Steve Verdon and I managed to scoop Matt Drudge on this working paper by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the bias of media outlets using the ADA scale. Where’s my gold star?

Meanwhile, James Joyner reacts to the paper itself. I agree that the method of using think-tank citations isn’t ideal, but I can’t come up with a better one offhand that allows you to put members of Congress and media outlets in the same measurement scale without a lot of a priori assumptions. (There are some other critiques at the Dead Parrot Society.)

Update: As Brock points out, Alex Tabarrok scooped us all. Story of my life.

James Joyner has some poll numbers that pretty much explain why John Kerry hasn’t articulated much of a political vision beyond “I’m not George W. Bush.”

Kate of Small Dead Animals has visual evidence of the Saskatchewan NDP’s hostility to the United States.

Radley Balko is keeping an eye on the state-level activities of the increasingly prohibitionist (and increasingly misnamed) MADD and their pet state legislators. It’s not a very pretty picture.

Dean Jens explicates the original purpose of the Electoral College:

[T]he electoral college as originally conceived was expected to elect George Washington as many times as he could be talked into it, and then to very rarely actually give a majority of the votes to any candidate. It was viewed largely as a nominating committee, giving the House of Representatives a short list of candidates from which to select a president. It didn’t work out the way they envisioned, and, if it had, it may not have worked out the way they envisioned; regularly having the legislative branch elect the chief executive may or may not have proved to be a good idea. But it’s my understanding that that was the idea.

Alexander Hamilton’s explanation of the selected procedure is in Federalist 68. Funnily enough, one of the changes to the procedure made in the 12th Amendment reduced the “short list” of candidates from an indecisive vote of the Electoral College from five to three.

Jeff Jarvis has unkind words for the 9/11 Commission:

The 9/11 Commission has perverted its work and, in my view, committed the unpardonable sin of politicizing 9/11 and turning the attacks of mudering terrorist nutjobs into a litany of things we did wrong, things that are our fault.

No, 9/11 is the fault of murdering terrorist nutjobs and the only solution to this is to hunt down and capture or kill every one of them we can find wherever we find them—yes, even in Saudi Arabia, even in Iraq, even in Pakistan, even in New Jersey. I wish I heard the Commission giving us a few more suggestions about how to do that.

Steve Verdon links a working paper (an updated version of which will be presented at APSA in September) by political scientists Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the partisan leanings of various media outlets on the basis of their reliance on think tanks for “neutral” information in straight-news stories. Estimated ADA scores for the think tanks are derived from their citations by politicians in the Congressional Record, which are then used to estimate ADA scores for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News’ Special Report, and the three broadcast network evening newscasts.

I’ve only skimmed the paper so far, but this seems like a fairly sound approach to the problem. As for the results… well, unless your name is Eric Alterman, I doubt you’ll be very surprised.

Both Alex Knapp and James Joyner (writing at Tech Central Station, so feel free to dismiss accordingly) think the 9/11 commission’s standard of proof for al-Qaeda involvement in, well, anything might be just a tad too high.

As for Saddam himself:

Saddam’s government was never the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism. Iran and Saudi Arabia far outstripped him in that regard. Nonetheless, the fact that Saddam Hussein actively supported Islamic terrorists has been an article of faith since the Carter Administration. Indeed, Iraq was one of the original five states (along with Iran, Libya, Syria, and Cuba) on the original “Patterns of Global Terrorism” list compiled by the State Department in 1979. Saddam was a major sponsor of various terrorist groups, including the PLO, Hamas, and the Abu Nidal Organization.

Read the whole things.

Steven Taylor:

Can we say “matching funds are dead”? I bet we can. There can be no doubt that after Bush in 2000 (and ‘04) and Kerry and Dean this time, that the presidential primary matching-fund process created by the FECA is essentially dead. At best it is campaign welfare for medium-to-low wattage candidates.

While we spend a while hashing out what we’re going to do about this travesty, Congress and the Federal Election Commission might do well to heed the words of baseball guru Bill James, on a completely unrelated topic, the balk rule:

Q: Can you elaborate on how/why the balk rule doesn’t work? Thanks

Bill James: The rule manifestly fails to achieve its goals. It’s one of those rules that, when it didn’t work, they tried to fix it. When that didn’t work, they fixed it again, and they fixed it again, and they fixed it again.

At some point they should have stopped and tried something else, but they didn’t, so they stuck history with a rule which (a) is almost totally unintelligible, and (b) is arbitrary in its enforcement.

In principle, trying to prevent one player from decoying another is a dumb idea. The balk rule is like a rule in basketball that says (a rule that would say… theoretical example) that if you fake a shot, you have to take the shot; otherwise it is travelling. That would be a dumb rule. The balk rule is basically the same thing, only applied to baseball. [emphasis mine]

I think the bolded passage pretty much sums up the state of campaign finance law in the United States in 2004.

Mark A.R. Kleiman:

So now we have a choice, as voters: Are we going to ratify the decision to make torture (described in various weaselly ways) part of the policy of the United States, or are we going to reject it by replacing those responsible?

Great idea, but what’s our guarantee that a Kerry administration wouldn’t engage in the exact same behavior, if not worse? Where are Kerry’s condemnations of Gitmo? (Everyone’s condemned Abu Gharib, so that doesn’t count.) Mrs. Kerry (the ex-Republican) seems rather more forceful than Sen. Kerry. And, if Kerry is going to try to outflank Bush on terror, is it plausible that he can simultaneously promise to get tougher on al-Qaeda while renouncing the current means by which the U.S. is getting tough on terror?

Throwing the bums out is a great idea… so long as we’re not bringing in new bums that are equally bad, if not worse.

Collin May has a capsule review of tonight’s English-language debate among the major party leaders in Canada; by all accounts, nobody really stood out or got bloodied.

Jeff Jarvis asks:

Now it’s time that a social scientist or a pollster to measure the passion of our opinions—and an issue better come out pretty high on that passion scale before any reporter can say it’s deeply divisive.

Jon Krosnick at Ohio State (a social psychologist/political scientist) has published at least a half-dozen papers on attitude importance (e.g. “the passion of our opinions”) over the past 15 years. So, my suggestion to the pollsters would be: go forth and read Krosnick.

I’d also suggest that they go back and read Converse on attitudes and nonattitudes and “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” but I suspect they read—and forgot—such things long ago; they certainly don’t need me reminding them.

There’s a petition drive is underway in Colorado to allocate the state’s electors in proportion to candidates’ popular vote. All I can find is the title as it will be presented to voters; I can’t find the actual text of the proposal (including any minumum threshold requirement or whether there will be “bonus” electors for the plurality winner), so it’s hard to judge what the impact of the plan will be.

I suspect the substantive effect of such provisions, if adopted in every state, would be minimal across the board; while candidates might arguably be more inclined to focus on the most populous states, I’m not sure that the actual benefit of such a strategy would be very large. Instead, the sensible strategy would be to focus on states where you’re close (say within 100,000 votes) to gaining an additional elector, and it’s not at all apparent that these states would be more likely to be large.

At the individual level, I suspect PR for the electoral college would somewhat increase turnout in relatively lopsided states like Massachusetts and Mississippi, and somewhat decrease it in perennial “swing states” like Florida and Ohio, but I think that would have more to do with campaign effects than any sort of utility calculus by voters.

Incidentally, there’s probably a good undergraduate or first-year graduate student paper in an analysis of the effects of various electoral college allocation systems (PR, bonus PR, congressional district, plurality), with particular focus on elections with relatively large third-party voting (1948, 1968, 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2000).

More from Daniel Geffen, James Joyner, DavidNYC, and Jane Galt.

Eugene Volokh gives the legalist’s reasoning as to why the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Newdow v. Elk Grove; I still believe the original plan of the justices who voted for cert was to also reach a substantive conclusion on the constitutionality of the pledge requirement (perhaps in line with Thomas’ concurrence), but Scalia’s recusal threw a wrench in the works of that happening.

Meanwhile, Alex Knapp agrees with Dahlia Lithwick that the more important issue settled in the case may relate to the majority’s newfound respect for the principle of federalism, at least in the area of family law.

Contrary to my expressed preference in the case, the Supreme Court decided to duck the case by pretending that Michael Newdow lacked standing to bring the case in the first place, a decision that essentially concedes (at least in the mind of this attitudinalist) that the Court couldn’t muster five votes to keep “under God” in the pledge without using the bogus “standing” issue. Indeed, Stevens’ justification for the 8–0 ruling (Scalia recused himself) amounts to a non sequitor:

When hard questions of domestic relations are sure to affect the outcome, the prudent course is for the federal court to stay its hand rather than reach out to resolve a weighty question of federal constitutional law.

How, exactly, does the question of who has custody over Mr. Newdow’s daughter affect whether or not the pledge of alliegance is constitutional? Whether or not the child’s mother approves of the pledge is irrelevant to the legal issue at hand.

One suspects, however, that this holding action won’t settle the argument for good, as I’d imagine Mr. Newdow will find another athiest parent with uncontested custody, or a high-school student of majority age, to bring a similar case in the near future.

Update: Stephen Green, Eugene Volokh (via Anti-Climacus), Jacob Levy, Mark of Memphis Red Blogs, Steven Taylor, and Spencer of Mediocrity’s Co-Pilot also have posts on the decision.

I think the interesting political question here is why the Supremes granted certiorari in the case; the standing issue certainly could have been decided without an oral argument, and perhaps even without briefs (the case simply could have been reversed and remanded). I don’t want to post too much about my thoughts, because I think this might be a good discussion topic in Con Law in the fall when we talk about the structure and powers of the Court, even though the content of the semester focuses on topics other than civil liberties (except economic regulation, which is covered).

Eric Muller starts hypothesizing about MemoGate:

This is the sort of thing one might expect to see a young lawyer do in a “brainstorming” sort of memo—and that one would expect to see a more senior lawyer react to by saying, “Very creative. I like how you’re thinking outside the box. But none of this is going to fly in the real world. Please go back and rewrite this into something we can actually use.”

The memo is marked “draft”—so maybe all of this too-clever manipulation of hornbook law ended up in the back of a filing cabinet of non-starter ideas. Somehow I don’t think it would have been leaked if that were true, though. [emphasis mine]

Alternative hypothesis: today is June 11, 2004, a mere 144 days before a presidential election. This memo is highly embarrassing to the Bush administration (at least in the opinion of those who already don’t much care for said administration; the jury’s still out on whether rank-and-file swing voter cares about Jose Padilla and Iraqi detainees). Lower-level functionaries in major government departments are known to be core Democratic voters. Ergo, any embarrassing material—even if it was never used to justify administration policy—is worth leaking, especially considering that Abu Gharib was finally moving off the front pages in light of progress in the political situation in Iraq.

Counter-hypothesis: today is June 11, 2004, the week of Ronald Reagan’s death. The memo is highly embarrassing to the Bush administration, but about the most damning piece of the paper trail that ties administration actors to extra-legal torture by CIA and military intelligence operatives. Leak it now, and the news will be buried along with Reagan, as the only media outlets who will still care in a week will be ones with known partisan taint like The New Yorker, and thus, any such accounts will be immediately discounted by otherwise-swayable Republican elites.

Needless to say, Mr. Neimeyer’s Wednesday column, which referred to the recently deceased Ronald Reagan as “the anti-Christ,” attracted a rather colorful exchange on the Letters page of the Daily Mississippian.

Thursday:

• Sgt. Chris Hankins.
• Prof. William F. Shugart II (yes, that William F. Shugart II).

Friday:

• Monty Horne.
• Steve Phillips.
• Kenneth Jones (who somehow manages to work in a reference to Matthew Shepard, thereby invoking what has to be the 21st century corollary to Godwin’s Law).
• Prof. David Sansing.

For what it’s worth, I was never a huge Reagan fan—I was more of a Thatcherite in my youth, albeit perhaps a bit more of a “wet” Tory than she was. But in a world with Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, and the entire leadership of the Chinese Communist Party still around, I think one can find much better candidates for the title “anti-Christ.”

I also think Dr. Shugart might have more properly addressed his remarks to Mr. Neimeyer for having written such ignorant drivel, rather than complaining that the paper failed to exercise proper editorial judgment—although the idea expressed by Mr. Jones that Dr. Shugart’s rather brief letter constitutes a “chill” on free speech only serves to highlight the widespread misconception among undergraduates that the right to hold an opinion somehow includes the non-existent “right” to have that opinion go unchallenged if articulated in public, no matter how ill-informed or poorly-argued it is.

The always-engaging Geitner Simmons has an interesting post on the links between South Carolina’s backward alcohol laws and über-segregationist Ben Tillman, who was pretty much the intellectual forebear to folks like Strom Thurmond and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo in the 20th century.

Daniel Davies:

I wish Saddam Hussein was still in power in Baghdad because if this were the case, then about 3,000 Iraqis would have been murdered by his regime and would be dead, the roughly 10,000 Iraqis we killed ourselves would still be alive, and we would most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him and handling the aftermath.

Sebastian Holdsclaw:

This is pure fantasy. European countries and the UN were not in the process of figuring out how to get rid of Saddam just before bumbling George Bush talked them out of it. In January 2002 France, Germany and Russia were talking about having sanctions removed from Iraq and trade and diplomatic relations normalized. Even if he were one of those people who is easily impressed by European words decoupled from actions he couldn’t take comfort in the words. There wasn’t even a large rhetoric-only anti-Saddam pose being taken by European governments. At best there was the admission that he had been somewhat naughty in the past and aren’t we glad that sanctions have brought him to heel.

We would not be ‘most likely be well on our way to formulating a credible, sensible, properly resourced plan for getting rid of him’ if only the U.S. hadn’t invaded in 2003. Unless of course by ‘we’ he means the U.S. acting unilaterally. I understand the need to protect the leftist conscience, but let us at least stick to semi-plausible hypotheticals like “If we were lucky Saddam might have choked on a chicken bone.”

Needless to say, this is engendering a good discussion—a lot of it from the eminently sensible Gary Farber, whose blog you really should read on a regular basis if you’re not already.

Some of my more conservatively-inclined readers may enjoy tearing a new one in this hapless Ole Miss undergraduate, who I’m sure thinks he’s far more clever than he actually is. A free sample:

The anti-Christ is dead. That was my initial reaction Saturday afternoon at a Cincinnati hotel bar to the news of former President Ronald Reagan’s death. I know it’s an insensitive sort of statement to the news of a death of someone grandly touted as one of America’s “greatest presidents.” Frankly, though, he is one of the worst presidents we’ve had.

Oh, don’t worry, it gets better from there. I think the only thing he forgot to complain about was Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers.

Will Baude:

Voting instrumentally (in presidential elections, at least) is quite irrational, except to the extent that voters enjoy doing it. The probability of any single voter changing the outcome of a presidential election is 0.

Tell that to a voter in Florida in 2000 (his probability was about .002, which isn’t great, but beats the heck out of the lottery). Because of the electoral college, the probability of any single voter changing the outcome of a presidential election varies from state to state, and is a function of the competitiveness of the election in that state. But you don’t have to believe me; instead, believe, er, Chris Lawrence:

For [supporters of third party candidates], the strategic/sincere choice rests on whether their vote is likely to be pivotal. Although Downs (1957) argues that casting a non-strategic vote is irrational, that is only the case if the vote has a non-negligible chance of affecting the outcome of the election. Sincere voting for minor candidates is irrational in the sense that elections are not normally thought of as a forum for expressing general preferences, but rather as a “selection process”; however, if political actors respond to election results as if they are referenda on particular policies espoused by candidates, sincere voting for minor candidates may be rational in certain circumstances. If a citizen’s vote is almost certainly not pivotal, it may be rational for voters to show their public policy preferences by supporting a minor candidate. ...

Thus, voters may be considered rational if they express a preference, rather than merely taking part in a “selection process,” in states where their vote is highly unlikely to make a difference in the outcome. For example, according to CNN (2000), only 20 of the 51 elections for electors in 2000 were in so-called “battleground” states that were expected to be close. Thus, a voter in one of the other 30 states or the District of Columbia could presumably vote for a third-party candidate and thus have virtually no expectation of affecting the presidential contest, as their vote would be highly unlikely to affect the disposition of their state’s electors. (103–04)

Unfortunately, the astounding finding that the variation in “pivotalness” of an individual’s vote varied in 2000 by a factor of nearly 1000 between the most competitive and least competitive state didn’t make it into then-Mr. Lawrence’s dissertation, although it has made it into at least one presentation of the findings of this chapter.

It’s not every day that you see a citation of The American Voter in The New York Times, but thanks to Nick Troester and Will Baude I stumbled upon David Brooks’ Sunday column on partisanship and rationality.

First, to settle the discussion between Messrs. Baude and Troester: Brooks’ analysis is essentially correct, although the transitory attachment voters would have with political parties under pure rationality wouldn’t be “party identification” (an affective—or emotional—orientation) as we conceive of it in American politics. Under pure rationality, voters would select among the platforms of the parties and vote for the party with the most desirable platform at that given moment, subject to the institutional rules governing vote choice (i.e. whether we are using plurality elections, proportional representation, majority-runoff, Condorcet voting, the alternate vote, or what-have-you, and the district magnitude).

Voting, I’d argue, has both expressive and (to borrow Baude’s term) instrumental aspects. One votes to both participate in the selection process—the way Downs conceived of voting—and to express preferences about how the government should act in the future. Much ink has been spilled over this debate over the past four decades (“proximity” versus “directional” voting, the rationality of turnout, etc.) and I need not recount it all here. Suffice it to say: voters aren’t rational in the Downsian sense (Page and Shapiro notwithstanding), people (to the extent they are rational) seek to maximize their expected utility, and Troester (despite his minor fault of not being an Americanist) is right—an outcome I attribute to Troester receiving a Michigan education, versus Baude’s Chicago one.*

On to Brooks, who shows he’s a little out of his field in his discussion:

Party affiliation even shapes people’s perceptions of reality. In 1960, Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, “The American Voter,” in which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters out facts that are inconsistent with the party’s approved worldview and exaggerates facts that confirm it.

That observation has been criticized by some political scientists, who see voters as reasonably rational. But many political scientists are coming back to Campbell’s conclusion: people’s perceptions are blatantly biased by partisanship.

I’ll grant that he’s working in newspaper space, but there are a couple of caveats:

1. I think he ascribes too much prescience to The American Voter on the role of perceptual screens or partsian filters. Most contemporary scholars would agree its psychological underpinnings are weak to nonexistent.
2. Political scientists aren’t “coming back” to their conclusions; with the exception of the aforementioned Page and Shapiro, the Michigan approach has been essentially the dominant paradigm in American political behavior since around 1980, and was certainly a leading contender since the mid-1960s.

Still, this is about the best explanation of contemporary thinking on American politics you’ll find in about 600 words, and it dovetails rather nicely with Ken Waight’s work at Lying in Ponds on elite political discourse.

I originally meant to discuss Virginia Postrel’s NYT piece from last month on the highway reauthorization bill, but got distracted. Luckily, she has resurrected the topic at Dynamist Blog, and given me something more to talk about:

New spending also ignores all the “micro allocative efficiencies” that transportation economists like Cliff Winston spend most of their time worrying about: Could pricing make roads more productive? Should we target spending and construction toward the most congested areas? Are the roads the right thickness? Should cars and trucks be segregated? Are construction costs artificially high because of Davis-Bacon and other political constraints? Are we building too many roads in rural areas? What is the right tradeoff between capital costs and maintenance? And so forth… These questions simply don’t get asked, because highway spending is entirely political. It isn’t about making the roads more efficient.

While I’ll concede that the bulk of the highway reauthorization is about new spending (whether for maintenance or new construction), I think many of these topics will be addressed in the eventual legislation. It expands the authorization of toll projects on existing free facilities for rehabilitation and expansion, as well as authorizing new pilot programs for congestion pricing and “high-occupancy/toll” lanes. FHWA and state transportation agencies have been experimenting with new and improved pavement technologies for years, leading to the development of Superpave™ and better standards for highway construction. The idea of separating cars from trucks has been advanced in other venues—Texas’ own Rick Perry has spearheaded the Trans-Texas Corridor project, which includes separate truck and car lanes as a central feature, while similar ideas have been explored for improving traffic flow in both urban areas (access to ports in southern California and the Detroit-Windsor border crossing) and on rural corridors (namely, the congested I-81 route in Virginia).

So, in sum, I think many of the questions are being asked—and answered. Looking for those answers in the national political process, however, overlooks the other areas of innovation—public-private partnerships, state transportation agencies, and (shockingly) the federal bureaucracy—where progress on ideas other than pure pork is being made.

Mike Hollihan has a very interesting post that manages to summarize pretty much everything worth knowing about Memphis politics today. A particularly interesting quote:

Also, if Memphians who want out—for good schools, racism, safe neighborhoods, whatever—know that Shelby County is now, or will soon be, a closed book, then they just skip county or state lines and move anyway. But now they’d be out of the reach of Shelby County altogether.

And, thanks to a oft-overlooked portion of Tennessee’s “smart growth” law passed in the late 1990s (after the “Toy Towns” crisis), they’re now out of the reach of Memphis too. Part of the deal that half-heartedly imposed Oregon-style urban planning on the state’s municipalities was a little provision that essentially cut off the “nightmare scenario” under previous law that would, essentially, have allowed Memphis to annex any unincorporated land in Tennessee, given sufficient ingenuity by the Memphis City Council;* now, annexations across county lines require county commission approval, except in limited cases where a city already straddled county lines.

In essence, the legislature told Memphis: “we saved you from the Toy Towns, now the whole mess is yours to sort out—the catch is, you only get to f*ck up one county.” The legislature is looking mighty prescient right about now.

Professor Bainbridge roots for the Redskins to win one for a very idiosyncratic reason:

A 72-year streak links the victory or defeat of the Washington Redskins on the eve of election day with the presidential race. If the Redskins go down to defeat or tie, the sitting president’s party loses the White House. That leaves the fate of President Bush squarely on the shoulders of Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs. Hometown hero Gibbs, who led the team to three Super Bowl titles, retired after the 1992 season and now has returned to the team’s helm.

The Redskins face off against the Green Bay Packers at FedEx Field on Oct. 31 — the last game before the election Nov. 2. ...

The Redskins’ performance has aligned with the presidential outcome in the last 18 elections — a probability of 1 in 263.5 million, according to Dave Dolan, an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Bainbridge at least acknowledges that this result “is a spurious correlation generated by data mining.” No such luck for someone else who should know better (quoted by Steven Jens):

From UVa poli-sci prof Larry Sabato comes word that no incumbent president with a four-letter last name has ever won (I’m avoiding using the term “re-elect” so as not to exclude Ford).

Sabato deserves his own personal category here at Signifying Nothing—particularly considering that I’m stuck with using his god-awful American government text in the fall. Even “Burns, Peltason, and 17 other dead people” would be better.