busily engaged in a “Bernie blackout,” but when they were, pundits urged readers to disregard them. (A classic example is an article by Slate‘s William Saletan entitled “Polls Say Bernie is More Electable Than Hillary. Don’t Believe Them.”) The pundits argued that Sanders had not been “vetted” as thoroughly as Clinton, and would therefore be more vulnerable to attack during the election campaign.

As Adam Johnson notes, this argument is wrong on two counts. First, Sanders’ qualifications had been thoroughly examined during the primary and throughout his long career. Secondly, whatever “vetting” Clinton had undergone had already resulted in a public evaluation that was more unfavorable than favorable, and she was still under FBI investigation. This effectively neutralized the corruption and character issues when voters compared Clinton with Trump.

But, you may say, Democratic Party could hardly have selected Sanders since Clinton received more votes in the primaries. She won it “fair and square.” (Cue the laughter.) Of course, this ignores the many obstacles the Democratic National Committee (DNC) placed in Bernie’s path. By far, the heaviest thumb they placed on the scales was the superdelegates—just under 15% of the convention delegates, nearly all of whom favored Clinton. More importantly, the corporate media, from day one, misreported the delegate totals by combining superdelegates (who were not committed) with those earned in the primaries (who were committed). This inflated Clinton’s lead by over 400 delegates. Her lead appeared insurmountable, and she was declared the winner before the primaries were over. It is reasonable to assume that this discouraged potential Sanders voters, but there is no way to tell how many votes this cost him.

It will be interesting to see whether the DNC reforms their primary selection process, or whether conservative Democrats continue to try to take the risk out of democracy.

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What Happened? What Will Happen Next?

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, , ,

This post is not completely thought out and is inadequately sourced.  I decided to write it quickly in order to compare my initial impressions of a Trump presidency to what happens weeks, months, or years from now.

What happened? And what will happen next? The first question must be approached with caution. I hope social scientists have collected good data on the demographic and ideological characteristics that are associated with support for Donald Trump. My guess is that the two leading contenders will be economic deprivation and racial or ethnic prejudice.

The corporate media have attempted to “normalize” Trump’s candidacy by suggesting that his support comes mainly from less educated Whites who have seen their standard of living decline in recent years. A couple of early studies cast doubt on this explanation and suggested that “racial anxiety” was the stronger motivator of Trump supporters. (See also this previous post.) A study by Rothwell and Diego-Rosell of the Gallup organization—the best I’ve found so far—finds only limited support for the economic explanation. Trump supporters are less educated and more likely to be blue-collar workers, but they are wealthier than either Clinton supporters or the population generally, and are no more likely to be unemployed. In other words, Trump is supported by the traditional Republican base of relatively affluent people hoping to increase their wealth. These authors also found that Trump supporters tend to live in racially isolated communities. However, their study lacked a measure of prejudice. Let’s hope some political scientists have included measures of racial attitudes in their research.

Why were the polls so wrong? The most likely explanation is the so-called Bradley effect, named for LA Mayor Tom Bradley, in which pre-election polls overestimate support for Black candidates. The flip side of this is that polls underestimate support for candidates who appeal to voters’ prejudices. The best indication of a Bradley effect so far has been the finding that Trump did better in online polls than telephone polls, possibly because respondents were embarrassed to admit they support Trump to a live person. (Of course, there are other explanations for this finding.)

To determine what will happen next, we need to divide Trump’s campaign promises into those that he can easily fulfill on his own, those that will require the cooperation of Congress, and therefore can be disrupted either by lack of unanimity among Republicans or a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and those that will be difficult or impossible to carry out under any circumstances.

The easiest thing for Trump to do is abandon efforts to control climate change. Both the Obama Clean Power Plan and the United States’ ratification of COP 21, the Paris climate change agreement, are essentially executive orders by President Obama. They can be undone with the stroke of a pen, and most likely they will be. The latest studies of climate change are extremely alarming, suggesting that previous climate models have dramatically underestimated the problem. Any international climate agreement will collapse without U. S. cooperation. This suggests that by electing Trump, Americans may have inadvertantly brought about the end of human life on Earth within a couple of decades.

All the rest is merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Since Republicans control the Senate, it is likely that Trump will be able to ensure conservative domination of the Supreme Court for at least the next three decades. If so, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned, and the few remaining barriers to racial discrimination will be eliminated. But the best descriptor of the Roberts court is “pro-corporate.” This is important due to corporations’ tendency to sue any time a law is passed which they find inconvenient. Needless to say, they will find a sympathetic audience in a Trump-appointed court.

I also believe that Trump will have little difficulty getting approval for elimination of the minimal protections against Wall Street risk taking and outright fraud provided by the Dodd-Frank Act. This will likely include elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. However, this may not make much difference since Dodd-Frank is so weak. In other words, it’s likely that we will have another Great Recession fairly soon, regardless of what Trump does.

At an intermediate level of difficulty for Trump are actions that require Congressional approval, and which all Senate Democrats and some Republicans may be reluctant to go along with. I put the repeal of the Affordable Care Act in this category, since it is essentially a massive giveaway of public funds to the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical industries, all important Republican donors. More likely to happen are modifications to Obamacare that increase corporate profits and make it more difficult and expensive for less affluent Americans to obtain medical care.

Another change requiring Congressional approval that will elicit Congressional resistance is Trump’s promise to cancel and/or renegotiate so-called “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, or to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. These treaties, the primary goal of which is to increase corporate dominance of the international economy, have always had greater support from Republicans than Democrats.

On the impossible side is Trump’s immigration policy. In the final months of the campaign, he began to back off from his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. More importantly, it is difficult to imagine the kind of chaos that would result from any attempt to deport the approximately 11 million undocumented people living in this country. More likely, he will cooperate with Congress in passing laws that make it more difficult or impossible for people of certain religious or ethnic groups to enter to the country in the future.

Now for two wild cards.

Will Trump be more or less likely than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to involve us in any more than the five foreign military interventions in which we are currently involved? My guess is that he will escalate the war against ISIS, with totally unpredictable consequences, but be reluctant to deploy American troops in new wars. But given Trump’s childlike temperament, this prediction could be way off base.

Finally, it is important to remember that George W. Bush and Barack Obama have created a massive national security apparatus, including the capability of spying on virtually any electronic communication between American citizens, and the militarization of the police, who can bring overwhelming force to bear against protesters and demonstrators. This is important because if Trump is able to fulfill his campaign promises, there will be widespread dissent on the left, and if he blunders badly, there will be buyers’ remorse among his current followers. Some of us were dismayed by FBI Director Comey’s recent intervention in the presidential election, but we should be prepared for the possibility that Trump will not hesitate to use the national security state for political purposes, including attempts to influence future elections.

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Trump’s Trump Card

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