UNC Everywhere

One of my fellow graduates students, John Cluverius (whom I still owe some drinks for proctoring an exam for me last semester... I haven't forgotten, John) has a post at the Monkey Cage on the American public's support for social spending across time. Using the "policy mood" data created by UNC Prof Jim Stimson, he shows a different result to that being bandied about in the press recently. It's an interesting post. Check it out.

Score Another One for the Materialists

A couple of years ago I posted a link to a paper by Mansfield and Mutz that called into question basic materialist explanations for trade preference formation. The argument of the paper was that attitudes towards trade are formed along sociotropic, rather than individual, lines. I said at the time that I was interested to see whether this study would hold up to future scrutiny. Well, former UNC PhDs Ben Fordham and Katya Kleinberg suggest that it might not in a recent IO article:

Recent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self-interest. The skeptical view suggests that long-standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one's own material well-being. We believe this conclusion is premature for two reasons. First, the practice of using one attitude to predict another raises questions about direction of causation that cannot be answered with the data at hand. This problem is most obvious when questions about the expected impact of trade are used to predict opinions about trade policy. Second, the understanding of self-interest employed in most studies of trade policy attitudes is unrealistically narrow. In reality, the close relationship between individual economic interests and the interests of the groups in which individuals are embedded creates indirect pathways through which one's position in the economy can shape individual trade policy preferences. We use the data employed by Mansfield and Mutz to support our argument that a more complete account of trade attitude formation is needed and that in such an account economic interests may yet play an important role.

The Public Is Not Easily Manipulated

During the Krugman/Crooked Timber kerfluffle this summer I argued that Krugman's argument that elite pundits and policy wonks ran roughshod over American politics was too simplistic; we also needed to account for voter preferences, especially on big-ticket policy decisions like the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq War. For this I was raked across the coals... after all, isn't public opinion created or manipulated by elites?

Via Chris Blattman, there is some new experimental research in the APSR (ungated) by John Bullock that shows that the effect of elites' cues on public opinion is not dominant:

An enduring concern about democracies is that citizens conform too readily to the policy views of elites in their own parties, even to the point of ignoring other information about the policies in question. 

This article presents two experiments that undermine this concern, at least under one important condition. People rarely possess even a modicum of information about policies; but when they do, their attitudes seem to be affected at least as much by that information as by cues from party elites. 

The experiments also measure the extent to which people think about policy. Contrary to many accounts, they suggest that party cues do not inhibit such thinking.  

This is not cause for unbridled optimism about citizens’ ability to make good decisions, but it is reason to be more sanguine about their ability to use information about policy when they have it.

That doesn't mean that elites can't use public opinion -- especially when it's an ignorant opinion -- to skew policies in ways that suit their own preferences. The selling of the Iraq War might be such a case, when the public was convinced in large numbers that Saddam Hussein was directly or indirectly response for the attacks on 9/11. It may be an example of the mass ignorance that Bullock describes. But as an exception to the general pattern that would have to be demonstrated rather than merely asserted. In general it's just not enough to say that the public is easily manipulated into accepting elite opinion.

Fighting Words

Scott Sumner goes hard after American political science:

Just one more reason why academics should pay no attention to “public opinion” polls. There is no such things as public opinion, there is only election results. No one knows what Americans would believe about Medicare if that sat down with all the government programs and tax revenues in a spreadsheet front of them, and told they had to equate the NPV of all future taxes with the NPV of all future spending. We simply don’t know. And anyone who argues otherwise isn’t thinking deeply enough about the issue.

Sumner calls this post "Thinking like an economist", which reminded me of my past post on the problem with economists.

The UNC political science department is well-known in academic circles for the study of public opinion in American politics, and the consensus view in Hamilton Hall is not that public opinion doesn't matter, much less that there is "no such thing". I very much doubt that Sumner has any familiarity with this literature, but he could start here and here and here. Public opinion matters a lot for policymaking, especially on issues that are salient with voters*. It even matters for the judiciary, even those with extreme job security such as the Supreme Court (see first link). It's not about voters having policy expertise, or what they'd do if they had to match the NPV of spending and revenue. The public does not even have to be coherent to have a major impact on policymaking, and not just via elections.

Let's take an example. Sumner is frequently exasperated by the Federal Reserve. He notes that the economy remains depressed several years after the beginning of the recession. He notes that Ben Bernanke has said that the Fed has plenty of tools to boost nominal GDP even at the zero interest rate bound. He notes that Ben Bernanke did a lot of research on both the Great Depression and Japan's lost decade, and thus understands the situation we're in quite well. The Fed does not face elections and is considered one of the most independent central banks in the world. And yet despite possessing the requisite expertise and policy tools the Fed is nowhere near as activist as Sumner would prefer.

How can we explain this? It could be that the Fed are a bunch of idiots, but Sumner does not believe that to be true at least in Bernanke's case. Or it could be that the Fed has just witnessed a series of events that have made them cautious. The Tea Party has had a major effect on American politics, and one ideological leader of the Tea Party -- Ron Paul -- wants to abolish the Fed and is now chairman of the House committee that oversees the Fed. Paul's book *End the Fed* has 375 reviews on Amazon.com, and nearly all of them give the book four or five stars. A Nobel Prize-winning economist -- Peter Diamond -- was blocked from joining the Fed by this element of the contemporary GOP. The leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination recently threatened Bernanke with bodily harm and insinuated that he was a traitor. And Bernanke is a fellow Republican who was appointed by a Republican president. He has also been criticized by the left for bank-friendly policies. All of these groups want a monetary policy that is tighter than Sumner's preferred policy, and that is what the Fed has done.

Given all of this, isn't it at least plausible that the Fed feels constrained by public opinion? To my knowledge no studies have focused directly on this question, but as a potential contributing factor to Fed policy choices it seems at least plausible. Even if public opinion doesn't affect the Fed, the finding that it affects the Congress, presidency, and judiciary is very robust. So to be so dismissive is really silly.

*My guess is that the specific issue Sumner is discussing -- the tax penalty for married couples -- is not highly salient for most people. When it is, couples can easily (and cheaply) get legally divorced or remain unmarried as Justin Wolfers and Betsy Stevenson have done.  

Trade, Exchange Rates, and Public Opinion

Drezner wants to know what's up with Republicans not supporting free trade these days:

What's more disturbing, however, and uncommented until now, was the total lack of support for freer trade among the GOP field.

This came through loud and clear through what was said and what was not said in New Hampshire. Trade didn't come up all that much during the debate. Tim Pawlenty provided the only comment of substance, and it wasn't a productive one...

The other thing that was striking was what wasn't said during the debate. All of the candidates focused like sharks with frikkin' laser beams attached to them on the economy. The standard GOP litany of solutions for jump-starting the economy were offered: tax cuts, cutting regulation, tax cuts, cutting government spending, tax cuts, reigning in the Fed, tax cuts, ending Obamacare, tax cuts. Not one of the candidates, however, mentioned trade liberalization as part of their fornmula for getting America moving again.

This is more off-the-cuff observation than analysis, and I'm not sure how far it reaches (as Scott Lincicome points out in Drezner's comments), but let's take it as given and think about why might this be the case. Another of his commenters presents a typical explanation:

The obvious thing is that when most of the American people have been economically hammered for decades, they're not in an economically liberal mood. They've seen repeated free trade agreements lead directly to lower wages and layoffs, despite what the various propagandists have said.

Call this the "business cycle theory of trade attitudes": When economic times are good, public support for further liberalization is high. But during downturns, everyone wants protection. It's a fairly standard argument, and Drezner's co-blogger at FP makes it every day.

Thing is, there are good reasons to doubt it. Dr. Oatley recently published an article arguing that real exchange rate movements better predict calls for trade protectionism than the business cycle. His central finding?

The empirical analysis therefore provides robust support for the real exchange rate hypothesis. The number of antidumping petitions rises as currencies strengthen and falls as currencies weaken. This relationship holds even once we control for other likely causes of industry demand for protection such as import growth and changes in macroeconomic conditions. ...

Thus, real exchange rate movements provide at least as strong an explanation for temporal variation in protectionism than the most popular alternative business cycle hypothesis.

Douglas Irwin has a recent article on the link between exchange rates and trade policy in historical perspective. So what's happened to real exchange rates in the US?



Looking at this in light of Oatley's paper, it's not all that surprising that Bush wasn't able to do much on trade during the 2000s. He entered office during a period immediately following a huge exchange rate appreciation that peaked with the early-naughties recession. Second, though the exchange rate depreciated during the decade, that process slowed and mildly reversed in 2008-2009. Recall, as Drezner does, the anti-trade competition that Hillary Clinton and Obama engaged in during the 2008 primary. We're still living through that, so it shouldn't be too surprising that momentum for new trade agreements has stalled in both parties.

In other words, Drezner, Lincicome, and Oatley could all be right: elite Republican opinion on trade might not have changed all that much (Lincicome), but they are choosing to remain eerily quiet on the issue (Drezner) as real exchange rates have yet to depreciate enough to restore American competitiveness (Oatley). The optimistic take for the globalist is that real exchange rate movements are occurring, and if recent trends continue we should expect greater enthusiasm for more liberalized trade in the coming years.

It's the Stupidity, Stupid

Roger Lowenstein says the reason no Wall Street executives have been prosecuted is likely because their actions were stupid but not criminal. But people don't find that satisfying:

While it may be harder to prove criminal guilt, it's easier for people to believe that some bad actor is the cause of bad things. This is a persistent trait in the national character. Historian Richard Hofstadter identified it in 1964 as The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He was writing mostly about McCarthyism, though he recognized that paranoia isn't limited to the political Right. Nor is it always harnessed to an unworthy cause; convicting criminals, especially in high places, isn't just worthy, it's crucial to democracy.

The paranoid style, as Hofstadter defined it, has as much to do with "style" as paranoia—it's about "the way in which ideas are believed [more] than with the truth or falsity of their content." It spawned a rhetoric that tilted every question toward conspiracy, so that random or unfortunate events were seen to compose a "baffling pattern." Thus, the "sharp decline"—Hofstadter was writing about America's perceived international strength, not the price of real estate—did not "just happen." It was inevitably brought about by "will and intention."

He writes elsewhere that the crisis was caused mostly by rank idiocy, not by fraud. He puts it something like "fraud accompanied the crisis, it didn't cause it". This is a view that I am pretty sympathetic to. I believe there was a some outright fraud, but I suspect that is always the case in financial markets. The bigger problem during the crisis was that all sorts of people thought very risky assets were not very risky. And, while some actions taken in the lead-up to the crisis are obviously crazy in retrospect, being wrong is not criminal. We don't imprison the gambler for backing the wrong horse and losing his rent.

In general I think we are too quick to assign bad motives to people when things go wrong, and are too slow to accept that people do very stupid things all the time without intending to. We often assume that people in high positions of business or government are more competent than they really are, so when things go wrong we conclude that it was intentional. I think we're also too quick to connect unrelated dots, rather than starting from the assumption that the world is pretty stochastic. This gets to the "Black Swans" post from yesterday.

There's a political element to this, of course. Hofstadter's famous essay largely focused on 1960s examples of right-wing paranoia (e.g. McCarthyism), but he was clear that this particular pathology affects people across the political spectrum. (One of the examples he mentions, but does not dwell on, is scare-mongering against bankers in the 1890s. It reads like it could have been writing today.) Politicians often try to tap into latent paranoia, and in some cases actively encourage it. (Think of Gingrich's "secular atheist radical Islamist" nightmare, which must have filled out somebody's Bingo card.) Sometimes, as in the case of the Republican establishment, incorporating the Tea Party movement (which I view as a somewhat-coherent but certainly-paranoid mass movement) is more an act of desperation: if they don't, their coalition risks fragmentation, as happened during the populist movements in the 1990s that led to Ross Perot's presidential runs. A big part of Perot's success was manipulation of fear of a "giant sucking sound", and Perot's relative success may have affected legislators' later votes on NAFTA.

Sometimes encouraging isn't really needed. Current populist movements in America on the left and right have strong grassroots characteristics, although media and policy elites sometimes encourage and try to co-opt them. Just as often they try to minimize them. The Birther, Truther, and Deather movements started small and grew, although none have really affected the political landscape in the same way as Perot or the Tea Party. As Hussein Ibish witnessed recently, fear of an Islamic conspiracy to annihilate Western civilization approaches common belief. It doesn't take much to convince lots of people that the financial crisis was the result of conspiratorial actions of bankers, and both Glenn Beck and Michael Moore have built careers playing to certain types of American paranoia. It doesn't take a lot to convince people that foreigners will take their jobs, or attack the homeland, or brainwash their children, or otherwise take away everything they hold dear.

Conspiratorial explanations are obviously appealing, and clearly conspiracies do sometimes exist. But quite often it might be worth taking a step back, acknowledging that the world is a messy place that often doesn't make sense, and chalk up bad outcomes to stupidity instead.

Closing Thoughts on Elites

I spent a lot of time in this Crooked Timber comment thread discussing my previous two posts and the reactions to them. I think it's safe to say that I convinced exactly no one, and it's now devolved well past the original point of contention, so I want to clarify a few things and then I'm letting this go. I suspect that in terms of actual views of politics there’s less disagreement than first appears, but I could be wrong. The first point is related to the initial context of Krugman, and why I reacted the way I did to him. The other points are more general, and mostly refer to specific arguments brought up by commenters at CT. Drezner has additional thoughts. Phil Arena had a good post too. And Michael Flynn adds some important points. Dan Nexon jumps back in, and I agree completely with him that politics is almost entirely about rent-seeking and redistribution, but interest groups are part of the public and elite opinion is only one component of political competition. I expound on this below.

1. (NOTE: After I wrote this, but while Blogger was down so I couldn’t post it, Krugman himself took note, although he tries to rise above it by not offering comment. Too bad… he might’ve used the opportunity to express what it is, exactly, I’m “creatively misreading” by saying how much responsibility he believes the public bears. Since he says my accusation – that he’s trying to exculpate the public – is a misreading, I’ll take that to mean that he agrees that the public does deserve some blame. This makes his column, as written, very odd. It also makes many of the criticisms of me in the CT thread criticisms of Krugman as well. Anyway, I’m leaving this in the post because it gets at the reading I originally had, and the reasons I had it, which is the most interesting thing from the perspective of argument rather than piss-contest.) A lot of people think I misread Krugman, or was otherwise uncharitable. I was definitely uncharitable, because I have a pretty strong distaste for Krugman's predilection towards a "good vs evil" characterization of politics. CTers, who all seem to like Krugman quite a bit more than me, were much more charitable. That's fine with me. But I don't think I misread him. [Ed.: I accept that I did, now that he says I did. I stand by my general argument, which may be knocking down a straw man in Krugman's case, but as I learned at CT there are certainly others who hold a view close to this.] The point of his op-ed was to place responsibility for policy disasters on policy elites (at least the ones he disagrees with). To do that, he felt he needed to exculpate the public. So he argued that these were "top-down" policies, not "responses to public demand". Only once in his column (Greece) does he mention that the public had any role in this ("So who was to blame for these budget busters? It wasn't the man in the street")*. There wasn’t any sort of “and the public went along with it” or even “and the public was gullible enough to buy Dubya’s lies hook, line, and sinker” or anything like that. A lot of time in CT comments was spent dissecting exactly what was meant by "responses to public demand", and no agreement was reached, but my definition (and Drezner's) included "doing things that the public broadly supports so that you get elected". The modal CT commenter seemed to prefer a stricter definition of "demand", and perhaps a lot of our disagreement stems from that semantic question, but short of election results and polling data I'm not really sure what they could mean by that and none of them was able to say. Krugman’s “top-down policies” implies, to me, that the bottom-up public had nothing to do with it.

My argument against what Krugman is saying now is actually congruent with what Krugman has written previously. Not just on Medicare Part D, as Henry Farrell pointed out, but more generally. When it comes to enacting policies that Krugman prefers, he has no problem at all citing poll data or election results as evidence of public demand, so I remain unconvinced that I was misreading him [Ed.: Caveat above applies here too.]. To drive this point home, here's what Krugman wrote a few weeks ago:

Eventually, of course, America must choose between these differing visions [from competing elites]. And we have a way of doing that. It’s called democracy. ...

For what it’s worth, polls suggest that the public’s priorities are nothing like those embodied in the Republican budget. Large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy. Large majorities — including a majority of Republicans — also oppose major changes to Medicare. Of course, the poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But that’s all the more reason to make the 2012 election a clear choice between visions. ...

So let’s not be civil. Instead, let’s have a frank discussion of our differences. In particular, if Democrats believe that Republicans are talking cruel nonsense, they should say so — and take their case to the voters.

This is the same evidence -- polls and election results -- that Drezner and I cited when arguing that the macro polity supported Bush's policies while Krugman says they didn't (or didn't "demand" them). So Krugman is trying to have it both ways: public demand as measured by polls and elections matters when it agrees with him, but does not when it doesn't. If the Democrats take their case to the voters and win, Krugman will claim a public mandate; If the Republicans win, he will claim elite manipulation by Very Serious People. How is this not a double-standard?

And I agree; let's not be civil. When an elite "pundit in good standing" plays intellectual three-card monty, let's call it what it is: "Unwisdom", to borrow Krugman's expression. Krugman is a partisan, and that's fine, but that shouldn't give him license to be this selective in evidence.

2. I very much believe that elites (and interest groups) play a huge role in creating policy, particularly in the details (i.e. where the devil is). In fact, the conclusion of my post previous to the one that started all this was:

It's no secret that investors will try to move markets in ways that are advantageous to them, nor that political elites will try to turn public opinion through the media. But in this case basically everyone agrees that Greece is insolvent, and that some form of restructuring is all but inevitable. That doesn't mean that the terms of that restructuring, nor the political implications for the eurozone, are assured. These might be examples of certain investors, government officials, or policy entrepreneurs [trying] to influence the timing of the restructuring, as well as the political response to it.

Elites matter, but within the context of public opinion plus institutional and other constraints. The relative weight of each of those -- public, elites, institutional constraints -- will vary by issue, but for high salience issues like tax policy and wars the public will play a large role in shaping the policy space.

One example (of several) I gave in comments at CT to illustrate this fact is that in addition to tax cuts that largely benefitted the wealthy, Bush also wanted to privatize Social Security. Many of the same elites that Krugman is attacking supported both policies. One of those became policy. The other didn't. Reference to "elites" in the way we've been discussing them doesn't tell us anything about why there were divergent outcomes in these cases. What we do know is that the public supported one, and not the other. Therefore, is it really so unreasonable to conclude that public opinion might be a relevant variable? And if it is, then shouldn't the public share some (not all) of the blame when things go wrong?

3. What we mean by "elites" isn't clear. As I pointed out in CT, and as Drezner mentioned too, by the definition Krugman uses -- "self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing" -- Krugman himself qualifies as an elite. As does practically everyone else with a recognizable name. Elites often have different preferences, so ex post it will always be easy to find some that supported any particular policy, and then blame them for any bad outcomes following from it. While this might be cathartic, it doesn't help us understand which elites got their way and why. For example, many elites (including Greenspan and the whole Republican party) wanted the Bush tax cuts. Many others (including Krugman and the whole Democratic party) did not. If that's all we knew, and we start from the assumption that only elites matter, how could we understand outcomes? And if elites aren't the only thing that matters, why should they be the only ones to take the blame when things go wrong?

Similarly, the “public” does not refer to 100% of everyone. Krugman’s definition of an elite – “self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing" – actually excludes the sort of interest groups that we generally think are involved in rent-seeking political behavior: industry groups (e.g. Wall Street), trade unions, religious organizations, farm associations, AARP, etc. According to Krugman’s definition, those would all be included in the “public” that had little-to-nothing to do with this. Instead, it’s all David Brooks’ fault.

The modal CT commenter surely thinks that the people who voted for George W. Bush made a big mistake, borne of ignorance, stupidity, or a view of politics that they completely disagree with. What’s wrong with saying that people who make mistakes deserve some portion of blame? (This is Krugman’s primary thesis, just applied to elites rather than voters.) If folks wish to exempt themselves from that slice of the public they are free to do so, without complaint from me. For my part, I never voted for Bush, actively campaigned against him in 2000 (I sat out 2004), and did not support any of the policies under discussion at the time they were put in place. So I’m more than happy to criticize those that did.

I didn’t highlight the role of interest groups within the public in my first post. That was a mistake. I think about politics is as interest group competition, and since (I believe) Krugman does too it didn’t occur to me that such a clarification was necessary. Sometimes interest groups coalesce around certain policies – tax cuts, wars – in sufficient numbers that referring to a macro polity as if it was unified makes sense (to me, at least), but that’s not to imply that interest groups are homogenous.

To reiterate and close: I'm fine with blaming elites for bad outcomes. I do it all the time. It's fun, they deserve a lot of scorn, and are rightly punished at the polls when they screw up. The thing I like most about Krugman, and basically the only constant thread in his popular writings from the 1990s until now, is that he's great at punching holes in bad numbers and illogic that pundits and politicians often use. But some blame is surely left over for an electorate that prefers low taxes and high spending, and rewards politicians that give them both, when those policies lead to a budget mess.

My next post will about something I really like about Krugman.

P.S. Farrell suggests I read Pepper Culpepper's book. It's been at the top of my Amazon wish list since I first heard of it (I believe via Farrell) six months or so ago. I hope to get to it later this summer. But as I understand it, the book is about "quiet politics", i.e. issues that the public knows and hears little or nothing about. I don't think that accurately characterizes the public debates over tax cuts, wars, or health care. (It probably does with regard to financial regulation, in the late-1990s and early-2000s at least.) Salience with the public is important, and these are the most salient issues in American politics. I'm not sure why we should expect case studies of some of the least salient issues (in other countries) to map on to this discussion very well. In fact, if David Soskice's blurb -- "Culpepper argues with detailed empirical plausibility that democracy can only impose change in technical policy debates if they are of high salience" -- is accurate, then if anything we should take the opposite view in these high salience cases. There's appears to be a huge generalizability problem. So while I'm willing to accept Farrell's chiding on how to do IPE better, we need to make sure that we're not going off too far in the other direction of extrapolating too much from limited cases.

*He doesn't mention Medicare Part D in his column, but does toss off "with few exceptions" which is possibly a reference to that, and as Farrell pointed out to me, Krugman mentions Part D in a separate blog post as being a response to public demand. The fact that he was this selective with his examples in his column indicates to me that a charitable reading isn't the right one. He's stacking the deck on purpose. And of course I think that the tax cuts, Iraq war, and euro-adoption are about as much "exceptions" as Part D. But I've already said that I'm not inclined to give Krugman a charitable reading, so YMMV, of course.

7 Year Old Politics

Henry Farrell goes after me over this post, and says he'd rather be an unsophisticated 6 year old than... whatever I am. Dan Nexon seconds the motion. Really Farrell's making a much bigger point about IPE and is using me as an illustrative case. He's written about this before.

This puts me in a weird position. I tossed off that post, mostly because I was short of time and because Krugman perpetually annoys me. The point of the post was intended to be that Krugman's constant moralizing doesn't get us anywhere, not even as far as the most basic view of democratic politics. The point was not that the most basic view is the right one. I tried to caveat a bit ("first approximation", "doesn't always work"), but that obviously didn't get across. So I guess Farrell's response is just desserts for being lazy. I'll try to flesh out what I meant better in this post. While I don't want to run away from what I wrote, much less what I intended to convey, I also don't want to get the shit kicked out of me for something I don't really think. So this will be at least as long as Farrell's post, and much longer than Nexon's.

As (I think) Farrell knows, I agree with many of his points about IPE in general. I agree that IPE does a very poor job of explaining preference aggregation, and a pretty poor job of preference formation (although, ideally, we could just import at least some of that from comparative politics). In fact, I'd extend it: I think IPE has a generally poor view of the political space, and like other subfields of political science is too reductionist. I agree that IPE does not have a very good sense of how interest groups and elites influence policy in democracies. I agree that we should pay more attention to subfields that examine these questions in detail. As he says, IPE generally infers preferences from economic theory, then applies some crude form of the median voter theorem (if that) to explain outcomes*. IPE generally assumes (implicitly) that voters are fully informed, and actually care about whatever issue we happen to be studying.

This is lazy even when it's not entirely wrong, and a big part of my dissertation is dedicated to more rigorously exploring how interest groups shape policy in a global context. So, as a jumping-off point, I don't mind him taking me to the rails. Except. He's writing this in defense of Krugman's purely elite-driven take. Here's what Krugman says:

The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

Here's what Farrell says:

On many important policy issues, the public has no preferences whatsoever. On others, it has preferences that largely maps onto partisan identifications rather than actual interests, and that reflect claims made by political elites (e.g. global warming). On others yet, the public has a set of contradictory preferences that politicians can pick and choose from. In some broad sense, public opinion does provide a brake on elite policy making – but the boundaries are both relatively loose and weakly defined. Policy elites can get away with a hell of a lot if they want to.

These are two very different statements. On the issues we're talking about -- tax cuts, Iraq war, prescription drugs covered by Medicare, housing policy -- the public did have pretty clearly identifiable preferences about policy, and those happen to map onto policy debates (and resulting legislation) fairly well**. As I linked in the prior post (via Drezner), a majority of the public supported the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war. The former represented the biggest policy proposal of Bush's 2000 campaign, the latter represented the biggest policy proposal of his 2004 campaign. He won both of them. (Okay, only kind of won in 2000.) Moreover, the public's representatives in the House and Senate voted for both policies.

Now we could believe that public preferences had nothing to do with the Bush tax cuts becoming law and the Iraq war being prosecuted. But then how to explain how a number of other policies supported by the same elites but not the public during the same period -- Social Security privatization, immigration reform, invading Iran -- did not become law or practice? If we're to discard polls and the votes of representatives, how else are we going to get at the public's preferences to know whether they're relevant?

That's not to say that elites don't have a huge role in shaping public opinion, crafting the specific nuances of policy, or even that they have quite a lot of flexibility to shape policy to their own ends. Of course they do. Legislation is written by elected elites, who are influenced by unelected elites and interest groups within their states/districts. One casual glance at trade law is enough to convince anyone of that. Medicare Part D gets closer to Farrell's last sentence. The public supported coverage of prescription drugs by Medicare. It seems likely to me that the public did not have strong preferences over precisely how that happened, other than that they would prefer not to have to pay higher taxes. So what we got was an unfunded bill that catered strongly to the interests of the drug industry. Similarly, the public supported tax cuts. The particulars of the Bush tax cuts met that demand, but in a way that also privileged powerful interest groups and likely Republican voters (see the cartoon in the Bartels paper Farrell links to). There is nothing in the Hacker/Pierson or Bartels studies that Farrell cites that disputes this interpretation***.

But here's the key point: the policy space that elites use to manipulate for their own ends does not exist without the broad support of mass publics****. Or, as Farrell says, "It is fair to say that the Medicare changes began in a shift in partisan patterns of competition over issues. However, it surely didn’t end there." No argument from me. That, however, is not what Krugman argues. He claims that the public had nothing to do with it at all. That this is purely a top-down disaster. This view is disputed by the Campbell and Morgan quote that Farrell reproduces:

More generally, gaining the support of powerful interest groups was essential in passing a reform that was likely to garner little Democratic support and was viewed skeptically by more conservative Republicans.

Right, but this was only important because the public wanted Medicare to cover prescription drugs in the first place. If they hadn't, a bill that both Republicans and Democrats were ambivalent about is unlikely to have become law. To gain passage, and thus satisfy the public demand, it became necessary to craft a bill in such a way as to get the necessary support from powerful interest groups. But that doesn't negate the public's interest in reform along the broad lines that reform occurred. A very similar process occurred during the PPACA ("Obamacare") deliberations.

Near the end Farrell writes:

One can certainly make a reasonable case that electoral politics plays a more important role than Krugman acknowledges. But one cannot make a good case that policies of the kind that Winecoff describes are a simple reflection of public preferences.

This where Farrell is misreading me. (And, I think, Drezner.) We're not saying that the public was perfectly represented, much less "reflected". Indeed, I think such a statement is all but meaningless. Drezner has written a book about how interest groups dominate regulation of the economy, particularly in highly-technical areas in which the public is unlikely to have much information or strong preferences. We're both very interested in how power and influence is filtered through political institutions/interactions. I'm just saying, contra Krugman, that mass publics are part of that equation. After linking to a bunch of surveys showing that the public broadly supported the policies Krugman says they had nothing to do with, I wrote in my post, "This [reference to public opinion] might not work all the time, but as a first approximation this sort of thinking holds up fairly well". Or, at least, to entirely excuse the public from the outcomes of policy you should first have to show that they didn't create the political space for those policies to be enacted. Krugman can't do that. That's the point.

(As for housing policy, I'd refer Farrell (and anyone else interested) to the CPE/IPE research done by Seabrooke and Schwartz (also here and this special issue of Comparative European Politics). Ragu Rajan has argued that the rise of credit was encouraged by policymakers to offset stagnating median wages. Oatley has an argument that "what we're experiencing right now" is a result of a number of macro policies, operating within an international context, that both elites and the public broadly supported, culminating in disaster. I think, though I've done no research to back it up, that home ownership was encouraged by major public policies -- including the mortgage interest deduction and Fannie/Freddie -- supported through a host public policies by administrations and majority Congresses from both major parties across several decades, and that the most recent housing crisis is only the most recent, not the only. In many cases, bipartisan elite opinion is/was that these policies distort the economy and should be abandoned. Which mass publics wanted less access to credit and higher interest rates? Sure, finance liked it also, but they weren't the only ones. I.e., We got the housing finance we got because the public wanted credit, the politicians wanted votes, and the financiers wanted profits. NOTE: I slightly modified this parenthetical after initial posting to improve clarity and fix typos.)

*Usually IPE just pumps POLITY into a regression and mumbles something about transparency or checks and balances and then moves on.

**As for "On other [issues], [the public] has preferences that largely maps onto partisan identifications rather than actual interests"... Who's lazily inferring interests now? Why can't partisan identification be an interest?

***The dearly departed George Rabinowitz used to befuddle his Intro to American Politics students every year by assigning Showdown at Gucci Gulch, a journalistic account of the passage of the 1986 tax reform act. It does a great job of explaining how the pressure for tax reform was generated by the mass public, but how the vagaries of getting it passed heavily involved elites and interest groups.

****For one thing, saying "elites did it" doesn't actually tell us anything at all. There are elites on both sides of every issue. Krugman himself is an elite now, as he was during all of the 2000s, and yet he disagreed with most major policies enacted during that period. Which elites get to control policy is decided, among other things, by the publics.

Aggregating Preferences

Every time a new poll of voter attitudes towards spending and taxes comes out, liberal commentators gleefully point out just how irrational the American public is. They seem to always want lower taxes and higher spending, but also a lower deficit/debt. Here, for example, is Krugman saying "The conclusion is inescapable: Republicans have a mandate to repeal the laws of arithmetic." And here is the Washington Post making their readers dumber:

Budget cutting is a top priority for the GOP, with 70 percent of Republicans in a new survey by the Pew Research Center saying the federal government should focus on reducing the deficit, not new economic stimulus. And in many cases, more Republicans now support cuts than did so two years ago.

But across 18 areas of federal spending, a majority of Republicans support decreasing spending in just one: aid to the world's needy.

This is stupid. For one thing, most (public) foreign aid does not go to the "needy poor", but rather to the military budgets of Israel and Mubarak's Egypt. There are perfectly good reasons for a pretty big consensus on cutting some of that spending. But more fundamentally, it is perfectly rational for a majority of individuals to support deficit reduction, while simultaneously opposing all means of doing so. Karl Smith points out one reason that is the case:

Suppose that you have three people. Adam, who believes in cutting spending to balance the budget. Bill who believes in raising taxes to balance the budget and Chris who believes that state balanced budgets are a pro-cyclical economic destabilizer that should be alleviated by federal transfers, or as he likes to say, “lame.”

Now we are going to ask a few questions.

First we ask: Should the state stick to its balance budget requirement? Adam and Bill say yes. Chris says no. We confidently conclude that the public wants balanced budgets.

Second we ask: Should we cut spending? Adam says yes. Bill and Chris say no. We confidently conclude that the public doesn’t want to cut spending.

Third, we ask: Should we raise taxes? Adam and Chris say no. Bill says yes. We confidently conclude that the public doesn’t want to raise taxes.

But wait a minute! Is the public insane! How can we balance the budget if we don’t cut spending or raise taxes.

No the public as individuals are completely sane, but when aggregated into a whole they become irrational. And, importantly there is no clear way to make them rational, since each person is answering truthfully and with complete knowledge of the facts.

That, as Krugman should know, is arithmetic. We should probably even expect this. When we ask a Yes/No question, we are almost guaranteed to get a majority in favor of one or the other. (Depends on whether or how strong of an option "Don't Know" is). In this case, that's a strong "Yes" in favor of deficit reduction. But if we then follow that up with a string of options of how to do that (18 in the WaPo survey of Republicans linked above, 13 in the Pew survey Krugman linked to), the broad-category majority will often -- even usually -- dissipate into a minority in each narrow category.

Here's a simple analogy to drive home the point: If you ask Americans if they like baseball, a majority will say yes. If you then ask them what their favorite team is, no team will get a majority. However, it would be daft to conclude from this that peoples' preferences over baseball are irrational.

Sometimes those options are nested, and when combined end up a majority (or even a supermajority, as in this example from Tyler Cowen). Sometimes they are not, or will not. But differences in the preferred means used to achieve an agreed-upon end is not a sign of individual irrationality, or even innumeracy.

You can sometimes get around this by changing the questions asked. Instead of asking "Yes/No" on a broad category then "Yes/No" on a series of smaller categories, for each category ask some variant of "If cutting Program X was the only way to balance the budget, would you want to do it?" I'll bet you find majorities pretty quick on many of those questions.

Final note: The Pew table that Krugman reproduces shows that in every single program, more people preferred cuts in 2011 than 2009.

Trade and Foreign Policy Attitudes

Katja Kleinberg and Benjamin Fordham, two UNC Ph.D.'s and currently Assistant Professor of Political Science and Professor of Political Science respectively, at Binghamton University-SUNY have a new paper "Trade and Foreign Policy Attitudes" in the most recent issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

The abstract:

Does trade influence whether individuals view other states as friendly or threatening? Liberal theory implies that it should, but the individual-level implications of the liberal argument are rarely tested. Trade should influence individual attitudes more strongly where trade is more economically important. International trade also creates both winners and losers within the trading states, and the foreign policy attitudes of these winners and losers should differ. The authors test hypotheses drawn from this line of argument using a forty-seven-country survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes project. They find some evidence that exports but not imports reduce hostile foreign policy attitudes. They find little support for the claim that the trade interests indicated by factor ownership influence attitudes toward trading partners in this broad cross-national sample. On the other hand, attitudes toward trade and foreign direct investment are correlated with broader foreign policy attitudes in the way liberal theory suggests. The authors conclude that there is reason to believe that trade influences individual foreign policy attitudes but that factor ownership does not provide an adequate account of individual interests in international trade in most cases.

As Tyler Cowen says, the paper is self-recommending.

American Diplomacy and Public Opinion

This post over at the Monkey Cage by John Sides speaks a bit to my earlier post on Obama's global poll numbers.

"Have U.S. public diplomacy efforts during the post-9/11 period successfully improved foreign publics’ appraisals of U.S. foreign policy? We examine this question by estimating the effects of U.S. high-level visits to foreign countries on public opinion in those countries…we show that the effects of such visits were initially significantly large and positive, but weakened once the war in Iraq began and international media started reporting negative aspects of the ‘‘war on terror.’’ Most interestingly, we find some evidence that high-level visits eventually exhibited a backlash effect."

That is from this new paper by Benjamin Goldsmith and Yusaku Horiuchi (gated; ungated). The data come from surveys in 61 countries conducted between September 11, 2001 and 2006, each of which asked questions about how respondents viewed the US. Goldsmith and Horiuchi then determine whether respondents surveyed in the wake of a high-level visit from American officials had more positive or negative views of the US.

Right after September 11th, public diplomacy worked. Compared to respondents in countries with no visit, respondents in countries who had just experienced a high-level visit gave 8% more positive responses and 16% fewer negative responses when asked their opinions of the US.

In the period between the beginning of the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib scandal, high-level visits had no significant effect on positive responses but were associated with 17% more negative responses.

After Abu Ghraib , high-level visits made responses made things even worse, driving down positive responses by 9 points and driving up negative responses by 20 points.

The lesson, say Goldsmith and Horiuchi, is that diplomacy depends on credibility:

"A U.S. leader perceived as credible abroad, even to the somewhat limited extent that this was so for George W. Bush or Colin Powell before March 2003, can have a substantial impact on public opinion about the United States and its foreign policy in the country he or she visits. As that credibility is diminished, however, our findings clearly show a loss of influence and indicate the potential for negative backlash."