In our last post we noted how Lord Lawson of Blaby used our arguments in Why Nations Fail to bolster his claim that Britain should not be committing itself to spend 0.7% of GDP on development aid. In his speech he noted:
A useful analysis, which I commend to the House, is to be found in a penetrating new study, Why Nations Fail, by a couple of economists, Acemoglu and Robinson…
A couple of economists? Actually, James Robinson likes to refer to himself as a “recovering economist”…
Why? Because to paraphrase Bill Clinton’s famous adage: “It’s the politics, stupid” — at least when it comes to understanding economic development.
I wouldn't limit it to just economic development. I would argue that the same applies to almost every sub-branch of social life. This is why decided to pursue post-graduate study in political science rather than economics, which was my undergraduate major. Fine, whatever, that's what I did and why I did it. No one cares. But Acemoglu is one of the most prominent young(ish) economists in the game, winner of the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal. And he's saying that the academic discipline of economics isn't up to snuff.
For about five minutes it was really fun to see everyone taking statistical modeling of political outcomes seriously. Well, ostensibly seriously. It was troubling that this was only done by the side whose preferred outcome was the one being forecast, but I had some hope that this might stick. Silly me. Immediately after the outcome became clear the same folks that were praising statistical models ten minutes prior discarded them in favor of ad hoc narrative.
This is unfortunate on a number of levels, not least because there is more at stake here than Nate Silver's reputation on Twitter. Silver was important because he was the closest that political science permeated the mainstream coverage of the election this cycle, and his case became both a bellwether and a rallying call. This in itself is unfortunate, since the consensus of various political science models of electoral outcomes had been predicting an Obama victory pretty consistently since last winter at the latest. So it's unsettling to see the lessons on offer being cast aside so soon. There are far more egregious examples than the one I'm about to present, but reformation begins at home. So I'll pick on my own home -- that being the IR blogosphere, in this case -- first.
But the 2012 election makes clear how far the GOP has strayed into the epistemological wilderness.
With respect, Dan, I just don't think this is true. What the 2012 election shows -- or, instead, what it reiterates -- is that incumbent presidents have a very large electoral advantage when the economy is growing. Almost every model that I've seen based on "fundamentals" -- even the generic-candidate ones, which zero out all the "binders full of women" and "Big Bird" and even "47%" and Super PACs... all of it -- showed Obama with a pretty high likelihood of winning. And I think those models likely dramatically understated the case, considering the depth of the trough the economy has been digging out of since Obama took office. The most similar historical precedent we have led to a presidential administration so popular that, absent mitigating factors like human mortality, it seemingly would have continued in perpetuity, thus necessitating a constitutional amendment which instituted presidential term limits. So there were very good reasons to think Obama was the strong favorite all along, no matter what the GOP did and even before they did it.
And that was in fact the case. Obama fluctuated in between 60-75% chance of victory for most of the past year, according to the best political science of which I'm aware. See this very simple one, which was so simple that even poli-sci sympathizer Ezra Klein doubted it despite commissioning it! It had Obama at 67% and incorporated no new information after June, and not much up until then. I know that a few models here and there deviated from that expectation, but they were often the models with the least amount of empirical support behind them.
As such, I think the story of this election is that there is no story. At least, there isn't a story if we're going to take political science seriously, other than we should take political science seriously. And the "we" in that sentence begins with political scientists. If our models expect Obama to win because the economy grew out of a deep recession, plus he had an incumbent advantage, then we should accept that as the best explanation for his victory until another story with better evidence comes along. Those factors have historically been very powerful forces in presidential elections. They remain very powerful. The only other possible takeaway that would be well backed up by prior theory would involve demographic dynamics, but even that isn't really needed. And if the GOP is in the "epistemological wilderness" then how the hell did they sweep the 2010 midterms? Are epistemological wildernesses created in two short years?
Maybe. This is not an analogous event in need of explanation. This is exactly what we should, and did, expect. So I'd go with the models until given a better reason to abandon them.
P.S. I agree with Nexon's general take on the desirability of the current GOP. (Although I am less sanguine than he about the Democrats, maybe.) But the best case evidence for that does not come from this presidential election. As someone at The Monkey Cage pointed out recently, the GOP has lost four lost Senate elections in the past two cycles -- Delaware ‘10, Indiana ‘12, Nevada ‘10, Missouri ‘12 -- which almost certainly would've gone to the GOP had the Tea Party not moved the GOP platform away from the median voter. Those four seats currently represent the difference between majority and minority in the Senate. So maybe Nexon's got something there, but this is also in line with the common models: if you move to the extreme, you will lose.
P.P.S. It is also not exactly regrettable for someone who identifies with the left generally, as I believe Nexon does. If the GOP wisens up in the ways that many are asking them to (including both me and Nexon) one by-product will likely be less Democratic success in future elections.
This touches on another habitual harangue of mine, which is that the Tea Party is the left's best friend right now but that the left is too myopic to realize it. The left still has no guiding ideology of its own that is capable of moving the median voter leftward. , The American voting public still skews center-right despite it all. The only thing giving the left a chance are extremists on the right pulling the GOP away from the middle. Without the extremists on the right, the Democratic Party might not have won a presidential election from 1976-2008. Think about it. Without Perot, perhaps Clinton doesn't win in 1992 (although some political science suggests that Perot hurt Clinton at least as much as HW Bush, and the fundamentals were weakly in Clinton's favor). Without Clinton in 1992 it is unlikely that a Democrat would have won in 1996. And... that's it until 2008.
[Ed. Light edits for clarity shortly after posting.]
My attitude towards voting is simple: as an expressive act, a form of signaling, it is fine. For any other purpose which comes to mind it is not fine. It is at best ignorant and at worst an attempt at deceit for purposes of self-aggrandizement.
I put things so starkly because I would like to clear more room for folks to say "I voted because I like to vote" and have that be accepted as a valid reason with no need for further justification. I would also for there to be more space for folks to abstain without opprobrium. During this season these are priorities of mine for both normative and positive reasons. Normatively, because it drives me batty when people feel the need to claim that the simple act of voting -- cheap talk if there ever was such a thing* -- is Virtuous and Good and Efficacious, while abstaining is Derelict and Uncivil and Defeatist**. Such a sentiment is not purely expressive; it is moralism of questionable provenance (I'll get back to that), it is not uncommon, and this moralism is sometimes draped in the cloth of pseudo-science.
Which leads to the positive concern: I am a political scientist, and every theoretical model and empirical finding in political science of which I am aware suggests that voting for instrumental reasons has no justification under any reasonable assumptions about the state of the world. In fact, the logic of democracy means that if that were not the case then the democracy would be malfunctioning, likely in ways which would call the act of voting even further into question.
As such I am in agreement with Phil Arena. The whole post is worth reading, but a key point occurs when he goes after Andrew Gelman, a prominent political scientist who has argued that voting may indeed be rational in some, maybe even most, circumstances. Here's Gelman (with sics):
In swing states (or for close non-presidential elections), though, it’s a different story Aaron, Nate, and I have estimated the probability of your vote being decisive in a swing state as being in the range 1 in a million to 1 in 10 million. Low, but not zero, and Aaron, Noah, and I argue that it can be make sense to vote because of the social benefits that a voter might feel arise from his or her preferred candidate winning.
Your vote is not going to decide which candidate wins. It's not. As Levitt says, when it gets close, they go to the courts. You know what else is a fabulous indicator that it's a flat-out lie that every vote counts? The fact that media outlets will announce which candidate won each state before election officials are done counting the votes. Can you ask for more explicit evidence than that? They literally do not count all the votes before determining the winner, and yet people say that every vote counts. Are you kidding me? Or do you just not know that words have meanings? Even in those cases where it's really close, the final vote count is going to be contested, at least at the presidential level. At that point, the outcome depends upon whose definition of a valid vote prevails, not whether you, dear reader, cast a vote for your preferred candidate.
Which is correct. It is not, in my opinion, the best part of Phil's post -- that would be the part where he attacks the self-righteousness of voters who think that if they were the deciding vote the Whole Wide World would be much off -- but it is a valid rebuttal. To my knowledge no national election has ever come down to a single vote, and if it ever did it would be litigated for centuries.
Even still Arena is giving Gelman's argument more credit than it deserves. In fact, Gelman doesn't have an argument. He simply pretends as if there was a utility function out there such that it would make sense for people to vote at 1/10,000,000 odds (those are only the swing state voters, not the median or modal or otherwise typical voter). So far as I know no such utility function has ever been modeled or tested against peoples' actual subjective utilities, and Arena points out numerous analogous situations in which folks generally behave differently -- getting in a car crash, getting shot while on campus, etc. -- despite similar or better (worse?) odds. Is it possible that someone somewhere fits the bill? Sure, there are extreme outliers. But that's now what Gelman is driving at, even including the caveats. Over 100,000,000 million people will vote in this election. How many of them will have anything even close to 1/10,000,000 chance of being the decisive vote? 0.00001% of them, at most? That leaves the other 99.99999% in need of explanation, and quite frankly I find that a bit more interesting and important.
It gets still worse for Gelman. His entire argument is a political science version of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager is exceptionally easy to dispute as a simple matter of logic and probability (see here for a few easy ways), so if we wanted to we could simply dismiss Gelman on grounds of absurdity and move on.
But it's even worse than that, because Pascal's Wager assumes that if you win the bet the reward is infinite. That was Pascal's entire justification for taking the gamble. It is also one of its logical flaws. Gelman doesn't go quite so far, mercifully, but as Arena usefully points out Gelman's view of voting "as equivalent to the purchase of a lottery ticket which, if it wins, corresponds to a huge donation to a charity" has a view of politics which is the antithesis of all actually existing political science theory (of which I'm aware). Political science models elections as something very different from charitable giving. As Arena puts it:
We have very good reason to believe that, no matter who wins, close to half of the population will suffer an enormous loss of subjective utility on election night. The very fact that so many people think that the outcome of the election matters is itself evidence that if your vote could determine the outcome of the election, it would not be at all like buying a lottery ticket to help the poor. No one, not no one, is going to feel devastated if a stranger randomly gives them money for no reason. Voting is much more akin to buying a lottery ticket in the hopes hiring a bunch of thieves to rob half of the country so that you can give the stuff they steal to the other half of the country.
Perhaps the reader will find the last line distasteful, but this is the rhetoric the right commonly uses to describe Obama, and it is the rhetoric the left commonly uses to describe Romney. It's the only way that elections could possibly matter. Gelman might be correct to repudiate his entire discipline, but it'll take more to convince me than he's given.
In any case, the point is that Gelman supposes -- like Pascal -- that there are no costs for being wrong. If you lose the Wager election you lose nothing, but if you win you have gained Eternity. Once again, this is absurd. If the gains of winning are so large, then the simple act of voting, if not matched by other efforts, is not rational at all. Either one canvasses with every spare moment, donates the max amount of money to campaigns, dedicates one's life to advocacy, and otherwise does everything in ones' power to achieve the desired result, or else one does nothing. If it's not worth incurring real costs then the lottery ticket for charity must not be worth so much after all. And if it isn't, then why does the act of voting, in and of itself, make sense? [Ed. I should have said that there may be some comparative static in which the combination of minimal effort + large reward is rational, but that Gelman hasn't found it. In any case the likelihood of finding such an equilibrium is, in my mind, made exceptionally unlikely by what follows.]
So Gelman contradicts political science theory. The median voter theorem might not be perfect in practice, but refinements to it have generally been marginal, not qualitative. They are attempts to uncover why the median voter theorem is somewhat less than perfect. (Search Google Scholar.) Indeed, the more perfect a democracy is, the more closely the median voter theorem will approximate reality. Achieving the will of the median voter is, after all, the entire point of democracy. This suggests that the better the democracy functions, the less valuable it will be to win an election, since the loser will be pretty close to the median voter anyway (in fact, arbitrarily as close as the winner). Which means that the expected value of voting for instrumental purposes -- which already approximates zero -- shrinks to even more closely approximate zero. At the limit it won't matter at all***.
All of this assumes that the president is omnipotent upon taking office. In reality, the expected value of one's vote being the decisive one collapses even more (if it can collapse further) by virtue of having to deal with constraints from two legislatures, the judiciary, the Constitution and other previous law, the electoral college system (or other voting rules, e.g. proportional representation schemes), and the shadow of future elections. So once we're talking about the odds of buying a lottery ticket not to win an election but to actually influence policy in a tangible way that benefits the majority, we must be in 1 in several billions odds at least. Still rational? At some point it must not be for essentially everyone. If not here, then where?
Moreover, Gelman's approach suggests that voters should not vote pragmatically, and should instead vote their conscience. After all, the chance that your vote is the deciding one which elects Romney is 1 in 10 million and with Gary Johnson it's maybe 1 in 100 million, but suppose a Johnson presidency is much more valuable to you than a Romney presidency: what's a few more decimal places among friends? Yet very few people do such a thing. They vote for a candidate that "has a chance of winning", a "viable candidate". As a rule they don't want to "waste their vote". This suggests to me that people are not voting their conscience, are not taking Pascal's Gelman's Wager. Something else must be going on.
I don't want to push the point too terribly far since revealed preference arguments are often troubled, but my best read of the situation is that people vote for candidates that they do not prefer ("lesser of two evils"), in a situation in which the probability that their vote is decisive is approximately zero, when even if it was decisive the gains would be slight and perhaps imperceptible on balance****, all for one reason: they like to be on the winning team. They like to "contribute" to the victory, because even if the "contribution" has no effect on the outcome they can feel as if it did. It's sports fandom, electoral politics -- not all politics -- is a game, and voters are the guy sitting at home watching it on television while wearing a rally cap*****.
I have no problem with that until the point that the fan voter wearing the jersey I Like Ike button insinuates that their partisanship is good for the country, or for me, or for charity, or for anything at all other than their subjective desire to feel like a winner. Because it's not. Any other assertion is either a delusion or a lie, as it is unsupported by logic, theory, or evidence. Scientists are supposed to do better, as Arena notes:
Personally, I think that anyone who really thinks that empowering their preferred party would make (most) everyone better off and (nearly) no one worse off should be disqualified from teaching political science, but maybe that's just me. At any rate, you're either profoundly insensitive to the well-being of approximately half of the population or so confident that you know what's best for them that you'd be willing to impose an outcome on them that they expressly oppose, which still means that you're insensitive to their short-term happiness. That may not make you stupid, but it doesn't say anything particularly flattering about you either.
If people wish to vote as a consumption good, they have as much of my support as they'd have if they chose to stay home and play Call of Duty on November 6th instead. The marginal effect on societal welfare is the same in either case. We would not accept as valid any argument from the gamer that (s)he has improved the lot of fellow (wo)men by pushing buttons; why accept as valid an argument from the voter that (s)he has improved the lot of fellow (wo)men by pushing levers in a voting booth?
And we would all be better off if we understood that politics is mostly not about elections.
*Don't think so? What do you think would happen to the number of voters if we charged a nominal fee -- say, $3 -- for the privilege of voting?
**The very worst are those who say "I don't care who you vote for, just vote." Why? If they don't care who I vote for then they must not care about the outcome of the election. And if they don't care about the outcome of the election then why are they voting? The statement practically contradicts itself, unless they just want to see people waste their time. In which case they are cleverer than I.
***And if it does matter -- if democracy is sufficiently imperfect that it could -- and if it could be corrected -- if greater participation pulled policy closer to the median voter -- on the utilitarian grounds that Gelman has proposed only voters that would pull the results back towards the median voter should vote.
****Or even worse. Suppose you voted for Obama in 2008 because you wanted a universal health care system, and you (against all odds) were the deciding vote. You get your health care plan, but probably not in any form which was ex ante recognizable or maybe even desirable. Meanwhile you lie awake at night thinking about the thousands dead from drone strikes, the continuation of the War on Drugs, the continuing expansion of executive prerogative, and a host of other downsides. Yes but it's better than McCain you think but is that really true? Even if it is how much consolation is it? I don't think I'd even want to be the deciding vote.
*****In other words, they are me when the Cardinals are in the playoffs. Not a pretty picture.
I'm very busy and so likely to disappear again for awhile after this, but Dan Nexon asked me to promote a new chapter in the the IR/FP blogosphere: an award show, accompanied by reception, at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association. It's sponsored by Sage Publishing, and the Duck of Minerva appears to be doing a bunch of heavy lifting. Anyway, the details are over at DoM. They're welcoming nominations for a number of categories. Please do go check it out whether you're an academic or not.
Nate Silver offers the following logic: winning Florida is essentially for Romney but not Obama; Obama has more paths to victory than Romney; Romney is currently winning in Florida; therefore Obama should concede Florida and re-direct his attention (and campaign spending) elsewhere.
If winning Florida represents a high-upside case for Mr. Obama, however, it also comes at considerable expense.
Florida, because of its large population, is an expensive state to advertise in. And it is a state that probably does require a considerable advertising expenditure. Florida’s population is large, but not especially dense, spread out in a number of exurban and suburban communities throughout the state. It’s easier to reach voters through the airwaves there than by knocking on doors or appearing at campaign rallies. ...
All of this should call into question whether Florida represents a wise use of resources for Mr. Obama. ...
Mr. Romney certainly doesn’t need Pennsylvania to win the election, but going for broke there is arguably a better strategy for him than having to pick off 4 or 5 states that are now tied or where Mr. Obama holds a small lead.
Mr. Obama, conversely, just needs to hold is ground in those same states. Trying to pull Florida back into his column would represent a heavier lift — and probably an inferior strategy given the recent polls there.
I'm not sure this is correct. Perhaps Obama should focus more on Florida because he's losing there, and because he has so many other ways to win the election. This may be true even if Obama expects that there is a pretty high probability he will lose Florida.
Why? Because Romney has to win Florida and Obama doesn't. If Obama dedicates a bunch of resources to Florida he can force Romney to do so the same to counteract Obama's move. Any money and time Romney is spending in Florida is money and time he isn't spending in Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Because Obama is winning in most of those states, and only needs to carry some of them to win the general election, anything he can do to prevent Romney from gaining in states other than Florida gives Obama an edge in the general election. Forcing Romney to expend resources defending his lead in Florida is one way to do that.
This only makes sense if Obama can credibly threaten Romney in Florida of course. But he probably can. Romney's lead in Florida is only a few points (Silver mentions a spread between 1-5% depending on the poll, so let's say 3%). If Romney loses Florida the election's all but over, so Obama would need a relatively low probability of victory there to force Romney to expend a lot of resources to guarantee a Florida win. Obama should force him to do it.
If Obama concedes Florida he's inadvertently putting other states in play by allowing Romney to divert resources from defending Florida to attacking Obama's advantage elsewhere. Obama should do whatever he can to prevent that from happening. Fighting in Florida means not fighting in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That's good for Obama, as he currently leads in all those states and will win the election if gets them all.
Those who have an education in game theory should recognize this dynamic as similar in some ways to a more complicated version of the "War Chest" game. The gist is that Obama should not expend his resources try to win the most states. He has an advantage: he's winning the election right now, and he gets no advantage from winning with 300 electoral college votes rather than 275. Instead, Obama should focus his efforts on preventing Romney from making further gains in states Obama currently leads. That involves strategic considerations that go beyond allocating resources to states where Obama has the best chance of winning the state. Instead, Obama should allocate resources to states where he has the best chance of winning the whole election.
The news that the US and EU will begin negotiating a bilateral trade treaty next year is welcome to me. This could be a big deal. For all the talk of China and emerging markets the US and EU are still the most important parts of the global economy:
EU-U.S. commercial links are unrivalled. Transatlantic trade in goods and services is worth $700 billion a year.
Total U.S. annual investment in the European Union is higher than in all of Asia, while EU investment in the United States far outstrips EU investment in India and China combined.
Some, like Jagdish Bhagwati, decry the proliferation of bilateral trade deals, believing that they pull momentum from the WTO and therefore limit the possibilities for widespread trade liberalization. This may or may not be true. What is true is that the Doha round of WTO talks is all but dead, as the politics remains intractable. If there are tangible gains to be found in other forms of liberalization then there is a compelling case to take them. A US/EU deal has the potential to have a big effect. It appears that the focus of the US/EU talks will mostly revolve around regulatory issues:
Businesses on both sides would like an agreement in which a car tested for safety in the United States would not have to be tested again in Europe, and a drug deemed safe by Brussels would not have to be approved as well by the U.S. government.
Small companies who make household appliances, lighting and wiring equipment say prohibitive costs of certifying products for different requirements in Europe and the United States make it impossible currently to export, according to a public consultation by Brussels-based lobby group Business Europe.
These types of restrictions make little sense on welfare grounds, and lifting them will almost surely have a positive effect on efficiency. Also true to form is that lifting agricultural restrictions is off the table:
But both sides appear likely to leave much of the highly sensitive agricultural sector out of the agreement altogether, diplomats say. Washington maintains a 15-year-old ban on EU beef imports imposed because of American concerns about mad-cow disease. The European Union says the ban breaks World Trade Organisation rules.
The United States, in turn, faces prohibitively high tariffs for its beef and pork products, running into Europe's complex definitions of high-quality meat.
Genetically engineered foods are also contentious, with the United States in favor of developing the industry but with the European Union against. "They will not be part of the deal," said one EU diplomat in Brussels.
It's worth remembering that the GATT -- the precursor to the WTO -- only had 23 members at first. These members were predominately the later EU members (and the remnants of their empires) and the US*. The WTO now has 157 members, with a wide range of conflicting interests, plus a rule of unanimity. That makes it very difficult to get a comprehensive deal passed.
So in a sense a bilateral US/EU deal is a step backwards. It could also be a precursor to future action. If the US/EU successfully pass a bilateral deal it might provide an impetus for their antagonists in the WTO to make further concessions to get a multilateral deal through the WTO process rather than be locked out of trade arrangements. This deal is the US/EU exercising its outside option. Having good ones increases bargaining leverage. So Bhagwati could actually be wrong: bilateral trade deals could actually be a force for completion of WTO rounds.
This is less than certain of course, and perhaps this US/EU deal will either fall apart or be less than transformative. But it's at least a possibility that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
*The full list is Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Burma, Canada, Ceylon, Chile, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, India, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Southern Rhodesia, Syria, South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States.
Haven't done one of these in awhile, but I'm in the throes of teaching, writing, and job hunt so my time is limited. I wish I could comment more substantively on each of these. Perhaps another time.
-- Credit where it's due: Stephen Walt has a good post on the advantageous geopolitical position of the U.S. right now. I've knocked him around a bit lately, but this one is right. I'm sure we'd differ on the reasons for this sustained advantage, but we agree with the conclusion.
-- UNC Poli Sci legend Tim McKeown is interviewed regarding the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, and helpfully nudges us away from romantic notions of the 13 days and towards a look at the broader political context. Also interesting: @missilecrisis62 is live-tweeting the events.
-- This new paper, by Julia Gray and Philip Potter, looks very interesting (but I haven't read it yet).
-- This fascinating CIA document (ht Sarah Bauerle Danzman) illustrates the many information asymmetries and commitment problems involved in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
-- I'm going to try to do Marginal Revolution University's free online development economics course, but again that will depend on time.
-- Robert Skidelsky says that economic growth is not a sufficient condition for happiness. Perhaps. But I'd bet that it's a necessary one... if not then why all the concern about recent recessions and austerity drives? (Worse: here's what he says about the Easterlin Paradox: "Easterlin found no relationship between income and happiness above an average per capita income level of between $15,000 and $20,000. Other findings confirm Easterlin." But still others, more recent and with better data, have strongly contradicted him.)
