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Born in San Jose, grew up in Seattle, received a Ph.D. in poli sci from University of Washington, worked for three years at Universiteit Twente in Enschede, Netherlands, and have worked at the University of Plymouth for eight academic years now in Plymouth, United Kingdom.

The Roberts Court and Free Speech Cases

[ 12 ] January 7, 2012 | Dave Brockington

The NYT has a nuanced article that discusses a new study released by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. Basically, contra conventional wisdom, the Roberts Court finds in favor of free speech at a lower rate than the three previous Courts. The Roberts Court has ruled in favor of speech 34.5%, whereas the rate for the Rehnquist Court was 49%, Burger 46%, and shockingly the Warren Court was 69%. While the NYT had the study reviewed by a couple political scientists who work in the field (Epstein and Segal) who determined that the difference between Roberts and the three previous courts in aggregate was statistically significant, yet the differences between Roberts and the two previous courts is not, I don’t find statistical significance a particularly useful tool considering the data involved.

What’s of greater interest is percentage of “free speech” cases that were actually about campaign finance (which I initially wondered about when reading the article). Here’s the money shot:

A majority of the Roberts court’s pro-free-speech decisions — 6 of 10 — involved campaign finance laws.

“What really animates” the Roberts court, Erwin Chemerinsky wrote recently in The Arizona Law Review, “is a hostility to campaign finance laws much more than a commitment to expanding speech.”

No shit. More Chemerinsky:

The court, he wrote, has a “dismal record of protecting free speech in cases involving challenges to the institutional authority of the government when it is regulating the speech of its employees, its students and its prisoners, and when it is claiming national security justifications.”

For the geeks among us, the article dips its toe into the pool of epistemology:

David L. Hudson Jr., a scholar at the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, said the studies lacked nuance by, for instance, treating every decision as equally important. His criticism illuminated a gap between the two disciplines used to assess the Supreme Court: political science codes and counts, while law weighs and analyzes.

Which reminds me, I’ll have a couple stacks of essays on epistemological issues to grade when I return to England early next week. Splendid.

Krugman on Jobs

[ 22 ] January 6, 2012 | Dave Brockington

Romney has critiqued Obama for being ‘”a “job killer” who is “in over his head”’; and one quote (which I can not source at the moment) has him claiming to have created more jobs as Governor of Mass. than Obama has done for the country.

It turns out, according to Paul Krugman, that this is bullshit. The figures are illustrative enough to be reproduced here. While they’re somewhat self explanatory, I’m going to bore you with some explanation. The first two measure total employment. The one on the left covers 2007 – 2012, the right 1999-2004.

The best figure to illustrate these data is that which has been released by the Obama campaign itself. The reason I prefer the data to be illustrated in this manner is that it makes two features blunt: the difference between job losses as opposed to job gains, and the arc of the trend. From a campaign perspective, this figure makes for a better narrative: Obama took over in the midst of a bad economic downturn, and while he didn’t turn it around during his first 100 hours in office, things did begin to improve in that the rate of decline was arrested.

And neither include today’s report that 200K jobs were created in December.

How Outperforming Expectations (in Iowa) Empirically Matters

[ 28 ] January 5, 2012 | Dave Brockington

A lot of you might have seen this already, but John Sides (of GWU and the Monkey Cage) has a nice piece at 538 that combines data from both Silver and a book by Redlawsk, Tolbert, and Donovan (which Sides blogs a bit about here) to demonstrate how outperforming expectations in Iowa (e.g. a certain former U.S. Senator who lost re-election by 58.6% to 41.3% in 2006) has a measurable knock-on effect in New Hampshire. This, in turn, has consequences for future primaries and caucuses. My only critique of the piece is that the relationship illustrated by the figure, which Sides characterizes as “substantively (and statistically) significant” does appear substantively weak to me. While this doesn’t go beyond empirically supporting common knowledge:

The conventional wisdom is this: candidates who overperform then receive increased attention from the news media — presumably because they have exceeded the news media’s expectations, which we can approximate with the pre-caucus polls. This is exactly what the graph shows. For every three-point increase in Iowa caucus performance relative to polls, candidates can expect to gain an additional two percentage points of media attention.

it’s import lies in that it does empirically support common knowledge, and we are now in a position to point towards something real when discussing how Iowa’s result will boost the chances of the aforementioned ex-Senator. To wit:

Why does this matter? Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues demonstrate that not only do candidates who do relatively well in Iowa do better in New Hampshire . . . but this shift in media attention may play the causal role. The media’s attention matters too, and their attention depends on how candidates perform versus expectations. Mr. Redlawsk and his colleagues then show that the results in New Hampshire shape the candidates’ overall share of votes in the primaries as a whole. So Iowa affects New Hampshire, and New Hampshire affects everything else . . .

Given this, we should see Santorum mounting the latest — and most credible — anti-Romney candidacy for the nomination (as possibly evidenced by the two polls that came out yesterday showing a surge in Santorum’s support). New Hampshire can even play as a strength for Santorum, as everybody knows Romney will win it overwhelmingly; Romney’s victory will be discounted, and if Santorum can finish second, no easy feat for a rabid conservative in New Hampshire, expect the effect demonstrated by Sides above to further strengthen Santorum’s hand going into SC and FL.

While I don’t think Santorum will parlay this well timed momentum into the nomination, it could at least make things more interesting.

In Case You Were Wondering About Rick Santorum’s Position on the NHS . . .

[ 31 ] January 4, 2012 | Dave Brockington

it turns out he’s somewhat opposed, if we can interpret “social programs led to the collapse of the British Empire” and “the British National Healthcare system is a devastating program that makes it dependent” as opposition. A couple summers ago I wrote a post here about the NHS, including notes comparing the per-capita GDP spent on health care (hint: it’s higher in the US), comparing outcome metrics (hint: better in the UK), and my own personal experience with the Health Service. All of which, charitably, is somewhat in disagreement with Santorum’s observations.

I love it when desperate politicians make shit up. Especially the line about how Thatcher lamented that the Health Service proved to be the reason that she “was never able to do what Reagan did to this country”.

Speaking of making shit up, I’m live on BBC radio within the hour. I wonder what they want?

So Iowa couldn’t make up its mind after all

[ 44 ] January 3, 2012 | Dave Brockington

With the vast majority of the counties reporting, and all the major population centers in Iowa at 98% or more, it looks like Iowa is done for 2012. Barring dramatic changes in Manona County at only 27% reporting (a whopping 106 “voters”), it’s close to a draw between Mittens and Our Saviour Rick Santorum.

I have a few brief observations. One, this is nothing but good news for Romney. Santorum is currently polling 4% in New Hampshire. He should get a “bounce” from Iowa . . . but to where? Double digits? Two, the final aggregates on RCP did a decent job of predicting the final result. Three, it looks like we’re going to lose the comedy levity that Michele Bachmann offers us, which is a crying shame. Four, Newt’s in some degree of trouble. His strengths are down south in SC and FL, but as I discussed a few days ago, and while he’s decently ahead in both, those polls are ancient.

It’s going to be Romney in 2012. The only question, according to a colleague of mine, is whether or not Mitt ’12 beats Mitt ’08 in Iowa. Romney got 30,021 in 2008, slightly over 25% (and finished second). Right now, he’s at 28,908, at 24.6% (and tied for first).

I’ll have more tomorrow, but right now, the wife wants to watch Downton Abbey.

In Praise of Cheap Hooch

[ 55 ] January 2, 2012 | Dave Brockington

Slate has a solid article on “why you should be drinking cheap wine”. While I know my way around a bottle a bit better than the average person, I strongly support the core thesis of said article. This dates back from my previous life as a brewer / beer judge / beer writer when I argued that the price/quality relationship in wine doesn’t even try to approximate a linear function. The same is true of single malts for that matter; back when I built and maintained a collection (which is sadly down to a single unopened bottle of 1974 Ardbeg), I only broke $100 on a bottle once, and that was for a 1973 Longrow. Yes, there’s really bad, dumpable wine available under $6 a bottle. But there are also plenty of terrific wines down there as well. The wine we served at our wedding, an Italian Pinot Grigio, is available at our local Trader Joes for five bucks, and it earned plaudits from those in attendance with superior knowledge and palates.

There are a couple statements in this article that I find contentious however. To wit: “Granted, few Americans actually drink that much wine—annual consumption is around one bottle per month per capita . . .” Seriously? One bottle per month? I guess my intake, even when limited to the several months I spend in the US per year, makes up for the lack of consumption of entire states. Second:

In Europe, consumption is 3-to-6 times higher than in the United States. But only the most affluent would spend 11 euros to drink a bottle of wine at home on a Wednesday night. Europeans seem perfectly comfortable cracking open a 1-euro tetra-pak of wine for guests. Germans, for example, pay just $1.79 on average.

Yet further evidence that the United Kingdom is not part of Europe. Wine is vastly more affordable here in Oregon than England; the same was true when I lived in the Netherlands, where it was fairly easy to find solid value, unlike in the UK. The best value I can find in Plymouth is a £3.15 bottle of Australian red (and white, I forget the varietals at the moment) sold by my local Tesco Metro (which has turned into the house wine at the Brockington Manor). Prior to the opening of this Tesco last summer, the best value was whatever was on offer at the local Co-op, usually at £5.

That said, I instinctively go for value when drinking wine. It’s easy, even on that outrageously expensive island where I spend the majority of my time, to find a solid wine at an affordable price.

h/t to my friend Karen Semyan.

Krugman on Debt

[ 44 ] January 2, 2012 | Dave Brockington

There’s a lot that makes sense here. Some of the high points:

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

and of course

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Obviously, we’re not going to get there any time soon.

Obama – Clinton 2012

[ 68 ] December 30, 2011 | Dave Brockington

or so desires Robert Reich.

I have several quibbles with this, from an empirical perspective. First, the strong implication is that Obama-Clinton would gain more votes than Obama-Biden, or specifically, “Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.”

There is no empirical evidence that the VP nominee makes a substantive difference in the vote; indeed, the VP nominee only makes the most marginal of differences in their home state (at a whopping 0.3%, with this article an outlier at 2.5%). Nor did Sarah Palin have a measurable effect on the outcome, either pro or con, though that 0.5% – 2.5% boost in Alaska quite likely secured those three critical electoral college votes for the Republicans as they were clearly in doubt.

Second, as Reich believes that the possibility exists for another recession prior to November, “Clinton would help deflect attention from the bad economy and put it on foreign policy, where she and Obama have shined.” Again, empirically, foreign policy will not make much of a difference against the backdrop of a bad economy; ironically, those who give a damn about foreign policy would likely point out that removing her as Secretary of State is a negative, not a positive.

Finally:

The deal would also make Clinton the obvious Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 – offering the Democrats a shot at twelve (or more) years in the White House, something the Republicans had with Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush but which the Democrats haven’t had since FDR. Twelve years gives the party in power a chance to reshape the Supreme Court as well as put an indelible stamp on America.

I agree with the Supreme Court statement; that’s where presidential legacy is at. However, this assumes an Obama-Clinton ticket wins in 2012, which is not obvious. Losing as VP nominee doesn’t burnish Clinton’s credentials for 2016. Second, Clinton will be 69 years old on election day 2016. It’s not clear that she would even want to run at 69.

While I admire Robert Reich and find myself in agreement with him far more often than not, if we’re looking for a silver bullet to salvage Obama’s chances in 2012, this isn’t it.

Pay Teachers More, Get Better Outcomes? Seriously?

[ 75 ] December 29, 2011 | Dave Brockington

The blog over at the LSE, British Politics and Policy at LSE, has an interesting post on the relationship between teacher pay and educational attainment outcomes. A fuller summary of the academic article is here, the article itself here. Both summaries are rather superficial; the meat of the methodology and econometric models can be found in the full paper.

It turns out that, holy crap!, pay teachers more, get better outcomes. The theoretical reasonings behind this simple hypothesis are compelling:

There are two potential explanations as to why teachers’ pay may be causally linked to pupil outcomes. The first is that higher pay will attract more able graduates into the profession. As the potential supply of teachers rises because of the higher pay on offer, entry into teaching as a profession will become more competitive. This in turn will mean that the average ability of those entering the job will rise. Once recruited, higher relative pay and/or more performance-related pay may provide teachers with stronger incentives to improve their pupils’ educational outcomes.

The second mechanism is more subtle – namely that improving teachers’ pay improves their standing in a country’s income distribution and hence the national status of teaching as a profession. As a result of this higher status, more young people will want to become teachers. This in turn makes teaching a more selective profession and hence facilitates the recruitment of more able individuals.

The models are a bit parsimonious for my liking given the topic (and I tend to favor succinct models in my own work where possible), which is possibly reflected in an R2 between .2 and .5 (which for aggregate data is somewhat middling) for the models which estimate the determinants of achievement. This level of model fit is — to my eye — consistent with the bivariate relationship illustrated by Figure 1 in the summary (to which no R2 data are available in any of the versions available that I could find).

The policy prescriptions are sound for the recruitment of new cohorts of teachers, but these are likewise obvious: pay teachers more. However, they flirt with controversy when entering the tricky realm of how to apply these findings as policy for the extant stock of teachers. Again, here, most are sound, but this is likely to cause concern: “One solution is to provide an incentive mechanism for existing teachers to improve quality by paying them according to the percentile performance (in value added terms) of their pupils.” Incentives for teachers to ‘teach to the exams’ already exist; this would simply compound that with a blatant self-interest motivation.

I read this thinking “this is so stunningly obvious, I should have thought of it”.

I’d love to see how Greater Wingnutia would spin this, but that would require the denizens of Greater Wingnutia to . . . well . . . gather information beyond their one source, and that would require . . . well . . . effort and curiosity.

Turnout is Key in 2012 (duh)

[ 41 ] December 28, 2011 | Dave Brockington

First, I’ve been absent (and sporadic when not wholly absent) for the past three months or so. The dominant issue in my life (aside from my 5/4 teaching load) has been the in/ability for my wife and her nine year old daughter to relocate to England with me (or even relocate so much as 60 miles away from where they currently live, just outside of Portland, Oregon, until said daughter turns 18); this has been ongoing since the early summer, and reached a unfavorable crescendo of sorts between late September and early November. I won’t be discussing it here in detail any time soon as the next court date is set for late February, but I have used it as a timely case study in my American politics class in England, as it is an example of the tension between Constitutional and State law.

On Boxing Day, Ruy Teixeira published a decent piece in TNR telling us largely what we already know — the youth vote is key to Obama’s chances in 2012 — and offers a couple policy / campaign prescriptions that could assist in his re-election.

We know that the decline in mobilization of the youth vote certainly did not help the prospects of the Democrats in 2010, much as the low turnout aided in the “surprising” elections of 2009. I’ve been using data from the 2010 mid-terms to illustrate my “turnout matters” lecture. While we can’t divine too much from aggregate numbers, in 2008 Obama garnered 65.2 million votes to McCain’s 52.2 million; in 2010, Democratic House candidates received 36.2 million to the Republicans 42.7 million. It’s both an article of faith and demonstrable empirical reality that smaller electorates favor more conservative candidates as the overall decline in turnout does not affect constituent SES components equally.

Exit polling data from 2010 supports this position (although the vagaries of exit polling validity should be taken into account here): when asked for whom a respondent voted for President in 2008, it was a draw at 45% to 45%; in 2008 Obama won by 7.2%. The 18-29 year-old cohort was 18% of the total electorate in 2008, yet only 11% in 2010. In 2008, that cohort broke 3 to 1 for Obama.

While the Republican nomination is up in the air and has evolved into a two-way fight between Romney and Gingrich, and it’s possible that it could take several months to resolve, especially with the Republicans adopting a form of PR for the nomination fight this year, my hunch is that it will be Romney in the end (assuming a non-brokered convention). My thinking for this is that Gingrich, like all of the “Not Romney” candidates over the past few months, has peaked too soon; Romney has superior organization, and while the primary electorate for that party has a strong batshit crazy caucus, one would think that the Republicans in the aggregate would prefer to nominate someone who could win rather than their own McGovern. Romney will look good finishing second to Ron Paul in Iowa, wins New Hampshire, and parleys that into a better than two to three week old polling data from South Carolina and Florida would currently indicate.

If it’s Romney, it will be close. Current aggregates on RCP have Obama up 2.5% in a head-to-head against Romney; 8.9% over Gingrich. This is the biggest lead against Romney that I can recall since September; we cover the state of the nomination in my American politics class once a week. At polling this close, mobilization will matter.

A paper recently released by Study of the American Electorate at American University (which I can’t seem to locate) suggests that the 18-29 cohort will participate at a rate lower than 2008. We all expect this, and I’d like to see the study to examine the methodology and the estimated erosion in turnout from this critical cohort. Indeed, Teixeira reports a Pew study that this cohort favors Obama over Romney 61-37. While Teixeira is broadly correct in his prescriptions for Obama’s securing similar lopsided support from this cohort in 2012, what he doesn’t discuss is mobilizing this cohort. Being overwhelmingly supported by a cohort is meaningless if they don’t vote. Stating the obvious, if they participate at 2010 rates, Obama’s job is that much more difficult.

If any of the above makes little sense in places, it’s because this was written while simultaneously listening to this: Celtic 1-0 Rangers.

1-6

[ 47 ] October 23, 2011 | Dave Brockington

Manchester United 1 – 6 Manchester City.

In the past, I would have absolutely delighted in this result. However, the cynic in me observes yet more evidence that in order to challenge for the title, one needs ownership with deep pockets and no business acumen. Arsenal were forced to sell Samir Nasri to Man City because there was no chance in hell Arsenal could match the wage offer of City, which I’ve read as four to five times what Arsenal offered in their contract extension.

And Nasri started on the bench against United.

British Attitudes Towards the European Union

[ 8 ] October 23, 2011 | Dave Brockington

are typically grim. It must be part of the genetic code for the Conservatives to bicker to the point of self-destruction over the EU; indeed, a Tory backbench revolt will surface in a vote tomorrow on whether or not the UK should hold a referendum on continued membership in the EU. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 Tory MPs are expected to defy a three-line whip ordered by the Prime Minister. The Economist is correct to point out both that the referendum won’t happen, and that leaving the European Union is a terrible idea anyway. Furthermore, how credible would a “renegotiate” result be? First, the other 26 countries in the EU could simply reply non, and second, they would correctly point out that the UK has renegotiated or opted out of a hell of a lot already; the UK does try to treat the EU as an À la carte experience as it stands.

Hypothetically, what would the results of such a referendum look like? UK Polling Report has a nice article today on public opinion towards the EU, and makes several good points, the best of which is that public opinion today might look quite different from that which follows a campaign:

Polls on attitudes towards Europe have become increasingly anti-EU in recent years, but this is not a long term trend. Looking at long term trackers from MORI, attitudes towards the European Union and its predecessors have ebbed and flowed over the years – the peak of opposition towards Europe was in the early 1980s, its nadir in the late 1980s and early 90s (while I’m on the subject of changing attitudes towards Europe, its probably also worth noting the experience of the 1975 referendum. Before the campaign started polls showed a majority in favour of withdrawal, eventually people voted 2-1 in favour of staying in – so don’t assume that because polls currently suggest people would vote to leave that they actually would in practice).

The article then proceeds on to a nuanced discussion of salience: why it matters, how it’s difficult to measure, etc. I’d add here that salience matters only insomuch as it should color our understanding of polling data in absence of an actual referendum; it’s possible that the strong anti-EU tendencies in public opinion are reflexive expressions of attitudes towards an issue of minimal importance, and once it’s real, and debated within the broader context of a campaign, then low-salience issues are more susceptible to shifting opinion. However, once the voter is actually confronted with the two-stage decision of whether or not to vote, and if so, for what?, salience should only affect the first decision. In other words, salience is a non issue once a voter decides to vote in such a referendum: public opinion on low salience items are less immutable, but salience per se should not have a discernible impact on the choice.

I’m not as sanguine as the paragraph quoted above regarding the chances of a majority (or even plurality in a three-option referendum) coming out in favor of continued membership int he European Union. Likewise, neither are all three major party leaders, which is why all three have issued three-line whips to their MPs to prevent such a referendum from hitting the ballot.