The Quantitative Peace

While the IR people are away, the Americanists will play.

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Joshua N. Zingher, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at Binghamton University. The content of this post is based on Josh's paper, ‘An Analysis of the Changing Social Bases of America's Political Parties: 1952-2008’, appearing in Electoral Studies. This piece is cross-posted at the London School of Economics' USAPP Blog, which can be found here. 

 

Demographic changes mean that traditional Republican constituencies are shrinking as the Democrats’ grow.

It is difficult to discuss electoral politics in the United States without talking in terms of social groups.  Journalistic accounts of party competition often stress the important role that specific constituencies play (such as the “evangelical” or “Latino” vote) in determining the outcome of presidential elections.  A great deal of political science research has shown that these social cleavages structure party competition.  However, the political importance of these social cleavages can change, which can lead to a reshuffling of the social bases of the party coalitions.  In addition, demographic changes also have the potential to dramatically reshape the political landscape, as new groups enter the electorate and the ratio of existing groups’ changes.  I am interested in how changes in the cleavage structure and changes in the ratio of groups work in conjunction to transform electoral coalitions.  In new research, I investigated two related questions: what group memberships influence individual level voting behavior and how has the number of votes each political relevant group contributes to the party coalitions changed over time?

 

Identifying the Group Bases of Party Support 

So what groups are politically relevant?  To answer this question, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis utilizing nearly 60 years of American National Election Survey (ANES) spanning 1952 to 2008.  I utilized group memberships as independent variables and vote choice as the dependent variable.  The battery of group memberships included variables for class, race, ethnicity, region, education, birth cohort and age. I define politically relevant group memberships as those that exert a statistically significant influence on individual level vote choice.  I ran a separate regression for each decade, which allowed me to assess whether the effect of specific group memberships have changed over time.  The substantive results of these models are displayed in Figure 1 below.

 

Figure 1 – Predicted effect of group membership on vote choice in presidential elections

 

 

The results of the analysis displayed in Figure 1 demonstrate that the following group memberships lead individuals to be consistently and statistically significantly more likely to support one party over the other: 

 

Table 1: The Core Democratic and Republican Social Groups 

Democratic Groups	Republican Groups
African Americans	Whites
Latinos	Protestants
Catholics	Weekly Church Attendees
Union Members	Southern Whites
Non-Religious	Men
College Graduates
Women Jews

 

This analysis highlights the continuity and change that characterizes the parties’ social bases.  Some groups have been stable members of a party coalition for the last 60 years.  African Americans, Catholics, union members and Jews have all been consistent members of the Democratic coalition while whites and Protestants have reliably favored the Republicans. 

Yet, other groups’ political leanings have changed considerably.  Whites in the Southern United States were once reliably Democratic voters; today they are one of the most solidly Republican constituencies.  The divide between the religiously devout and the secular has also become more politically important in recent elections.  Non-religious voters have become increasingly likely to vote for Democratic candidates while weekly church attendees have become more likely to support Republicans.  Similarly, a partisan “gender gap” emerged in the 1980s.  Men have become significantly more likely to vote for Republican candidates while women have become more likely to support Democrats.  In sum, many traditionally politically important social cleavages have endured (e.g. black/white) while other cleavages have become politically important only in recent decades (secular/religious or female/male).

           

Group Contributions and the Importance of Demographic Changes

The preceding analysis established what group memberships significantly influence vote choice, however, simply understanding what group memberships shape individual level voting behavior paints an incomplete picture of electoral change.  Winning an election is not about having core groups of loyal supporters.  Rather, parties must be able to obtain a majority of votes in order to win elections.  Thus, any process that leads to a party gaining more or less from a specific social group is potentially politically consequential.  Figures 2 and 3 show my calculations for each group’s contribution to the Democrats’ and Republicans’ party coalitions, as measured as a proportion of the party’s total votes. There have been considerable changes in the size of group contributions to the party coalitions—many of which highlight the important role that demographic shifts play in reshaping the party coalitions. 

 

Figure 2 - Group contribution as a proportion of Democrats’ total votes: 1952-2008

 

 

Figure 3 - Group contribution as a Proportion of Republicans’ total votes: 1952-2008

 

The Democratic Party has been obtaining an increasing proportion of its support from groups that are growing as proportion of the electorate, such as Latinos, college graduates and the non-religious. In addition, increasing turnout among Latinos and African Americans has also led to the size of these groups’ contributions to the Democratic coalition.  The Republican Party is being forced to confront the opposite scenario—many Republican groups, whites, Protestants and weekly church attendees, are making up a continuously shrinking proportion of the electorate.  Thus far, the Republican Party has been able to offset demographic changes via high turnout among their core groups as well as through winning an increasingly large majority of the Southern white vote.

So what are the conclusions can be drawn from this analysis? Firstly, the group sources of party support are dynamic, the political relevance of certain social cleavages ebb and flow across decades, which is evidenced by the changing relationship between group membership and vote choice.  Secondly, demographic changes can be politically consequential.  The Republican Party is currently in the undesirable position of having to find new sources of electoral support in order to remain viable in future elections.  The Republican Party’s need to find new sources of electoral support has come about not as a result of the loss of electoral support among loyal groups—rather, the Republican Party must find new sources of electoral support simply because traditionally Republican constituencies are making up a shrinking proportion of the electorate.     

 

 

 

Bipartisanship and the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy

Editor's note: A version of this piece is cross-posted at the LSE USAPP blog, and can be found here. This post is based on my recent article, The International and Domestic Sources of Bipartisanship in U.S. Foreign Policy, in Political Research Quarterly.

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The idea that foreign policy and national security issues are somehow exempt from the partisan rancor that often characterizes domestic politics is perhaps best encapsulated by the old adage, “politics stops at the water’s edge.” In American foreign policy, nowhere is this spirit better exemplified than by President Franklin Roosevelt’s appointment of Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War. Since World War II, Stimson and other prominent bureaucratic appointees—such as Robert Lovett and John McCloy—have come to represent this ideal. This phenomenon of bipartisan cooperation that is held to have characterized the early Cold War period has been popularly referred to as the “Cold War Consensus”, or as “Establishment” bipartisanship.

However, following the Vietnam War pronouncements of the collapse of this bipartisan consensus became commonplace. Similar claims followed the end of the Cold War, and more recently, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Indeed, such assertions have become common in discussions of American foreign policy, with the broader substantive implication being that the conduct of American foreign policy has become increasingly erratic and subject to the kind of partisan political battles that have long afflicted domestic politics. 

Some of my recent work evaluates just how closely these stylized truths match up with reality. Earlier accounts of the breakdown of bipartisanship in foreign policymaking relied largely on anecdotal accounts or individual’s assertions with little in the way of systematic evidence (see here, here, and here). Some work by political scientists has done better in approaching the concepts of bipartisanship and consensus in a more systematic way (see here, here, here, and here). Still, there are some gaps that my work tries to address. First, earlier qualitative works often focused on elite bureaucratic policymakers (like Stimson), while quantitative studies have tended to focus on congressional voting patterns or public opinion. Second, foreign policy scholars often view bipartisan cooperation through the lens of foreign threats and crises, ignoring or downplaying more basic domestic political pressures that may drive bipartisanship. My work aims to apply a more systematic form of analysis to the subject of bipartisanship in presidential appointments, while also assessing the relative importance of domestic and international factors in affecting bipartisan cooperation.

Using data on over 1,000 individual appointees to the foreign policy bureaucracy—agencies like the State Department and the Department of Defense—I identified those individual appointees who were members of the opposition party (e.g., Republican serving in a Democratic administration). Figure 1 shows the number of bipartisan appointees in a given year between 1948 and 2011. While this is only a starting point, it does not lend much support to the conventional narrative regarding the apparent collapse of bipartisanship following either Vietnam or the end of the Cold War. In fact, the early Cold War period sees some of the lowest counts observed in the data.

Figure 1 — Annual count of bipartisan appointees, 1948–2011.

However, Figure 1 does not provide us with any insights into the effects of a wider range of variables that might be influencing bipartisanship. Accordingly, I modeled the probability of observing a bipartisan appointment in a given year as a function of these different forces. Briefly stated, I find no evidence to support the idea that bipartisanship has undergone a structural shift following either Vietnam or the end of the Cold War. In fact, as is displayed in Figure 2, each party’s probability of making a bipartisan appointment has converged when comparing the pre- and post-Vietnam periods. Though it may be contrary to our expectations, this finding makes sense when we consider the domestic political environment of the early Cold War period. The McCarthy hearings, as well as the long absence of Republicans from the White House, help to explain the scarcity of bipartisan appointments during some of the early Cold War years.

 

Figure 2 — Predicted probability of a bipartisan appointment by party and time period

 

 

Similarly, I find no evidence that US conflict involvement promotes bipartisanship. On the contrary, my findings indicate conflict involvement actually has a negative effect on bipartisanship. As Figure 3 shows, the predicted probability of observing a bipartisan appointment decreases as the duration of US war involvement increases. Furthermore, these results actually match the findings of previous studies. Using different metrics, an earlier study by Peter Trubowitz and Nicole Mellow also finds a negative correlation between international crises and bipartisanship in Congressional voting. This negative relationships is likely due to the increasingly contentious and politicized nature of particularly long military engagements.

 

Figure 3 — Predicted probability of a bipartisan appointment as a function of war duration.

 

Lastly, I find that domestic political conditions play an important part in promoting bipartisanship. I argue that bipartisan appointments can serve to compensate presidents for lower levels of partisan support in Congress and aid in the construction of moderate coalitions. However, this dynamic only works when the parties are close and there are moderate legislators in Congress with whom the president and his appointees can work. But as the parties in Congress have become more polarized, moderate legislators have become increasingly scarce. Figure 4 illustrates this dynamic. At low levels of polarization, a decrease in the number of seats that the president’s party controls in Congress leads to an increase in the probability of seeing a bipartisan appointment. As polarization increases the size of this effect becomes smaller, eventually becoming negative.

 

Figure 4 — Marginal effect of a decrease in presidential support in Congress on the probability of a bipartisan appointment

Note: Gray box denotes area of statistical insignificance.

 

Overall, these findings cast doubt on some of the conventional wisdoms surrounding American foreign policy, pointing instead to the importance of the domestic political environment in promoting bipartisanship. Accordingly, my research suggests that we should expect to see less bipartisan cooperation through presidential appointments moving forward. The fact that polarization unfolds over several years at a time also suggests that this trend is unlikely to reverse itself any time soon. President Obama’s retention of Robert Gates, and his appointment of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, would seem to provide some evidence to the contrary. However, while these appointments are surely important, they are not necessarily indicative of broader trends.

 

To Nobody's Surprise...

Last night, Idaho Governor Butch Otter signed SB 1254 into law, making Idaho the seventh state in the US to allow concealed weapons on college and university campuses. The law allows anyone with an enhanced concealed weapons permit to carry on campus. However, they are are not allowed to carry in dormitories or in public entertainment facilities. I wonder if I can start holding my classes in Bronco Stadium. But I digress.

From a political science perspective, I find the passage of SB 1254 intriguing on several fronts. First, it is not at all surprising that Republicans in the Idaho state legislature were able to pass this bill through the legislative process so quickly. Idaho is the perfect example of what political parties can accomplish when they have a tight grip on both the executive and legislative branches. Republicans hold about 80% of the seats in both chambers. Idaho also has a Republican governor. In addition, Idaho Republicans tend to be more conservative than the typical Republican in the US. Given that conservative Republicans hold a supermajority in both legislative chambers and hold the governorship, it is quite easy for the Republican Party to push through a piece of conservative legislation quickly through the legislative process. Their control over all veto points essentially nullifies the separation of powers between the branches.

Second, the Idaho state legislature is also a perfect example of how important it is to have a viable second party in the legislative process, if only to slow it down and encourage legislators to take their time in drafting legislation. Even though there were several legitimate arguments against SB 1254, Idaho legislators did not seem to take the time to take them into account. Here is a summary of some of the arguments against the bill:

1. The Idaho state legislature is trying to solve a security problem that does not exist on Idaho campuses. 

2. Guns on campus can make it easier for arguments between faculty and students, or between students, to escalate quickly and get out of control. 

3. Guns are not permitted in primary and secondary schools. Some Idaho colleges and universities share buildings with these schools. In addition, Boise State invites student groups from around the state to campus for activities throughout the year. How will this affect their ability to take field trips to college campuses?

4. It is unclear how much this bill is going to cost colleges and universities to implement. It could cost millions of dollars to increase security measures and retrain police officers to deal with issues arising with the new bill.

5. Idaho recognizes out of state concealed weapons permits. Would this allow non-Idaho residents to carry weapons on campus?

6. It is unclear how this bill affects whether faculty member can defend themselves on campus. 

Despite these arguments, opponents of the bill had no power to stop the legislature from quickly passing this bill. What is disconcerting is Governor Otter's response to signing the bill: "It should be noted... to mitigate potential unintended consequences... the Legislature in particular must appropriately and carefully monitor, manage and oversee those difficulties and costs." Or, in other words, the state legislature is going to wait and see if something unfortunate happens before they modify the law instead of carefully considering and dealing with these potential issues before the law takes effect.

Third, what I find most intriguing about SB 1254 is that the Idaho state legislature is passing this bill to cater to a constituency that gains nothing from it. The people who are most affected by this bill--members of the college and university communities throughout Idaho--strongly oppose this bill. The people who are least affected by this bill--the constituents of state legislators--strongly support it. Clearly the Idaho state legislature is catering to its constituents, who gain nothing from this bill except the satisfaction of reducing gun restrictions, instead of taking into account the security concerns of the members of the college and university communities.

Last, it is important to note that as of today, there are only about 1,100 people in Idaho who hold an enhanced weapons permits. However, the state only introduced enhanced weapons permits last summer, so that number could rise in the future.

The Military and Competitive Sports

I missed my last post, but thankfully I'm on top of this week's edition. 

Kyleanne Hunter and Oliver Kaplan have a piece at Political Violence @ a Glance discussing some of the military roots of the biathlon. I've never known much about the sport's history, but it certainly makes sense that its origins are so closely tied to the kinds of security needs that Hunter and Kaplan cite. This was particularly interesting to me as both my wife and I grew up close to Lake Placid, New York. Lake Placid hosted the winter Olympics twice—once in 1932 and again in 1980—and continues to be a destination for tourists and athletes alike. Additionally, the 10th Mountain Division is headquartered about three hours from there at Fort Drum, and they have an armory located in Saranac Lake, New York where I grew up. Two members of the US biathlon team are also from Saranac Lake: Annelies Cook and Tim Burke. 

I went to high school with both Annelies and Tim, and it's great to see them doing so well. Hunter and Kaplan's discussion of the biathlon's history also makes me appreciate the sport and where I grew up a little bit more, and it's neat to think about the sport in terms of how it intersects with my own personal historical/research interests. The idea that specific military assignments can evolve into cooperative/competitive sporting events is really interesting, and I'm sure there's been much more written about it than I'm aware of (which is little). Naturally this makes me wonder what other sports have evolved out of military activities. Archery comes to mind, but I suspect that has competitive origins that are less exclusively military. There are a number of other shooting-related events during the summer games (see here), but again, many of these events are not necessarily exclusively military in origin either. Some of the historical information the link provides, and the descriptions of some of the events, suggest more of a hunting-related background. And many of these events appear to have been phased out, or have only been held once or twice.

It also makes me wonder as to what kind of selection effects might be at work in terms of how these activities evolve into competitive sports. Presumably you need activities that are a mixture of some highly specialized skill, but also something that's not overly secretive. After all, you don't want other states knowing that you have individuals highly trained in a particular task if that will compromise their work in some way. You also need an activity where multiple countries have need of the same type of training or force. As Hunter and Kaplan discuss, multiple countries were deploying similar sorts of forces to patrol remote, mountainous border regions, thereby facilitating the development of some sort of competitive event based on these shared activities. So not every state needs to have a given force, but at least a few do in order for it to be competitive. 

So what are some contemporary examples of the sorts of military activities that could evolve into internationally competitive sports? And how has technological innovation changed the landscape, so to speak, in terms of the pool of potential activities that could evolve in this way? My mind immediately went to some underwater sports, thinking of some combination of navigating an underwater obstacle course, and then performing some task requiring a demonstration of dexterity. This list of underwater sports suggests there are some sports that at least partly resemble these activities. Underwater navigation and underwater target shooting, specifically. This article also indicates that no underwater sports have been a part of the Olympic games. This appears to be due to the International Olympic Committee selecting which games it will grant approval to. Still, these seem like activities that require a high degree of specialization, but are also pursued by enough countries to facilitate competition. 

Another future possibility would be sort sort of aerial drone competition. Competitors might be judged on their ability to take off, perform certain maneuvers, perhaps "paint" a moving target for a given period of time, and then land. Though there are more advanced military variants, less sophisticated and less expensive drone variants are already being experimented with for a variety of purposes (see Amazon's recent talk of drone-based delivery). Though this would certainly emphasize physical performance less than other athletic activities, I'm not sure it's all that different from other activities like shooting, much of which emphasizes hand-eye coordination. This is also technology that more countries are likely to pursue for security/military purposes as time goes on.

If anyone can think of other military activities that might translate into internationally competitive sports, please share in the comments. 

The Conversation on Political Science & Public Engagement

As I'm sure most of you are aware, Nicholas Kristof believes that American academics (especially political scientists) don't do enough to engage with the public.  Political scientists have responded:

• Steve Saideman discusses how Kristof's complaints are oddly out of date, the importance of academic journals, and his role in the ISA blogging dustup;
• Erik Voeten points out that we're doing a lot of relevant research and more outreach than ever before; 
• Will Moore reminds us that professors are already getting their ideas out to the public by teaching them to the next generation and sheds some light on the reasoning behind the ISA blogging proposal that contributed to Kristof's complaints;
• Seth Masket discusses the degree to which Kristof misunderstands what political scientists do and the many ways that political science is increasingly entering the public conversation;
• Corey Robin uses a few examples to show how strong academics that are off of the tenure track are a missed opportunity for the Kristofs of the world;
• and Erica Chenoweth shows that academic research can be important to a much broader audience than the U.S. government leaders that appear to be Kristof's focus.

Overall, I think it is good that we regularly have these moments to reflect on how we engage with the public. In recent years, we have made great strides in our ability to get the substance of our research out to a larger audience, and I see no evidence that we are slowing down. Still, it never hurts to take some time to think about how we might do more of this and do it better. 

Of course, the conversation is ongoing, and many more are likely to contribute.  Feel free to add links in the comments!

The Private Provision of Security

One of the basic functions of government in the modern era is to provide security for its citizens. Sometimes governments are unwilling or incapable of producing enough security, and so instead they will delegate the use of force to private citizens so they can provide security themselves. Here are two recent examples:

Although the Mexican government has made some progress with its fight against drug cartels, drug related violence still plagues certain regions of Mexico. In response, some Mexican citizens have formed vigilante groups to help fight back against the cartels. For a while the groups have been helping the government officials fight against the cartels. Last week the Mexican government finally recognized and "legalized" some of these groups. "The government said it had reached an agreement with vigilante leaders to incorporate the armed civilian groups into old and largely forgotten quasi-military units called the Rural Defense Corps." So the vigilantes will have some autonomy, but the Mexican government will still be able to monitor their behavior.

During the late 1990s, the state of Idaho began a push towards privatizing prisons in the state. Currently, the largest private prison in the state is run by Corrections Corporation of America. However, this will not be for long. Not only did the state of Idaho delegate the control over prisons to a private corporation, employees of the corporation themselves delegated the provision of security to inmates. Apparently gang violence got out of control in the prison, and so the prison guards worked with a handful of gang leaders to keep the inmates in line. It is possible that the prison could have hired more guards to control the violence, but apparently the prison was consistently understaffed. (The state of Idaho was unaware of this: "CCA acknowledged last year that falsified staffing reports were given to the state showing thousands of hours were staffed by CCA workers when the positions were actually vacant.")

Incorporating Blog Consumption into the Classroom

There is currently a proposal before ISA to prevent blogging by the editorial members of ISA journals.  While there are a few posts discussing how this is professionally problematic and limits some real discussion that is happening via blog, there is one other arena such a mandate would also hurt: My classroom.  

During the 2013-2014 academic year, I have been part of a teaching program at Boise State (Boise State Teaching Scholars) that aims to help early-career professors develop a more robust classroom while incorporating what we know from the scholarship on teaching and learning.  Part of my work through this group has been to develop a new current events section in my course based on blogging. Some of you are familiar that I have already worked on making my IR syllabus more web-consumption friendly, and this is a more formal extension of that project. 

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One of the major things lacking in my introduction to International Relations course is a concurrent focus on ongoing international events.  While issues about Syria or North Korea would inevitably creep up into the classroom last semester, I have not previously devoted classroom time or grading space to incorporating student comprehension of active events, but instead, hope that they used the theoretical and empirical understanding of world politics to understand whatever events they happen across in their daily habits.

In some previous classes that I had taken as an undergrad or had been a teaching assistant for, there has, occasionally been a component that incorporated current events.  When I was a teaching assistant for Introduction to American Politics at Binghamton, the course required students to be subscribed to the New York TImes and had regular quizzes on the major current events that the front page covered.  This requirement is an expectation for students to be knowledgeable about the ongoing world.

While I have toyed with introducing newspapers into the classroom, I have been reluctant to force students to subscribe to a newspaper on top of the three books they already have to buy for IR. I do not think many of my students read newspapers currently and may be entirely foreign to the concept of a folded newspaper---I can only imagine them trying to put a newspaper back together, like a map in the glove box (another archaic task that most of my students will be unfamiliar with).  I considered having them keep up with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN online as well, but given the constant flux in front page news and the addition of pay-walls to some of the content, this would be too burdensome for my students to keep up with or have a reasonable expectation of what they should know.

Given these issues, I have turned to blogs for the current semester.  My students mostly get their news online, so having them add a few blogs to their daily reading should not be too problematic for them.  Additionally, blogs are timestamped and I can require them to pay attention to blogs on particular days to supplement their reading.  Finally, the blogs I am having them read discuss current events in the context of international relations research.  Occasionally, political scientists do write op-eds for local newspapers, but this is much more sparse than the current blogging environment. Ultimately, I hope this increases their comprehension of class material by having access to additional academic voices analyzing current events. 

The syllabus entry for my class is the following:

Over the last two days of class (we are on day three as of today), I have discussed this component, how to access to the blogs, and went over the kinds of posts they should be interested in and the ones that they can skip (though, if the topic is of interest to them, they should read it).  This experiment is new, so I have yet to evaluate my students' ability to keep up and I am months away from seeing if it has any effect on their tests relative to previous classes. 

Today (Wednesday), is the first quiz.  Given the topics covered on both sources over the last four business days, I am asking the following questions  (if any of my students are keeping up with my blog via RSS feed, then they will be well prepared for class today):

1) In what European country are there ongoing, massive political protests?
    A. Italy
    B. Greece
    C. Ukraine
    D. Belarus
    E. Latvia

2) What recent behavior provoked the protests?
    A. The President of the country has been diplomatically moving the country away from the European Union.
    B. The President of the country has been diplomatically moving the country away from Russia. 
    C. The protests are mostly anarchists from surrounding countries; there’s no real cause.
    D. The collapse of the Soviet Union.
    E. The United States threatened to send troops to the country.

3) Former President Mohamed Morsi was removed as President of Egypt by the military. What faction within Egyptian society does he have strong ties to?
    A. The military
    B. The Muslim Brotherhood
    C. Al-Qaeda
    D. The International Monetary Fund
    E. Israel

4) Research indicates (as discussed on The Monkey Cage) that there is a correlation between increased repression levels in Muslim countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen) and support for what?
    A. US intervention
    B. The government currently in power
    C. Islamism
    D. Israel
    E. Democracy

5) True/False: Tension between South Korea and Japan has been increasing and both countries are allies of the United States.

I expect questions Two and Four to be the most difficult of the questions.

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My classroom currently relies upon academic blogging to help my students engage the material they are learning with current events.  While I attempt to do some of that in my class, having online resources added to their daily consumption will help me help them struggle through some of the more difficult concepts while also putting a face to sometimes abstract theory.  The ISA's proposed rules would potentially limit the daily content of several political science blogs and may make it harder for me to point my students to active conversations within the discipline.  

Mexico may reform term limit rules this year

One of the goals of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) was to institute term limits for all elected offices in Mexico. The term limits movement was in response to President Porfirio Diaz's rule over Mexico from 1877 to 1911, when he served seven terms. He became unpopular towards the end of his sixth term and it became apparent that it was impossible to remove him from office when he was re-elected to his seventh term.

Mexico instituted a complete ban on re-election in 1933. Ever since, all elected offices in Mexico have had a one term limit. Presidents can only serve one six year term. Members of the lower chamber of the legislature serve for three year terms and members of the upper chamber serve six year terms. Legislators can run for re-election, but only after sitting out at least one term. And last, mayors can only serve one three year term.

Proponents of term limits argue that term limits prevent ineffective politicians from holding elected office for too long. This argument assumes that voters are incapable of properly determining whether their representatives deserve to be re-elected, and so instead politicians should just be forced out of office. The assumption is not unfounded. Diaz continued to be re-elected President of Mexico despite his waning popularity. So term limits can effectively remove ineffective individuals from office when voters are incapable of removing the politicians themselves.

The Mexican experience with term limits has provided evidence that there is a darker side to term limits. Term limit reformers argue that the opportunity for re-election could have a positive influence on politicians' behavior. If a politician wants to get re-elected to the same office, he needs to cater to his constituents in order to get their votes. He also needs to care about the long term needs of his district if he wants to hold office for an extended period of time. So the desire for re-election can have positive effects on representatives' behaviors, encouraging them to take actions that have positive impacts on their districts.

Under term limits, the incentive for a politician to care about constituents' needs does not necessarily exist. A politician who can only serve one term does not rely on his constituents to continue his political career. Instead, he relies on the individuals who will help him get elected to his next office. In Mexico, political parties have traditionally helped politicians jump from one position to another. So politicians have to care a great deal about catering to their party's needs so they can continue their political careers.

Individuals who support term limit reform in Mexico have provided several examples of bad governance as a direct result of term limits:

• In the fall of 2011, a severe flood affected several residents along the Grijalva River in the state of Tabasco, displacing about 300,000 people. The state is flood prone, and government officials had promised for years to implement flood control projects in the state. However, they never delivered on their promises. "The closest any government has come to delivering, says Tabasco native Raúl Abreu, "is bringing in some sandbags." Federal and local officials attribute the frequent flooding to unfavorable geography and unusually heavy rains. Abreu, however, blames politics. More specifically, he blames the idiosyncratic political system that has been in place in Mexico for decades in which candidates are banned from running for re-election. Voters never have the opportunity to pass judgment on the record of their elected officials, so those officials see no incentive to having a record at all, good or bad."
• Carrie Kahn, an NPR correspondent in Mexico City, shared an example of what happens in some Mexican towns when the mayors leave: "I've seen towns in Mexico where not only does the mayor take all of his people with him and all that expertise that has built up over three years, but he also takes all the furniture. He takes all the computers, all the pens, everything. And you also get entrenched political parties where these mayors and these local legislators are more beholden to the political parties than they are to the voters. And so that's something that they really want to put an end to."
• Mexican legislators are not given positions of power within the legislature because of their expertise, but rather because of who they know. These legislators generally have limited experience with the legislative process. Fortunately, there are professional legislative staff members do stick around from election to election, and they help legislators do their jobs, so they provide some level of expertise to the process. Nevertheless, the staff members are not accountable to voters, so they may not necessarily take the needs of voters into account.

Given the negative experience Mexico has had with unresponsive politicians, there has been a push to reform term limits in Mexico for at least 20 years. And it actually seems likely that reforms will be made soon. The Mexican legislature approved a bill in mid-December to reform term limits. The bill allows mayors to serve two three year terms, and legislators to serve up to 12 years. In addition, the bill would also enforce campaign spending limits. If a candidate wins an election but went over the spending limit, electoral authorities could annul the election. In order for the bill to become law, lawmakers in 16 out of 31 Mexican states have to approve it. If so, it will be the largest electoral reform law in Mexico since the 1990s.

Educational Attainment and Race in Alabama

A part of my responsibilities as a post-doc here at Alabama entails helping faculty with seeking out external funding for projects. One of these projects has involved developing a program to promote educational outreach throughout the state. In the course of this work I've been digging through some data on educational attainment rates in Alabama. In terms of learning about the political and economic characteristics of my new state, this has been an informative exercise. I also think it's helpful in illustrating the benefits of digging through your data, and helps to shed some light on the benefits of considering the distribution of your data more carefully, and so I thought I'd write a quick post on the subject. For the purposes of this post I'll be drawing on data collected from the American Community Survey's 2006–2010 five year population estimates. 

The mean percentage of Alabama's population holding a bachelor's degree or higher for this time period is 21.7%.  Compare this figure with that of my home state—New York's overall rate is 32.1%. This is a fairly large disparity, but further disparities emerge when we begin to disaggregate the data by race. The graph below shows the mean value of this same variable across the black and white populations of both states. 

From this we can see that the total values mask some important differences between groups within each state. In both cases the college attainment rate of the white population is slightly higher than the overall mean value. Alternatively, the attainment for the black population is significantly lower than the overall mean value in each state. Even New York, which on its face appears to have a significantly higher overall college attainment rate, is not much different from Alabama when we compare black college attainment rates with Alabama's values. 

Even when disaggregating the data in this way, we often still lean on the mean value pretty heavily. The distribution of the data around the mean can be incredibly informative as well, but we don't often pay as much attention to this as we should. Below I present a quick illustrative example of why this can matter.

Looking at Alabama's data again, I have drawn on county-level college attainment data for both groups.

Looking back at the first graph we can see that the statewide mean white college attainment rate was about 24%, and the statewide black attainment rate is roughly 14%. Looking at the county-level distributions can help us to get a better grasp on educational attainment rates throughout the state. In the case of white attainment, we can see that the distribution is slightly skewed towards the low end, but the lowest value in the distribution is around 8–9%. Alternatively, the distribution of black college attainment rates at the county level is more heavily skewed, and the lowest value in the distribution is considerably lower than for the white attainment rates, as shown in the preceding graphs where the X-axes are held constant to help make the figures more comparable. In fact, .30% is the lowest black attainment rate recorded in the data. 

Looking at the distribution of the data in addition to the mean values for these different groups can provide some additional insights into the substantive issues we're interested in. In this case, it's already apparent from considering the mean values that there are disparities in the college attainment rates of the black and white segments of the state's population. However, these values may actually underestimate the magnitude of those disparities. Though the distribution for white attainment rates is still skewed, it's floor is considerably higher than that of black attainment rates. In fact, by my count there were 14 counties in which the recorded black attainment rate was lower than the lowest recorded white attainment rate. The maximum for each group is roughly the same, however. Areas around Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Huntsville have fairly high college attainment rates. But these areas are highly unrepresentative when considering the state more broadly. In fact, although the mean statewide black attainment rate is 14%, the majority of counties fall well below this figure. And while most counties also fall below the mean on white attainment rates, there are, comparatively, more counties falling above the mean. All of this suggests that the mean statewide black college attainment figures are more heavily influenced by outliers in the data than are white attainment rates.  

Lastly, looking at these plots reveals another important feature of the distributions—the variance. The variance in white college attainment rates is 66.2. The variance in black college attainment rates is nearly half that, at only 37.5. This tells us that not only are black college attainment rates lower than white attainment rates, but they are more uniformly so. To put it differently, there is greater dispersion in white college attainment rates, while black college attainment rates are more tightly clustered around lower values. This is made apparent by looking at the two preceding graphs. Though both are skewed towards the lower end of the X-axis, white college attainment figures are less tightly clustered here, as I mentioned above.

This is an issue that I'll come back to in the future, but for now it seemed like this was a useful example for illustrating the importance of familiarizing yourself with the data that you're working with, and how relying less on simple mean values can reveal interesting features of the data you're working with. Bear Braumoeller has an interesting Political Analysis piece about examining the variance, which is worth checking out. More substantively, I also think that this exercise helps to more fully draw out the disparities that may exist between social groups. Relying on simple indicators of central tendency can be useful in some contexts when we want to quickly convey bits of information, but these figures can also be misleading. At the very least, they don't always tell us the full story.

 

Concessions, Recognition, and Blame

Forcing the government to shutdown, instead of fully implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), may seem like a huge misstep by the Republican party, as most Americans would rather see the implementation of the ACA instead of the government shutdown. But as I discuss below, Republicans may be able to walk away from this whole mess with wins on three fronts. First, they may be able to get concessions on the ACA. Second, they may be able to limit Obama's ability to garner recognition for the ACA as it is now being implemented for the first time. And last, if the economy takes a hit from the shutdown, Republicans may be able to blame the implementation of the ACA for that instead.

Concessions

In the images below I use simple spatial models to show how the Republican Party can gain concessions from Democrats on the ACA from attaching the ACA to the debt limit.

In the unidimensional space below, the x-axis represents the left-right spectrum with respect to universal health care. The left represents implementing the ACA and the right represents overturning it. The D represents the Democrat's ideal point and the R represent the Republican's ideal point. The ACA, the current status quo, is located on the D. Democrats and Republicans prefer policies closest to their own ideal points.

The Republicans obviously would like to see the status quo moved to the right. In other words, they want to overturn the ACA. However, there are no proposals that deal exclusively with the ACA that the Republicans can introduce to convince the Democrats to move it to the right, since it would be moving the policy away from the Democrat's ideal point. By attaching the ACA to government funding, however, the Republicans may be able to coerce Democrats to make concessions.

The two dimensional policy space below is similar to the one above except I have added a government funding dimension. The Democrat's ideal point is now moved up to Implement ACA-Extended Government Funding. The Republican's ideal point is moved to Overturn ACA-Short Term Funding. The current status quo is Limited Funding-Implement ACA. All the points inside the blue circle represent points that Democrats prefer to the current status quo. All points inside the red circle represent points Republicans prefer to the status quo. The reddish-purple area with the two circles overlap represent points both Democrats and Republicans prefer to the status quo.

A few observations about the policy space: 

(1) There are several policy proposals that the Democrats prefer that could move the ACA to the right, which would be a win for Republicans.

(2) On the other hand, according to this simple model, Republicans actually prefer the Democrat's ideal point to the current status quo. So if the Democrats hold out long enough, they may be able to convince Republicans to fund government and maintain the SQ.

(3) The most probable outcome is agreement on a policy proposal somewhere between the Republicans and Democrat's ideal points. So we should see some concessions on the ACA but with an extended raise in the debt ceiling.

What else do the Republicans get out of the shutdown? They get to control the news cycle so Americans are not focusing on the implementation of the ACA, which happened on October 1st. Instead Americans are now focusing on the shutdown. Obama and the Democrats will be less able to enjoy recognition for their accomplishment.

Not only can Republicans prevent Democrats from gaining recognition at the implementation of the ACA, next fall they may be able to argue that the ACA disrupted the US economy. If the shutdown does cause a slight disruption in the economy, Republicans may blame the ACA instead. Americans have short memories, and the conclusions they draw from evidence is often influenced by their party identification. So it may not be that hard for Republicans to convince their base next fall that the ACA hurt the economy, not the shutdown.