Category Archives: Politics

Gun control legislation to move forward due to the support of suburban politicians?

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Here is an interesting theory on how the gun control debate may turn out: suburban politicians could tilt the discussion in certain directions.

More recently, Democrats appear to have found a different source of bipartisan support for significant new gun control: otherwise right-leaning politicians who represent suburban constituents. Lawmakers from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia have recently warmed to new gun legislation. As Philip Rucker and Paul Kane propose in the Washington Post:

The shift underscores a new reality of gun politics in America: The rapid growth of suburbs in historically gun-friendly states is forcing politicians to cater to the more centrist and pragmatic views of voters in subdivisions and cul-de-sacs as well as to constituents in shrinking rural hamlets where gun ownership is more of a way of life.

The growing political influence of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh suburbs in particular may have something to do with Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey’s sudden involvement in forging a compromise. Something similar is happening in the rapidly expanding suburbs of Virginia, a state where politics are dramatically different in the Blue Ridge than they are in the D.C. suburbs (the NRA’s national office also happens to be located right in the heart of the Northern Virginia suburbs). In gun-friendly Georgia, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns is betting on pro-gun control TV ads airing in the Atlanta region.

Rucker and Kane again:

Unlike every other debate that has unfolded recently in a bitterly divided Washington, the gun debate is much more about geography than party. The dividing lines are not between Democrats and Republicans, but between rural lawmakers and those who must cater to urban and suburban constituencies.

This is interesting but it isn’t new in American politics: with the majority of Americans now live in suburbs, there are plenty of voters in the suburbs who could go one or the other depending on the issue or election. Indeed, the past presidential elections have hinged on the suburban vote as big cities have voted Democratic and rural areas have voted Republican. There are splits within the suburban vote based on geography: those closer to big cities, living in places like inner-ring suburbs that face many big city issues lean more Democratic and suburbs further out and the exurbs lean Republican.

I think we could also flip the causal direction in this argument: suburban politicians could indeed influence the gun control debate one way or another but, more broadly, couldn’t suburban politicians throw their weight around if they could agree? Some might argue American politics in the last 60 years or so has already been dominated by suburban interests (think interstate highways, the emphasis on the middle class, etc.) but imagine a suburban lobby that doesn’t just mediate between urban and rural politicians but dictates the main terms.

More aldermen voting with Emanuel than did with Daley

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Chicago may have a newer mayor but a new study shows voting with the mayor is now even more pronounced for Chicago aldermen:

After analyzing 30 divided roll calls in the nearly two years since Emanuel took office, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers concluded that Emanuel has enjoyed more iron-fisted control over the council than former mayors Richard M. Daley, Richard J. Daley or Ed Kelly, the Democratic machine co-founder.

Twenty-one aldermen supported the mayor’s programs 100 percent of the time, while 18 others were more than 90 percent in lock-step.

There have been no shortage of controversies — ranging from speed cameras, police station and mental health clinic closings to the mayor’s Infrastructure Trust and his plan to nearly double water and sewer fees.

But only seven of the 30 issues drew six or more dissenting votes. Emanuel’s average level of support on all of the divided roll calls was 93 percent, compared to 83 percent during Richard J. Daley’s first two years in office and Kelly’s 88 percent…

Pressed to explain the City Council’s obedience, Simpson pointed to the take-no-prisoners reputation Emanuel built while working under former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama and as chief architect of the 2006 Democratic takeover of the U.S. House.

Still Chicago, “the city that works“?

One issue with this analysis is that is still leaves Chicago residents with little knowledge of whether these voting patterns are unusual or not. Do other major cities have more contentious voting patterns? Or, is this fairly normal for big cities outside of the occasional wide disagreement? There are always references to more contentious times in the history of the Chicago City Council (see the short-lived Council Wars) but how about even a long view within Chicago for sake of comparison? I imagine this consistent voting together is fairly unusual but once you are around Chicago long enough, this becomes normal.

And regardless of the voting patterns, how about more analysis about whether Mayor Emanuel’s decisions have been good for Chicago in the long-term? Some of this will take time to sort out…

When Chicago suburbs disqualify candidates running for public office

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Local government and control is a cherished part of suburban life. But, the Chicago Tribune highlights today on its front page how often Chicago suburban governments disqualify candidates running for local office:

For its investigation, the Tribune focused on races that critics say are the most troubling: suburban candidates running for city and village offices. Reporters canvassed every suburb in the Chicago region, reviewed scores of objections filed against candidates and interviewed dozens of those involved in the system. The newspaper found:

Widespread abuse. At least 200 candidates faced objections this year, with only a small fraction alleging serious matters, such as criminal histories, residency issues or outright fraud. Ultimately panels kicked 76 candidates off the ballot across three dozen suburbs.

Rampant bias. Of those knocked off, most fell at the hands of panels stacked with members who had a political stake in their own decisions. Conflicts also went beyond simple politics: Even relatives ruled on their own family members’ cases.

Wild inconsistencies. The rules are not evenly applied, with similar infractions leading some panels to remove candidates, but not other panels.

Costly tabs. The challenges cost taxpayers in some towns tens of thousands of dollars each election cycle, many times in suburbs that can least afford it…

The Tribune studied local election systems in the suburbs of the nation’s other largest metro areas: New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Philadelphia. None has Illinois’ combination of difficulty getting on the suburban ballot and ease in getting kicked off.

Local government is often thought to be more non-partisan than elections at higher levels of government. But non-partisanship does not necessarily mean that officeholders aren’t still looking to stay in office and will do what they can to keep challengers out. Local races can be particularly nasty even as very few people vote. I suspect most suburbanites would not like what the Tribune found but ironically probably wouldn’t be too motivated to vote on the issue, pressure politicians about their concerns, or run for office themselves to change the situation.

Underlying all of this in the suburbs is that suburban culture promotes letting people do their own thing and trying to avoid public friction. A great source on this is the book The Moral Order of a Suburb by M. P. Baumgartner. Here is how the Amazon book description puts it:

Drawing on research, observation, and hundreds of in-depth interviews conducted during a twelve-month study of an affluent New York City suburb, M.P. Baumgartner reveals that the apparent serenity of the suburb is caused by the avoidance of open conflict. She contends that although nonviolence, nonconfrontation, and tolerance produce a superficial social harmony, these behaviors arise from disintegrative tendencies in modern culture–transience, fragmentation, weak family and communal ties, isolation, and indifference–conditions customarily viewed as sources of disorder, antagonism, and violence. A kind of moral minimalism pervades the suburbs, a disorganized social order that, with the suburbs’ rapid growth in America, promises to be the moral order of the future.

This is a paradox of the suburbs: we tend to think of transience and fragmentation leading to social disorder but Baumgartner argues this is what actually brings suburbanites together.

Will Nate Silver ruin his brand with NCAA predictions?

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Statistical guru Nate Silver, known for his 2012 election predictions, has been branching out into other areas recently on the New York Times site. Check out his 2013 NCAA predictions. Or look at his 2013 Oscar predictions.

While Silver has a background in sports statistics, I wonder if these forays into new areas with the imprimatur of the New York Times will eventually backfire. In many ways, these new areas have less data than presidential elections and thus, Silver has to step further out on a limb. For example, look at these predictions for the 2013 NCAA bracket:

The top pick for 2013, Louisville, only has a 22.7% chance of winning. If Silver goes with this pick of Louisville, and he does, then he by his own figures will be wrong 77.3% of the time. These are not good odds.

I’m not sure Silver can really win much by predicting the NCAA champion or the Oscars because the odds of making a wrong prediction are higher. What happens if he is wrong a number of times in a row? Will people still listen to him in the same way? What happens when the 2016 presidential election comes along? Of course, Silver could continue to develop better models and make more accurate picks but even this takes attention away from his political predictions.

How boundary work helps explains false equivalence in the media

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Read here for an explanation of how the sociological concept of boundary work is applied to the issue of false equivalence in media coverage:

Boundary work is a kind of rhetorical work that is performed in public argument: something is asserted to be science by stressing what it is not (pseudo-science, or faith, or religion, or what have you). Even Tim Geithner did it in his exit interview when he painted his own work as just a kind of technocratic problem-solving rather than politics, see this analysis.

It seems to me that our political discourse also contains a similar kind of boundary work — between “politics” and “policy.” Our politicians will always say: what I’m doing is just plain old common sense or the right thing or just good policy, or just the solution to a problem; whereas what my opponent is doing is playing politics. And if one sees politics as actually a way of managing relations between conflicting groups of people, one can see why they do that.

For instance, reforming the American health care system is almost certainly a matter of redistribution: taking money from older people and giving it to others (the uninsured, younger people, etc.). But one can’t say that if one is a politician, and so there is a delicate balancing act: one’s own work is constructed as problem-solving and policy-making, the opponent is portrayed as playing politics (where politics is understood to be trading off between different social groups).

I think this kind of boundary work exists in journalism too (and more on why it exists later); it’s what you call false equivalence (and Yglesias calls bipartisan think). Here the newspaper is seen as above politics, which is what grubby politicians do. And therefore the contrast between the policy that the newspaper is advocating (which is not politics but merely good moral sensible stuff), and that what the politicians are doing. It is imperative, I think, in this model that both parties be painted in the same brush. Because if you don’t, then you agree with one of the parties, which therefore makes you political.

Why should the newspapers practice this kind of boundary work? My sense (which comes straight from Paul Starr’s history of the media) is that it’s a holdover from the times when the newspaper industry changed. As we all know now (from arguing about partisanship), newspapers in the 19th century were unabashedly partisan. They also catered to niches, and made money from subscriptions. And that changed sometime in the 20th century when newspapers started to make money from advertisements — and therefore they had to be less partisan and attract more people. Hence the objective tone of the reported stories (he says, she says) — and also I think the false equivalence of the editorials.

The concept of symbolic boundaries is an important one in the sociology of culture. Groups or organizations engage in drawing boundaries between what they are (by their own definition) and what they say others are. Policing these boundaries is a consistent and tricky task; the changes the other groups make might force a group to redraw its own boundaries. Or, outside social forces and circumstances might push all groups to redraw or double down on their boundaries. A good application of this concept to defining social class in the United States and France is Michele Lamont’s book Money, Morals, and Manners.

New York governor says local governments, schools should save money by merging

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo suggested one way local government can save money in this economic crisis: merge or consolidate.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had tough words Friday for local officials facing fiscal crises and seeking more help from Albany, telling them they should consolidate services or whole governments and school districts rather than looking for relief from Albany.

“If it was really, really tough, you’d see that happen,” Cuomo said in his strongest comments yet on the local fiscal crises. “If you are a school district, or a city, or a town or a county, and you are looking for a fundamental financial reform, consolidation is one of the obvious ones.”

Cuomo said he believes local politics is standing in the way of mergers and consolidations that would save taxpayers money and improve efficiency of services. He said deciding to consolidate should be easy, yet “politically, it’s difficult … I get the politics.”

Despite years of hard times, Cuomo said you can count “on one hand” the number of consolidations among 50,000 local governments, school districts, fire and library taxing districts and more.

School districts and local governments say they are already consolidating and merging, but that’s not enough. They are asking for more laws than Cuomo has offered in his state budget proposal to cut labor costs, pension costs and more funding.

Advocates like Myron Orfield and David Rusk have been pushing for metropolitanization for decades – and if Cuomo is right, it might happen now because local governments will have little choice when faced with tough economic issues. However, there are three major issues standing in the way of government consolidation even when times are tough:

1. Local control and interests. This is part of the foundation of the American governmental system: residents should have some say in local government. Thus, local governments and residents will fight hard before they have to hand off decision-making to outsiders.

2. We could end up with situations where communities and governments that are harder off are pushed to consolidate while wealthier areas can hold out longer. This is then a different kind of inequality: wealthier residents would have more local control while poorer residents would have less control.

3. Consolidation might save money but what happens to the quality of the local services? Merging might lead to a reduction of services and some residents will not be happy about this. This is more of a quality of life issue that could influence crime rates, school performance, garbage pickup, and more.

You can collect lots of Moneyball-type data but it still has to be used well

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Another report from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference provides this useful reminder about statistics and big data:

Politics didn’t come up at the conference, except for a single question to Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight election oracle who got his start doing statistical analysis on baseball players. Silver suggested there wasn’t much comparison between the two worlds.

But even if there’s no direct correlation, there was an underlying message I heard consistently throughout the conference that applies to both: Data is an incredibly valuable resource for organizations, but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions — whether that’s in the pursuit of athletes or voters.

And the Obama 2012 campaign successfully put this together. Here is one example:

Data played a major role. There’s perhaps no better example than the constant testing of email subject lines. The performance of the Obama email with the subject line “I will be outspent” earned the campaign an estimated $2.6 million. Had the campaign gone with the lowest-performing subject line, it would have raised $2.2 million less, according to “Inside the Cave,” a detailed report from Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini and the team at Engage.

This is an important reminder about statistics: they still have to be used well and effectively shared with leaders and the public. We are now in a world where more data is available than ever before but this doesn’t necessarily mean life is getting better.

I recently was in a conversation about the value of statistics. I suggested that if colleges and others were able to effectively train the students of today in statistics and how to use them in the real world, we might be better off as a society in a few decades as these students go on to become leaders who can make statistics a regular part of their decision-making. We’ll see if this happens…

Is it worth holding local elections for less than 15% turnout?

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The Daily Herald asks whether the low turnout for Tuesday’s local elections in the Chicago area means the elections should not be held:

Voter turnout Tuesday was so poor area election officials were calling the effort a waste of tax dollars…

Numbers show no county in the area managed even a 15 percent turnout. Suburban Cook County faired the best overall with a 13.8 percent turnout, according to the summary report available online. Much of even that low number is attributable to interest in the special primary to replace Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. In other places, such as Palatine Township, the top vote-getter was township clerk candidate Lisa Moran with a mere 1,612 votes.

Without a Congressional draw on the ballot, Lake County logged a turnout of a little more than 11 percent. The low total left Lake County Clerk Willard Helander scratching her head…

In DuPage County, a narrowly focused ballot fueled a 3.9 percent voter turnout, officials said. Tuesday’s primary affected voters in only two precincts who could make a choice between five candidates for Aurora Ward 9 alderman…

Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham took that sentiment one step further. His county logged a 2.9 percent turnout. That works out to about one vote cast per minute in all of the county for the entire election day, Cunningham said. That’s not enough to justify the cost of running the election.

Those are some low turnout totals. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was anything to be voted on in DuPage County and I keep up with local news and regularly read the newspaper. If it hadn’t been for some of the coverage of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg giving money in the race for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s former seat, I may not have known anything was being voted on.

Some obvious points (to me):

1. Why not vote for these offices and other matters during bigger elections? Yes, this may mean there is more for voters to consider at a time and it is hard to keep up with it all, but at least people would have more of an idea to vote.

2. In response to the low turnout, one county clerk asked whether people care about their local government. My short answer: no, not really. Most communities don’t generate the kind of involvement or major issues that consistently divide the community that would drive people to vote. Even in talking to local public officials, some of them will tell you that they got involved in local government because they saw something they wanted to change and then got involved.

3. I would love to see this story include some data about local voter turnout over time. We know that election turnout has dropped even with the bigger elections. What about these smaller elections? Is there a “golden age” when people used to care more about local government and voted?

Correlations that get at why big cities lean toward Democrats

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Richard Florida discusses several reasons, based on correlations, why big cities now so clearly lean toward the Democratic party:

Density played a key role in the metro vote. (To capture it we use a measure we of population-based density, which accounts for the concentration of people in metro). The average Obama metro was more than twice as dense as the average Romney metro, 412 versus 193 people per square mile. With a correlation of .50, density was an even bigger factor than population (where the correlation is .34). The reverse pattern holds for the share of Romney votes; the negative correlation for density (-.51) was significantly higher than that for population (-.33)…

The chart below plots the relationship between a metro’s share of college grads and its share of Obama votes. The line slopes steeply upward showing how the share of Obama votes increase alongside metro density. The share of college grads in a metro is positively correlated with the share of Obama votes (.42) and negatively with the share of Romney votes (-.44)…

The chart above shows the relationship between the share of the creative class and the share of Obama votes across metro areas. The line slopes steeply upward, indicating a considerable positive relationship. The share of creative class workers is positively correlated with the share of Obama votes (.40) and negatively with the share of Romney votes (-.41)…

Republicans may still be the party of the rich, but most of the country’s more-affluent metros lined up squarely in the Obama camp. The correlation between the average wages and salaries of metros and the share of Obama votes is positive (.50) and it is negative for Romney votes (-.51). This makes sense too, as larger metros have greater concentrations of knowledge-based talent and industries and are wealthier to begin with. (The associations we find are even more substantial for metros with more than one million people, with the correlations increasing to .71 for Obama and -.72 for Romney.) This follows the “Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State” pattern identified by Andrew Gelman of Columbia University, who infamously found that while rich voters continue to trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic.

Florida argues this is evidence of class-based differences in American life, specifically, differences between the creative class and those in knowledge industries compared to the rest of the United States.

However, this raises a few questions:

1. The analysis here seems to be done across metropolitan areas while some of these voting patterns break down as we compare cities versus suburbs. For example, there are those who suggest it is really about cities and inner-ring suburbs that vote Democratic while more further flung suburbs and exurbs vote Republican. See earlier posts about the analysis of Joel Kotkin – here and here.

2. Making claims with correlations with tricky. Florida acknowledges this before he rolls out the analysis: “As usual, I point out that correlation points to associations between variables only, not causation.” But, then why stop the analysis at correlations here? Looking at the relationships just between two variables at a time ignores the complex relationships between factors like race, class, location, jobs, and more. Why not quickly run some regressions?

3. If this analysis is correct (and we need more in-depth analysis to check), why are Republicans so bad at appealing to the creative class?

Evaluating the charts and graphics in President Obama’s “enhanced experience” version of the State of the Union

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In addition to the speech, President Obama’s State of the Union involved an “enhanced experience” with plenty of charts and graphics. Here are some thoughts about how well this data and information was presented:

But sometimes, even accuracy can be misleading, especially when it comes to graphics and charts. On Tuesday night, President Obama gave his State of the Union address and the White House launched an “enhanced” experience, a multimedia display with video, 107 slides and 27 charts…

Overall, Few said Obama’s team created well-designed charts that presented information “simply, clearly and honestly.”

On a chart about natural gas wells:

“This graph depicting growth in natural gas wells suffers from a problem related to the quantitative scale, specifically the fact that it does not begin at zero. Although it is not always necessary to begin the scale of a line graph at zero, in this case because the graph was shown to the general public, narrowing the scale to begin at 400,000 probably exaggerated people’s perception of the degree in change.”

On a chart about “energy-related CO2 emissions”:

We found that the data behind this chart match up with what the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports in its table of U.S. Macroeconomic Indicators and CO2 Emissions. But the y-axis is too compressed and as a result the chart exaggerates the trend a bit.

On a chart about American troop levels in Afghanistan:

Annotating discrete data points as this chart does can be helpful to tease out the story in a bunch of numbers, but that’s not a replacement for properly labeled axes. And this chart has none.

It seems like the data was correct but it often was put into a compressed context – not surprisingly, the years Obama has been in office or just a few years beforehand. This is a basic thing to keep in mind with charts and graphs: the range on the axes matters and manipulating these can change people’s perceptions of whether there have been sharp changes or not.