The Myth of the Independent Voter

Richard Wolf at USA Today reported today that the number of Independent voters have declined precipitously since 2008. Examining the registration statistics from more than 20 states, Wolf writes that voters are leaving the two major parties in ‘droves.’ 

He goes on to suggest that:

The pattern continues a decades-long trend that has seen a diminution in the power of political parties, giving rise to independents as Ross Perot and Ralph Nader and the popularity this year of libertarian Republican Ron Paul.

Wolf goes on to suggest that this trend could impact the 2012 Presidential election in key swing states, including Colorado. Contrary to Wolf’s assertion, however, there is little evidence for a decline in either of the two major parties.

The problem with Wolf’s argument is that the increased number of Independents does not necessarily lead to his conclusions.  Indeed, the implicit assumption that most people hold about Independents is that they are unaffected by party ID, which political scientists have long agreed is the core consideration for understanding American voting behavior. That assumption, however, is far from true.

In their important book, The Myth of the Independent Voter,  Bruce E. Keith et al. argue that far from being unaffected by party ID, the vast majority of Independent voters are actually closet partisans.  By examining polling data gathered by the University of Michigan as part of the American National Election Studies since 1952, they find that even though there has been a remarkable increase in the proportion of Independent voters, most still lean toward one party or the other, so much so that they function essentially like partisans.  The number of true Independents, the authors argue, have remained relatively constant throughout the post-World War II period. 

Of course, it is impossible for Wolf to know if there has been an increase in true Independent voters or just closet partisans simply by looking at registration statistics. Polling data would be needed to make that kind of conclusion for his newspaper report. Nevertheless, this oversight does diminish the importance of the ‘trend’ identified by Wolf.  In fact, the increased polarization of the electorate as well as the ideological “sorting-out” that made conservative almost synonymous with Republican has, if anything, strengthened the influence of political parties and call into question what political scientists call ‘the decline of party thesis.’ 

It is unlikely, in other words,  that the decline in major party registration will have any significant impact on the stability of the two party system in general, let alone the 2012 Presidential election.

Al Sharpton on MSNBC

I sat down and watched MSNBC yesterday for the first time in months. And, my first foray back into cable news was the tail-end of Al Sharpton’s show, Politics Nation.  I was appalled. The show was horrible.  Sharpton looked uncomfortable and stiff; he has no charisma in front of the camera, and he stumbled over the words on the teleprompter. The awkwardness Sharpton projected was palpable, and it affected his interactions with his guests.   

More than anything else, though, the hallmark of a good cable news host is someone who is articulate and quick witted—two qualities that make Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow, for example, so successful. Al Sharpton is neither of those things. He rambled incessantly. His political arguments often amounted to tautologies.  He is loud, overly partisan, and his moralistic rhetoric was grating.  It was painful to watch.

I don’t know who made the decision to give Sharpton his own show, but he needs to be fired.  As does Sharpton. 

Satire As The Best Defense Against Lunacy

I always love it when political leaders get publicly mocked for their flagrant disregard for the truth.  The most recent example comes courtesy of the Colbert Report, where he lampoons Senator Jon Kyl for making the absurd statement during last week’s budget showdown that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does are provide abortions.

Watch:

Other brilliant tweets include:

Jon Kyl holds the Guinness World Record for "Largest Collection of Penis Enlargers."

Legally, Jon Kyl cannot be within 100 yards of Helen Mirren.

Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.

In 2009, Jon Kyl lost $380,000 wagering on dwarf tossing.

And my personal favorite:

John Kyl is 90% prune juice.

Diana DeGette Is Doing…Something!

John Tomasic at the Colorado Independent published a story yesterday about the ways Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette is finding herself at the leading the cause against GOP efforts to curtail abortion rights:

Colorado Representative and head of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus Diana DeGette is surprised to find herself doing heated battle on a number of fronts in the war over abortion rights this early in the year. This session of Congress was supposed to be about jobs and the economy, she has said, but the new Republican majority right out of the gate has gone full steam ahead with two bills aimed at expanding restrictions on federal abortion funding while, outside of Capitol Hill, conservative media activists have launched an attack on Planned Parenthood, using cut-and-paste undercover videos to spur Congress to slash all federal aid to the organization.

“I’m surprised, given that the number one issue right now is jobs, that the Republican leadership would make [this] extreme position one of their top three priorities of the session,” DeGette told Politico.

DeGette’s fight in defense of abortion rights is commendable. What is more commendable, however, is the fact that she is doing anything at all.  Representing CD-1, which is confined to mainly the Denver city limits, DeGette is in perhaps the safest Democratic district in Colorado. In part because of that safety, she is often criticized for being an absentee Representative for her district, rarely attending public events and doing little to help fellow colleagues during election time. 

As such, I am pleased to see DeGette getting out in front on this issue.  Maybe she can use this as a stepping stone for leading on other issues as the most senior Colorado Democrat in Congress.

Liberal Bias in Academia, Continued.

A former colleague of mine made some interesting and noteworthy comments to me about how self-selection can lead to shoddy scholarship and diminish the stature of the academy.  He writes:

I think this phenomenon is largely a product of self-selection. People who believe they can use their intellects to decipher society and remake it in their own image tend to go into sociology because that was the whole point of the discipline from Durkheim and Weber on forward. The various "studies" programs that arose out of sociology (Women's, African-American, Ethnic, etc.) tend to attract the same sort of people. One consequence is the rift between those who go into the "studies" programs vs. the traditional disciplines; just ask anyone who has ever sat through the tension of a seminar cross-listed in history and women's studies (like me, for example).

Personally, I have found this phenomenon to be quite disturbing because it stops certain questions from being asked and allows people to get away with shoddy scholarship. And that is worrisome, because the public should not be asked to shoulder the cost of a poorly reasoned political agenda.

I am reminded of the kerfuffle over Ward Churchill's remarks [at the University of Colorado] over the September 11 attacks a few years back. I think the basis of his arguments had merit. Unfortunately, he delivered them in a strident fashion that assumed a friendly audience that wouldn't bother to ask about his credentials, methodology, or footnotes, and that assumption destroyed his career and tarnished the academy. If his department and discipline had been more politically diverse and more critical of his work, he might still have a job right now, and there might be a more sustained and nuanced critique of American capital in public discourse.

As it is, professors often talk themselves into irrelevance.

Liberal Bias in Academia: It Really Exists

John Tierney published an article yesterday in The New York Times that has elicited a great deal of debate and chatter across the interweb in blogs and on Facebook and Twitter.  His article, which exposes the liberal biases among social psychologists across the country and the latent discrimination against conservatives that exists in that field, has been used to launch a larger discussion about liberal bias in academia and why there is a demonstrable lack of conservative voices in the Ivory tower.

In particular, the article notes an informal poll done by psychologist Jonathan Haidt at a social psychology conference.  By a show of hands, Haidt asked how many conservatives were in a room of 1,000 social psychologists.  Only three people raised their hand.  According to Tierney, Haidt went on to make an interesting observation to suggest the possibility of discrimination:

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

Indeed, liberals and academics defend the leftward slant of their profession by arguing that there is no discrimination in academia because, for various reasons, conservatives self-select themselves out of university professions. Others, like Paul Krugman, go even a step further by arguing that even trying to create an equivalence between racial and gender discrimination and ideological discrimination is absurd because one can choose their ideology but not his/her race, gender, or sexual orientation. 

I think Krugman’s argument is absurd. I would like to see him spontaneously and sincerely change his political and economic outlook to look more like Ayn Rand’s.  Let’s see how easy it is for him to make that choice!

Nevertheless, even though I think there is something to the notion that liberals tend to self-select themselves into academia and conservatives tend to self-select out of it, I think there is still often discrimination at play. 

Megan McArdle makes a great point when she notes the interesting role reversal that has occurred between liberals and conservatives on the standard argument about discrimination when it comes to academia:

Conservatives are usually reluctant to agree that women and minorities are still often victims of structural or personal bias--despite numerical underrepresentation and some fairly compelling studies showing that hiring is not race or gender blind.  Yet when it comes to conservatives in academia, they suddenly sound like sociologists, discussing hostile work environment, the role of affinity networks in excluding out groups, unconscious bias, and the compelling evidence from statistical underrepresentation.

Meanwhile, liberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination--structural or personal--suddenly become, as Haidt notes, fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything.  Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don't really want to go into management because they're much happier without all the responsibility.  Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren't open new ideas; they're too aggressive and hierarchical; they don't care about ideas, just money.  In other words, it's not our fault that they're not worthy.

Truth be told, as a former member of the academy, I can say that I have seen the discrimination Haidt believes exists first hand.  As a graduate student in a history department at a major research university, I have seen faculty members reject prospective professors for no other reason than they thought they would be too conservative and because their research priorities didn’t comport well with the social and cultural priorities of faculty members in sub-altern studies. 

It is a real problem, and I find it deeply disconcerting.   

Why Teaching the Controversy Disserves Students

A new national survey of over 900 biology teachers across the country found that the teaching of creationism still flourishes in American classrooms.  The New York Times reports:

Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.

That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.

I am not surprised by these findings, but I am nevertheless troubled by them. Students who are not taught the fundamental difference between science and faith are being disserved by our education system, and “teaching the controversy” in scientific terms creates a false equivalence between evolution and creationism. 

The theory of evolution is an accepted truth in the scientific community in much the same way as the theory of gravity and the theory of relativity. That is, it can be tested and confirmed by empirical observation and the scientific method. Creationism, by contrast, is premised not on scientific foundations, but on a belief system grounded in faith. Faith, by definition, cannot be empirically verified, and, as a result, it is a subject that does not belong in a science class room.

I am not opposed to the teaching of creationism in public schools, but I am opposed to it being taught in a science classroom. Instead, it is a subject that belongs in a philosophy, religion, history or social science class.

More on Health Care Reform and the Supreme Court

Writing in the pages of The New York Times, Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe persuasively shoots down the myth that a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act’s constitutionality will be determined by a partisan 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court. 

Echoing some of the arguments found in this blog (here and here), Tribe argues that “the constitutionality of the health care law is not one of those novel, one-off issues, like the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, that have at times created the impression of Supreme Court justices as political actors rather than legal analysts.”

In his legal analysis, which concludes that a bipartisan majority of the Court will uphold the constitutionality of the ACA, he challenges the central argument of conservatives who want to overturn the law: that is, the idea that there is a distinction between economic activity and inactivity, even though it is found nowhere in the Constitution.

Tribe writes:

The justices aren’t likely to be misled by the reasoning that prompted two of the four federal courts that have ruled on this legislation to invalidate it on the theory that Congress is entitled to regulate only economic “activity,” not “inactivity,” like the decision not to purchase insurance. This distinction is illusory. Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system. They know that if they need emergency-room care that they can’t pay for, the public will pick up the tab. This conscious choice carries serious economic consequences for the national health care market, which makes it a proper subject for federal regulation.

Even if the interstate commerce clause did not suffice to uphold mandatory insurance, the even broader power of Congress to impose taxes would surely do so. After all, the individual mandate is enforced through taxation, even if supporters have been reluctant to point that out.

Indeed, often lost in the debate over the individual mandate is the original intent of the provision, which was to promote individual responsibility—a conservative notion—in having insurance coverage and to prevent the problem of free-riders in our health care system. Because free-riders can still get free care in emergency rooms and pass the cost on to the rest of society through higher premiums and higher taxes, the lack of insurance coverage by an individual has a substantial impact on interstate commerce. 

In the end, its ironic that it is conservatives who are arguing that asking citizens to take a personal responsibility to pay for their own medical care, and not pass the cost onto others, is an attack on one’s essential liberties.

Health Care Reform and the Supreme Court

Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic believes that the country is going to overreact to Florida district court judge Roger Vinson’s ruling against Affordable Care Act, which he struck down today as a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause.  The more important legal development as it relates to the ACA, according to Cohen, is Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia forceful dissent in the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Alderman v. United States, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court ruling affirming the use of a federal statute that makes it a crime for a convicted felon to buy, own or possess body armor:

In the ongoing debate over the Commerce Clause and the health care law, these are akin to fighting words. This is the advocacy rhetoric of the Tea Party. It is the partisan language of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). It is the hyperbolic theme of the fiercest opponents of the Patient Protection Act. And coming as it does from the two justices—unsolicited, unnecessary to resolve Alderman, unrepentant about its link to current political discourse—the paragraph confirms to the world that no more than seven votes on the Supreme Court are still in play over the constitutionality of the federal health care measure. That this is not a surprise coming from these two jurists makes the development no less extraordinary -- and far more important than anything Judge Vinson can or will say in his looming order.

I agree with Cohen that decision in Alderman to deny Certiorari is far more significant than anything a few conservative district court judges may rule when it come to the ACA. However, I think he is taking the wrong message from the decision.  The way Cohen’s post reads, he seems to suggest that the events surrounding Alderman portend a tough Supreme Court battle ahead for health care reform since two justices have already staked out a clear position on the issue. It could just as easily mean that the Court is weary of hearing any ole Commerce Clause case.

It takes four votes to grant Certiorari and have a case heard before the whole Court.  Alderman only got two, which means the other two votes—likely Roberts and Alito—sided with the liberal wing of the Court on a case whose facts bear, it could be argued, a more tenuous relationship with the Interstate Commerce Clause than the facts surrounding the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. If Congress has the authority to deny ex-convicts the ability to buy body-armor using the Commerce clause, then certainly it has the ability to regulate a health insurance and care industry that comprises almost 20% of the national economy.  

In other words, the message from the Supreme Court could just as easily be: If you want us to hear a health care reform challenge, you better give us more than a weak Commerce Clause challenge. 

“You’re So Cool!”: Jared Polis on Repealing DADT

Congressman Jared Polis was on Hardball with Chris Matthews last week to discuss the imminent repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy concerning gays in the military.  It appears that their are enough Republicans in the Senate now to successfully bring the measure to a cloture vote.

Here is Polis on Hardball:

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