2008 Election: Did race matter?

John at the Monkey Cage took a preliminary stab at hashing out the effect of individual voters' racial views and their liklihood of voting for Obama. This comes from the recently released ANES numbers from 2008.

As best he can tell, the aggregate effect on the election outcome was really pretty small. People who were going to vote for McCain most likely were going to vote for him regardless of the color of the other guy:

In sum, there are relatively few voters who are both negatively disposed toward blacks and not already strongly committted to a candidate for other reasons.

In other words, racial prejudice rarely exists in a vacuum - there are other issue preferences, attitudes and demographic factors that will tend to go along with it. And while this need not necessarily be the case, in this election those folks tended to fall in with the Republicans.

See the blog for more detailed discussion, and have a look at his pretty graphs

Immigration: Does national framing set up local threat perception?

Harvard's Social Science Statistics Blog links to a paper by Dan Hopkins, another in what appears to be a crowding field of researchers of inter-ethnic attitudes in political science. The paper advances his theory of 'politicized change' argues that 'realistic threat' approaches fail to explain why communities will sometimes get into an uproar over a rising tide of immigration and other times not. Hopkins argues that localized demographic changes, in combination with a political atmosphere that makes immigrants and immigration more salient in national politics and media, dramatically increase the liklihood that communities will hone in on immigration as a local issue.

Incidentally, for a documentary that illustrates exactly what local opposition to immigration looks like, in all its sound and fury, check out Farmingville. It's the story of a small Long Island community divided over a boom in hispanic migrant laborers. Definitely intense, it tends to under-represent moderate voices on the issue, but paints a clear picture of how these kinds of issues can get completely out of hand and - crucially - demonstrates very clearly the impact that national-level politics (and activist networks with a national platform) have on the framing of local issues.

photo: flickr/Kevin Coles

Spurious?

A comic from xkcd that's making the rounds of quantoid blogs:

Dan Ariely

The Economist recently put out a podcast of an interview with behavioral economist Dan Ariely  who's hawking his book: Predictably Irrational. I can't speak to the book, but I can say that he articulates, in the interview, what is perhaps the driving force behind my own interest in such matters:

 

"When we come to design the physical world -- we design it, we design chairs and watches and shoes and all of these things -- we understand our physical limitations and we design the world accordingly ….But we also design a world that requires mental effort."

 

"While we recognize our limitations in the physical world, we don't recognize our limitations in the mental world. Why would we be physically limited and supermen of the mind? So, behavioral economics tells us where we fall short…. And the good lesson…is if we understand where we fall short, we have the capacity to design a better world. We can design a world that takes into account our own limitations."

He goes on to talk about how consumers could potentially be protected when shopping for mortgages by means of a user-friendly mortgage calculator that can help them actually figure out what the long-term cost/benefits equation looks like. 

My interests are different, but along the same lines: to better understand our underlying social prejudices, understood in this light as context-dependent limitations on our capacity to make good social decisions (who/when to trust, who/when to fight, when to stop NOT trusting, etc.), so as to improve the interaction of political institutions, individuals and social groups. In other words, I ask 'Why Can't We Be Friends?' No, really.

Incidentally, I like how the title of the Spanish version of his book is a little spicier: 'The Traps of Desire.' I smell a spin-off telenovela!

[get the podcast through iTunes]

In other news, the sky is blue-ish in color

Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times

Sorry ABD-ers. 

Three Card Monte and the American Way

The ever-brilliant On The Media looks at the enduring appeal of the Confidence Man.

 

They paint the classic con man as an American national icon, tying it in to the Madoff mess.

I wonder: does the enduring sense of American exceptionalism and entitledness make us easier marks because we think we can beat the odds? Or are we just humans like everyone else: letting greed outweigh our scruples and reasonable doubts? Whatever you think, have a listen to a nice piece of radio.

Japan's State of Mind

NY Times had an op-ed the other day with a nice testable hypothesis in poli psy: Japan's Crisis of the Mind.

But what most people don’t recognize is that our crisis is not political, but psychological. After our aggression — and subsequent defeat — in World War II, safety and predictability became society’s goals. Bureaucrats rose to control the details of everyday life. We became a nation with lifetime employment, a corporate system based on stable cross-holdings of shares, and a large middle-class population in which people are equal and alike.

In the West, on the other hand, the idea of progress rests on establishing individual autonomy and liberty. In Japan, bureaucratic rule offered security and predictability — in exchange for personal freedom. The problem is that our current political leaders can’t keep their side of the bargain. Employment security can no longer be guaranteed. The national pension and health plans seem to be insolvent in the long run. People feel both insecure and unfree.

The author goes on to cite various endemic 'signs of despair' such as the distinctly Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori ('shut ins' who stay in their rooms for months or years on end). Or young people who live with their parents well into middle age.

 

Now, I have anecdotal evidence that single people continuing to live with their folks into adulthood is not a uniquely Japanese phenomena, but I don't have hard numbers on that just now. Still, what of the assertion that the Japanese as a whole are more deferential to authority than others?

A little rummaging brought me to a paper from a couple years ago:

 

"Authority Orientations and Democratic Attitudes: A Test of the 'Asian Values' Hypothesis"

 

Essentially, this is a stab at an empirical test of an argument popularized by the father of independent Singapore, former PM Lee Kuan Yew that a Confucian-derived cultural legacy left southeast Asia with a different set of values from the West. In essence, while Asians were more than willing to share a system of market capitalism, the tradition of liberal democracy was a step too far.

 

They look at data from the 4th wave of the World Values Survey that measure deference to authority. They acknowledge the diversity of the region (Indonesia being largely Muslim, Philippines being largely Catholic, etc) and, lest we forget, Sam Huntington (may he find that heaven is predominately populated by those with swarthy complexions) gave Japan their own "civilization", rather than lumping than in with their "Sinic" or "Buddhist" neighbors.

 

The authors find that:

 

Questions regarding one's views about parents (due to a common theory that authoritarian attitudes may be analogous to one's views about the authority of one's parents - Adorno's influential The Authoritarian Personality and Stanley Milgram's experimental work, e.g.). Items included whether one should always respect one's parents despite faults, or whether one's main goals included making one's parents proud.

 

Respect for Parents -

USA: 78%

Canada: 79%

 

Japan: 73%

South Korea and Singapore: 94%

Taiwan: 91%

Vietnam: 99%

 

The WVS also asks about values that parents see as necessary to emphasize to in childrearing, such as  obedience, following the instructions of work superiors even if you disagree, and a desire to see greater respect for authority in society.

 

Here, there is an even more striking difference in values, with 35% of Canadians and 31% of Americans reporting that they saw teaching obedience to children as important, with only 5% of Japanese agreeing. And, regarding work instructions, 58% of Canadians and 66% of Americans agrees, with 29% of Japanese agreeing.

 

They find a cohort effect in these attitudes in southeast Asia. Whereas older Americans tend to share similar values to their grandchildren, older Japanese are much more likely to say they value deference to authority than the young. They argue that stereotypical views of the Japanese are simply not born out by the data:

 

Admittedly, the social traditions in many East Asian nations still place a priority on parents and a sense of duty that is seen as exceptionally strong by Western observers and experts of the region. But social customs are not the same as individual beliefs

 

The young may comply to social norms of conformity, but not truly adhere to them in their minds.