Category Archives: Politics

Framing the Debates

Media, Politics, ,

There was much to dislike about the three presidential and one vice-presidential debates, but one objection that was near the top of everyone’s list was the narrow range of topics about which the candidates were questioned. Adam Johnson has tabulated the number of questions asked by the moderators about each of the 22 issues they brought up, along with 10 issues that were not included.

questionsubjects

Of course, candidates could have brought up issues that were not specifically targeted by the questions. Johnson’s second chart tabulates the number of mentions of each of 33 issues.

finaldebatementions

Russia, terrorism and taxes were the moderators’ favorites, and Donald Trump’s taxes and Hillary Clinton’s emails received more attention than such issues as climate change, poverty or campaign finance. Johnson describes the framing of the issues as “center-right in nature,” and offers some examples to support his case, i.e., Elaine Quijano’s question, “Do we ask too much of police officers in this country?”

I subsequently ran across an article by Alexander Podkul and Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute. As part of the 2016 Primaries Project, they tabulated the issue positions, taken from their campaign websites, of over 1700 Congressional primary candidates. They found that candidates in the two parties are not talking about the same issues. Here are the top five issues mentioned by Republican and Democratic hopefuls. Aside from their common focus on the Affordable Care Act, there is little overlap.

gs_20161020_primaries-project-issues

In the debates, there was one question about Obamacare. With regard to the other top Republican issues, there were four questions about taxes, three about the debt, two about immigation and one about gun control, for a total of eleven questions about Republican issues. The Democrats did not do as well. There were two questions about social security, but the framing suggested it needed to be “reformed” rather than expanded as some Democrats maintain. Since there were no questions about climate change, education or the minimum wage, the Democrats scored a total of three questions. It appears that the debate moderators (or their corporate media bosses) shared the views of Republican candidates about which issues are more important.

Tabulation the number of mentions of each issue yields a similar result. There were 241 mentions of the five Republican issues and 90 mentions of the Democratic issues. (The 45 mentions of Obamacare account for half of the comments about Democratic issues.) Unfortunately, Johnson does not tabulate mentions of the minimum wage, but even if we assume that it was referred to all ten times that poverty came up for discussion, that would still bring the Democratic issue mentions up to only 100.

Of course, these mentions were largely triggered by the debate questions. However, Secretary Clinton could have raised some of the Democrats’ issues more often than she did. Thus a second interpretation of these data is that the Democratic candidate approaches the upcoming election from a more Republican point of view than their Congressional candidates.

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Are the Terrorists Getting What They Want?

The World According to the Donald

Trumping Bernie

Are Terrorists Getting What They Want?

Foreign policy, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination

When terrorists attacked the Brussels International Airport and a metro station on March 22, killing 31 people and injuring 340, the response in this country was predictable. The corporate media provided blanket coverage of the attack, but failed to address its causes. The presidential candidates called for more of our current policies—on steroids. Donald Trump advocated revising international law to allow waterboarding and other unspecified forms of torture. Ted Cruz suggested “patrol(ing) and secur(ing) Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Hillary Clinton made a vague call for increased cooperation between the technology community and government. While she did not spell out the surveillance implications of this cooperation, it can only mean that she accepts the Obama administration position that there can be no telephone or internet communication between American citizens that can’t be accessed by the federal government.

What do we know about the effects of terrorist actions such as the Brussels bombings on public attitudes?

On July 7, 2005, a small group of terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda carried out an orchestrated set of attacks on the London subway and bus system, killing 52 people and injuring 770. By a fortunate coincidence, a group of researchers headed by Julie van Dyver at the University of Kent had conducted survey measuring intergroup prejudice among a nationally representative sample of about 1000 U. K. residents six weeks before the July 7 attacks. They repeated the survey with an equivalent group of British people four weeks after the attacks.

The two surveys measured negative attitudes toward Muslims and toward immigrants, and political orientation—that is, whether the participant favored the political left (Labour party) or the political right (Conservative party). They predicted that the effect of the bombings would be to increase negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants of all nationalities, but that not everyone would be equally affected. Based on what they called the reactive liberals hypothesis, they expected the shift to be greater among liberals than conserva- tives, since conservatives already held negative attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants before the bombings.

Here are the results for prejudice toward Muslims.

As predicted, the liberals showed a significant increase in anti-Muslim bias, but the conservatives did not change. In other words, the effect of the terrorist threat was to cause liberals to think more like conservatives. The results for prejudice toward immigrants were nearly identical.

If liberals are more influenced by terrorism than conservatives, can this be explained by changes in their basic values? The moral foundations theory of political ideology proposes that liberals and conservatives hold different values. Liberals place a higher value on harm reduction and fairness, while conservatives place a higher priority on ingroup loyalty and respect for authority. Previous research not only supports these predictions, but it also shows that in-group loyalty and respect for authority are predictive of greater prejudice toward minorities, while harm reduction and fairness are associated with lower prejudice. These results are consistent with the well-established finding that conservatives are more prejudiced than liberals.

The London surveys included items measuring these four values. Liberals showed an increase in in-group loyalty and a decline in concern with fairness as a result of the bombings, while conservatives’ concern for these values was unchanged. (Neither liberals nor conservatives changed their attitudes toward harm reduction or respect for authority.) Finally, the researchers’ statistical analysis showed that these changes in attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants were mediated by the changes in the basic values of in-group loyalty and fairness. (See this previous post for an explanation of how mediational hypotheses are tested.)

Many progressive commentators, beginning with Noam Chomsky in his 2001 book, 9/11 (now in its second edition), warned that the United States and Europe were falling into a trap set by Osama bin Laden. As Tom Engelhardt, Glenn Greenwald, and others have also pointed out, the West is continuing to follow the terrorists’ “playbook.”

The short-term strategy behind 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks was to provoke outrage against Muslims among Western populations, in the hope that their governments would overreact by bombing and invading Middle Eastern countries. Their greatest success was George W. Bush’s ill-advised invasion of Iraq, which destabilized the country and led to the establishment of the Islamic State (ISIS). Since the most important predictor of suicide terrorism is the perception by its perpetrators that their homeland is occupied or threatened by foreign military forces, such actions have the effect of recruiting more terrorists.

In fact, as early as 2004, a secret study commissioned by the Defense Department acknowledged that the primary cause of Muslim terrorism was American foreign policy, but knowing that we had no intention of changing our policies, its authors suggested “transforming our strategic communications”–that is, reframing our propaganda directed at Muslims.

A second reason for terrorism, according to this analysis, is to provoke Americans and Europeans into harassing and discriminating against their domestic Muslim populations. If Muslims living in the West are convinced that they can never be assimilated, they will initiate local acts of terrorism, as in San Bernadino, Paris and Brussels. The combined effect of increased military action abroad and repression of Muslims at home is to create a self-perpetuating military machine which recruits many more terrorists than it is able to kill.

The endgame of al Qaida and ISIS is to convince the U. S. and Europe to withdraw completely from the Middle East by drawing us into a series of long, expensive and ultimately unsuccessful ground wars in the Persian Gulf. In this way, they hope to end the West’s economic exploitation and cultural influence on the region.

The study of the London bombings, which its authors entitled “Boosting Belligerence,” suggests that, when Muslim terrorists attack Western countries, the effect on public opinion is exactly what they are hoping for—increased support for right-wing political candidates, an aggressive foreign policy, and repressive domestic policies. It seems to follow from the political analysis of Chomsky and others that ISIS would prefer a Republican to be elected the next president of the United States. Donald Trump is ideally suited to their purposes. Assuming the election is close, ISIS could easily influence its outcome by scheduling a few small-scale terrorist attacks in the weeks leading up to Election Day.

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Deep Background

On Obama’s Speech

Chomsky, Greenwald and Snowden on Privacy

Chomsky, Greenwald and Snowden on Privacy

Law, Media, Politics, , ,

Last night, there was a panel discussion entitled “A Conversation on Privacy” at the University of Arizona, featuring Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald and (live from an undisclosed location) Edward Snowden. The discussion was moderated by Nuala O’Connor of the Center for Democracy and Technology. The video is about two hours long. Although it starts off slowly, your patience will be amply rewarded by the end.

No, this isn’t a lobby card from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. It’s actually an image from the poster advertising the panel discussion.

The discussion was broadcast via Livestream, which I was unable to insert directly into the blog. To watch it, click on the link below. If you’re familiar with the participants, you can skip the introductions. The discussions starts about 11 minutes into the video.

http://livestream.com/azpm/events/4958510/videos/116998760

Trump’s Trump Card

Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

Kenneth MacWilliams, a pollster and graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reports that only two variables predict support for Donald Trump among Republican voters. Gender, age, income, education, religiosity and even ideology failed to predict Trump support. The two significant predictors were authoritarianism and fear of terrorism, and authoritarianism was “far more significant.”

MacWilliams’ article is light on details, but the poll was a national sample of 1800 registered voters conducted by UMass during the last five days of December.

What is authoritarianism? The theory of the authoritarian personality has its origin in the aftermath of World War II when social scientists were attempting to account for anti-Semitism in Europe. It was originally measured using the California F-Scale, in which “F” stands for fascism.

The most extensive research program on authoritarianism was conducted by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in the 1980s and 1990s. He found that authoritarianism is best described by three attitudinal clusters:

  • Authoritarian submission refers to a high degree of obedience to authorities that are regarded as legitimate in the society in which you live.
  • Authoritarian aggression refers to hostile behavior directed at disliked outgroups, provided that such aggression is sanctioned by authorities.
  • Conventionalism refers to a high degree of conformity to behavioral norms endorsed by religious and political authorities.

Combining the first two clusters, authoritarians are said to have a bicyclist’s personality. They bow to those they perceive to be above them in the social structure, while kicking those they think are below them. Not surprisingly, people high in authoritarianism tend to be politically conservative, religious, and prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities and homosexuals. They favor more punitive sentences for criminals and are more accepting of covert government surveillance such as illegal wiretaps. Their preferences for strong leaders and for the exclusion of outsiders are consistent with their support for Trump. MacWilliams found that high authoritarians were more likely to support deporting immigrants that are in the country illegally, prohibiting Muslims from entering the country, closing mosques, and establishing a national data base to track all Muslims.

MacWilliams measured authoritarianism with four questions about child rearing. Participants were asked whether it is more important for children to be respectful or independent, obedient or self-reliant, well-behaved or considerate, and well-mannered or curious. The first of each pair is the authoritarian option. While these questions may seem remote from politics, I see this as a strength of the current survey, since these items are largely independent of any campaign issues.

Political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler found that, while at one time authoritarianism was unrelated to party affiliation, over the last several decades white authoritarians have gravitated to the Republican party while non-authoritarians have shifted into the Democratic party. This may be a result of the Democrats’ support for civil rights and Republicans’ “Southern strategy” of using coded racial messages to appeal to white Southern voters. In the current survey, 49% of Republican voters scored among the top quarter of authoritarians, over twice as many as the number of Democratics.

In 2008, authoritarianism predicted preference for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama among Democratic voters. However, in the current survey, authoritarianism did not predict Democrats’ candidate preference. (Maybe not enough Democrats are aware that Bernie Sanders is Jewish yet.)

Hetherington and Suhay found that the threat of terrorism is associated with greater support for an aggressive foreign policy and the suspension of civil liberties among low authoritarians, but not among high authoritarians, since they prefer these policies regardless of the threat level. In other words, the threat of terrorism leads low authoritarians to act like high authoritarians. There is a very real danger that terrorist attacks in the U. S. and Europe could influence the 2016 presidential election.

Figure-3-Threat-Decreases-Effect-of-Authoritarianism-on-Preference-for-Military-Strength

Altemeyer reports a small study in which he had two groups of about 65 participants each—one consisting of high authoritarians and the other of low authoritarians—play the Global Change Game, a complex 3-hour simulation of the Earth’s future in which players represent different continents. In the low authoritarian simulation, no wars or threats of wars occurred and there was considerable international cooperation. However, the the high authoritarian game, countries responded to the same crises by increasing their arms and the session ended with a nuclear war in which the total population of the Earth was declared dead.

Of course, it was only a game.

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The World According to the Donald

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Old-Fashioned Racism

Racialization and “Student-Athletes”

Education, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

The spillover of racialization hypothesis proposes that white racial attitudes are significant predictors of their opinions about a variety of race-neutral social policies. For example, Martin Gilens found a strong relationship among whites between anti-black prejudice and opposition to welfare, which was explained by the fact that whites greatly overestimated the percentage of welfare benefits going to African-Americans. Racialization has increased during during Barack Obama’s presidency. Michael Tesler found that racial attitudes have become a stronger predictor of attitudes toward health care reform in recent years. In addition, attitudes toward two specific health care plans were more strongly affected by prejudice when the plans were attributed to Obama than when they were attributed to Bill Clinton.

It is difficult to reconcile the conflicting estimates of the amount of money generated by college sports, but the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reports revenue approaching $1 billion per year. In 2013, the University of Texas athletic program alone generated $166 million, and 13 universities took in over $100 million. The NCAA will receive $7.3 billion to broadcast the College Football Playoffs between 2014 and 2026, and $11 billion for the NCAA Basketball Tournament for 14 years.

On the other hand, the college students who play in these games, whose labor is at least the equivalent of a full-time job, and who risk permanent injury, are only permitted to receive athletic scholarships that cover tuition, books, fees, room and board. Preventing athletes from receiving compensation while everyone else profits so greatly has to qualify as one of the great economic injustices of our time. Yet a 2015 HBO Real Sports/Marist poll found that 65% of Americans are opposed to paying college athletes for their labor.

There are a number of possible explanations for this result. It could be partly a matter of self-interest, since people might reasonably infer that ticket prices, cable television fees and college tuition will increase if the athletes are paid. However, most people, when asked about student athletes, probably think of college football and basketball, and since the majority of college football and basketball players are African-Americans, racial attitudes may also be relevant. In fact, the HBO poll found that 55% of African-Americans favor paying college athletes, compared to 42% of Latinos and only 26% of whites.

This led economist Kevin Wallsten and his colleagues to look into the possible racialization of this issue. (This post is based not on their journal article, which is as yet unpublished, but on an article they wrote about it for the Washington Post.) With the help of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, they conducted a survey in which respondents were asked about paying student athletes and also completed a measure of “racial resentment,” two items from the Modern Racism Scale. In a statistical analysis that controlled for other influences, they found that racial resentment was the most significant predictor of white opposition to pay-for-play.

Nevertheless, these data are correlational. It’s possible that some other variable associated with racial resentment is responsible for this outcome. Therefore, they did a followup experiment in which they manipulated the salience of race prior to asking about paying student athletes. They did this by showing one group pictures of young African-American men identified as student athletes prior to asking the question, while another group was not shown any pictures. This is a priming manipulation, similar to Tesler’s experiment in which he attributed health care plans to either Obama or Bill Clinton. The results are shown below.

Both among all whites, and the subset identified as most racially resentful, opposition to paying college athletes was greater following the priming of race. That is, merely inducing the participants to “think about” black people, either consciously or unconsciously, reduced support for the policy.  While race may not be the only factor affecting attitudes toward pay-for-play, these results clearly imply that it plays a causal role.

It reminds me of a study in which whites were more in favor of voter I. D. laws when primed with a picture of black people voting than when the voters in the photo were white. We seem to be in a historical period in which attitudes toward most domestic political issues, as well as party affiliation, are affected by racialization. Many white people oppose social policies if they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the policies primarily benefit blacks, although they may not be aware that this is the reason for their opposition and would probably deny it.

The myth of the “student-athlete” is one of the most embarassing hypocrisies in higher education today. Since most of those who control decisions about possible payment are white, it’s hard to be optimistic about obtaining justice for college athletes through any mechanism other than the courts.

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Voter I. D. and Race, Part 1

A Darker Side of Politics

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination, ,

Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in the political decisions—often referred to as Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”—that have resulted in an association between racism and membership in the Republican party. During their political campaigns, Republicans (and sometimes Democrats) use “dog whistle politics”—racially coded appeals that automatically activate the negative stereotypes of their increasingly prejudiced audience.

There is now a fairly extensive literature in social psychology demonstrating that white people respond more negatively to images of dark-skinned African-Americans than those with lighter skin. For example, one experiment found that participants assigned more negative traits and fewer positive traits to dark-skinned blacks than to light-skinned blacks. Another study showed that, among blacks convicted of murder, those with darker skins were more likely to receive the death penalty.

There are persistent rumors that Barack Obama’s skin tone has been manipulated in campaign advertisements. For example, in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was accused of doctoring images of Obama to make him appear blacker, although it’s not clear whether this was deliberate. A new set of studies by Solomon Messig and his colleagues analyzes images of Obama from the 2008 presidential campaign against John McCain.

Working from a complete library of television commercials aired by both candidates, the researchers electronically measured the brightness of the faces in all 534 still images, 259 of Obama and 275 of McCain. The advertisements were independently coded for content by judges who were unaware of the purpose of the study. The researchers looked at whether each image appeared in an attack ad, and whether the ad tried to associate the candidate with criminal activity. Two differences emerged. Obama’s skin tone was darker in commercials linking him with criminal activity—see example below—than in all other images of Obama.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONfJ7YSXE5w%20

In fact, 86% of the photos in these ads were among the darkest 25% of all Obama photos. Secondly, in attack ads produced by the McCain campaign, images of Obama grew darker toward the end of the campaign, even as their own images of McCain grew lighter.

The authors did two followup studies to determine whether darker images of Obama activated more negative reactions to black people than lighter images of Obama. They wanted to show that darkening the skin of a familiar black man, whom they refer to as “counterstereotypical,” would have the same effect as the darker faces of the unknown persons used in previous studies. In one experiment, participants viewed one of the Obama images below and completed a stereotype activation task in which they were asked to fill in the blanks of incomplete words such as “L A _ _” and “_ _ O R.” The darker image of Obama on the right elicited more stereotypical completions—“lazy” and “poor,” in these cases—than the lighter image.

The second study was more complicated, involving subliminal priming, but it too found that a variety of darker images of Obama yield more negative reactions than lighter images of Obama.

It’s not clear from these studies what the McCain campaign actually did in 2008. Did they deliberately darken some images of Obama, or did they merely select darker images? If the latter, did they select images because of their darkness, or were they merely trying to choose images than made him “look bad,” without thinking about why. The fact that these darker images appeared in ads attempting to link Obama with criminality, however, suggests that whatever they did was not accidental.

These campaign ads appeared on television seven years ago. The pace of social psychological research—including the publication lag—is often quite slow. The two followup studies probably accounted for most of the delay. Although they allowed the authors to tie up some loose ends, it could be argued that they were unnecessary, since they largely replicated previous studies. The delay was unfortunate, since the analysis of the ads didn’t appear in print until Obama was no longer running for office and the corporate media could treat it as old news. Sometimes postponing the release of information is almost as effective as completely suppressing it.

Of course, there will be other black candidates and many more opportunities for dog whistle politics.

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Another Dog Whistle

Guarding the Hen House

Media, Politics, Prejudice and discrimination,

What role does Fox News play in the recent wave of anti-Muslim attitudes in this country? Fox has a long history of race baiting. This Bill O’Reilly segment, called “The Muslim Invasion,” predates both the Paris and San Bernadino attacks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWCWquEh68A%20

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has released an analysis by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel of survey data collected by the American National Election Studies (ANES) in 2012. A national sample of respondents was asked, “How well does the word ‘violent’ describe most Muslims?” The chart below shows the averages for white Democrats and Republicans who do or do not watch Fox News regularly, while statistically controlling for age, income, education, religiosity and geographical region.

The lower the dot, the more violent Muslims are perceived as being. While you might have guessed that Republicans are more likely to see most Muslims as violent than Democrats, watching Fox News is actually a stronger indicator of bias against Muslims than party affiliation. In fact, if they watch Fox News regularly, Democrats don’t differ significantly from Republicans in their tendency to describe Muslims as violent.

The ANES survey also found Fox News viewing to be a significant predictor of responses to five of ten items measuring prejudice against African-Americans. For example, one item read, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Researchers found strong effects of both party affiliation and Fox viewership.

Regular Fox viewers (and Republicans) were also more likely to:

  • Agree that blacks should be able to overcome prejudice without any special favors, just as “Irish, Italian, Jewish and other minorites” have done.
  • Disagree that generations of slavery and discrimination have made it more difficult for blacks to get ahead.
  • Disagree that over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
  • Agree that blacks have too much political influence in this country.

All of these items were intended to measure modern or symbolic racism, sometimes also called racial resentment, which refers to racism revealed in subtle, indirect ways which allow the respondent to deny being prejudiced. Fox viewers did not differ from non-Fox viewers on indicators of old-fashioned racism, such as labeling blacks as “lazy” or “unintelligent.”

To complete the trifecta, studies also find that Fox viewers are more likely to hold anti-Latino and anti-immigrant attitudes.

These are correlational studies, since people decide for themselves whether to watch Fox News. Correlation does not imply causation. Does watching Fox News lead to greater prejudice, do people who were already prejudiced prefer Fox News, or is some third variable causing some people to both be more prejudiced and to watch Fox News? (Note, however, that some of the more likely third variables, such as age, education and region, are statistically controlled in the ANES analysis.)

Two arguments can be offered in support of the claim that Fox News is causally responsible for at least some of these differences in prejudice.

  1. The mass media are more likely to directly influence attitudes toward current events than to change long-standing beliefs. The “try” question above is probably a long-standing belief. But a 2010 study found that Fox News viewers were also 31% more likely to believe that President Obama was not born in the United States, a view that was heavily promoted by Fox at the time. Fox viewership was also associated with false rumors about the “Ground Zero mosque” in 2010.

  1. Two studies examined the effects of the spread of Fox News into new television markets. They both measured conservatism generally, rather than racial attitudes, but conservatism and prejudice are strongly related. In one study, the introduction of Fox into the area significantly increased the Republican vote share between 1996 and 2000, compared to other locations. Another study found that Congressional representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—became more conservative in their voting patterns following the startup of Fox News in their districts.

Both of these studies are quasi-experiments. They are not true experiments because Fox News does not randomly choose locations in which to broadcast. However, in order to explain away these data, you would have to assume not that Fox chooses more conservative locations, but rather that Fox happens to choose locations that are on the verge of a conservative shift. This is unlikely, though not impossible.

I cringe whenever I walk into a public building and find Fox News playing in the lobby or waiting room, especially when it’s a location, such as an airport or hospital, that is subsidized by government funds.

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The World According to the Donald

Politics,

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work. . . . Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.

The corporate media find Donald Trump to be by far the most newsworthy candidate of the 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Tyndall Report, as of November 30, he accounted for more than a quarter of the campaign coverage on the nightly ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts, more than the all the Democrats combined. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have made preliminary attempts to describe his rhetoric.

Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of the Times “analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences”—95,000 words, we are told. Four days later, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson of the Post did a “review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.” The Times article focuses more on the content of the speeches while the Post identifies what they call campaign strategy. Unfortunately, neither article describes the process by which the analyses were done or provides any meaningful data. I assume they simply read the speeches and recorded their impressions.

According to the Times, Trumps’s speeches are characterized by “constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery.” They identify  several overlapping themes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LznMz3YC5Vk%20

  • Us vs. them. Trump takes advantage of the human tendency to categorize people into ingroups and outgroups, and to show ingroup favoritism, but he carries this to an extreme by characterizing the outgroup as inherently evil. In this exchange with a 12-year-old girl, he describes terrorists as “animals,” then makes a promise.

You know what, darling? You’re not going to be scared any more. They’re going to be scared. . . .We never went after them. We never did anything. We have to attack much stronger. . . . We have to be much smarter, or it’s never, ever going to end.

Trump identifies the grievances of his audience, and attributes these problems to disliked groups, as when economic problems are blamed on Mexican immigrants. According to the scapegoat theory of prejudice, prejudice, discrimination and violence toward minority groups increase during times of economic hardship.

  • Ad hominem attacks. Trump frequently attacks the person rather than his or her ideas. As Ted Rall points out, we have Trump to thank for introducing the word “stupid” into campaign discourse. According to the Times, he used the word “at least 30 times.” (Unfortunately, this number is meaningless without something to compare it to. How often do other candidates use such negative descriptors?) Other favorite adjectives are “horrible” (14 times) and “weak” (13 times). No target is out of bounds, including mocking a reporter with a disability.
  • Violent imagery. ISIS is described as “chopping off heads,” and Trump is going to “bomb the hell out of” our enemies. “Attack” is a favorite word. At one rally, Trump appeared to endorse the roughing up of a “Black lives matter” protester in the audience.
  • Creating mistrust. Trump tries to create suspicion about scientific facts and other data provided by the government and the news media. His audience is told that “nobody knows” the number of illegal immigrants or the rate of increase of health care premiums, when in fact reasonably accurate estimates are available.
  • Ingratiation. If you’ve seen films of Adolf Hitler, or American demogogues such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace, you known that they are not attractive or charismatic speakers. Trump, however, is a practiced entertainer. He is relaxed and informal (a favorite word is “guy”). He flatters his audience. While other candidates are stupid, he claims that no one is smarter than the American voter.

The Post adds two comments about Trump’s campaign strategy.

  • Message testing. Trump takes an experimental approach to constructing his stump speech. He tries out various lines, using audience response as the criterion of success. The article describes a joke about Bernie Sanders’ hernia operation that was tested, revised, tested again and eventually abandoned when it did not get laughs.
  • Consistent presentation. Trump repeats the same words and lines in almost every speech. Of course, all candidates have a standard stump speech. The difference may be that Trump appears to be ad libbing, but is not.

I found two other reports which compare Trump’s rhetoric to that of other candidates.

Matt Viser of the Boston Globe transcribed all the speeches in which the candidates announced they were running for the presidency, and analyzed them with the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. The test uses word and sentence length to determine how difficult a passage is to understand. The results are expressed as a grade level. Trump’s speech was the simplest. It could be comprehended by a fourth grader. One hypothesis is that candidates try to match the educational level of the audience they are hoping to influence.

21language_graphic_WEB-1547

Angie Drobnic Holan, the editor of PoliFact, a political fact checking website, published an analysis of the ratings of all the statements by 2016 candidates that she has fact-checked since 2007. Trump scores second only to Ben Carson in dishonesty. Of 70 Trump statements, 76% have been found to be false, mostly false, or “pants on fire”—reserved for the worst lies. There seems to be a relationship between honesty and party affiliation.

2015-12-12_11-39-52

PoliFact describes the process by which statements are selected and analyzed. There are two possible sources of bias in these data. They do not analyze a random selection of candidate statements. Maybe front-runners or people who are disliked by reporters are subjected to greater scrutiny. And since the content of these statements varies, there is no uniform method of deciding whether a statement is true or false.

To my knowledge, no one has done a scientific content analysis of Trump’s rhetoric. Such an analysis would require selecting a random sample of statements to be analyzed, operationally defining the speech categories to be counted, and comparing Trump’s totals to those of other candidates. Unfortunately, the time and effort required to do such an analysis makes it unlikely that it will be done until after the campaign is over.

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Politics,

In the wake of the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College on Thursday, here are some possibly interesting data.

Christopher Ingraham reports that, as of October 1, we have had 294 mass shootings in this country in the 274 days of 2015. A mass shooting is defined as one in which four or more people are shot (but not necessarily killed), including possibly the shooter.

The number of mass shootings has increased in recent years. This chart tabulates active shooter incidents, defined (by the FBI) as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.”

The U. S. homicide rate is greater than in any country at a similar level of economic development.  However, it is lower than in many less developed countries such as Mexico and South Africa. (Canada is in red in the chart because the data come from the Canadian government.)

c-g04-eng

 

Gun laws work. In spite of the narrow range of such laws, states with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. Here’s the scatterplot of the positive correlation between strength of gun laws and state violence rank. (A high rank means less violence.)

com_nwl_c4e_20151001_ProgressReport_6

And here’s a state by state comparison.

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Support for gun control laws has declined during most of this century and is now below 50%.

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Support for gun control is largely unaffected by recent mass shootings. This is probably because a highly publicized mass shooting carries a mixed message. To some, it implies that we must control access to firearms, but to others it implies that we need more guns to protect ourselves.

The Washington Post reprinted a chapter by former Supreme John Paul Stevens from his book Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. In “The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment,” he argues that it should be changed to read as follows (Stevens’ five words are in bold):

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.

Stevens argues that this change would more accurately reflect the intentions of the Bill of Rights’ authors.

Speaking of favorite sports, another is reading news reports of the day after a mass shooting to determine whose “side” the shooter was on. (Come on, admit it. We all do it.) Conservatives are hoping the shooter will be a member of a minority group and/or a liberal, while progressives are rooting for a white Tea Party sympathizer. It looks like the Oregon shooter, Christopher Harper-Mercer, has something for everyone. He identifies as “mixed-race.” (His mother is black and his father is British.) In spite of this, his social media profile identifies him as a white supremicist, and in spite of this, he showed a hatred of Christians. (He killed Christians, while non-Christians were “only” shot in the legs.) Congratulations to partisans of both sides.

What’s Goin’ On?

Politics,

The University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) held its inaugural National Security Symposium on Thursday without its best-known participant, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, a controversial expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who was scheduled to speak about media coverage of Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza. This is either an outrageous act of academic censorship or a colossal screw-up by the GSPIA faculty.

Dr. Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy. He is the son of Holocaust survivors and has publicly criticized the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. He was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 despite an impressive publication record, an action that was criticized as an affront to academic freedom by public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. This interview from seven months ago will give you an idea of Dr. Finkelstein’s views.

The symposium was planned by an organizing committee of graduate students. Their advisor was a visiting professor, Dr. Luke Peterson of Cambridge University.  Dr. Finkelstein agreed to speak at the symposium on April 20 and signed a contract on August 26. However, to be official, the contract had to be signed by a Pitt representative, and that never happened.

According to the official story, the student committee realized last week that there was not enough money to pay for the symposium, and it was decided to cancel Dr. Finkelstein’s appearance. But when Dr. Peterson called him last Wednesday, September 16, to let him know his invitation had been withdrawn, he told Dr. Finkelstein that the Pitt administration refused to sign the contract, and “raised a number of issues regarding your presence–all of which I’m sure you’re familiar with, many of which or all of which are either bogus or trumped.” Not surprisingly, Dr. Finkelstein criticized Pitt on his website for a blatant act of political censorship, saying that the administration had “the moral integrity of a slot machine.”

Dr. Peterson now says “my bad;” he claims that he misunderstood the reason for the cancellation, and that the real reason was a shortage of money. Which of Dr. Peterson’s statements was truthful? Did he fall on his sword for the benefit of the Pitt administration?

It’s not clear from publicly-available information what the budget for the symposium was. Their website lists four “supporters”—the Pitt Global Studies Center, the Pitt Nationality Rooms, the GSPIA’s Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, and Katz Business School’s International Business Center. Ordinarily, “supporters” are groups that have contributed money for the event, although that isn’t explicitly stated. The organizing committee also made a crowdsourcing appeal for $5000. Their final update states that they only reached 51% of their goal. Dr. Finkelstein’s speaking fee was $4000.  Since there were two other speakers plus venue, catering, and other expenses, it’s unlikely that $5000 was the total budget for the event.

If the official story is true, why did representatives of a major university book speakers for a highly-touted symposium without having secured the money to pay them? Did the committee only realize that their crowdsourcing attempt would fall short just a week before the event? Why was Dr. Finkelstein the speaker who was cancelled? (In case you’re wondering, he says they did not ask him if he would accept a smaller honorarium.) I can accept the idea that a group of inexperienced graduate students would be naively optimistic about their likelihood of raising money, but were there no permanent GSPIA faculty members looking over their shoulders to protect the university’s reputation?

Anyone who reads Pittsburgh newspapers knows that local conservatives react angrily to any criticism of Israel. Is it possible that the committee’s financial problems were real, but were caused not only by the crowdfunding shortfall but also by the withdrawal, or threatened withdrawal, or one or more of their primary sponsors?

We should never accept conspiracy theories when incompetence is a plausible alternative explanation. However, having spent almost 40 years as a university professor, this official story does not ring true to me.

The real losers are the Pitt students who lost the opportunity to hear Dr. Finkelstein’s important point of view.