Category Archives: Politics

State Budget Crisis Task Force: big debt trouble in Illinois

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Even if politicians in Illinois don’t talk about this much, outsiders such as the State Budget Crisis Task Force are noticing the debt trouble in Illinois:

For years, Illinois has racked up billions in public debt to plug budget holes, pay overdue bills, and put money into its mismanaged pension funds. And for the people who live there, this has resulted in decrepit commuter trains and buses, thousands of unsound bridges, 200 hazardous dams and one of the most inequitable public school systems in America…

The group, led by the former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul A. Volcker, and the former New York lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch, recommended an overhaul of Illinois’ budgeting practices, to make it harder to kite money from year to year and raid special-purpose funds. It also warned that tax increases may be in store…

Illinois has the lowest credit rating of the 50 states and has America’s second-biggest public debt per capita, $9,624, including state and local borrowing. Only New York State’s debt is bigger, at $13,840 per capita. But Illinois has not been able to use much of the borrowed money to keep its roads, bridges and schools in good working order, because years of shoddy fiscal practices have taken a heavy toll, the report said…

While many states have heavy debt burdens and unfunded pensions, the task force warned that Illinois’ problems had been building for decades and were advanced. The state was “insolvent” even before the financial crisis hit in 2008, the report said, but that was hard to detect because “budget gimmicks became a standard practice.”

Not exactly a rosy outlook.

This could relate to the discussion at the national level about how the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget while other levels of government do. Well, states and other government bodies can still mess up the process even if they are “balancing the budget.”

How Republicans became the party against cities

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After noting Republicans barely mentioned the word “city” at the Republican National Convention, the rest of a review piece in the New York Times looks at how Republicans became anti-urban:

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles…

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975…

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Fascinating.  A sociologist adds an addendum through a letter to the editor several days later:

While I agree with much of Kevin Baker’s article, his statement that in the postwar years “newly prosperous whites and eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs” suggests that postwar urban America became the bastion of the poor and minorities.

Mostly true. But in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, many members of the black middle class continue to live in proximity to their poor and working-class counterparts.

Indeed, in the postwar and post-civil-rights era, blacks have been inheriting urban America, hence the rise of black mayors and other elected officials across all levels of government. Mr. Baker’s analysis of the concerted turn away from urban America by the G.O.P. reveals that a major consequence of this strategy is not just a forsaking of cities but also the alienation of a large swath of poor, working-class and minority voters.

This has all led to the situation today where both parties try to cater to middle-class suburbanites as more exurban and rural voters are in the Republican camp and more urban dwellers are in the Democratic camp.

I have three other ideas about this:

1. Republicans have shifted over the years toward protecting “traditional” American life which sounds often like it can best be lived out in small towns. While the country may still hold on to some small town values (think of President Obama’s talk about Wall Street versus Main Street), the era of Main Street, even in suburbs and towns that have real Main Streets as opposed to the shopping mall kinds (see here and here), is over.

2. This is a bit odd considering that cities and metropolitan regions are massive economic engines. Aren’t Republicans for markets and a growing economy? Most of this is not happening in rural areas but rather in cities.

3. Tied to #2, suburbs are in part made possible by cities. On one hand, suburbs are more independent than ever before but they are still tied to cities for things like major cultural institutions, major financial institutions, airports and other transportation facilities, and sports teams. Additionally, we should be thinking more about metropolitan regions anyway rather than cities versus suburbs

Overall, we aren’t going back to a United States that is primarily small town or rural. The percent of Americans living in non-metropolitan areas in 1910 was 71.6% while over 80% of American live in metropolitan areas today – a complete switch. The population density of the country tripled from 25.7 to 79.6 people per square mile between 1900 and 2000. The United States of today is an urban nation – and both Republicans and Democrats have to adapt to this.

Lack of WASP candidate for election due to the Internet?

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Several commentators have picked up on this feature of the 2012 presidential election: neither candidate is a WASP.

Right now, we’re looking at an absence that would have been a startling presence 50 years ago. With all the focus on economic issues in the U.S. presidential race, there’s hardly any talk about the fact that, for the first time, none of the leading presidential and vice-presidential candidates is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court has no WASPs. These are new phenomena in the United States.

The totally non-WASP tickets signify major political and social shifts in the networked age. As Robert Putnam showed a decade ago in Bowling Alone, organized groups such as churches, political clubs, fraternal clubs and Scouts have declined in importance. People have moved sharply away from traditional, tightly knit groups into more loosely knit networks that have fewer clan boundaries and more tolerance. The rise of the Internet and mobile connectivity has pushed the trend along by allowing people to expand the number and variety of their social ties…

In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg showed how white America was rigidly divided in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Indeed, one of the authors of this article was barred from college fraternities because he was Jewish.

Now, when Chelsea Clinton marries, no one remarks on the kippa on her husband’s head. This year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 81 per cent of those who know Republican Mitt Romney is a Mormon are either comfortable with his affiliation or say it doesn’t matter to them.

I’m not sure I buy the Internet argument; WASPs lost their elite control because of the Internet? I think the process had started way before this. I wonder if the most basic explanation is that there are simply less WASPs overall in the population. Since the 1950s, there has been a sharp uptick in immigration and more people have had access to education and college and graduate degrees.

NYT lays out three options for how personal religious faith could influence sociological work

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At the end of a column looking at this summer’s public debate over research findings from sociologist Mark Regnerus, the writer suggests there are three ways personal religious faith could influence a sociologist’s work:

So if there is not really a Christian method in sociology, but there is a role for a self-described Christian in sociology, as Dr. Regnerus once averred, then what is that role? One can imagine several answers.

First, the religious — or atheist, for that matter — sociologist might have a set of topics that she finds particularly relevant to her beliefs. Given their traditions’ emphasis on traditional family, for example, a conservative Catholic or evangelical Protestant could reasonably gravitate toward the study of family structure.

Second, a scholar might have faith that good research ultimately brings people to God or furthers his plans. A Christian historian might trust that even a modest study of the Spanish-American War, or of Rhode Island history, would do a small part to reveal the providential nature of all history.

Finally, a scholar might be a “Christian scholar” by virtue of the pride he takes in his faith, especially in the secular academy. Dr. Regnerus was a proud Christian witness, once upon a time. But these days he won’t discuss his faith, even with a Christian magazine. Two weeks ago, Christianity Today ran a lengthy interview with Dr. Regnerus in which he said nothing about his religious beliefs.

Option one presented here seems to be the one that would probably be most acceptable to the broader scientific community. Lots of researchers have personal interests that help guide them to particular areas of study but then we tend to assume (or hope), a la Weber’s arguments about value-free sociology, that the findings will not necessarily be influenced by these personal interests. At the same time, some might argue that completely separating personal life and research results may be a modernist dream.

I suspect options two and three wouldn’t get as much broad support.

It would also be interesting to see how this would play out if we weren’t talking about personal religious beliefs but other personal beliefs. For example, Jonathan Haidt has been looking at politics within social psychology and thinking about how these personal (and more collective) beliefs might influence a whole field.

Cell phone users now comprise half of Gallup’s polling contacts

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Even as Americans are less interested in participating in telephone surveys, polling firms are trying to keep up. Gallup has responded by making sure 50% of people contacted for polling samples are cell phone users:

Polling works only when it is truly representative of the population it seeks to understand. So, naturally, Gallup’s daily tracking political surveys include cellphone numbers, given how many Americans have given up on land lines altogether. But what’s kind of amazing is that it now makes sure that 50 percent of respondents in each poll are contacted via mobile numbers.

Gallup’s editor in chief, Frank Newport, wrote yesterday about the evolution of Gallup’s methods to remain “consistent with changes in the communication behavior and habits of those we are interviewing.” In the 1980s the company moved from door-to-door polling to phone calls. In 2008 it added cellphones. To reflect the growing number of Americans who have gone mobile-only, it has steadily increased the percentage of those numbers it contacts.

“If we were starting from scratch today,” Newport told Wired, “we would start with cellphones.”…

Although it may be a better reflection of society, mobile-phone polling is more expensive, says Newport. They have to call more numbers because the response rate is lower due to the nature of mobile communication.

As technology and social conventions change, researchers have to try and keep up. This is a difficult task, particularly if fewer people want to participate and technologies offer more and more options to screen out unknown requests. Where are we going next: polling by text? Utilizing well-used platforms like Facebook (where we know many people are turning every day)?

Politicians trying to woo the ambigiously defined middle class

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Amidst an election cycle where all sides want to woo the middle class, several researchers suggest that providing an exact definition of the middle class is difficult:

“You can’t define middle class, but you can ask people, ‘Do you still feel middle class?’ And more and more people don’t,” said Tim Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin…

“The whole attraction of middle class … is it doesn’t mean anything,” said Dennis Gilbert, a sociology professor at Hamilton College who studies class issues. “Middle class means anybody who might vote for you.”…

Still, experts say the term middle class has a cultural connotation that goes beyond the number on your paycheck or tax stub.

Kevin Leicht, director of the Iowa Social Science Research Center at the University of Iowa, said many Americans think of a middle-class life as being one in which you have a stable job, own your own home and occasionally buy something substantial like a new car. You also either went to college or have the aspiration of sending your children to college.

I would disagree with Gilbert and agree with Leicht and Smeeding. When asked, Americans do tend to feel they are middle class, the recent economic crisis notwithstanding. The middle class in America is more of an idea than a clearly-defined category that people move in and out of. Cultural categories can be powerful, perhaps even more so than economic realities.

Recently, the Brookings Institution defined six likely life stages a middle-class person goes through and in 2010, a government task force tied being middle class to six outcomes. It is not impossible to set such criteria for measurement purposes but they do not match up with everyone who would call themselves middle class.

Speaking of politicians looking for middle-class votes, I haven’t seen journalists or scholars discussing how this wooing developed in American political history. How long has this wooing been taking place? Is this primarily a post-World War II phenomenon or does it have a longer history? I wonder if the middle class only matters here because it is in this period of history that politicians think there are a large number of voters to be swayed in this category…

Cory Booker uses his social networks to funnel Wall Street money to Newark

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Newark mayor Cory Booker has found a way to bring needed money to his city: work his wealthy social networks.

“The room is packed; you had every major hedge-fund, private-equity person,” recalls Joseph Shenker, chairman of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.

Booker holds guests spellbound using the Hebrew phrase “tikkun olam,” or fixing the world, to describe Ackman’s generosity. It’s a notion Booker has adapted to his city 12 miles (19 kilometers) west of Wall Street, and the moneyed elite are buying in…

“One of the things Cory Booker has done is turned Newark into a national cause,” says Shenker, 55, a New Yorker who remembers watching TV footage of the 1967 riots that left 26 dead. “He has made it a serious issue for the United States.”

Booker, midway through his second four-year term, has raised more than $250 million in donations and pledges for a city where the previous three mayors were convicted of or pleaded guilty to felonies after leaving office.

Mining a network stretching back to Stanford University and Yale Law School, Booker is promoting New Jersey’s largest city as a lower-cost alternative to New York and overseeing nonprofits to fund everything from security cameras to midnight basketball tournaments. Benefactors view Booker as somebody they can work with after decades of corruption, says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

This reminds me of some of the public-private efforts also being undertaken by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. If major cities are facing budget issues, this is one way to get money: work with wealthy business people, offer them some results/benefits of investing, and then use the money as you wish.

I could imagine some potential issues with this:

1. Is this a sustainable long-term solution? What if another cause becomes more attractive? What if the city problems become too big to be dealt with using private money?

2. Do the donators have any sway or influence of how the money is used? If so, or, perhaps even more important, if there is even the perception of this, the public may not appreciate this.

3. Generally, does this suggest that it is primarily the powerful people in society, people like important elected officials and wealthy businesspeople, who really to get to decide what gets done? Who really controls a city: the people or those with money and clout?

4. What happens if this money doesn’t lead to much improvement? In business terms, what if there is not a high return on investment?

Political operative discusses which polls he thought were reliable, unreliable while working for Edwards 2008 campaign

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Amidst discussions of whether current polls are accurately weighting their samples for Democrats and Republicans, a former political operative for Al Gore and John Edward talks about how the Edwards campaign used polls:

However, under cross-examination by lead prosecutor David Harbach, Hickman acknowledged sending a series of emails in November and December, and even into January, endorsing or promoting polls that made Edwards look good. Asked about what appeared to be a New York Times/CBS poll released in mid-November showing an effective “three-way tie” in Iowa with Hillary Clinton at 25 percent, Edwards at 23 percent and Obama at 22 percent, Hickman acknowledged he circulated it but insisted he didn’t think it was correct.

“The business I’m in is a business any fool can get into, and a lot can happen. I’m sure there was a poll like that,” the folksy Hickman told jurors when first asked about a poll showing the race tied. “I kept up with every poll that was done, including our own, and there may have been a few that showed them a tie, but… that’s not really what my analysis is. Campaigns are about trajectory, and… there could have been a point at which it was a tie in the sense that we were coming down, and Obama was going up, and Clinton was going up.”

Hickman also indicated that senior campaign staffers knew many of the polls were poorly done and of little value. “We didn’t take these dog and cat and baby-sitter polls seriously,” he said.

Hickman acknowledged that on January 2, 2008, a day before the Iowa caucuses, he sent out a summary of nine post-Christmas Iowa polls showing Edwards in contention in the Hawkeye State. However, he testified two-thirds of them were from firms he considered “ones we typically would not put a lot of credence in.” Hickman put Mason-Dixon, Strategic Vision, Insider Advantage, Zogby and Research 2000 in the “less reputable” group. He also told the court that ARG polls “have a miserable track record.”

Hickman said he considered the Des Moines Register polls, CNN and Los Angeles Times polls more accurate.

This seems like typical politics: an operative is supposed to spin the best news they can about their candidate, even if they don’t think this is the whole story. However, it is fascinating to see his opinion of different polling organizations. I wish he went on to describe why some of these polls were better than others: better samples, more reliable and/or predictive results, they lined up with other reputable polls? At the same time, I think the DrudgeReport’s headline for this story, “Under oath, Edwards pollster admits polls were ‘propaganda,'” is a bit misleading.  Hickman wasn’t disparaging all polls; he was admitting to using some polls that he thought were inaccurate to tell a particular political story.

If we got a bunch of current political operatives in a room, here are questions we could ask that would revealing:

1. Are there certain polls that you all consider to be reliable? (I hope the answer is yes. But I would also guess that each political party thinks certain polls tend to lean in their direction.)

2. What information do you all work with regularly that helps give you a better picture of what is going beyond the polls? In other words, the American public doesn’t get much of an inside view while the campaign is happening beyond a stream of polls reported by the media but the campaigns themselves have more information that matters. How much should the public pay attention to these polls or can they pick up clues from what is really going on elsewhere? (The media seems to like polls but there are other ways to get information.)

3. In the long run, who is helped or harmed by having a lot of polling organizations? Hickman suggests some polls aren’t that worthwhile so if this is the case, should they not be reported to the American public? (Americans can look at a variety of polls; should there be that many to choose from?)

Unfortunately, this story feeds a growing mistrust of polls. Generally, it is not good for social science if 42% of Americans think polls are biased for one candidate or another. On one hand, these 42% may simply not like what the polls are reporting, have little idea how polls work, and simply want their candidate to win (and won’t like the polls until this happens). On the other hand, perceptions matter and decisions about polls should be made on scientific grounds, not on ideological or partisan affections. And, surely this has to play into the finding that only 9% of Americans are willing to respond to telephone surveys.

The fight over transit money between Chicago and its suburbs

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A fight over funding is brewing between the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) and Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Pace, and Metra about how to divvy up sales tax revenues and discretionary money:

Twelve votes are needed to approve budgets, yet five out of the 16 directors on the board are Chicagoans who have the CTA’s back, conventional wisdom says.

And this isn’t just an RTA fight. It also involves the region’s political heavyweights like Mayor Rahm Emanuel and [DuPage County Board Chairman Dan] Cronin, who appoint RTA directors to their $25,000-a-year positions.

Cronin says he recognizes [CTA President Forrest] Claypool and Emanuel didn’t create the problem. But he describes the standoff as “bullying.”

“The money is collected from all the taxpayers in the region, the majority of whom reside in the suburbs. Why should we subsidize the CTA more than we already are?” he asked. “They seem to care little for their neighbors in the suburbs.”

This is tied up with two larger issues:

1. The Chicago area is infamous for its many governmental bodies. This is another example of the broader issues associated with metropolitanization: multiple transit agencies are fighting for revenues and surplus funds that are controlled by an umbrella organization. All three agencies could really use the money so how is it to be decided outside of what will end up being a very politicized process?

2. In the larger public discussion about taxes, a growing theme is illustrated here: why should funds/taxes raised in one area be spent in another area? This is what Cronin is arguing: the revenues raised from relatively wealthy DuPage County (#57 in the country according to 2011 figures) are being used to fund mismanaged services in the nearby big city that many DuPage residents and shoppers do not use on a regular basis. This, too, is tied to metropolitanization: how can communities, agencies, and governments across a region come together to address common problems if everyone is only looking out for their self-interests?

Gerson suggests we can’t solve social problems through individualism; we need to correct dysfuncational institutions

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Michael Gerson argues we can’t address America’s social problems through individualism but rather we need to help strengthen dysfunctional institutions:

While the Romney video was making news, I was reading some recent research by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. He recounts an interview with a woman given the fictional name of Mary Sue, who lives in a declining industrial town in Ohio. Mary Sue’s parents divorced when she was young. Her mother became a stripper and left for days at a time. Her stepmother beat her and confined her to a single room. Mary Sue told the interviewer that, for a time, her only friend had been a yellow mouse who shared the apartment.

Mary Sue went in and out of juvenile detention. One boyfriend burned her arms with cigarettes. Her current partner has two children by two other women.

Is such a story really explainable as a failure of personal responsibility? That seems both simplistic and callous. Putnam describes these social conditions as “depressingly typical” in America’s working class. He measures a number of growing gaps between poorer and more affluent Americans — gaps of parental time and investment, of religious and community involvement, of academic achievement — that widen a class divide and predict a “social mobility crash” for millions of Americans.

This crisis has a number of causes, including the collapse of working-class families, the flight of blue-collar jobs and the decay of working-class neighborhoods, which used to offer stronger networks of mentors outside the home. Perverse incentives in some government programs may have contributed to these changes, but this does not mean that shifting incentives can easily undo the damage. Removing a knife from a patient does not automatically return him to health. Whatever the economic and cultural causes, the current problem is dysfunctional institutions, which routinely betray children and young adults. Restoring a semblance of equal opportunity — promoting family commitment, educational attainment and economic advancement — will take tremendous effort and creative policy.

Gerson goes on to argue for a kind of conservatism that looks to improve civil society rather than retreat into a libertarian world.

A few thoughts:

1. Gerson brings up an important idea: simply removing unhelpful government programs doesn’t necessarily solve the larger social problem. In fact, there may be two issues at stake: a misguided program as well as the social problem. But simply doing nothing doesn’t necessarily rectify the problem either. For example, making certain kinds of discrimination illegal in the 1960s was a big step in the right direction. But, this didn’t immediately equalize the life chances for different groups, particularly those who had endured decades of legal discrimination. There is still work to be done on this front so simply acting like the new law or program has completely solved the problem is false.

2. Note that Gerson is not necessarily calling here for government to tackle all of these issues. Also, he brings up issues that tend to worry conservatives like the decline of the traditional family.

3. Is this what moderate Republicanism looks like?