The next installment in this week’s presentation of NSF-funded research is this piece from Brown University political scientist Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro.  The importance of the piece is straightforward: vote-buying is alive and well in many countries—including in Latin America, which Weitz-Shapiro focuses on—and the practice subverts democracy in various ways.  So what might lead Latin American politicians to reject this practice?  Weitz-Shapiro provided this summary of her research:

While the practice of buying votes with public goods and services (sometimes known as “patronage” or “clientelism”) has declined in the United States, it is alive and well in many parts of Latin America. But not all public officials rely on patronage.  This study details the circumstances in which city mayors in Latin America will opt out of vote buying.  Two conditions are necessary to get public officials to reject patronage.  First the community must have a large share of higher income voters and second the offices must be politically competitive.  Higher local income means that more voters dislike patronage.  Intense political competition leads politicians to be responsive to these higher income voters. Absent these conditions, clientelism will be common.

Where patronage or clientelism persists, policies are perverted, ballot secrecy is put in doubt, and voters may become disillusioned with democracy.  Latin America has seen some reversals of democracy in recent years, which makes it especially important to understand conditions that may increase the risk of such reversals.

[For more NSF-funded research recently published in the American Journal of Political Science, see here, here, here, and here.]

A colleague in California sent a letter to both Senators Feinstein and Boxer and received this from Feinstein:

Thank you for writing to express your opposition to Senate Amendment 65 to the fiscal year 2013 continuing appropriations bill.  I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.

I believe that advanced research in the social and natural sciences is the bedrock of American innovation, and I am proud that California and its excellent universities have been a leader in this field.  I also agree that the National Science Foundation (NSF) plays an integral part in promoting scientific research and supporting science education.

On March 13, 2013, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) introduced an amendment (S. Amdt. 65) to the Senate Continuing Resolution that bans the use of National Science Foundation funding for political science projects.  However, it is important to note that this amendment was subsequently modified to allow for political science funding that supports the nation’s economy or is in the interest of national security.  Senator Coburn’s modified amendment was agreed to by a voice vote and included in the final version of the Continuing Resolution, which passed the Senate on March 20, 2013 by a vote of 73-26.  The President signed the bill into law on March 26, 2013 (Public Law 113-6).

I understand you support federal funding of the Political Science Program through the National Science Foundation (NSF).  As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, please know that I have made careful note of your support for this program, and will keep your comments in mind as I work with my colleagues in the Senate to pass appropriations legislation for fiscal year 2014.

Once again, thank you for writing.  If you have any additional questions or concerns, please contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841, or visit my website at http://feinstein.senate.gov.  Best regards.

Someone pointed me to a remark someone who felt that statisticians were not doing their job to help out “mathematically challenged” psychology researchers. My first thought was that statisticians often help in an indirect way, by developing advanced methods that quantitative psychologists then translate to their colleagues, but I also realized that there was some specific advice I could give that could be used right away. This made me think that my colleagues and I should put together a short document (an article? webpage? wiki? pamphlet?) of statistical advice. Maybe 50 useful tips. Much of this is in our books but it could be useful to have something that people can use right away, with no prerequisites and without feeling that it would be a big time commitment.

The thing I wanted to talk about here on the Monkey Cage, though, is that I can’t imagine a political scientist complaining that statisticians weren’t helping them out. The difference, I suppose, is that psychology has a longstanding field of psychometrics and mathematical psychology, and these people have been developing their own methods for many decades. In contrast, political methodologists take from other fields (mostly econometrics and statistics), so they are used to having to learn the language of others. And political scientists who are not methodologists (the equivalents of the “mathematically challenged psychologist” who asked the original question) know that if they want to do statistics, they have to learn some statistics; they don’t really expect to get by otherwise.

P.S. Just to be clear: None of this is meant to disparage qualitative research. Qualitative research is great. I’m certainly not saying that all researchers need to use statistics. This discussion is all about people who are doing quantitative work and fell the need to use methods that are somewhat beyond their mathematical/statistical comfort zone.

The following guest post is from political scientists Ora John Reuter and David Szakonyi

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Foreign policy pundits have been bullish about the ability of social media to bring democratic change in authoritarian regimes. Observers have argued that social media can literally “make history” by helping topple regimes, and democracy promoters are sinking big money into a variety of trainings with this very goal.   But in countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, where users of local social networks still far outnumber users of Facebook and Twitter, authoritarian governments have used their leverage over domestic networks to contain online opposition to the regime.

The story of Russia’s most popular social networking platform, VKontakte, illustrates this point well.  In March 2013, reports (ru) surfaced about how VKontakte collaborates with Kremlin officials to gather intelligence on opposition groups that use the site.  The most damning of the reports claimed that the site shut down opposition “groups” and misdirected message traffic between opposition figures.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the December 2011 parliamentary elections, when allegations of massive electoral fraud brought tens of thousands of Russians onto the streets in the largest anti-regime protests since the fall of the Soviet Union, the relationship between VKontakte and the Kremlin even became coercive. Four days after the election, the company’s founder Pavel Durov reported that he had been summoned by the FSB (Russia’s internal security service) to answer questions about opposition activity on Vkontakte. Durov’s hesitation to cooperate fully appears to have landed him in hot water, as investors with ties to the Kremlin recently purchased a 48% share in Vkontakte and Durov may have fled the country after his home was searched in connection with an alleged traffic violation.

In our research on social media, we have found that the ownership structure of social media matters greatly for politics. When nondemocratic governments have leverage over the content and structure of social networks, users lose the ability to access independent points of view and learn about government malfeasance. Not only is information sharing monitored and potentially blocked, but democracy activists avoid networks connected with government authorities for fear of reprisals.

Though scholars have long warned about the attempts of authoritarian leaders to influence the internet, little empirical evidence has been brought forth about the effects of these efforts on politics at the micro-level. In a forthcoming article, we used survey data from the 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia to examine how usage of different social networks affected users’ awareness of electoral fraud. Our results indicate that users of Western networks like Facebook and Twitter are about five percentage points more likely to believe that there was significant electoral fraud during the elections.  Usage of Russian networks, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, meanwhile had no effect on awareness of electoral fraud.

We argue that the reason for this discrepancy lies in the type of information being spread on these networks. During the election season, local networks’ vulnerability to state pressure seems to have led many opposition activists to focus their social media strategy on Western social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, which are much harder to monitor and pressure.   Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most popular political blogger, maintained an active public Facebook page and Twitter account, which he used to spread hundreds of YouTube videos, photographs, and anecdotes documenting electoral fraud, and yet Navalny maintained only a token presence on Vkontakte and no presence on Odnoklassniki.  This strategy is at odds with the goal of reaching a mass audience since Odnoklassniki and VKontakte each have five times as many users as Facebook (only 5% of Russian internet users are on Facebook).

Caption: Figure 1 shows the week on week change in activity on social networking sites in the weeks surrounding the elections.  There were large spikes in activity on Facebook and Twitter, but no such spikes in VKontakte and Odnoklassniki usage.

Of course, it’s possible that individuals with preformed opinions about electoral violations select into usage of Facebook and Twitter and eschew usage of native social media platforms. Its hard to dismiss this possibility, but our findings do indicate that Facebook/Twitter users are remarkably similar to VKontakte users across a range of factors that might be correlated with perceptions of electoral fraud (sex, income, education, place of residence, support for Putin, levels of political participation, and support for the opposition).

Our presumption was also that Facebook and Twitter usage would also increase levels of protest participation, as the emerging narrative suggests.  This should certainly be true if the self-selection process described above was at work (users with preconceived notions about rampant fraud should be especially likely to join protests against electoral fraud).   But surprisingly, we found no relationship between usage of Facebook/Twitter and participation in post-election protests.

Thus, users of Western social networks were not more politically active than either their counterparts on Russian social networks or even non-users of social networks. Yet they were more informed about the wrongdoings of the government.

Our findings corroborate a slew of recent work that emphasizes an information-centric view of social media, rather than one geared towards organizing collective action. In a clever field experiment, Catie Snow Bailard (gated) randomized free access to Internet cafes in the run-up to Tanzania’s 2010 election. Again, Facebook users were more likely than the average Internet user to think the elections were conducted unfairly.  This finding aligns with recent work done by scholars on thousands of tweets emanating from the Occupy Wall Street protests in Greece, Spain and the USA. They find that online social media are used less for protest organization than they are to spread information about the grievances

What this discussion suggests is that social media’s effects on democratization are not straightforward. The information spreading function of social media is limited when most of a country’s online social networking occurs on domestic platforms that are vulnerable to government pressure, as is the case in a clutch of the world’s most prominent authoritarian regimes.  Indeed, one might speculate that one of the reasons that Russia was able to overcome its protest movement was that it was able to contain and control online dissent, while Egypt, which had no domestic social network, was unable to control the spread of information on Facebook and Twitter.  But a note of optimism is warranted:  Facebook is on the march. Just three years ago domestic social networks still dominated in much of the developing world, but the list of countries where Facebook is not dominant grows smaller every year.

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (±9.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change.

From this piece by Lars Hall and colleagues.  It is connected to their broader research agenda on choice blindness.  It’s a pretty striking result, though one wonders whether there is any real-world analogue to the experimental manipulation they carried out.  And I’d like to see what kinds of conditions might affect subjects’ ability to detect the manipulation.  Regardless, I thought this was interesting.

From p. 213 of the book, “After the Music Stopped” (blurbed on cover as “A masterpiece—simple, straightforward, and wise”—President William J. Clinton), by economist Alan Blinder:

On December 19, the ultraconservative President Bush let pragmatism trump ideology and tapped the TARP for multibillion-dollar bridge loans to both GM and Chrysler. . . .

“Ultraconservative” . . . isn’t that a bit strong. I think we can all agree on “conservative.” And, to the extent that you believe Bush didn’t handle the economy well, you could add “incompetent.” But “ultra”conservative? That sounds a bit strong.

We welcome this guest post from Robert Jones and Daniel Cox of the Public Religion Research Institute.

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May 2013 is only half over, but it has been an eventful month for same-sex marriage legislation: Rhode Island, Delaware, and Minnesota all legalized same-sex marriage, bringing the total number of states with such laws to 12. Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn called on the state House of Representatives to send him a law legalizing same-sex marriage, which he says he will sign. This burst of legislative movement, coupled with increasing numbers of polls showing majority support for same-sex marriage, makes it is easy to forget that until recently, this debate—and many public opinion polls—included civil unions as a viable third option. Now, many states that, like Illinois, legalized civil unions in the past decade appear to moving toward same-sex marriage.

Why have civil unions lost momentum? Examining the changing size and composition of civil union supporters provides a useful metric for understanding how the center of gravity has shifted in the same-sex marriage debate. Over the past decade, the number of Americans who prefer civil unions over either same-sex marriage or no legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships has declined significantly – and while in the past, this group was composed primarily of political moderates, today it’s dominated by conservatives.

Less than ten years ago, a substantial number of Americans believed that gay and lesbian relationships should be recognized, but held reservations about marriage. This group gravitated toward civil unions as an acceptable middle ground. In 2004, civil unions were significantly more popular than same-sex marriage, with roughly one-third (32%) of the public voicing a preference for this option, while approximately 1-in-5 (21%) supported same-sex marriage. Until very recently, it was also the preferred option for Democratic politicians. In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry endorsed civil unions while remaining opposed to same-sex marriage. Four years later, Barack Obama adopted a similar approach, which he held until mid-2012, when he announced that his views had “evolved” to support same-sex marriage.

As a result, most public opinion polls a decade ago also included civil union measures, either as the middle option in a three-part question or as a standalone question separate from same-sex marriage. As the public debate over same-sex marriage changed, however, advocates on both sides increasingly emphasized a binary choice of support for or opposition to same-sex marriage. As public support for same-sex marriage has grown, particularly over the past four years, many Democratic candidates have shifted their position from support for civil unions to support for same-sex marriage, while Republican candidates generally have remained opposed to any legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships. In response, some polling firms such as ABC News and Quinnipiac have stopped asking about civil unions, with the assumption that opinion was polarizing into two opposing camps.

But are attitudes really polarizing among the public? If so, we would expect an evacuation of the civil union category as the culture war battle lines became more brightly drawn. The empirical evidence, however, does not bear this out. While opposition to any legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships has declined by nearly 20 points over the last nine years (from 44% in 2004 to 26% in 2013 in a three-part question), support for civil unions has fallen by only eight points (from 32% in 2004 to 24% in 2013). In fact, PRRI’s most recent survey (April 2013) found that roughly as many Americans support civil unions (24%) as say that there should be no legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples relationships (26%).

During this time, the composition of civil union supporters has been transformed. In 2004, only 3-in-10 (30%) civil union supporters identified as politically conservative, about half identified as political moderates, and another 20% identified as politically liberal. In 2013, a majority (52%) of civil union supporters are conservatives, while 29% are moderates, and 14% are liberals.

The changing political composition of civil union supporters shows that the center of gravity of this debate has shifted significantly. The civil union option has moved from being a middle way dominated by political moderates a decade ago to one that is, today, most attractive to political conservatives. And looking ahead, there is evidence that the civil union option may have a limited future, at least if younger Americans are any indication. When given a three-way choice, civil unions are the least popular option among Millennials (Americans born after 1980). Only slightly more than 1-in-10 (13%) Millennials prefer civil unions, while 67% say they support allowing gay and lesbian people to marry, and 15% oppose any legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship.

Niall Ferguson is a history professor who also gives paid lectures, including a notorious recent event where he made an offhand commend dissing John Maynard Keynes for being gay, marrying a ballerina, and talking about poetry. Ferguson later characterized his own remarks as “stupid.”

I blogged a bit about this already, but I just wanted to repeat one point, after reading a couple of comments by some observers who, I think, misunderstood his remarks, taking them more seriously than was appropriate.

Tyler Cowen wrote:

For all of the brouhaha over Niall Ferguson, everyone is forgetting what Robert Skidelsky wrote in 1977, Skidelsky too it seems. I don’t agree with either the immigration study or with Ferguson (at all, in either instance), but the response has been a case study in…something or other. There is a glee and also a selectivity to it all which I am uncomfortable with, to say the least.

and this from Eric Alterman:

The best reason to doubt the sincerity of Ferguson’s retraction, however, is his complete lack of any compelling explanation of why he would wish to say such a thing in the first place. He was not drunk or high or on pain medication or even careless in his wording. None of the reasons that can sometimes lead us to say the opposite of what we mean—save perhaps mere sniveling hypocrisy and dishonesty—can be said to apply in this case.

I think the key is this bit from Oliver Berkeman (quoted by Alterman):

There are really only two options. One is that Ferguson didn’t believe what he said, but just says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear; the other is that he believed it then and still believes it now.

I think it’s mostly the first option. Of course Ferguson says what his audience wants to hear. That’s part of being a public speaker. The trick is to avoid going over the line and saying something that you do not believe. Here’s a simple (but, I think, not unreasonable) model. Suppose you believe 25 things and you have time to say 10 things. Then you can choose the subset of 10 that you will think the audience will most like. But there is the temptation to throw in a couple other juicy bits of red meat that you think will make the crowd happy.

In this case, my guess is that Ferguson thought that a bit of Keynes-bashing would go over well at a conference of financial advisors. But what about the homophobia, the presumably irrelevant bits about ballet and poetry? Here I have no idea. This could be coming from Ferguson’s gut, he may have internalized the fag-bashing attitudes that we were all exposed to in junior high school. Or maybe it was a failed attempt on Ferguson’s part to be a “regular guy.” Maybe it’s a bit of Oxford/Harvard snobbery on Ferguson’s part, that he thinks that a room full of businessmen will respond well to not-so-subtle locker-room-style allusions to sissy stuff? This time, however, rather than establishing Ferguson’s street-cred as a real man, it just embarrassed him. In retrospect, he would’ve been better off with some Henny Youngman-style zingers.

I don’t think Ferguson’s remark was entirely an attempt to please the crowd. As Cowen, Alterman, and others point out, he has a history of personally smearing his political opponents and, in particular, of attributing Keynes’s political and economic attitudes to his sexuality. And, indeed, it’s completely reasonable for a historian to consider such connections. In this case, however, I don’t think Ferguson was making such explorations. The bits about ballet and poetry give it away. He was making an “us vs. them” move. And then, to his dismay, he found out that most people are on the side of “them.”

I completely understand why Ferguson called the move “stupid” and I have every reason to think he was sincere in his regret. I think the commenters quoted above didn’t completely understand this because they treated Ferguson’s original remarks as serious statements by a historian rather than an attempt a crowd-pleasing by someone who was unsuccessfully trying to act like a “regular guy.”

P.S. In answer to the natural question, Why do I care about this?, my response is that I see something of myself in pop-academics such as Ferguson, researchers who also write and speak for popular audiences. Ferguson is of course much more successful at that than I am, but I am aware of the tradeoffs involved in balancing scholarship and communication.

A TEDxSydney talk by Stanford political scientist Simon Jackman.  His post about it is here.

During the April 2004 oral arguments in the Hamdi v Rumsfeld case about whether an American citizen could be detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant, Supreme Court Justice David Souter sought to probe the breadth of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which the Court ultimately held did support Hamdi’s detention, albeit with some procedural rights attached.

Souter asked:

“Is it reasonable to think that the authorization was sufficient at the time that it was passed, but that at some point, it is a Congressional responsibility, and ultimately a constitutional right on this person’s part, for Congress to assess the situation and either pass more specific continuing authorization or at least to come up with the conclusion that its prior authorization was good enough. Doesn’t Congress at some point have a responsibility to do more than pass that resolution? …. You come with an authorization that the President relied on and which I will assume he quite rightly relied on at the time it was passed. But my question is a timing question. Is it not reasonable to at least consider whether that resolution needs, at this point, to be supplemented and made more specific to authorize what you are doing?”

The AUMF’s text is very broad, resolving “that the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” That last clause is particularly sweeping. Still, given the link in the resolution between the President’s authority and the 2001 attacks, is it broad enough to cover ongoing drone strikes (against American citizens, and not) in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan? Intervention in Syria?  How closely connected to the 9/11 attackers, or to Al Qaeda, or to its affiliates, does someone (who could have been of grade-school age at the time) have to be, to count as someone who “aided” those attacks? Could the AUMF apply to the Boston marathon bombers?

These are the kinds of questions Souter presciently raised, and the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing today at 9:30 am to start a potentially important conversation about their resolution. The list of those testifying is here. Today’s Washington Post editorializes in favor of a new AUMF; Lawfare has a useful summary of some of the arguments here.

UPDATE - 2:36 pm, 16 May – a webcast of the hearing (3 hours plus) can be found here.