Pretty good article in the New York Times today takes up this question, with quotes from political scientsts Alan Abramowitz, James Gimpel, Andrew Reeves, John Sides, and an unnamed “political scientist [who] estimated that the impact of changes in unemployment was 27 times greater than the impact of equivalent changes in gas prices.” The basic message: gas prices aren’t important!
Irony Department: Money in Politics Edition
2 items in the Washington Post this morning:
2012 GOP contest shaping up to be cheapest race in years
Even adding this year’s spending by super PACs — a new kind of independent group that can raise millions of dollars at a time — the Republican contenders spent more cash in 2008 all on their own.
Poll: Voters want super PACs to be illegal
The widespread disgust directed toward super PACs from voters comes amid a Republican presidential primary election season in which these organizations have played an outsized role.
Are elected representatives more responsive in election years?
Election-year adjustments in a lawmaker’s voting pattern are common. But this election cycle is shaping up as unique. The pressure from the right flank of the Republican Party is intense, and unlike in 2010, party veterans this time around have had time to see it coming after the last primary season bumped off or nearly toppled so many of their colleagues.
So writes Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times on February 25th. Which made me wonder: has it been shown empirically that “election-year adjustments in a lawmaker’s voting pattern are common”?
This would be hard to test with members of the House, since they are up for election every two years. But one could test it with senators, which is what this article is about. And in fact this is what Steven Levitt (who later went on to Freakonomics fame) does in a 1996 article in the American Economic Review. The money paragraph:
As elections near, the weight given [by senators] to overall state voter preferences doubles, with that increase being offset by a decline in the weight placed on the party line…These results suggest that senators alter their voting patterns as elections approach to better reflect the preferences of the median voter. Senators apparently consider voters to be myopic since most of the change in voting patterns is concentrated in the election year itself (435-436).
Causal effects of daylight savings time?
Daylight saving time, mostly a scam
Researchers have found that daylight saving doesn’t save much energy — and can even kill people. But its effects are still hotly debated.
Read the entire story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/daylight-saving-time–still-mostly-a-scam/2012/03/09/gIQATaxP3R_blog.html
Citizen United and Inferences on Money in Politics
What did Citizens United do?
Ask 5 experts and you might get 5 different answers. (Well, 2 answers really.)
Kevin Drum writing for Mother Jones (via Rick Hasen):
In Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruled that the only justification for limiting campaign expenditures was “corruption or the appearance of corruption.” And since independent expenditures, including those from corporations and unions, don’t have any kind of corrupting influence, there’s no justification for limiting them.
Wendy Kaminer in the Atlantic (via the Monkey Cage):
The paper [the New York Times] is promoting the misconception that the ruling allowed for unlimited campaign contributions from super-rich individuals. It didn’t.
The NYT’s Public Editor responds to the charges (via Rick Hasen):
The truth is – at least as far as I can tease it out of this mess – that the Sheldon Adelson phenomenon is the product of a long line of decisions. Perhaps it would be better to de-emphasize Citizens United as the critical milestone and get on with tracking the money in the current campaign.
Rick Hasen’s own response to the critiques:
Bottom line: Citizens United has led, indirectly but surely, to the emergence of Super PACs. But it is up to Congress, not the Supreme Court, to fix the disclosure problems with Super PACs.
The Sunlight Foundation wades in, taking the side of Hasen et al. (via Hasen):
So let’s recap briefly. Citizens United opened the door for incorporated organizations to make unlimited campaign expenditures underwritten by their own treasuries or by the unlimited donations of corporations, labor unions or individuals. That, in turn, led a lower court to rule that independent political committees–section 527 committees–can do the same. In a move not called for by Citizens United, but certainly responding to conditions created by that decision, the FEC ruled that politicians can raise money for and direct donors to the resulting super PACs. That’s when we get Miriam Adelson’s check, or for that matter, any of the big donors we’ve seen giving to presidential super PACs. By itself, overturning Citizens United wouldn’t eliminate big money from politics. We’d merely return to the last decade’s favored ways of infusing cash into the political system, like giving to 527s and qualified nonprofit corporations that faced more restrictions on their political activities than corporations face today. And what we wouldn’t see is politicians steering their well-heeled donors, like Miriam Adelson, to super PACs that support them.
Washington Post critiques crime stats
(1):
How D.C. police got to 94 percent
D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier claims a 94 percent closure rate for homicide cases last year, but the actual number of 2011 cases closed amounts to 57 percent. The difference: Lanier counts homicide cases from earlier years that were closed last year.
Read the entire story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/the-trick-to-dc-police-forces-94percent-closure-rate-for-2011-homicides/2012/01/30/gIQATErbMR_story.html
(2):
Mystery surrounds cases of award-winning detective
D.C. police officials called Detective Milton Norris a “standout,” with a 300 percent case-closure rate in 2010, and they named him Homicide Detective of the Year. But the record shows that Norris had two homicide cases in 2010 and both remain open.
Read the entire story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/confusion-over-numbers-for-award-winning-dc-detective-milton-norris/2012/02/10/gIQABxZUMR_story.html
Potpourri
Does food aid increase conflict?
Via the Freakonomics blog, this working paper by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian tackles a big question with an interesting design. Abstract:
This paper examines the effect of U.S. food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuations in U.S. wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country’s tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Our estimates show that an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.
End of urban segregation?
NY Times, “Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds“:
The findings by the two professors — Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Jacob L. Vigdor of Duke — were generally seconded by a spectrum of other experts with several caveats and an admonition that the study should not be seen as declaring the end of all segregation.