The Monkey Cage

Yesterday, John posted a theory of sex among the political class. Very timely, one might think, in light of all the shenanigans that have been reported lately. Well, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I beat him to it by more than a decade.

And now (ultimate outrage), Henry posts an implicit challenge to my capacity for completing “unusual,” shall we say, research projects. Well, some of his are doozies, and we can all be grateful to him for alerting us to their existence. But I wonder whether they’re more outrageous than what I’m about to drop on you.

So to kill two birds with one stone, I hereby post this piece, which was done in the warm afterglow of Monicagate. Eat your heart out, Henry; and get a new idea, John. (This, like the piece I posted the other day in response to another of John’s provocations, will appear in The Wit and Humor of Political Science.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via BoingBoing, NCBI ROFL, a blog devoted to cataloging the … more interesting academic articles in the literature. Recent finds include articles:

testing hypotheses about navel fluff generation

on sheerness of disco clothing and female sexual motivation

providing an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces

presenting a preliminary survey of rhinotillexomania [nose-picking] in an adolescent sample

on accidental condom inhalation as a medical problem (the other medical articles concern subjects even less suited to discussion on a family-friendly blog).

and my favourite, an experiment in which

“Twenty-four dogs were divided into two equal groups, one of which wore cotton underpants and the other polyester ones. Seven dogs wearing nothing were used as controls.”

Truly, academic research is a many-wondered thing …

Posted by Henry at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at the Political Theory Rumor Mill, there’s a heated exchange around the change of editor at Political Theory with allegations of undue interference, editorial coups etc swirling around. Me - I know nothing beyond what I’ve seen on the Internets. Anyone out there with better info?

Posted by Henry at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have two questions:

1) Are politicians more likely to have extramarital affairs than the population at large, controlling for relevant demographic factors (notably sex)?

2) If the answer to the first question is “yes,” then why?

I do not know the answer to the first question. Thinking about recent presidents, my categories are: definitely yes (FDR, JFK, WJC), there-are-rumors-but-just-rumors (LBJ, GHWB), I-have-no-idea (RWR, HST, DDE, RMN), and almost-certainly-not (JEC, GWB, BHO). So I wouldn’t hazard any definite answers based on this list. This article suggests some sort of systematic family dysfunction among the GOP’s class of 1994, although the stories there don’t necessarily involve affairs.

But for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that politicians are more likely to have an affair. Why? A typical class of explanations revolves around personality, such as arrogance, hubris, neediness, or a desire for attention. Politicians are presumed to be “higher” in these qualities, and this leads them to have affairs. The counterfactual: take these same individuals out of political life — say, into the corporate world or some other occupational sphere — and they would be equally likely to have affairs.

A second class of explanations revolves around circumstance or situation. I can think of two dimensions that matter here. The first is separation from family. Here’s a quote from one of the GOP ‘94:

Mark Neumann, a Wisconsin Republican who was elected to the first of two House terms in 1994, said that when he came to Washington, he initially had trouble balancing congressional duties with his responsibilities as a husband and father.

“It was extremely intense and there was a lot of pressure,” said Neumann, who announced Wednesday he’s running for governor in 2010. “The whole concept of being away from home and family was certainly difficult to adjust to. I’d never been away from my wife for more than a day at a time until then.”

(To be clear: Neumann is not cited as having an affair. He’s just articulating the problems created by separation.) Separation from family may weaken bonds with spouse and children, at least to some extent. And that increases the likelihood of finding another person attractive, etc., etc. Of course, some politicians do live at home (e.g., governors). But even they travel quite a bit.

A second circumstantial factor is just opportunity. Here’s a passage from this NY Times piece:

But perhaps the strongest risk factor for infidelity, researchers have found, exists not inside the marriage but outside: opportunity.

“People tend to assume that bad people have affairs, and good people don’t, or that affairs only happen in bad marriages,” said Peggy Vaughan, a San Diego-based researcher who runs the Web site dearpeggy.com, and author of a forthcoming book on infidelity and marriage, “To Have and to Hold.” “These assumptions are just not based in reality.”

To me, “opportunity” means various things. Irrespective of one’s relationship with spouse or family, being separated from them simply makes it logistically easier to cheat. It’s easier to keep things from your spouse. It’s easier to sneak around without their knowing.

Opportunity also gets at how many more people politicians typically meet as compared to others. And somewhere in that large group is someone that politicians will find attractive. Other things equal, the larger your sphere of friends and acquaintances, the greater the chance of an affair. So, in a sense, all the pressing of flesh just leads to, well, some pressing of flesh.

The counterfactual is this: if we took a random sample of the population and installed them in political office, would it increase the chance that they would have affairs? My guess is that it would.

There is perhaps an interaction here as well. Aspects of politicians’ personalities make them more attractive — e.g., self-confidence — and that, combined with opportunity, increases the likelihood of affairs. In other words, it’s the combination of personality and circumstance that is particularly potent.

What am I missing?

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

In earlier post, I passed along this query from a friend and asked for data:

It seems to have become much more common in the post-1989 period for coupsters to hand over at least the nominal reins to some sort of civilian entity as quickly as possible — to pose as a democratic coup, if you will, recognizing the pro-democracy ethos that is pressed by the OAS, AU, UN, etc after coups. This has happened quite frequently in Africa in recent years; see also Thailand and Bangladesh. But do the numbers bear me out?

John Carey kindly sends along the following. (Thanks, John!)

Continue reading "Some Data on Latin American Coups" »

Posted by John Sides at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• Some 2008 polling data on Zelaya.

• Greg Weeks’ blog on Latin American politics.

• These three posts by Matthew Shugart.

Posted by John Sides at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tom Schaller says no:

Is Sanford a cad for bolting his family on Father’s Day weekend? Of course, but that is a private, moral failing, rather than a failure of public duty. . . .

I [Schaller] oppose most of what Mr. Sanford stands for politically. His showy rejection of federal stimulus money targeted for his state was a crass publicity stunt designed to garner national attention for Mr. Sanford at the expense of his constituents, many of whom are struggling economically. . . . Should Mr. Sanford’s ambitions founder on the shoals of a personal scandal, however, yet another opportunity will be lost to establish the long-overdue separation between private comportment and public service. So here’s hoping he doesn’t resign or, if he does, it is a matter of personal choice rather than him bowing to political pressure.

I see where Schaller is coming from. Lots of people have complicated personal lives, and it’s not clear at all that these difficulties have much if anything to do with governing. But I don’t know if I agree with him on the wall of separation between private comportment and public service.

Consider the Sanford case. Schaller’s a Democrat, so he can evaluate Sanford on his policies. But if Schaller were a Republican, he might very well want Sanford out of there because he tarnishes the brand, makes the party a laughingstock, etc. Also makes it harder for Sanford to convincingly follow a “family values” agenda which Schaller (if he were a Republican) might want. These are legitimate concerns for a Republican to have. Even if you don’t think Sanford’s personal indiscretions are important, you might want him gone and replaced by a more effective Republican. Just as, from the other direction, a Democrat would’ve preferred a zipped-fly version of Bill Clinton.

Continue reading "Should Mark Sanford resign?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Drawing from more than 25 hours of oral history interviews, Dr. Glenda Balas of the University of New Mexico has written and produced “The Long Road to Decatur: A History of Personal Influence.”

The video documentary chronicles the development of the classic (and controversial) book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, first published in 1955.

The webpage of the documentary, with a video file to download, is here. I haven’t yet watched the video. The book is still in print. Here is a critique of how the book’s findings have been interpreted.

[Hat tip to Doug Hess.]

UPDATE: Here is a summary of a 2008 lecture by Katz. Thanks to Francisco Pérez.

Posted by John Sides at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What looks to me like one of the most important articles in political science over the last several years is out in the new American Political Science Review under the rather unprepossessing title, “A Model of Social Identity with an Application to Political Economy: Nation, Class and Redistribution” (available here for APSA members; ungated earlier version available here). Moses Shayo briefly lays out a model of identity that borrows insights from both economics and social psychology. What is interesting is that the model’s predictions are (a) starkly counter-intuitive about the relationship between national identity and preferences over redistribution, and (b) appear to be born out by the data.

Continue reading "Redistribution and National Identity" »

Posted by Henry at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.

Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life.

From a 1966 article in Time. I’ll pair this with a graph from the General Social Survey. The question wording is “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex—do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”

Posted by John Sides at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

The Bulwer-Lytton contest is to write the worst first line of a novel. The runner-up is equally awful:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor—the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Many more are here.

Posted by John Sides at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The removal of an elected president by the military, and the installation of a civilian as the new president, leads a friend to ask:

It seems to have become much more common in the post-1989 period for coupsters to hand over at least the nominal reins to some sort of civilian entity as quickly as possible — to pose as a democratic coup, if you will, recognizing the pro-democracy ethos that is pressed by the OAS, AU, UN, etc after coups. This has happened quite frequently in Africa in recent years; see also Thailand and Bangladesh. But do the numbers bear me out?

Does anyone have a sense of systematic data on this subject?

Posted by John Sides at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

John’s excellent post, just below, on the differential morality of Democrats and Republicans brought back memories of a piece I wrote long ago, around the time when John (who is a few years my junior) was focusing more on picking up some new Michael Jackson dance moves to show off at the junior high sock hop than on political science.

I wrote the following in, I think, 1994, and Richard Morin, who was then doing a column for Washington Post on offbeat research findings, picked it up and ran it there. It’s good to know, based on John’s post, that my argument is as true today as it was then.

(By the way [shameless self-promotion], the following will be reprinted in a forthcoming volume titled The Wit and Humor of Political Science (please hold your sarcasm), edited by Sigelman, Newton, Grofman, and Meier, to be published jointly by APSA and ECPR.)

The Hobbesian World of Democrats

Democrats are stupid (Sigelman 1988) and ugly (Sigelman 1990). This much is certain. From these hard but uncontestable truths it is but a small step to an image of Democrats as bottom feeders in a dismal swamp, relegated by the flatulence of their intellects and the unsightliness of their visages to the bottom rungs of a societal pecking order in which looks and smarts are what count.

Until now, there has been no hard evidence — merely logic and common sense — to indicate that Democrats are miserable failures in life. In the grand tradition of social science, my purpose here is to confirm what everyone already knows, or at least should know. However, because social scientists are themselves notorious Democrats (Ladd and Lipset 1975), it is never safe to assume that they know what they should.

My argument is simple: Compared to respectable Americans, i.e., Republicans, Democrats can be expected to inhabit a Hobbesian state of nature, a world in which life is poor, short, solitary, brutish, and nasty (Hobbes 1968). My method is equally simple: I compare Democrats’ and Republicans’ answers to questions about their lives that have been asked in the ongoing NORC General Social Survey, 1972-1993 (Davis and Smith 1993).<1>

Continue reading "The Hobbesian World of Democrats" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Charles Blow revisits familiar findings: “red” states have higher divorce rates as well as higher rates of teen pregnancy and higher rates of on-line pornography consumption. He writes:

While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.

Welcome to another episode of “The Ecological Fallacy”! Once again: you cannot infer the behavior of individuals — Democrats and Republicans — from data at an aggregate level, such as states.

What happens when we look at individual-level data? Blow’s story falls apart. Using the General Social Survey, I first created a relevant measure of marital status: whether the respondent was divorced or separated at the time of the interview, or had ever been divorced or separated. So you are coded 1 in those cases, and 0 otherwise (i.e., if you had never been married or if you were married or widowed but never divorced or separated). The GSS included marital status in 27 surveys between 1972-2008. These surveys contain about 50,000 respondents.

I also created a measure of whether the respondent admitted to having an affair (leaving aside the issue of how many survey respondents answer this question honestly). For this measure you are coded 1 if you admitted to having an extramarital affair and 0 if you had not. I excluded respondents who had never been married. So this measure includes only those who are married or were married at some point. The GSS included the affair question (charmingly labeled “evstray” in the dataset) in 10 surveys between 1991-2008. These surveys contain about 16,000 respondents.

What do we find? Simple descriptive statistics suggest only small differences between Democrats, Republicans, and independents (here, independents who “lean” toward a party are counted as partisans):

About 29% of Democrats, 30% of independents, and 26% of Republicans are or have been divorced or separated.

About 19% of Democrats, 19% of independents, and 15% of Republicans admit to having an extramarital affair.

If anything, Republicans are slightly less likely than both Democrats and independents to get divorced or mess around. This is the opposite of what Blow suggests — which, yet again, reveals the problems of using aggregate data to make individual-level inferences.

To see if additional factors could explain even these small differences among groups of partisans, I then estimated two logit models. Here, the probability of being divorced or having had an affair is a function of a binary measure of partisanship (coded 1 if Republican and 0 otherwise, since there appears to be little difference between Democrats and independents), as well as controls for these factors: age, sex, race, educational attainment, and year of survey.

There are statistically significant, but small, differences between Republicans and Democrats/independents: other things equal, Republicans are 2 percentage points less likely to be or have been divorced. They are 4 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair. To put that latter effect in some context, men are about 9 points more likely than women to admit to an extramarital affair.

These effects are slightly larger if we focus only on the 2008 data: Republicans are 4 points less likely than Democrats or independents to be or have been divorced, and 5 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair.

This is a very simple analysis. Perhaps there are other factors one should control for, and perhaps there are interactions between party identification and the partisanship of states — a la Andy et al.’s research.

But I think the basic finding is likely robust: partisanship has a very weak relationship with either divorce or infidelity, and the relationships that do exist suggest that Republicans are less, not more, likely to get divorced or be unfaithful. Those, like Blow, who want to decry Republican “hypocrisy” on issues of family and sexuality may want to focus their ire on Sanford, Ensign, et al., and not on Republicans in the mass public.

Posted by John Sides at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

“Baseball is so much harder to televise than the other sports because it is a game of angles.” — Tim McCarver.

Tim McCarver was a major league catcher for many years and he’s been a major league announcer for just short of forever. He never shuts up, and some of the things he says even make sense.

If baseball is a game of angles, as he says, then the folks who sign Tim McCarver’s paycheck have been getting it all wrong. Here’s the story, as told by Slate’s Greg Hanlon.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some of this consists of inside jokes for those of us who live in the DC area and who— as all right-thinking people do — despise the Northern Virginia suburbs. But lots of it is about generic suburbia and should be recognizable no matter what part of the country you live in, because suburbia is so … well, generic.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Here’s something to spark discussion over the weekend. Is it time to say that the window of opportunity for an Iranian “colored” Revolution - e.g., a massive protest following electoral fraud that succeeds in overturning the results of that election and/or changing the leadership of the country as a result - is coming to a close? It now looks likely that these election results are going to hold - in part for some of the reasons I suggested in a previous post - and Ahmadinejad is going to get inaugurated for a second term later this summer. If this the case, then the potential for an Iranian colored revolution is over.

This is not, however, meant to sound the death knell for protest in Iran, or even for the possibility of some sort of regime change in Iran in the future because of these events. But I think now the model becomes the Iranian Revolution of 1979 itself. While I am far from an expert on these events, the general story is that protest built up gradually from late 1977 through 1978 and then culminated in regime change only in 1979. Given the memory of these events in the minds of many Iranians - and probably passed along to younger generations by parents and grandparents as well - it strikes me that we at least need to consider the possibility that this will become the new model for the many Iranians that the past weeks revealed are so clearly dissatisfied with the current regime. And to the extent that the events of the last two weeks may have revealed the Iranian regime to be more of your typical petro-dictatorship propped up by security forces (here and here) than its citizens may have believed previously, then perhaps this sort of scenario is slightly more likely than it might have seemed in previous years.

Thoughts?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Turn your sound down and enjoy.

[Hat tip to Phil Young]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John has had at least fifteen hours to comment on this story and hasn’t, so I’m going to steal it from under him.

In a surprise announcement the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Wednesday that it would double the number of nominees for the best-picture Academy Award to 10 from 5, returning to a practice it used more than a half-century ago when the number of films released was larger. … In a question-and-answer session that followed the announcement Mr. Ganis said, “I would not be telling you the truth if I said the words ‘Dark Knight’ did not come up.” This year “The Dark Knight,” a critically acclaimed blockbuster fantasy, did not make the final list of nominees that included “Frost/Nixon,” “Milk,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Reader” and the eventual winner, “Slumdog Millionaire.” None of those films were as widely seen as “The Dark Knight” or the animated “Wall-E,” another favorite that was snubbed by the best-picture category, adding heat to a debate about whether the Oscar voters had drifted too far from the moviegoing public.

As I read it, there is a three way distributional fight between (a) the producers of ‘Oscar’ type movies with limited commercial audience, (b) the makers of popular movies, and (c ) the producers of the Oscars (nb - I have no specialist knowledge about Hollywood worth talking about and am chancing my arm on a lot of the claims below). Under the status quo ante, people who make ‘serious’ movies try to hype them up through campaigning for Oscar nominations (and wins) - while these publicity efforts are expensive, they are cheaper than conventional advertising aimed at a mass audience, and can pay off very well if the movie wins a major award allowing the movie to go into re-runs etc. People who make more traditional mass audience movies have less to gain from Oscar nominations (their movies will succeed or fail based on box office receipts in a compressed time period), and hence less incentive to push their movies. The producers of the Oscar ceremonies have a difficult balancing act between credibility (the awards have to have some relationship to some notion of artistic merit that is not dependent on commercial success if they are to carry cultural cachet) and mass appeal (if the slate of contenders is limited to subtitled five hour movies about the politics of cultural despair among Ukrainian tractor mechanics and the like, few people are going to want to tune in).

Clearly, the producers of the Oscars have decided to change the balance towards commercial production. This may in part be an over-reaction to an unusually weak set of Oscar contenders last year, with a heavy preponderance of non-commercial movies. How are the various sets of actors likely to behave under the new status quo? My first prediction is that we will see significantly fewer ‘serious’ movies being produced - one major channel of promotion for such movies is now less viable (assuming that these movies need a win more than they do a mere nomination).

My second prediction is that the new system may not favor commercial movies much more than the old system did - they are obviously more likely to become nominees, but I am not convinced that their chances of winning the prize will go up significantly. This is, frankly, a hunch as much as anything else - one would like to have access to voting data from previous years to figure out exactly what has happened - but I don’t see that there will be much more incentive to run expensive Oscar campaigns for commercial movies under the new system.

My third prediction is that we will see more variation in the genre of winners of the Best Movie award than previously - films like Wall-E will have a significantly better chance of being nominated, and hence of winning. I can see how the typical Oscar voter last year might have had qualms about nominating a movie like Wall-E given historical precedent - but I can also see how she might have ended up voting for Wall-E if it had been nominated, given some of the other dog’s dinners that were up for the award. Choices at the nomination stage are (I suspect) going to depend more on perceived credibility than choices at the voting stage (where voters are more likely to vote their sincere preferences) - if my suspicions are correct, this may lead to a mild improvement, overall in the quality of the final winner. As long as it stays light on the Ukrainian_tractor_mechanic_angst factor.

Posted by Henry at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

It’s on, according to Colin Scott at Paul Krugman-cited blog, The Irish Economy.

There is a consensus that the practitioners and discipline of economics have been key beneficiaries of the financial and fiscal crises. The views of leading economists as to where we are and what we should do are widely sought across the media and within government. A conference organised at TCD earlier this week on the issue of political reform was part of a deliberate effort by political scientists to demonstrate the relevance of their discipline and the Irish Times has been publishing opinion pieces and articles drawing on the conference.

University College Dublin political scientist, John Coakley (UCD is my alma mater, but he arrived after I left).

ECONOMIC CRISES rightly push economists to the forefront when it comes to seeking to devise solutions. But the roots of such crises are often political, so it is not surprising that we also find calls for political reform matching demands for corrective action in the economy. … One of the most significant constraints is the nature of Irish political culture. After generations of familiarity with the operation of Irish-style democracy, Irish people have developed particular expectations of what is possible and appropriate.

University College Cork political scientist, Neil Collins:

THERE IS a truism in political science that power is inversely related to noise [HF - never heard of this truism meself, and it would seem to go against the findings of a large literature on social movements etc]. If you are in the streets, behind the banner or peering down from a poster, you have probably already lost. Important decisions affecting our everyday life are usually made by those we are least likely to be able to name. … The irony is that political institutions have ceded power to regulatory systems on foot of economic arguments, while the mechanism of accountability from those systems has been shown to be inadequate. Political parties, pluralism, ministerial accountability, elections and parliamentary scrutiny have failed to guarantee democratic control and popular trust in political institutions, and the economic levers are proving inadequate for the purpose. [HF - Collins seems on safer ground here]

It is interesting to me that there isn’t even the hint of political science involvement in the general public debates over the economic meltdown - the only political scientist I can think of who has been at all prominent is Barry Eichengreen, who holds a joint appointment in economics. Nor can I imagine US political scientists engaging in collective action to try to change this. Why the differences with Ireland?

Posted by Henry at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Millions of young Americans pay little attention to politics. They don’t follow the news, they lack even the most basic knowledge about political institutions, they don’t vote, and they don’t care. Identifying these behaviors as problems for the future of American democracy and recognizing that many of them are products of early-life socialization processes, numerous organizations are now pushing “civic education” efforts of various sorts, many of them targeted at elementary, middle school, high school, and college students.

In a new study, Timothy Vercellotti and Elizabeth Matto probe the impact of political participation in the school and at home on knowledge about politics and the sense of political efficacy. The design of the study is unusual – more innovative and ambitious than appears to be the norm in this research area. The participants were 361 high school students from four high schools who were assigned to either a treatment group that read newsmagazine articles weekly for eight weeks and discussed them in class, a treatment group that read the same articles and discussed them in class and with their parents, and a no-treatment control group. Each group was surveyed three times – first at the very start of the study, again after the eight-week treatment period, and once more six weeks later.

Political knowledge, as gauged by familiarity with various public figures, increased in all three groups, presumably because the study was conducted during the presidential caucus and primary period. Even so, the greatest increase occurred for the second treatment group – the one that discussed the articles both in class and at home. And knowledge remained at its second survey level six weeks later.

Internal efficacy, as measured by the National Election Study items that will be familiar to many “Monkey Cage” readers. Once again, the largest effects were for the second treatment group.

I have some methodological qualms. For one thing, intact classes, not individual students, were randomly assigned to the treatment groups, a feature that introduces uncertainty about what the treatment really is (the treatment itself, or something about the class, e.g., the quality of the instructor). Moreover, as Vercellotti and Matto recognize, using the same knowledge items in all three surveys could have produced a wave-to-wave learning effect. The timing of the survey, coming as it did in the middle of a high-visibility campaign, is also unfortunate. And I wish the design could have been expanded to include more groups: another control group that was surveyed only during the third wave; yet another control group that received a placebo of some sort like reading stories from, say, Sports Illustrated; and a third treatment group that discussed the articles at home but not at school.

Notwithstanding these qualms, there’s a lot to like about this study. Its subject matter is important; its application of a large-scale field experiment to address these issues is a definite step forward; and its findings, while hardly the last word on the subject, strike me as warranting greater confidence than those reported in many previous political socialization studies by political scientists and others.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Following on John’s post on how Republicans have taken a dimmer view of the Supreme Court since losing control of the White House and my earlier post noting the same trend with Ben Bernanke, it is heartening to note that Fox News has apparently turned Gov. Mark Sanford into a Democrat:

[Hat Tip to Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, who also notes that Fox News did the same thing to Mark Foley as well!]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)