Brendan Nyhan

From my Twitter feed:
-TPM’s “House Crazy Caucus” (based on rhetoric) only overlaps slightly with my Congresional Myth Caucus (based on bill sponsorship/cosponsorship)
-Quote of the day — Barbara Boxer on “death panels”: “Now why would I ever pull the plug on granny? I am granny”
-Health care misinformation takes a turn toward the absurd
-Disturbing to see a Washington Post reporter blaming voters for not fact-checking politicians — isn’t that his job?
-Must-read Bruce Bartlett column on intellectual corruption of think tanks — see, for example, my 2002 Spinsanity article on Heritage and Cato article
-If you like data-driven blogging, you should be reading OK Cupid’s blog — who knew online dating could be so interesting?
-I’m fascinated that people think Haley Barbour is a plausible presidential candidate — Jon Chait has the goods

Christie Aschwanden has written an excellent article on how resistance to corrective information hinders progress in health and medicine for Miller-McCune. Here’s a sample:

A surprising number of medical practices have never been rigorously tested to find out if they really work. Even where evidence points to the most effective treatment for a particular condition, the information is not always put into practice. “The First National Report Card on Quality of Health Care in America,” published by the Rand Corporation in 2006, found that, overall, Americans received only about half of the care recommended by national guidelines.

A $1.1 billion provision in the federal stimulus package aims to address the issue by providing funds for comparative effectiveness research to find the most effective treatments for common conditions. But these efforts are bound to face resistance when they challenge existing beliefs. As Nieman and countless other researchers have learned, new evidence often meets with dismay or even outrage when it shifts recommendations away from popular practices or debunks widely held beliefs. For evidence-based medicine to succeed, its practitioners must learn to present evidence in a way that resonates.

Or, to borrow a phrase from politics, it’s not the evidence, stupid — it’s the narrative.

The problems in health are at least as bad as they are in politics (and maybe more so). It’s a very difficult issue.

(Disclosure: I’m quoted in the article, which also discusses my paper on resistance to corrections with Jason Reifler.)

Statistically-minded readers may be interested in a paper that Jacob Montgomery and I just had published in Political Analysis (normal people can stop reading here):

Bayesian Model Averaging: Theoretical Developments and Practical Applications

Jacob M. Montgomery and Brendan Nyhan

Political science researchers typically conduct an idiosyncratic search of possible model configurations and then present a single specification to readers. This approach systematically understates the uncertainty of our results, generates fragile model specifications, and leads to the estimation of bloated models with too many control variables. Bayesian model averaging (BMA) offers a systematic method for analyzing specification uncertainty and checking the robustness of one’s results to alternative model specifications, but it has not come into wide usage within the discipline. In this paper, we introduce important recent developments in BMA and show how they enable a different approach to using the technique in applied social science research. We illustrate the methodology by reanalyzing data from three recent studies using BMA software we have modified to respect statistical conventions within political science.

Replication materials (including R/Stata code) are available on my academic website.

Update 5/3 11:57 AM: An R package is now available — see my academic website or Jacob’s for details.

CBSNews.com’s Stephanie Condon reports that the myth of Barack Obama being born in another country is not going away. The new CBS/New York Times poll shows that only 58% of Americans, and 41% of self-identified Tea Party supporters, think he was born in the United States:

Although the Constitution requires American presidents to be natural born citizens, as many as 30 percent of Tea Partiers say they think President Obama was born in another country, according to a new CBS News/ New York Times poll. More Tea Partiers, however, at 41 percent, say he was born in the U.S.

The so-called “birther movement,” questioning Mr. Obama’s origins, began during his presidential campaign. It has steadily persisted through Mr. Obama’s presidency, in spite of overwhelming evidence he was born in the United States — including his 1961 birth announcement, printed in two Hawaii newspapers.

The myth persists among the larger American population, but to a lesser degree, according to the poll, conducted April 5 – 12. Thirty-two percent of Republicans think the president was born in another country.

Among Americans overall, 58 percent think Mr. Obama was born in this country, while 20 percent say he was born elsewhere. Significant percentages aren’t sure or don’t have an opinion.

For more, see my previous posts on the birther myth and my research with Jason Reifler on the persistence of political misperceptions.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-News that Jake Tapper won’t be reporting fact-checks on air makes This Week/Politifact arrangement far less important than it might have been
-Rachel Maddow again hacks it up with claim that GOP is “already pledging to filibuster” Obama’s Supreme Court nominee
-Republicans who didn’t believe in Iraq WMD or 9-11 ties supported the war more than Democrats who did
-NYT’s David Leonhardt debunks the misleading claim that 47% of households owe no taxes
-New context on the state of the 2010 generic ballot from Mark Blumenthal and Charles Franklin
–News photo of the year
-Slate’s Tim Noah on continued misperceptions about the uninsured’s access to health care (see also my research on correcting misperceptions with Jason Reifler)

Update 4/14 11:43 PM: Jonathan Bernstein objects to my Maddow tweet above:

On the narrow point, I suppose that Nyhan is correct: the GOP hasn’t “pledged” to filibuster. In the real world, however, Senate Republicans are filibustering Barack Obama’s choice for the Supremes. Obama knows, as he makes his selection, that he’s going to need 60 votes in the Senate. Does Nyhan really think that it’s even remotely likely that a nominee could be confirmed, say, 53-47? I don’t. It’s a 60 vote Senate, and any pretense by Republicans to the contrary is just posturing. In other words, any nominee unpopular enough that she won’t draw 60 votes will trigger Republican “threats” to force a cloture vote. Given that, I think it’s much better to use clear language and talk about the need for 60 votes, which requires calling, a filibuster a filibuster.

It would be false to claim that all 41 Senate Republicans are committed to opposing any nominee Obama sends up. Clearly, that’s not the case. It’s not even absolutely certain that there are no potential votes for yes on cloture, no on the nominee. But realistically, Obama has to worry about getting 60 votes, not getting 50 votes plus Biden and hoping that there’s no filibuster. And in my view, reporting and commenting on the nomination should make that clear.

I don’t disagree with any of what Bernstein writes, but it’s not a direct rebuttal of my point. Maddow is misrepresenting Republican statements to suggest they are pledging a filibuster; this is false. Whether Republicans will filibuster in the end is a different issue. Also, note that Bernstein himself isn’t saying Republicans will filibuster. He’s saying they would if they had enough votes to block the nominee — a conditional claim that is far different than the phony filibuster pledge that Maddow has manufactured.

Via Steve Benen, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) has joined the chorus of figures on the right who have smeared Barack Obama’s loyalty to this country. In a short article for The Daily Caller, Fleming alleges that Obama is “undermining this country’s national defense on purpose” — a grave charge to issue against the President of the United States (emphasis added, italics in original):

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I work daily to ensure our men and women have the resources they need to protect this country, and I continue to be dismayed by the national security policies coming out of this White House. Simply put, President Obama is disadvantaging the United States one step at a time and undermining this country’s national defense on purpose. Whether he is catering to the anti-war leftists or truly doing what he thinks is best for our security, the president is leading this nation down a very dangerous path.

As I’ve shown, conservatives have repeatedly suggested that Obama is disloyal to this country since the earliest days of his 2008 presidential campaign — a smear campaign that builds on post-9/11 accusations that dissent against President Bush aided terrorists. In addition to radio and TV pundits, the list of offenders includes current and former Republican members of Congress like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Senator Kit Bond (R-Mo.), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and now Fleming. The updated timeline of attacks on Obama’s loyalty is here.

In yet another 1994/2010 comparison piece, the New York Times suggests, as I once did, that the Republican Party’s image problems might limit its gains in November:

Moreover, the Republican Party has a different image than it did in 1994. At that time, Republicans had been out of control of Congress for long enough that they were able to present themselves as the party of change. They were viewed unfavorably by just 39 percent of Americans. By contrast, 57 percent said in February that they had an unfavorable view of Republicans in a New York Times/CBS News poll.

While it’s true that Republicans are viewed more negatively than they were in 1994, that’s not the relevant comparison in 2010. Electoral politics is a zero-sum game. What matters is the strength of the Republican image relative to Democrats. And as I showed a couple of weeks ago, the gap between the parties’ images is now comparable to 1994:

As such, there’s no reason to think that the GOP’s negative image will protect Democrats, especially given the likelihood that the Republican brand will continue to gain luster (as it did between June and November 1994).

For a better analysis of the state of play for November, see Mark Blumenthal’s National Journal column on the generic ballot and Charles Franklin’s accompanying blog post on Pollster.com (where I cross-post). Franklin’s key graph comparing generic ballot trends over time looks very ominous for Democrats:

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-Jon Chait on the conservative misinformation feedback loop and cracks therein

-Which “very high-ranking Republican member of Congress” told TNR circa 2000 that Bill Clinton stole the 1996 election?
-GW’s John Sides summarizes why significant spending cuts are politically impossible in one simple graph
-Good news for naming and shaming: PolitiFact to fact-check ABC’s “This Week”
-Gallup finds “Democratic Party Image Drops to Record Low” — see my post from last week for more
-UWM’s Dave Armstrong uses Heritage Foundation data to debunk their claims of declining US economic freedom
-Bob Somerby on the liberal hackery of Rachel Maddow

It’s great to see a Republican standing up to misinformation about health care reform:

Sen. Tom Coburn, a staunch conservative from Oklahoma, is doing what seems almost unthinkable in this polarized political climate: Defending his Democratic colleagues from critics at Fox News.

At a town hall meeting, Coburn suggested that a woman who said “they can put us in prison” for not obtaining health insurance under the health care reform bill is misinformed.

“The intention is not to put anybody in jail,” he said. “That makes for good TV news on Fox but that isn’t the intention.”

My research with Jason Reifler shows that corrections by media sources frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the most susceptible ideological group and sometimes make them worse. In this case, I’m hoping that Coburn’s reputation as a conservative will make his correction more credible to other conservatives.

Update 4/8 11:25 AM: Along similar lines, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has an article in RedState that could be effective in alleviating conservative misgivings about filling out Census forms.

From my Twitter feed:
-Rush Limbaugh claims Obama has created an authoritarian regime
–Very bad generic ballot news for Democrats
-GW’s John Sides on how media overstated importance of dramatic campaign events during Obama campaign here and here (see also this post on hype of debates)
-Slate’s Tim Noah debunks some new myths about the health care reform bill
-Media Matters counts Washington Post stories mentioning the “death panel” myth without debunking it
Charles Franklin on the similar approval trajectories of Obama and Reagan
-Ezra Klein has a great piece on the conflict between the partisanship of contemporary politics and the outdated rules of the Senate
–Don’t trust the Harris poll on conservatives (see also here
-Even by Michelle Bachmann’s standards, the claim that economy was 100% private before Sept. 2008 and is now 51% public (which she repeated on Face the Nation) is completely nuts