greenpass

It's political science Monday

A quick run-down of an important concept. Since party identification has been shown time and again to be the best predictor of an individual’s voting behaviour (Dalton and Wattenberg, 1993), any study of voter decision-making must take into account how and why individuals identify themselves with a political party. The models discussed here have been proposed to explain how and why an individual will consistently, and often against all evidence to the contrary, persist in voting for a particular party, usually over the course of their entire voting career.

The classic model (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944), posits the existence of social factors that influence party identification. This sociological model of party identification argued that voters vote along the social cleavages in society, and that party ID is shaped by one’s demographic. However, this theory had limited use in explaining social change as it emphasized continuity and stability (Dalton and Wattenberg, 1993).

The social psychological model (Campbell et al. 1960) argues that “the partisan choice the individual voter makes depends…on a field of psychological forces...[and] attitudes towards the perceived objects of national politics” (Campbell et al. 1960). This model sees party ID as a filter for voters, allowing them to not only make decisions but also to interpret events and information in a partisan manner.

Downs (1957) posits the economic or rational choice model. Here, voters evaluate candidates’ policies based on their own self-interest and select the party and candidate they believe will provide the greatest benefit to themselves. This also works retrospectively – voters may evaluate presidential candidates based on whether the utility they received in the last four years would have been greater or less with the opposite party in power.

Under the retrospective or rational choice model, Fiorina (1981) describes a party identification that is slowly updated according to events and information that is continually received by a voter. He accounts for this as a “running tally” of performance evaluations, which are totted up when it comes time to vote for or against an incumbent.

Green et al. (2002) outline a model where party ID is shaped by the social groups that a voter belongs to. The analogy of party ID to religious affiliation is particularly salient – both party ID and religious alignment are strong psychological bonds formed early in life that have some relation to ideological leaning but that are not impervious to new information, and can change as an individual ages and alters their social groupings.

This last model is by far the most convincing. It incorporates the feasible elements of the previous models – the psychological effects of Campbell (1960), the social effects of Lazarsfeld (1944), the information updating of Fiorina (1981) and the utilitarianism of Downs (1957) – without succumbing to the limited explanatory power that these models have. The analogy to religious affiliation is convincing in the paradoxical strength and flexibility of the voter-party bond. This model is the only one that accounts for the concept of voting for a candidate while still feeling and identifying with the opposite party.

Garrrghh

"Three of the most prominent bloggers" on NBC:

--Wonkette (Why? Why?)
--Joe Trippi
--someone from "Powerline Blog"?

Joe Trippi is the only coherent or respectable one up there. I guess the real bloggers are all at home watching TV with their computers on their knees (like me :-)

Cassandra...

So it appears that as of 1.15am, my prediction below, made nearly a month ago using economic data and lots of statistical analysis, was correct.

I have never been more unhappy to be right. (Or at least provisionally right).

Today I drove up to New Hampshire with my brother to vote - I hope it was people like us that finally got the only southern state in the north to see the light. Driving four hours to vote seems excessive, but it was worth it to vote in a swing state. I voted for all my friends and family who are not American citizens and therefore have no say in what will be an incredibly important decision to their lives as well.

And another thing - Kos claims that the turnout for 18-29 year olds was the same as in 2000, and the next age bracket actually had a lower turnout than 2000. This makes no sense to me - everything I've heard and seen indicates that many more young people voted this year than in 2000, and certainly many more young people were extremely politicized this year in a way I've never seen before. I prefer to distrust the poll rather than to try to explain what would seem empirically to be extremely skewed results.

Predicting the votes

Mathew Gross has challenged, and I have answered. Here are my predictions, based on:
a) the economy
b) the numbers and preferences of self-identified registered voters AND leaning independents
c) how I think the campaigns have gone so far, and
d) past performance in elections of candidates
e) all other random factors that I could think of that affect my perception of the race.

Bush: 52% of the popular vote
Kerry: 48% of the popular vote

Bush victory: about a 65% chance (MLE estimate)

Electoral college: I think that PA, OH, WI, NV and ME will go for Kerry, and Kerry will have 268 electoral votes, leaving Bush with 270 votes (giving him NH, IA, NV and AK).

I think that adds up...trust a statistics concentrator to have made a regression model for the popular vote and then not be able to add up the electoral college votes correctly. Let me just say right now though that I REALLY REALLY hope I'm wrong. No one will be happier than me to find out that I am way off.

China advice

Although I usually write about chinese political stuff, this was an interesting task - advising Matt Singer what to do in Beijing for six days in December. For the edification of everyone soon or someday on their way to the great Zhongguo, here's what I said:

I would say definitely try to get your hands on a car (and a driver that speaks english) and take a day trip out to Huairou county (buy food in the city first). Ask to be taken to the parts of the Great Wall that are completely run down and unrestored - it's utterly gorgeous (and may require a little hiking - a little desolate in December but still fun).

Another fun thing to do might be to take the train to Shanghai - the trains are incredibly anachronistic, Shanghai is an amazing city, and it would be a fun 3-4 day trip. Another trip could be up north to Harbin to see the ice sculptures.

In Beijing, make sure you get someone to take you to one (or more...) excellent Sichuan restaurants - someone who knows how to order and preferably speaks chinese. (Hopefully you like incandescently spicy food...) A good place to find someone to help you would be to go to the bars in Sanlitun district after midnight and buy a journalist a drink - they know all the best restaurants and will probably end up taking you there themselves. I highly recommend the bars Bookworm and Hidden Tree (cheap Chimay Belgian ale).

Other fun things: the Silk Market on Jiangguomenwai, eating lunch at the stuffy old Beijing Hotel, flying kites on Tiananmen Square, and if you're going in December you HAVE to go ice skating in Beihai Park and then go to the cooked food market afterwards. You can rent skates or these little metal chairs on runners with metal poles to punt yourself along with. Get your friend to take you to a traditional teahouse as well - lots of fun.

One thing that will make your stay far more enjoyable - take taxis everywhere. They're unbelieveably cheap and the taxi drivers are fun to talk to, and they'll take you anywhere you need to go. Bikes are also fun to ride around on but it can be bitterly cold in December, and you probably won't have access to bikes if you're only going for six days.

And lastly: a) make sure your visa is obtained WELL before you go, and b) if you're in town on Christmas Eve and aren't too much of a stickler about religious things, be sure to go to the midnight mass at the Irish embassy - they serve excellent Irish whiskey at the reception afterwards, and it's open to anyone who wants to come (minimal audience participation makes it perfect for religious dilettantes like myself).

Red letter day

The theory of everything - one of our oldest friends wins the Nobel Prize. We all knew it was coming, it was just a matter of when and where. Of course, Betsy was thrilled, and blogged all about the call from Sweden and the aftermath.

Let it be known that I beat Frank SOUNDLY this summer at Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit, although he plays the piano far better than I do. My dad also named a particle that Frank discovered one summer - the indron (after Indra, the Hindu god). Frank helped my brother Chace with his physics problem set last night as well - I wonder if they'll rescind the Nobel if they find that he couldn't solve an electrodynamics problem for college students.

One important thing he said today at the press conference - that he was entirely educated in the American public school system, and that without it he wouldn't be where he is today. (Reported by the NYTimes as "I want to thank the U.S. for supplying the system of public education that did so well by me.")

Hence the importance of funding public schools and therefore in a roundabout way voting Bush out of office (or that was what he intended, I think...)

More NYTimes fallout

Betsy stands up for me, and points out the obvious - in that NYTimes article, the female bloggers were either cute and lolling around wearing tank tops, or they were Wonkette. The men got much more substantive attention to their work and actual ideas. To be fair, there were many more men there, but Betsy goes on a nice, polite, irked warpath. And yes, that really is a picture of a shirtless Matt Klam. Sort of looks like he's doing a Japanese cat food commercial.

Reading...

Current reading for class: campaigns don't matter because they are so easily predicted by environmental and other exogenous factors. The vast majority of voters have their minds made up by partisan identification before the campaigns even begin, and undecided voters are unlikely to change their mind on campaign effects but rather on the basis of the economy and the performance of the incumbent prior to the start of the campaign. Discuss.

Also, Betsy liked this article on Kos. I thought that the best part of the debate was that it was obvious that Kerry had sat down with his debate prep team beforehand and said, "I need to come up with something to counter the 'flipflop' thing and the '87 billion dollars' thing. Do it." And they did.

In related news, the head TF of my gov class is the head of Bush's debate team, and was away all last week prepping Bush. Yet another nail in the coffin for the "crazy wooly liberal university" meme.

Loss and busyness and creativity

The past few days I've been running around like crazy, and when I combine this with a severe lack of a laptop, the computer access has been short (but sweet). I've been going to and holding auditions for a number of different things, attending recruiting events (anyone want to hire me to do something interesting?), planning for the opera, and doing homework. And my very best friend in the world left for England on Monday, prompting me into a flurry of activity and enterprise to prevent myself thinking about and missing someone who has been such an important part of my life for the past few years.

One hopes that something useful will come out of all this activity. Certainly Greenpass has taken a hit in terms of posting frequency. But if I manage to exit this year with a job, an opera well-directed, four years of serious music-making and a degree in statistics, I think I will consider my job here well done. We'll see how that goes.

In other news, my gov class had an (anonymous) survey at the beginning of the last class, in which only 64.5% of students said they were voting for Kerry - all others went Bush, not a SINGLE person for Nader. And how many said they intended to vote? 100%. Two conclusions: 1) it's too bad that in a "likely voter" poll, the whole room would have automatically been excluded because of a lack of voting history, and 2) we can take that whole "liberal university" thing and bury it deep in a dank dark hole. There are a lot of very, very, VERY conservative people here, and unlike the liberals they're well funded and well connected.

Finally

Finally done with auditions for L'Orfeo (the opera I'm directing), and callbacks are today - this will hopefully explain the long hiatus from blogging, since I've been in auditions continuously until midnight every night the past week and a half (only a very very slight exaggeration).

And yeah, there seem to be some problems with typepad. I'll see about that. New visitors, this site is usually a very pretty shade of green with a nice three column layout, blogroll, links, archives, and all that jazz.

And yeah, the New York Times article? Since I've definitely never worn a tube top in my life, methinks I've been confused for Ezra Klein's lovely and intelligent girlfriend - a woman I'm honored to have been mistaken for, but unfortunately not me. And although Jesse is a wonderful and extremely sweet guy, I'm not dating him (or even practically dating him), since at the moment my life is wedded to a certain Monteverdi opera.

Ah well...now I have first hand evidence that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the Times.

UPDATE: Problems fixed - yay!

UPDATE UPDATE: I finally managed to read the article. Didn't get all the way through it before I had to bang my head against a wall - it's like hearing your own voice on tape, seeing the way other people see you. At least it's the first time I've been described as a "cute woman" rather than a "cute girl" or (worse) "cute coed". Eugh.