Civility out of context
I fielded a survey recently, and this out of context result really intrigues me. For the non-quantitative people, these are regression results that show how each variable predicts the outcome variable with all the others controlled. The outcome here is agreement with the statement, “When most Americans debate issues facing the country, they are more civil today compared to ten years ago.” I’m looking at blog use, ideology and partisanship in this study, and here are the predictive results (the ones with the footnote symbols are statistically significant):
| Beta | |
| Gender (Female) | .03 |
| Age | -.05 |
| Race (White) | -.19*** |
| Education | -.11* |
| Income | .01 |
| Partisanship (Republican) | .10† |
| Ideology (Conservative) | -.04 |
| Conservative Blog Use | .23** |
| Liberal Blog Use | .03 |
| *** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05, † p < .1 | |
I’m pretty sure that the partisanship and conservative blog use results are manifestations of those individuals remembering 2001 as a time when everybody was being so mean to George W. Bush all the time. It’s likely also the reverse — Democrats seeing the current environment as severely uncivil — but the distribution of the blog use data suggests to me it’s more the former than the latter. More on this at MAPOR next month.
Filed: Science Is Real || 19:53, October 1 || View Comments
Peer-to-peer review
I’m in my tenth year as an academic, which means that my view of how things worked in the world of research pre-2002 is based purely on output — that is, the papers and books I’ve read that were published before my time. As a result, I really don’t know if the phenomenon I’ve been noticing lately is new or not, but man, there are unpublished papers everywhere. Conference papers, working papers, executive reports, etc., are posted all over scholars’ web sites, their academia.edu profiles, departmental sites, and then frequently logged in Google Scholar and/or touted in news releases. They may or may not make an academic splash, though there are certainly a number of recent conference papers in political science and mass comm that used the web to gain a lot of notice, but news organizations and commentators don’t operate with the same filters as academics do. This University of Washington study (including one author who is a former colleague of mine at Wisconsin) is a good example. It was linked by Talking Points Memo, in a way that seems fairly typical of how unpublished work is disseminated through blogs and other online political commentary. Its conclusion makes the paper appealing, as it seems to inject some empirical evidence into the debate over whether “Twitter revolutions” really have anything to do with Twitter, which has already gone back and forth in the press.
At the same time, it’s a study that hasn’t gone through the peer review process. Maybe it’s applying theory in an unconventional way, or maybe there’s something odd about the data, or maybe it’s exactly right (and I should note I’m only highlighting this study because it’s the most recent example I’ve come across — there are dozens more). But the widespread availability of unreviewed research presents a twist to the science news cycle model, which relies on carefully considered and reviewed conclusions to be reined in. If we’re inserting more and more research from earlier stages of the process into our discussions of public policy, current events, etc., we could see major challenges to the peer review model.
Filed: Science Is Real || 14:16, September 27 || View Comments
My country, right or wrong
Via Matthew Yglesias, the Washington Post seems to have come close to answering the question I asked in the last post:
17. Please tell me whether you agree or disagree with the following statement: Whatever its faults, the United States still has the best system of government in the world. Do you agree or disagree?
Agree Disagree No opinion 9/8/11 77 21 2 10/3/10 77 21 2 12/19/07* 81 17 1 12/15/00 89 11 * 5/6/96** 83 15 2 4/9/95** 85 14 1 9/1/94** 84 13 3 *ABC News/Facebook; **ABC News
I’d quibble with the wording a bit (“Whatever its faults” seems like it would prime dismissal of those faults), and I think this is a question that’s being asked in the absence of much knowledge of other political systems among the American public, but still, we’re not getting rid of the Senate any time soon.
Filed: Science Is Real || 22:24, August 14 || View Comments
Structure and cosmetics
Matt Yglesias has a solid post summing up something he’s been harping on quite a bit lately — the strange obsession of Washington elites with a fantasy, “centrist” president. The main point he makes — that we already have a decidedly centrist president, and that a “non-partisan” replacement for Obama wouldn’t change anything in terms of policy — is the most salient one on this particular topic. All of the pining for Mike Bloomberg, Lincoln Chaffee or whomever the third-party flavor of the month is rests on the fervent and mistaken belief that Barack Obama’s agenda is that of a socialist revolutionary.
But the secondary point that Yglesias makes is actually the more broadly interesting one:
The main difference, as far as I can see, is that getting executive branch nominees confirmed would be much more difficult for a nonpartisan president. Essentially every nominee would be greeted with overwhelming hostility from all quarters as Senators seek leverage points to influence executive branch policy.
It’s boring, and it’s not a satisfying answer, but it’s true that most of the structural-institutional problems with the federal government can be traced back to the Senate, either in its existence or its design. This is just one example — the president has to go to the Senate, hat in hand, to get a significant portion of his administration staffed. Add the filibuster to the mix, and you’re left with a situation in which 41 senators can decide that they don’t like an executive agency and that it can’t have a director, no matter what. The routine deployment of filibuster threats and anonymous holds also means that standard-issue legislation requires a supermajority in the Senate to pass, and the Constitutional design of the upper house drastically overrepresents small states in both Congress and the electoral college.
Many of the problems caused by the Senate are things that the public dislikes — it increases horsetrading and bickering, and makes it more difficult to pass even minor legislation. But would it be possible to get rid of the Senate? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you could get 67 senators to vote for a Senate-abolishing Constitutional amendment and that the biggest hurdle came from the general public. I doubt anyone’s ever polled support for abolishing the Senate, but in the wake of the 2000 election, there was never a time when abolishing the electoral college even enjoyed support at the level of Al Gore’s popular vote total — that is, at the time when such a move should’ve been at its most popular, even some of the voters who got screwed by this institutional anachronism still didn’t want to get rid of it. I wonder whether this reaches back to the way civic education works here, with an emphasis in both formal schooling and informal norms on reverence for the Constitution. Even though it’s totally stupid in 2011, the Senate is a central part of how American government operates, and it appears that the public is much more likely to see and judge individual political actors than the largely invisible institutions that restrict them.
Filed: Super Special Questions || 16:29, July 31 || View Comments
Open tabs, June 12
Here are several things I’ve been meaning to talk about but haven’t had quite enough motivation.
- In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rob Jenkins addresses what he calls “the third rail in American higher-education politics“: online courses. In particular, he notes that success rates for online courses significantly trail those of traditional courses and sees a trend toward avoiding important pedagogical and epistemological questions in the face of higher enrollments in bad budget years.
- Matthew Shafer and Regina Lawrence of LSU have produced a study (forthcoming, I presume) examining news coverage of Sarah Palin’s “death panel” note. I’m particularly interested in this both because I have a study examining social media discussion of the note and because I’m doing a magazine write-up of an unrelated study, and this piece was helpful in thinking about how to do that.
- I’ll probably do a full post on Windows 8 at some point, but All Things Digital and Daring Fireball each have interesting things to say about Microsoft’s attempt to straddle the PC/tablet divide.
- A new report on British intellectual property policy suggests that IP protections actually get in the way of innovation, rather than spurring it. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve heard that the New York Stock Exchange is claiming ownership over any photo of the NYSE trading floor and is using that claim to try to stifle photo use by news organizations.
Filed: Open Tabs || 15:03, June 12 || View Comments
Safe seats
Nancy Pelosi is calling for an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting habits, making a pretty clear show of throwing him under the Democratic caucus bus after his press conference admissions. It presents an interesting wrinkle to the notion that Weiner should just try to ride this out, since he’s in a “safe” seat. This was the same logic that applied to Senator David Vitter, a conservative Republican in conservative Louisiana, who won re-election in 2010 despite being revealed as a prostitute-frequenter. But for Weiner, if Pelosi and the national party turn against him, suddenly his seat may go from safe — in that it’s a strongly Democratic district that is highly likely to elect whomever the Democratic nominee is in 2012 — to dangerous — in that its general election safety allows the party to feel free to support a primary challenge against Weiner, knowing the challenger would likely win the general election. It’s a good illustration that a “safe” seat is simply one in which party power players, rather than unaffiliated voters, have the most sway.
Filed: We R in Control || 21:05, June 7 || View Comments
I’m gonna cuss on the mic tonight
The declining relevance of physical media for audio has led to a declining relevance of printed parental advisory labels:
Parental warning logos are set to be introduced before songs and music videos on services such as Spotify and YouTube that contain explicit material, following recent concern about the amount of risqué music content too easily available to children online.
Music industry body BPI is to update its 15-year-old Parental Advisory Scheme – which is responsible for the well-known warning symbol appearing on CDs, DVDs and records with strong language, sex or violence – to “bring up to date what happens on the high street to the digital age”.
It’s an interesting attempt, but of course the thing they can’t replicate is the one thing that makes the sticker most useful (to the extent that it is) — the parent as physical intermediary in the consumption of media. A label that can be seen while the parent is making the purchase on the child’s behalf, or that the parent might notice when seeing a surreptitiously purchased CD sitting on the kid’s bookshelf, is much more noticeable than a warning that plays before a streamed song or an icon that appears next to a download button. If parents aren’t physical intermediaries anymore, solutions based on physical sensations (sights and sounds) aren’t going to work. I’m a little surprised they’re not jumping straight to a technological solution, like the parental access codes that are commonplace on TV receivers.
Filed: aka Syscrusher || 10:16, June 6 || View Comments
Red brick, green brick
An abandoned brick building near Choteau and 14th in St. Louis. Photo by Bill Keaggy.
A while back, I read that brick buildings in St. Louis were being burned down so that the bricks could be stripped, shipped south and sold:
But the blaze, one of 391 fires at vacant buildings in the city over the past two years, may have had a more sinister cause. Law enforcement officials, politicians and historic preservationists here have concluded that brick thieves are often to blame, deliberately torching buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.
“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”
Driving through downtown yesterday I found myself thinking about this, because downtown St. Louis is littered with abandoned, bombed-out warehouses and factories made of this same brick. There are a lot of them, butting right up against attractions such as Busch Stadium, and they are a significant source of blight in the area. To the extent that St. Louis has a crime problem (and it does), these big, empty buildings aren’t helping make things better.
Presumably somebody owns these properties and pays property taxes on them, or the city owns them. Either way, if this St. Louis brick is in high-enough demand to warrant burning houses down to steal it, why not tear these things down and sell the brick? They’re in no shape to move new businesses in anyway — if something were going to happen in these buildings they’d need near-total renovation. Perhaps there’s a good answer to this, but I’m not sure what it might be.