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.

---

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.

 

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. 

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.

 

Political Science and Scientists in the News

Just a quick link to this Atlantic article. It features several works by political scientists on why and when the public is likely to support military action. Complete with graphs and everything. 

 

*Picture taken from the aforementioned and linked Atlantic article. 

Follow-up

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday's post. Chad sent me a link to this paper that was recently posted on AJPS' early view. I've not read the entire article yet, but it seems apropos given the subject matter of yesterday's piece. 

History vs. Political Science? Temporally Constrained Studies and Generalizability.

So this is my first post back from a prolonged break. As I mentioned in a previous—albeit brief—entry, I’ve had a busy but enjoyable summer. I got married, defended my dissertation at the beginning of July, and my wife and I have since relocated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama where I’ve accepted a position as a post-doc. We’re both pretty excited about the move and we’re really enjoying ourselves. Having grown up in the Adirondacks in upstate New York, summers that extend beyond a two month window have a certain appeal. And now that we’re getting settled in down here, I’m slowly getting back into a routine for work. I’ve been sitting on some papers for a while now that I’m finally turning my attention to, and it’s my experience with one of these papers that motivated me to write this particular post.

I’ve been thinking recently about how we view the place that history holds in our discipline. Now, I suspect there is an initial reaction that many people (particularly quantitative political scientists) are likely to have to the word “history,” and I’m guessing that is probably one of derision. It’s not that political scientists necessarily dislike history or historians, but this reaction is conceivable given that these disciplines are marked by some important epistemological differences, and many quantitative political scientists are often taught from the outset to avoid relying on single cases when drawing more generalizable lessons and conclusions (with good reason). When we think of historians, it is often in the context of someone who provides an excruciating level of detail about one particular event, and then tries to explain its origins and broader implications/lessons. My issue is not in fact with this particular point—as social scientists, we want to be able to assess just how generalizable the relationships that we’re looking at really are. We are typically interested in exploring systematic relationships, trends, and patterns that hold over broader periods of time and apply to a wide range of actors than are many historical studies. So to be clear from the outset, I am not advocating that quantitative political science should attempt to emulate the professional approach or methods that many historians employ.

My issue, really, stems more from the assertion by many quantitative political scientists that a study that is time bound in some way is “history”. This does not apply to all political scientists, but it’s been my experience that reviewers will often look at the temporal range of a study and dismiss its if it is explicitly bound to a particular period of time that does not overlap with the present (allowing a few years of slack on just what constitutes the “present”, that is). Indeed, some seem to be under the impression that it’s not even political science if the gap between the time period covered by a study and the present is sufficiently large. For example, let’s say I’m interested in understanding the domestic determinants of pre-hegemonic US foreign policy behavior. In this particular instance, there are theoretical reasons to suppose that the behavior of the US could be different in this time period as compared to later periods. Let’s further suppose that I have theoretical expectations regarding the relationship between X and Y, and I write a paper on this relationship for the period between 1900 and 1945. I would not at all be surprised to receive reviews rejecting the paper at least in part because the reviewer(s) questioned the study’s broader relevance, given that it’s bound to a 46-year time period.  

I think these sorts of reactions expose some problems and some important assumptions that we often make as political scientists. First, not every study necessarily needs to neatly map onto the present time period—or any other arbitrarily chosen time period. There is nothing inherently unscientific about the notion that certain relationships or phenomena can only be found in a particular temporal context. I’m fairly certain people have not abandoned the study of dinosaurs simply because we no longer see T-Rex roaming around the countryside. And our field is rife with examples of research, the temporal context of which is fundamentally limited in some way. Scholars of American politics provide perhaps the clearest example of an entire sub-field that cannot be held to apply to a period extending back beyond 1789. The sub-field of international relations is similarly dependent in many ways upon the existence of the modern nation-state, which we typically trace back to 1648, and some of the most widely used only go back to 1815. Do we consider our endeavors in these areas “history” because our studies are bound to these time periods?

Also on this point, there seems to be a double standard when we consider the broader implications of our research. Taking my example from earlier, reviewers will commonly ask how the study of US foreign policy between 1900 and 1945 is relevant for today, but rarely do we consider how a study of US foreign policy from 1945–2013 informs our understanding of the 1900–1945 period. It strikes me that this is (1) perpetually moving the goalpost, and (2) that it may be the wrong goalpost. This may seem like an odd point, but what it “relevant” by current standards is something that obviously changes on a day-to-day basis, and it’s a standard that says nothing about the quality of a paper as a piece of social science, or whether or not a paper helps us to understand a particular question about a given set of relationships. Really, this only represents our own innate temporal biases, but it says nothing about how scientific a piece of research is.  If the goal is truly generalizable theoretical and empirical knowledge, in a temporal sense, then this kind of consideration should apply just as much as thinking about how a study informs our understanding of the present. Conducting a study with the purpose of expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships between societal actors is not synonymous with expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships between societal actors for the purposes of informing our understanding of the present.

And it’s not as though we don’t attempt to deal with “unique” time periods and cases in our current research. However, it’s often the case that the manner in which we deal with these cases is fairly crude. For example, we might include a dummy variable in a model to control for a time period (or characteristics of a time period) that we believe to be unique in some way. Bipolarity during the Cold War, for example. Similarly, we might include a dummy variable in our model to control for states that we believe to be unique—depending on our topic, it might be a state like Israel, Egypt, the US, or maybe a group of states like the “Great Powers”. Sometimes we might also include an interaction term to account for how the effect of one variable might be conditional upon another. 

But these approaches are not always appropriate methods for dealing with the questions that we want to answer. Dummying out a particular time period is only going to tell us whether or not a given time period or group has a higher or lower intercept than the alternative time period or group. This approach is also often atheoretical. For example, we might have a belief that a time period is somehow different, but cannot fully articulate why or how. Similarly, interaction terms with a variable capturing a particular time period, for example, are implicitly suggesting that a given relationship is time-bound in some way. However, these approaches don’t allow us to examine whether or not the remaining variables in our models also have different effects in the context of a particular time period. For example, maybe we’re interested in whether or not both regime type and economic interests have a different effect on conflict propensity during the Cold War as compared to after. This, then, would suggest that maybe splitting our sample into two time periods is the more appropriate means of addressing our question. In fact, the notion that we would dummy out a particular time period because we suspect that it’s “different” in some way, but don’t exactly know how, is exactly the reason why we would want to conduct a study that is temporally bound in the first place.

This points to another issue. I think these biases are somewhat rooted in, and reinforced by, our relatively limited access to “good” data. Almost every journal article contains passages wherein the authors attempt to assert the broader relevance of their work. In the case of international relations, it is also quite common for these articles to then proceed to test their arguments using data that is only available for the post-World War II period. Sometimes, these tests will use data for a single country—often the US. Yet the arguments the authors make are often asserted as applicable to a broader set of countries than just the US, and rarely do such papers even address their own temporal limitations. We implicitly accept the generalizability of papers in which the tests of broader theoretical arguments rely on data from an incredibly narrow and often unrepresentative set of states, but push back when a study openly acknowledges its more narrow temporal confines. Why should we automatically assume that such studies inform our understanding of international relations and state behavior in the 1800s?

This is understandable. Particularly in the field of international relations, the availability of data is exponentially greater in the post-World War II period than before. Commonly used indicators like GDP and trade either don’t exist, are often missing, or are highly inaccurate for earlier time periods. Accordingly, many of our studies focus on this 50–60 year time period—not because it somehow matters more, or because we are interested only in this particular time period, but because this is the period for which we have access to relatively abundant data sources. But even in the post-World War II time period some of the data we use can still be of questionable reliability. Accordingly, when we see an article that focuses on a much earlier time period it sticks out like a sore thumb, and reviewers will often proceed to subject that paper to a different standard than other papers—a standard that really has nothing to do with the execution of the paper or the soundness of its argument.

This knee-jerk reaction against studies that are temporally bound in some way can also have deleterious consequences for our ability to understand the world. Finding that a particular relationship between two variables holds only for a given time period can reveal new and interesting questions. For example, we have evidence that Republicans and Democrats have switched their positions on military spending over the course of the Cold War. If we were looking for a relationship between Republicans and higher military spending over the entirety of this time period, we might erroneously conclude that there is no relationship. Alternatively, the finding that this relationship is temporally bound in some way raises new questions: Why did they switch? What caused the switch? Etc.

If our goal is to continuously develop and refine our understanding of how the world works then we must think carefully about the standards we set. If that standard is that we must only examine relationships that hold for centuries at a time, then we are imposing some very serious limitations on ourselves as researchers. These kinds of “big” systematic relationships are clearly important, but the march of scientific progress is not marked exclusively in these terms. 

Trading Statehood for Votes: The Early Decline of the Democratic Party in the Idaho

Since I recently moved to Boise, I decided to learn more about the political history of Idaho. I discovered that there are several cases in the formation the Idaho political system that are relevant to the study of Comparative, American, and state politics today, and so I am going to devote a few blog posts to some interesting aspects of Idaho history. In this first blog post, I discuss the early rise and decline of the Democratic Party in Idaho.

Today Idaho is one of the most Republican states in the country. It has the second largest percentage of Republicans in a state legislature. In addition, since 1968, 11 out of the 14 House of Representatives members have been Republican and all but one of the US Senators have been Republican. Idaho has also consistently voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since 1968.

Although Idaho is currently a Republican stronghold, it did not start out that way. The Democratic Party had a strong presence in the original Idaho territory. This was in part due to the small but significant Mormon minority in the state voting in bloc for the party (yes, Mormons were mostly Democrats in the late 19^th century). However, as I discuss in more detail below, in order to receive statehood, members of the Democratic party in Idaho (as well as members of the Republican party) had to distance themselves from Mormons in order to convince Congress to grant them statehood (as Congress was anti-Mormon at the time). The original Idaho state constitution, which Congress had to approve, prohibited Mormons from voting. Essentially the Democratic Party had to choose between catering to a loyal and significant voting bloc in their party and statehood. The Democratic Party chose statehood. 

Why Statehood?

In Territorial Governor George Stoup's call for the Idaho Constitutional Convention in 1889, he made it clear that there were several significant political and financial benefits for Idaho becoming a state. With respect to political representation, if Idaho became a state, residents could vote in Presidential and Vice Presidential elections. They would also have at least one House Representative and two Senators. While they had a territorial representative to Congress, the representative could not vote.

Concerning local politics, residents of the Idaho territory were also not able to select their governor, nor were they able to select their judges. The President appointed individuals to fill these posts. If Idaho became a state residents would have more control over who represented them in local politics.

Also, perhaps more importantly, there were several financial benefits for statehood. According to Governor Stoup’s estimates, the Treasury only gave Idaho $28,000 a year to run the territorial government. However, if Idaho were a state, Congress would contribute about $3.5 million a year to the state (with a large portion of those resources being allocated to the establishment of a public education system in the state). Furthermore, due to the Alien Land Act of 1887, foreign investors could not own or lease real estate in territories controlled by Congress. If Idaho became a state, they would be in a better position to attract foreign investment, especially in the mining regions of the state (mining was an extremely important sector of Idaho’s economy). And last, if Idaho became a state, the legislature could sell or lease public land, which would have brought in a great deal of revenue.  

Requirements for Statehood

One of the major obstacles to Idaho statehood was the small but significant Mormon population in the region. They made about 17% of the territory’s population in the 1880s and were mostly located in the south and eastern portions of the territory. Representatives from Congress who spoke at the Idaho Constitutional Convention in 1889 made it very clear that the “Mormon question” was the largest obstacle for Idaho to overcome to gain statehood. Below is an excerpt from one Congressperson’s speech at the Convention:

Mr. Burrows: “But allow me to say, gentlemen, that the most serious obstacle to my mind in the way of your admission into the Union, is not the question of irrigation, it is not the question that concerns your material affairs in the territory, but the most serious obstacle lying in the pathway of your admission into the Union is the question of Mormonism… Now your constitution will be very carefully scanned upon that question.”

So why was Congress at odds with the Mormon church? Congress saw the Mormon church as a threat to the Federal government. Mormons were very loyal to their church leaders. This was in part due to the history of the church itself. Mormons ended up in the west to escape religious prosecution in the east. They lived in isolation for many years, and this forced them to establish their own cities and towns with their own economic and political systems. It was almost as if they had built their own small country in the west, where religion, economics, and politics intertwined. Given the relationship between religion and politics, members of Congress believed that Mormons were loyal to their leaders in almost a similar fashion to how Americans were loyal to Congress or the President. Another excerpt from the Convention:

Mr. Burrows: “Now gentlemen, no organization, whether religious or secular, no body of people in this country can dominate, either in the state or in the nation that acknowledges a higher power than the power of the government in civil affairs...”

Congress took the Mormon “threat” so seriously that they passed the Edmunds Act in 1882. The act essentially stripped Mormons of the right to vote. It also prohibited Mormons from serving on juries and prohibited them from holding public office. By the time of the 1889 Constitutional Convention, it was clear that if Idaho wanted statehood, they would have to repress their Mormon population.

Disenfranchisement Prior to the Constitutional Convention

Mormon political repression in the Idaho territory began a few years before the push for statehood, in the mid-1870s. Up until this time, Mormons were actively involved in territorial politics. They tended to vote in bloc for the Democratic Party, which meant the party did quite well in territorial elections.

Eventually the Republican Party in the Idaho territory realized that they could increase their vote share if they used the Democratic Party’s affiliation with Mormons against them. An anti-Mormon arm of the Republican Party started in the territory, primarily in Oneida County, in the 1870s. The anti-Mormons mainly argued that Mormons should not be able to participate in politics because of their support of polygamous marriages (even though less than 1% of Mormons in Idaho actually engaged in polygamy). The campaign was so successful that anti-Mormons gained control over the territorial legislature in 1884. And in order to re-enforce Mormon repression, they passed the Test Oath.

The Test Oath of 1884 prohibited Mormons in Idaho from voting, holding political office, and serving on juries. The early effects of the Edmunds Act and the Test Oath on the Democratic vote share were drastic. Democrats almost continuously sent a territorial representative to Congress for 18 years (see the chart below). Not only did the Republican Party start winning these elections, by the time of the 1889 Convention, they were so strong that they actually made up the majority of the representatives at the Constitutional Convention.

Non-Mormon Democrats quickly recognized that the Republican’s anti-Mormon strategy was working, as they were losing control over territorial politics. They began to regard their Mormon co-partisans as a serious liability. An anti-Mormon faction formed in the Democratic Party and they made it very clear that they wanted to distance themselves from their Mormon co-partisans.

Disenfranchisement during the Convention

Anti-Mormon sentiment in Idaho continued during the Constitutional Convention. Members of both parties wanted to make it abundantly clear that they did not support the Mormon church.  Several Democrats gave several speeches about Mormons, trying to distance themselves as far from them as possible. As one Democrat representative stated:

 “... the conservative element in that caucus … wanted to show to this territory, to show to the good people that we would go far beyond even our conscientious scruples to put down Mormonism, to show to this territory that we stood side by side with the republicans.”

In order to eliminate the Mormon vote in Idaho permanently, representatives in the convention carefully worded Article 6, sections 3 and 4 of the Constitution in order to disenfranchise Mormons. They wanted to make sure that the language was clear enough that Mormons could not find a loophole to get around disenfranchisement. But they also wanted to make sure that the state legislature could not take the right to vote away from any other religious or civic organization.

The final language of Article 6, sections 3 and 4, read as follows:

“Sec. 3. No person is permitted to vote, serve as a juror, or hold any civil office who… is a bigamist or polygamist, or is living in what is known as a patriarchal, plural or celestial marriage, or in violation of any law of this state, or of the United States, forbiding any such crime; or who in any manner, teaches, advises, counsels, aids or encourages any person to enter into bigamy, polygamy, or such patriarchal, plural or celestial marriage, or to live in violation of any such law, or to commit any such crime; or who is a member of, or contributes to the support, aid, or encouragement of, any order, organization, association, corporation, or society, which teaches, advises, counsels, encourages or aids any per son to enter into bigamy, polygamy or such patriarchal or plural marriage, or which teaches or advises that the laws of this state prescribing rules of civil conduct, are not the supreme law of the state; …

Sec. 4. The legislature may prescribe qualifications, limitations and conditions for the right of suffrage, additional to those prescribed in this article, but shall never annul any of the provisions in this article contained.”

Timing, Another Factor

Since there were clearly significant political and financial benefits for Idaho residents if the Federal government granted them statehood, it is not too surprising that Democrats were willing to disenfranchise their Mormon supporters in exchange for statehood. However, I also think that the short time frame in which Idaho had to petition for statehood also played in role in forcing the Democrats to make concessions. If the Federal government had not granted them statehood in 1889, they believed they would have had to wait years for another opportunity.

So why was there a quick time frame? In order for Idaho to become a state, it had to prove it had enough residents to justify statehood. The territory had to meet the population requirements of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was “60,000 residents.” It also had to have enough residents to justify a House member representing the state. According to the 1880 Census, there were only 32,610 residents in Idaho, which was far less than the 60,000 required. Unless the population in the state almost doubled by 1890, it would have been impossible to gain statehood.

Since it was clear that the Idaho territory might have not had enough residents to justify statehood, representatives from Idaho started exaggerating about how many residents lived in the territory. In the late 1880s, Stoup claimed they were 113,777 residents in the state, almost four times the 1880 Census count. 

In order to prevent Congress from having a more accurate idea of what the population of the Idaho territory was, Idaho needed to petition for statehood prior to 1890, the year of the next Census. They waited until 1889 to draft a state constitution and present it to Congress. Since there was such a short time frame, it may have forced Democrats to make serious compromises in exchange for statehood. Had they had a longer time frame they could have had more time to make the argument that Mormons were not a threat to the Federal or state government. 

Statehood, Enfranchisement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party

On July 3, 1890, Idaho officially became a state. It became one of the few states in the US to include a religious requirement for suffrage in its constitution. Nevertheless, Mormon disenfranchisement did not last long. The state repealed the Test Oath in 1892. And the constitution was not used to prevent Mormons from voting. Still, it was not until 1982 that Idaho formally changed its constitution to remove the anti-Mormon language.

Even though Mormons quickly regained their right to vote, the Democratic Party never regained the dominance it had in the mid-1800s. The Republicans and Democrats basically shared power for about the first 80 years, until the 1960s. And then Republicans dominated elections thereafter. 

Tom Coburn's Grudge, Part II

Via Jennifer Diascro's Twitter feed: The Economist has an article up addressing the specific targeting of Political Science Research by Senator Coburn. The article addresses a point that I've brought up a couple of times in the past (see here for example). Specifically, why only political science?

The Economist:

The real debate seems to be over what is of value. For many Republicans the answer is nothing having to do with political science. Yet it is hard to see how that discipline is any more frivolous than—or even all that different from—economics, sociology or anthropology.Mr Coburn's measure wouldn’t touch NSF funding for other social sciences. But this is the fourth time since 2006 a Republican has singled out political science for cuts.

If we look closer at those efforts, the picture becomes a bit clearer. Mr Coburn, for example, has particularly objected to studies on American attitudes to the filibuster, at a time when Republicans are using the filibuster routinely. Mr Flake had likewise complained about research on climate-change negotiations. When Mr Coburn first proposed cutting off funding in 2009, he complained that NSF money had gone to fund The Human Rights Data Project, which, he noted, had “concluded that the United States has been ‘increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists,’ leading to a worldwide increase in ‘human rights violations’ as others followed-suit.” Mr Coburn even groused that Paul Krugman had received NSF grants more than 15 years earlier. Presumably that was because Mr Krugman went on to become a liberal columnist and not because the research won him a Nobel prize.

In all of these cases, the research risked calling into question the wisdom of policies supported by the Republican Party. In none of the cases did Republicans argue that the studies were flawed. They appeared to simply object to financing research that might contradict their point of view.

I would add that my impression is that political science research is probably the one field that is most likely to draw upon and combine insights from all of these other fields. Perhaps I'm mischaracterizing the work of scholars from these other disciplines, but if this view is accurate then it further hurts the credibility of Coburn's claims to be going after wasteful spending. If the idea is to get as much bang for our buck as taxpayers, political science seems like exactly the right field to invest in. But does this matter? Probably not. Most people just don't know or care enough about this to really see the problem, and for these people Coburn's credibility is really a non-issue, so he can still claim to be simply fighting the good fight against bloated government budgets. 

Finally, I'd urge all of my Americanist and comparativist colleagues to start building up the national security implications of their work. After all, we must remain ever vigilant to safeguard our democratic institutions from infiltration by the communist scourge. Maybe ANES can just add a question asking "Are you a communist spy?" or "Are you a terrorist?" and Coburn will be satisfied.