A Study of Deliberative Forums

Deliberation is a central theme of our book.  In a paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Brian E. Adams analyzes citizen deliberation.  Here is the abstract:

Critics of deliberative democracy argue that average people are either unable or unwilling to engage in thoughtful, reasoned discussion over policy issues. Through an analysis of conversational dynamics in 10 National Issues Forums, I found that deliberators typically gave reasons to support their arguments, most commonly with factual statements or examples drawn from personal experience. However, the logical connections between evidence and conclusions were often tenuous: even though the evidence presented was relevant, deliberators frequently neglected to explain how and why it supported their conclusions. Further, they rarely explored the premises underlying their arguments, assuming away key points of contention. These findings indicate that the obstacle to effective deliberation does not lie in citizens’ inability or reluctance to give reasons to support their opinions, as they routinely did so. Instead, a more significant barrier to effective deliberation lies in deliberators’ capacity (or willingness) to construct coherent arguments. These findings also indicate that the manner in which citizens engage in policy discussions can limit some of the beneficial outcomes hypothesized by deliberation proponents.

Research on Labor Unions

On Labor Day, it is appropriate to look at some recent research on unions.  Though Hurricane Isaac forced the cancellation of the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, many papers prepared for that conference are available online.  Two are particularly relevant here.

Sarah F. Anzia and Terry M. Moe, "Public Sector Unions and the Costs of Government."  You may find the full text here and the abstract below:

As recent political battles in Wisconsin, Ohio, and a number of other states attest, public sector unions are among the most active interest groups in American politics. They are also different from other interest groups in two key respects: they engage in collective bargaining, and are thus in a position to shape the organization of government in ways that other groups are not, and their members are the government’s own employees — its bureaucrats — who not only influence government from the inside through their official roles, but also from the outside through their unions. For all of these reasons, public sector unions are eminently worthy of scholarly attention, and yet political scientists have almost never studied them. This paper is an attempt to make some headway. Our focus is on how unions and collective bargaining in the public sector affect the costs of government. We present three separate studies, using different datasets from different historical periods, and we examine a range of cost-related outcomes: wages and salaries, health benefits, employment levels, and pension liabilities. In all three studies, our findings show that strong unions and collective bargaining do tend to increase the costs of government, and the impacts are both substantively and statistically significant. In presenting these findings, we hope to encourage other scholars to view public sector unions as important subjects of analysis.

"Turning Out Teachers: Collective Bargaining Laws and Citizens’ Political Engagement." You may find the full text here and the abstract below:

The decision to become involved in politics through voting and other participatory activities is among the most studied topics in political science. A large literature focuses on the effects of resources, mobilization efforts, and registration/election laws on patterns of political participation. In comparison, far fewer studies investigate the effects of governmental policy on citizens’ subsequent political engagement by asking the question: Do policies make citizens? We examine the case of statewide public sector collective bargaining laws and consider whether variation in these policies influence levels of political participation among public school teachers. Utilizing a difference-in-differences estimation strategy that exploits variation in the time at which these bargaining laws were adopted, we find that teachers consistently report higher levels of political participation in the years immediately following the adoption of mandatory collective bargaining in their state. These findings help explain how teachers, a group that was at one time largely apathetic toward electoral politics, evolved into one of the most active and organized political constituencies in the United States. Given the recent flurry of state policymaking activity aimed at restricting or eliminating collective bargaining rights for public employees, these findings further underscore the important effects that policy decisions can have on citizens’ political engagement.

Guns and American Exceptionalism

Our chapter on civic culture talks about cultural differences between the United States and other nations, citing crime and gun control as examples.  Dylan McLean, of the State University of New York at Buffalo, has a new paper on the topic.  Here is the abstract:

This paper attempts to extend three leading schools of thought on the nature of Canadian and American political differences to other countries with a common English heritage, namely Australia and New Zealand. In so doing it will use the political-culture surrounding gun regulation and gun ownership to critically evaluate these theories. The theories of Can-Am differences of interest in this paper are Lipset’s ‘Origins Thesis,’ the ‘deep structures’ approach from Grabb and Curtis, and the legal-culture approach taken by Kaufman. The theories will be reviewed and the possible ways they may be extended will be outlined. The cases under review are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For each of these cases three questions will be asked and broadly reviewed: 1) what does the current firearms regulatory environment look like, 2) what historical path led to the contemporary environment, and 3) what does firearm ownership represent to the citizens of these countries. The answers to these questions will show that gun control is most severe in the United Kingdom and Australia, while it is least restrictive in the United States. It will also be shown that the gun culture is most developed, by a fairly wide margin, in the United States. The findings will lend strong support to Lipset’s thesis, moderate support for Kaufman’s work, and no support for the deep structures approach. America is clearly exceptional on this issue and it is quite possible that, as Lipset would suggest, this American exceptionalism has its roots in the American Revolution. Also, the values that gun ownership represents for many Americans are the same values that Lipset suggests makes American political-culture unique. Americans stand apart from the commonwealth countries in the contemporary relationship of firearms with self defense and with the tendency to attach symbology to guns and gun ownership which is not directly related to their instrumental purposes. For example, it is common for Americans to tie concepts such as freedom, liberty, and individualism with their decision to own guns. It will be shown that this is clearly not the case in the members of the commonwealth realm to be examined here. This paper presents the broad outline of a research agenda which will likely prove to be quite fruitful and it displays the value of extending theories of Canadian and American differences to other countries with a similar heritage.

John Adams and American Exceptionalism

At several points in our text, and multiple times at this blog, we discuss American exceptionalism.  Sarah Beth Vosburg of Louisiana State University has a new paper on the subject:  "American Exceptionalism, Responsibility, and the Limits of Politics: America's Purpose and Liberty's Progress in the Political Thought of John Adams."  Here is the abstract:

Like America’s Puritan forefathers, whose efforts he affirmed he was extending, John Adams (1735-1826) advanced the theme of America as a remarkable political undertaking, conducted before God and the watching world. For Adams, America was exceptional not because she was a new Israel but because she was by divine providence the site of an ongoing political experiment. That experiment would test whether it was possible to secure right order and so to advance liberty, against the alternatives of chance and caprice as ruling forces in human affairs. The purpose of this essay is to examine Adams’ understanding of the American political experiment, its origin, aim, obligation, and special significance for “all mankind.” The essay’s three main sections explore (1) Adams’ evaluation of the American experiment and his political science, (2) his view of America’s responsibility to advance well-ordered liberty before God and all people, and (3) his conception of the limits of politics. It concludes by examining Adams’ thought that continued success for America depended upon the choice by members of subsequent generations to advance the difficult experiment in liberty.

Missing the High-Tech Campaign Game

At The New York Times, Sasha Issenberg writes that reporters have long been missing -- or misunderstanding -- the high-tech methods of today's campaigns.

Breathless, and often fact-free, stories about “data mining” and “microtargeting” soon became plentiful. But few journalists had access to any of the campaigns’ data, or even much understanding of the statistical techniques they used. We found ourselves at the mercy of self-promoting consultants who described how they were changing politics by ignoring stodgy old demographics and instead pinpointing voters according to their lifestyles. We played along, guilelessly imputing new mythic powers to microtargeting. In many retellings, data analysis became the reason George W. Bush was re-elected.

Microtargeting was at once less directly influential, and more fundamentally disruptive, than these analyses suggested. The most colorful commercial variables that appeared prominently in journalistic accounts of microtargeting — whether someone drank gin or drove a Subaru — were never of much value on their own. It was the combination of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of data points that offered value: algorithms could weigh previously imperceptible relationships among variables to predict political attitudes and behavior.

Now, instead of defining voters by a handful of self-evident attributes like rural Hispanic Democratic men or non-college-educated white seniors, campaigns could group individual citizens according to segments or scores that reflected gradations of predicted habits — of how likely they were to turn out to vote or to support a specific candidate. They could be aggregated into what campaigns call a universe — targets for the same persuasive media or get-out-the-vote drive — not by visible demographic commonalities but because they were projected to behave in similar ways.

Social Media, Obama, and Romney

Fox News quotes Romney social media direct Zac Moffatt:

Moffatt said that of the 5.8 million Romney followers currently on Facebook, about 2.4 million are using the online social network to “post about” the candidate and his campaign. A report by “Inside Facebook,” an independent news service of Inside Network, says that the average number of “interactions” per day on Obama’s Facebook page is not much higher than on Romney’s.

The Pew research study, however, finds that the Obama campaign is still active on nearly twice as many digital tools and that the online content it produces generates more responses from users on average. Obama has 28 million “Likes” on Facebook versus Romney’s 5 million. On Twitter, Obama and his campaign have tweeted 5,685 times and enjoy 19,169,596 followers. Romney, in contrast, has tweeted 1,109 times and has 996,729 followers.

The Obama campaign recently showed how it uses social media to its advantage when it responded via Twitter to Clint Eastwood’s impromptu act before the Republican convention Thursday, during which the legendary actor addressed an empty chair meant to be an imaginary Obama.

“This seat’s taken,” the Obama campaign tweeted a day later – and included a photo of the commander-in-chief from behind, sitting in a chair at what appears to be a cabinet meeting.

National Journal reports that Obama has many more Facebook friends than Romney

But all indications this year are that the real action in digital campaigning doesn’t hinge on public-facing social-media networks.

Obama’s online organizing tool, called Dashboard, lets volunteers make phone calls to voters on their own time, working off scripts provided by the campaign and targeting voters in their own personal networks or in their area. A mobile canvassing application, released in July, gives volunteers access to voter information on their smartphones, to increase the efficiency of door-to-door visits and to input new information into the voter database that also includes information on political contributions and responses to survey questions. One Republican digital strategist who is not working for Romney called the Obama app “the most exciting piece of technology in the entire 2012 campaign.”

Social networks may have more muscle when it comes to down-ballot races. A new tool from NGP VAN, the Democratic campaign technology provider, lets volunteers and activists match their Facebook friends against voter lists. Stuart Trevelyan, CEO of NGP VAN, describes the social-organizing tool as “self-serve, on-demand politics” that allows campaign supporters to raise money and get out the vote. It’s being used in state and local races, but it isn’t being adopted by the Obama campaign because Dashboard already functions as a social network all its own.

Likability Gap, Continued

Much of the GOP convention focused on closing the “likability gap” between Governor Romney and President Obama. The party probably made some progress in that regard, but commentators have put way too much emphasis on the topic. If likability were all that counted in presidential elections, we’d be getting ready for the second Huckabee administration right now.

True, President Obama is doing better than one might predict just from the state of the economy -- but mostly for reasons other than likability. He is the incumbent, after all, so he has the benefit of media attention and the “don’t change horses in midstream” mentality. Just as important, there is a good deal of partisan polarization in the electorate. Many voters on each side of the partisan divide would not think of casting a ballot for a presidential candidate on the other. In the past quarter-century, no candidate has won a greater share of the popular vote than the 53.4% that George H.W. Bush received in 1988.

If you’re looking for numbers that could tip the 2012 election one way or the other, keep an eye on September7:  that’s when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the unemployment figure for August.