Category Archives: Politics

Overconfidence and Ideology

Posted on by

This theory predicts that overconfidence in one’s own beliefs leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger identification with political parties. Our predictions find strong support in a unique dataset that measures the overconfidence, and standard political characteristics, of a nationwide sample of over 3,000 adults. In particular, we find that overconfidence is the most reliable predictor of ideological extremeness and an important predictor of voter turnout in our data.

One of the most important cognitive biases is to over-weight your own experience and to under-weight the opinions of others who have different experiences. In a post last week, I talked about how I used to interview job candidates. One commenter correctly pointed out that people tend to over-estimate what they learn by interviewing job candidates relative to other sources of information.

I believe that overconfidence gets strongly rewarded in the realm of politics and punditry. Admitting that you might be wrong seems to hurt your credibility. Insisting that the other side is wrong is the best way to gain a following.

From the Monkey Cage Blog

Posted on by

Pippa Norris writes,

Most remarkably, by the most recent wave in 2011, almost half — 44 percent — of U.S. non-college graduates approved of having a strong leader unchecked by elections and Congress.

The chart in the post shows that 28 percent of college graduates agree. To me, this suggests that the problem is hardly limited to those without a college education. In fact, I am much more worried about the college graduates who do not believe in the Constitution.

For the most part, the post consists of “analysis” that tries to connect dots that I am not sure are connected–between low levels of education, conservative beliefs on social issues, and support for Donald Trump.

Personality and Ideology

Posted on by

Alan Gerber and others write,

Agreeableness is strongly, and consistently, associated with liberal economic positions and Emotional Stability is strongly associated with conservative economic positions.

… while previous research has rightly identified Conscientiousness and Openness as the traits most
consistently related to ideology, our analysis shows that the other Big Five traits—particularly Emotional
Stability and Agreeableness—significantly and substantially affect political attitudes.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The authors departed from previous research by separating issues into economic and social issues. By not confounding the two, they find different patterns of relationships between personality traits and conservatism. People who dislike markets tend to score higher on agreeableness, meaning that they like to be seen as pleasing to others. They tend to score low on emotional stability, meaning that they are prone to worry and fear.

The Two Parties

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen writes,

both the Democrats and the Republicans have their ready made, mostly true, and repeatedly self-confirming stories about the defects of the other. They need only read the news to feel better about themselves, and the academic contingent of the Democrats is better at this than are most ordinary citizens. There is thus a rather large cottage industry of intellectuals interpreting and channeling these stories to Democratic voters and sympathizers. On the right, you will find an equally large cottage industry, sometimes reeking of intolerance or at least imperfect tolerance, peddling mostly true stories about the failures of Democratic governance, absurd political correctness, tribal loyalties, and so on. That industry has a smaller role for the intellectuals and a larger role for preachers and talk radio.

It is characteristic of Tyler, and also of Robin Hanson and on occasion Bryan Caplan, to look at human behavior in terms of status competition. If you buy into that, as I do, then a reasonable way to differentiate the parties is in terms of whose status they wish to elevate and whose status they wish to demean.

1. I would say that for Democrats, the goal is to elevate the status of public sector workers, social scientists, well-educated people in general, urban residents, and members of groups who are willing to see themselves as oppressed groups fitting the Democratic narrative. They wish to demean the status of business owners, non-urban residents, strong religious believers, and working-class whites who fail to see themselves as an oppressed group fitting the Democratic narrative.

2. Note that Barack Obama hit most of the right buttons, in part simply by being black.

3. I would say that for Republicans, the goal is to elevate the status of members of the armed forces, non-urban residents, religious believers, small business owners, and working-class whites who prefer to blame their problems on society coddling immigrants and minority groups. They wish to demean the status of wealthy and successful progressives, particularly those in the media and entertainment industries. They wish to demean the status of unmarried individuals and of people they perceive as hostile to conventional families.

4. Note that Donald Trump has hit at least a couple of the right buttons spectacularly effectively: raising the status of working-class whites who prefer to blame their problems on society coddling immigrants and minority groups; and demeaning the status of wealth and successful progressives, particularly those in the media.

5. Note that many of Trump’s negative traits, including narcissism, authoritarianism, and uncharitable views of those who disagree with him, are shared by Barack Obama.

6. Denouncing Trump is a form of virtue signaling. That is, it is a cheap way to try to raise your status among well-educated people.

7. Notwithstanding all of these remarks on status competition, one may still think of politics in terms of ideology. And I think of Donald Trump as destroying the Republican Party as an ideological vehicle. In terms of Clay Shirky’s metaphor, the host (the Republican Party) has been taken over by a parasite (Trump). The Republicans I know tend to subscribe to a conservative/libertarian ideology. None of them would vote for Trump in a primary, and most of them would not vote for him in November.

8. From my point of view, the Trump candidacy has no upside and considerable downside. I doubt that a Trump victory would lead to policies that correspond to a conservative/libertarian agenda. And I think that he can only hurt Republican candidates for other offices. When those candidates are asked whether or not they support Trump, there is no answer that they can give that will not cost them votes.

9. Conversely, those on the Democratic side with an overt ideology are in a no-lose position. The ideological Overton window has moved very far to the left, somewhere between Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Really Bad Sentences

Posted on by

Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance suffers from the fallacy of composition: It uses individual-level evidence about political behavior to draw inferences about the preferences and actions of the public as a whole. But collective public opinion is more stable, consistent, coherent, and responsive to the best available information, and more reflective of citizens’ underlying values and interests, than are the opinions of most individual citizens.

Those sentences, from Benjamin Page of the political science department of Northwestern University, were published in 2015. I don’t think that they hold up so well in 2016. I wonder how many of the critical participants in the symposium on Somin’s book (note: in several months, this link may lead somewhere else) would care to reconsider their views. As always with academics, I expect fewer to reconsider than should do so.

[Note: I wrote this post before Tyler also posted on the symposium, but I scheduled it for now.]

I think that a lot of conventional wisdom in political science is starting to look like pre-September 2008 conventional wisdom in macroeconomics. As Daniel Drezner put it,

the political science theories predicting that someone like Trump was highly unlikely to win a major-party nomination were so widely believed that they turned out to refute themselves.

Praise for the Council of Economic Advisers

Posted on by

1. Timothy Taylor writes,

When you read a CEA report, there is always a certain admixture of politics, and at some points over the roughly 40 years I’ve been reading these resorts, the partisanship has been severe enough to make me wince. But it’s also true that one can read just about any report looking for ways to discredit it. My own approach is instead to search for nuggets of fact and insight, and over the years, CEA reports have typically offered plenty.

2. Robert J. Samuelson writes,

Thumbing through the annual report of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is always an education. This year’s 430-page edition is no exception. Crammed with tables and charts, it brims with useful facts and insights.

●On page 62, we learn that the growth of state and local government spending on services (schools, police, parks) has been the slowest of any recovery since World War II. One reason: Payments into underfunded pensions are draining money from services. . .

Probably a useful corrective to my typical focus on what I didn’t like about the CEA report.

A Handle Comment

Posted on by

He writes,

1. My vision of the future is indeed that the political parties will divide up the middle class into two groups of ‘beggars’ fighting each other for a bigger slice of the pie. And I agree that government interventions in the big three sectors have made things worse than they would otherwise be, but that the trend of prices increasing faster than wages would still be happening had those policies remained static, or even without them. And it’s the policy-indifferent trend, and the forces behind it, that matters.

Remember, prices of real estate are reaching for the sky in the central economic or political hubs of almost every country in the world, regardless of the huge variety of local zoning and development rules. . .

2. I think that those ‘cultural reasons’ will fade in importance, and, if anything, become mere badges and ways to signal tribal membership but without any genuine political significance. The culture war is over and the progressives won a decisive victory against traditionalist social conservatives, and we are presently observing the mopping-up operations. You may be pleased or saddened by that result depending on your perspective – and might does not make right – but it’s a fact. A lot of people are in denial about this. The once mighty force of religion in American politics was reduced to impotence and must now try to survive an era of increasingly overt persecution.

…progressivism is unique and has a special competitive advantage because of its emphasis on equality of results and willingness to use the government to intervene to achieve it.

It can claim to be a transcendent ideology and at the same time tell its ethnic and identity-group clients that disparities in life outcomes are caused by oppression and that correcting these unfair evils requires leveling which just so happens to take the form of government payments and preferences that disproportionately benefit these groups. That is, it can rationalize treating citizens differently in order to achieve social justice. The other ideologies can’t do that, they claim neutrality and prize uniform treatment and non-intervention.

Unfortunately that probably means a much more racially-conscious politics in our future on all sides.

It would be interesting to see a dialogue between these views and those of Yuval Levin in his forthcoming The Fractured Republic.

The Agony of the GOP, 2016

Posted on by

My take on the Barry Goldwater debacle is derived from a book I read 50 years ago by Robert Novak, called The Agony of the GOP, 1964. The book was to tap the market that Theodore White found with “The Making of President, 1960” and subsequent works. I don’t think that Novak’s book did nearly as well. I read it only because my father was sent a review copy, and he was not interested.

What I remember from the book was all of the idiosyncratic factors that went into the 1964 election. For example, George Romney (Mitt’s father) gaffed himself out of the race by saying that a briefing he had received on Vietnam consisted of “brainwashing.” In hindsight, that remark seems like a nugget of insight, but it offended Republicans who were staunchly anti-Communist and saw Romney as giving aid and comfort to the enemy by accusing our side of brainwashing. [UPDATE: that gaffe came after 1964. I was a bit worried about my memory when I put up this post. I should have checked. By the way, I don’t still have a copy of Novak’s book. I with I could have remembered more of the idiosyncratic factors that were actually in it.]

Another random event that effected 1964 was Nelson Rockefeller’s remarriage. Having survived politically after a divorce, he figured that getting remarried would not be a problem. But he married the woman who had broken up his first marriage, an in those days that offended people, particularly married women. Down went Rockefeller.

Think of the events that are conspiring to make Donald Trump a possible (likely?) nominee. The primary schedule, with the largest early voice going to small states and southern states. The large field, which allows a candidate to appear to be a big winner with less than 50 percent of the vote. The strange “debates” in which the issues take a back seat to the dynamic between the media personalities and the candidates.

Unless Hillary Clinton is indicted I (and perhaps even if she is), I think that a Trump nomination will lead to a Republican debacle comparable to 1964. In a sense it will be worse, because the best the Republicans could have hoped for in 1964 was a respectable defeat. This year, they would be throwing away a reasonable chance of winning.

Clay Shirky on Sanders-Trump

Posted on by

Shirky writes,

Social media has turned Republican & Democratic Parties into host bodies for 3rd party candidates.

Thanks to a commenter for the pointer, although Tyler Cowen also saw it.. The analysis strikes me as very Gurri-esque.

And get this line:

Each party has an unmentionable Issue X that divide its voters. Each overestimated their ability to keep X out of the campaign.

Speaking ow which, let me say one more thing about immigration. If you believe that immigration is the main reason (or even a major reason) that low-skilled workers in America are having a tough time, then (a) you are entitled to make a big issue out of immigration but (b) I do not share your belief.

To get back to an economy where low-skilled workers can earn the sort of incomes, relative to highly-educated workers, that they could earn in 1965, you would have to squeeze an awful lot of toothpaste back into the tube: computers, the shift from goods to services, the emergence of China and India, and the decline of the traditional family. You could send home 100 percent of the illegal immigrants and I think at best a tiny amount of toothpaste gets back into the tube.

The Goldwater Debacle

Posted on by

I have finished reading my advance copy of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic. I am confident that when I make up my list of most important books of 2016 that it will be included. Unfortunately, it does not go on sale for another three months.

Levin attempts to interpret extended periods of economic, cultural, and political history in terms of broad themes. Given that such an effort takes huge risks (of which he is aware), I think he does a very creditable job. But these sorts of high-level analyses are always subject to quibbling over details.

One such detail concerns Lyndon Johnsons’ Great Society. Levin–and he is hardly alone in this–sees the legislation of 1965 as a natural product or capstone of an era in which the Federal government took on increasing responsibilities.

I want to push back and to stress the idiosyncratic and accidental nature of the Great Society legislation.

1. Johnson never succeeded in selling his program to the public. The public’s attitude toward the Great Society was predominantly scornful and cynical. Grace Slick, before she became the lead singer for Jefferson Airplane, was in a band called The Great Society. It was not an homage.

2. The left had very mixed feelings about Johnson. Many northern liberals were put off by his southern accent. They were still in mourning over Kennedy and many were put off by Johnson’s lack of the Kennedy charm and grace. Also, by 1965, Vietnam was cutting deeply into his support among liberals, particularly younger ones. And there seemed to be a disconnect between the term Great Society and the urban unrest that was starting to erupt. Rather than wishing to share in the glory of the Great Society, many liberals saw it as an exercise in Johnson’s ego and parliamentary wiles.

3. What made the Great Society possible was the landslide victory that Democrats won in 1964. In that sense, we owe the Great Society to Barry Goldwater. His nomination shattered the Republican Party. In today’s terms, think of an effect on the Republican establishment somewhere between a Cruz nomination and a Trump nomination. Moderate Republican voters stayed away in droves in 1964, and in those days coattail effects were much stronger. As a result, the disaster of 1964 decimated Republicans up and down the ballot. There are those on the right who like to romanticize the Goldwater insurgency by saying that it “paved the way for Reagan.” What it actually paved the way for was Democratic control of Congress that remained well entrenched into the Reagan era and beyond. It was the class of 1964 that passed the Great Society programs and that made them impossible to repeal even when Republicans re-took the Presidency.

It can be difficult to predict the consequences of one’s preferred candidate winning a nomination or an election. That is one reason to agree with Tyler Cowen that you should be careful what you wish for.