Brendan Nyhan

Context: George Lakoff is a UC-Berkeley linguist who has become the new guru of liberals who want to reframe the national debate. Via his book and the think tank he helped start, Lakoff argues for mechanically re-framing each issue from a liberal perspective, an approach we criticize in All the President’s Spin as another destructive step in the escalating spin war.

Here’s a new post on the wildly popular Daily Kos weblog about the new New York Times/CBS poll that shows what’s wrong with this approach:

One of the striking things about that poll was this:

Still, in a telling contrast with the 2000 election, 82 percent of respondents said that Mr. Bush legitimately won on Nov. 2. Just before Election Day, 50 percent of respondents said they considered Mr. Bush’s defeat of Al Gore in 2000 a legitimate victory.

That’s quite a shift. In terms of Lakoff framing, or reality, or whatever you wish to call it, it makes sense to understand that on the one hand, the election is over in most people’s mind  (and happily so, since the bulk of the populace is sick of the ads and wants to move on/not think about politics) and that on the other the idea of working to overturn this election is a dead end. What’s not a dead-end is working to identify and correct errors, glitches, irregularities and where they can be identified, disenfranchisement and discrimination (and whatever happens when that is done is what happens). No one doubts the sincerity of those who are working hard for verification… it’s a matter of framing.

If we can’t distinguish “Lakoff framing” from reality, we have a problem.

You can’t make this shit up:

Artest is promoting his record label, Truwarier, and said that with his other career endeavors he was trying to make his life more positive.

“Having a record company and putting out my own CD. There’s clothes and shoes. There’s also an upcoming book deal that I’m trying to do,” he said.

“I’m trying to be positive. I’m a big fan of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Paging Nelson Mandela…

Despite their lack of social science credentials, the liberal activists at Media Matters are endorsing the highly problematic UC-Berkeley study of voting in Florida:

The mainstream media have mostly ignored a statistical study conducted by faculty and students of the University of California at Berkeley sociology department on voting irregularities in Florida in the 2004 presidential election that found major discrepancies in vote counts between counties that utilized electronic voting machines (e-voting) and those that used traditional voting methods. The study, released on November 18, determined that President George W. Bush may have wrongly been awarded between 130,000 and 260,000 extra votes in Florida — 130,000 if they were all “ghost votes” created by machine error, or twice that if votes intended for Senator John Kerry were misattributed to Bush.

And here’s where the train really goes off the tracks:

According to the Berkeley study:
-Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to Bush in Florida.
-Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.
-In Broward County alone, Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.
-The Berkeley researchers can be 99.9 percent sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Extrapolating “excess votes” from these regressions is ridiculous, and they also use the p-value from the UC-Berkeley regression to give a misleading picture of how precise the results really are. Consider this: when you control for changes in party registration, the supposed e-voting effect vanishes. 99.9 percent sure indeed.

Update: The Berkeley study is now on CNN.com, Salon.com and in the San Francisco Chronicle. Also, Craig Newmark, a NC State economist, has a good post on the problems with the Berkeley study — here’s the key part:

1. They estimate a regression model. The dependent variable is “Change in % Voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004”. The observations in the analysis are all 67 counties in Florida . There are four independent, explanatory variables in their basic model: % Voting for Bush in 2000; % Voting for Bush in 2000, squared; total number of votes cast for Kerry and Bush in 2004; and–the variable of interest–a binary variable indicating whether the county used electronic voting in 2004. (15 of the 67 counties did so.)

The results from estimating the model using just these four explanatory variables do not support the hypothesis that Bush received an excess number of votes in counties using electronic voting. The coefficient on the electronic-voting variable is not positive–which would mean electronic voting raised Bush’s total beyond what would be expected–but the opposite, negative (albeit with a t-ratio of just -0.66).

2. To obtain their reported results, they have to add two other explanatory variables: % Voting for Bush in 2000 times the electronic-voting binary variable and % Voting for Bush in 2000, squared, times the electronic-voting binary variable. These variables reflect the additional claim that problems with electronic voting occurred ” . . . proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade [counties].” (Page 1 of the Hout., et. al. paper.)

But they have absolutely no theory for why electronic voting problems that spuriously created votes for Bush should affect counties in proportion to their Democratic votes!

All you need to know. (Links via Alex Strashny and Newmark.)

Update 2: UCLA’s Jason Lenderman has more on the statistical problems with the Berkeley analysis.

Kevin Drum has a good rundown of the problems with a UC Berkeley sociologist’s analysis of voting in Florida (PDF). It’s the same issue as Steven Freedman’s paper and the supposed optical scan anomalies — a tendentious result produced by people who don’t have a good background in the field. Kieran Healy shows in a working paper (PDF) that if you control for the two anomalous counties Drum flags, the supposed e-voting effect goes away. And Alex Strashny at UC-Irvine has an excellent methodological and substantive critique up as well, which shows (among other things) that if you account for changes in party registration, the e-voting effect also goes away.

The larger problem here is that lefty academics with access to voting data can come up with a million supposedly unexplainable anomalies and put them up on the Internet, fueling partisan suspicions that Bush stole the election. It’s the same thing as bogus accusations of voter fraud from Republicans – part of the never-ending assault on the legitimacy of electoral results. This pattern is not good for our democracy…

[Disclaimer: It’s possible that someone could use statistical methods to discover fraud, and we want to pay attention to them if and when they do. But the burden of proof cannot be entirely borne by the system – elections are messy and complex, and it’s easy to raise questions that cannot be disproven. Going forward, people making claims about “anomalies” should have to meet a much higher standard of proof than these papers have.]

Political scientist/blogger Dan Drezner has posted a link to his book manuscript, which argues that the great powers retain a great deal of regulatory power despite the much-hyped trend toward globalization. I’m no expert on the subject and haven’t read the whole manuscript, but it highlights a useful rule of thumb: people who argue that “[insert buzzword here] changes everything” are usually wrong.

Let’s review some recent examples:

1) “The Internet changes everything for business” (circa 1996-1999). A few years later, most of the big companies have adapted; most of the startups have died; and the world of business is moving forward with its fundamentals largely intact. Sure, some things have changed, but the vast majority of predictions about the Internet’s impact on business were grossly overstated.

2) “The Internet changes everything for politics (circa 2003-2004). For reasons I’ve explained, the Joe Trippi-inspired fantasy of a third party “Internet candidate” in 2008 is just so much nonsense. Despite all the predictions, the parties and interest groups are adapting the Internet as another tool; certain aspects of politics have been altered, but it – like business – has not fundamentally changed.

3) “Globalization changes everything for national policy” (circa 1998-2002). Once again, a supposedly inexorable force is seen as impossible to resist, but this misses the essential point that Drezner focuses on — the modern phenomenon of globalization is in large part driven by conscious policy decisions. It did not emerge from the ether, and when the great powers want to resist it, they can. Once again, the fundamentals of international relations remain largely intact.

Any bets on the next silly intellectual bubble? I’m going with biotech/genetic engineering/neuroscience; there’s already a burgeoning market of people hyping research that’s in its very early stages…

Does anyone have a good explanation for what parts of the country tend to have announcers that explicitly root for the home team? I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’d say it’s rare to non-existent out there, but it seems shockingly pervasive to me in North Carolina — just noticed this again tonight listening to the Charlotte Bobcats on the radio.

Today David Broder weeps for Charlie Stenholm, another conservative Democrat who has gone down to defeat. The declining number of moderates in Congress is certainly cause for concern, but this is getting carried away:

Bigger names are leaving Congress — notably former Democratic leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt — but no one will be missed more on both sides of the aisle than Charlie Stenholm, the cotton farmer from Texas who has been in the House for 26 years.

No one will be missed more on both sides of the aisle? Stenholm has a lifetime rating of 70 from the American Conservative Union, which makes him essentially a moderate Republican, so I doubt the Democrats will be missing him as much as, say, Daschle or Gephardt. And the Republicans explicitly redistricted Stenholm out of a seat. I doubt most of them are too upset either.

I also can’t resist making fun of this passage, which perfectly expresses Broder’s metaphysical belief that the best path always lies in compromise between the parties:

[Stenholm] also believes that both parties will eventually have to come to grips with the unsustainability of Social Security in its current form. With a laugh, Stenholm recounted his amazement at hearing “my conservative Republican opponent make the same promise as the Massachusetts liberal [John Kerry] — ‘I will not cut your benefits, or raise your taxes or increase the retirement age.’ “

“When both extremes are talking nonsense,” said this defeated but unrepentant middle-roader, “there must be some way of getting them together that makes sense.”

If only we worked out our disagreements, everything would be a-ok!

We have a huge deficit, but apparently someone in Congress

One expenditure buried in the bill is $2 million for the Navy to repurchase the presidential yacht Sequoia. The yacht was built in 1925 and first used by President Herbert Hoover. In the throes of Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon cruised the Potomac at night on the boat and brooded on his fate.

The New York Times has the all-important filibuster today that includes one somewhat misleading quote:

In 1975, the Senate cut the required vote for cloture to three-fifths, or 60 senators, instead of 67.

At about the same time, the Senate created a two-track process that allows senators to block action on a piece of legislation merely by invoking the right to filibuster, without actually having to stand before the chamber and drone endlessly on. Meanwhile, the Senate can take up other business.

The measure, intended to promote efficiency, inadvertently encouraged filibusters by making them painless, said Julian Zelizer, a historian of Congress at Boston University. “The filibuster exploded, and became a normal tool of political combat,” he said. In 1995, he noted, almost 44 percent of all major legislation considered by the Senate was delayed by a filibuster or the threat of one.

Professor Zelizer calls the filibuster a relic, stained by its use to block civil-rights legislation. But in the polarized Congress of today, he said, “this is one way to check the partisan domination we have.” Because it forces the majority to negotiate with the other party, the filibuster “is one of the few forces pushing toward the center,” Professor Zelizer said.

It is true that the filibuster weakens the power of the majority party in the Senate. But it doesn’t necessarily push policy toward the center, as Keith Khrebiel’s Pivotal Politics illustrates. In some cases, policies are modified to win the support of senators from the opposition party and get to the required 60 votes, and the bill that goes through is closer to the center than it otherwise would have been. But in other cases, Congress can actually be prevented from moving policy closer to the center by a successful filibuster, as it was in 1998 when McCain-Feingold was defeated. Another example is the Clinton health care plan in 1994. Most Americans preferred health care reform, but rather than work out a compromise that would have moved policy closer to the center, the whole plan was killed by Republicans wielding a potential Senate filibuster. The story is not so simple – it depends on the configuration of the different branches of government, and where the status quo policy is on the ideological spectrum.

The Boston Globe Ideas section reports on a conference pondering the future of the liberal arts in higher education, a subject that is near and dear to my heart as a graduate of Swarthmore College. And unfortunately, the Globe finds that colleges are under enormous pressure to make education more career-focused, meaning shifting to more “practical” courses like accounting and journalism even at the most elite colleges and universities.

One response is to try to square the circle by taking a liberal arts approach to “practical subjects”:

Menand noted that many economics departments at liberal-arts institutions have historically resisted student demands that courses be added in practical subjects like accounting. But what about courses that put accounting in a broader historical and theoretical perspective? “Garbage is garbage,” Menand said, “but the history of garbage can be scholarship.”

Jonathan Crewe, a Shakespeare scholar at Dartmouth and the organizer of the conference, said that attitudes like Menand’s may well be necessary. Dartmouth’s English department, for example, just approved its first course in journalism. Crewe said students had been pushing for a course for years, and the proposal, which probably would have been rejected as inappropriately careerist 10 years ago, sailed through. The syllabus suggests that it will take the kind of approach Menand suggested: Practical assignments on various types of writing will be mixed with reading and analysis of journalism from different periods in American history, from muckraking to the Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” of the 1960s.

If done properly, this sort of responsiveness to the market can be fine, but the problem is that it might be the first step toward abandoning the liberal arts model. Students are much better served by being taught how to think than by any career-focused education that will be out of date in five years. That is the great virtue of the liberal arts education, and it is no less true today than it was thirty years ago. But unfortunately higher education costs far, far more today than it did then — in large part to finance an absurd country club lifestyle for students — and the escalating price tag drives demands to justify that investment by providing a gateway to a high-paying career. If liberal arts institutions don’t break this vicious cycle, the shift to careerist higher education is inevitable.