The old South

Fifty years ago, almost all of the senators from the South were Democrats--today, only two (out of twenty-two) are.  But many accounts of the shift suggest that there was little change in political philosophy--it's just a matter of going from conservative Democrats to conservative Republicans.  It's possible to check this using the DW-Nominate scores, which basically try to reduce all roll-call votes to a small number of dimensions.  Although it's not based on prior classification of votes as liberal or conservative, the first dimension generally turns out to be pretty much equivalent to liberal-conservative positions on economic issues: for example, in the 2011-12 session, Bernie Sanders was at one extreme, while Rand Paul was at the other (closely followed by Mike Lee).

Since the scale of the scores doesn't have any natural interpretation, it's easier to work with ranks.  Here is a comparison of the ranks of Southern and non-southern senators on the first dimension in three sessions (1 is most "liberal"):

                   Non-South            South              

2011-12            46                     71

1963-4              50                     60

1947-8              51                     42

Another way to look at it is to divide senators into groups.   Here are the number of Southerners among the 30 most "liberal" and 30 most "conservative"

                      liberal                conservative
2011-12           0                         11
1963-4             4                          5
1947-8             4                          1

So it appears that Southern senators have moved well to the right since 1964.  I'd known that there used to be a some southern liberals, but was surprised that there weren't many consistent conservatives--if ideology were independent of region, you'd expect about 6.5 southerners in the 30 most conservative, so southerners were actually under-represented.

Of course, this comparison is limited to the first dimension--there was also a second dimension corresponding to civil rights issues, and southerners were almost uniformly on the "right."  The major exceptions were Al Gore, Sr. and Ralph Yarborough, both of whom lost their seats in 1970.  

Something happened

In April 1965, the Gallup Poll asked "In some places in the nation, there have been charges of police brutality.  Do you think there is any police brutality in your area, or not?"  The question has been repeated a number of times--the most recent that has reached the Roper Center was in 2005, although hopefully they have asked it within the last couple of months.  The percent saying "yes":

There was a very large change between 1967 and 1991, and little change since 1991 (or I should say, between 1991 and 2005).  Given the long gap, it's not possible to say much about exactly when or why the change occurred.

A similar question was asked in 1970 and 1991:  "When you hear charges of police brutality, how likely do you think it is that the charges are justified----very likely, fairly likely, not too likely, or not at all likely?"  In 1970, 9% said very likely and 27% fairly likely; in 1991, 22% said very likely and 46% fairly likely.

PS:  The question was also asked of a sample of blacks in May 1969:  40% said yes, 38% said no, and 23% weren't sure.

[Source:  iPOLL, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Less than meets the eye

Paul Krugman gave some statistics today on the rate of change in government purchases and economic growth in 33 countries from 2010 to 2014.  There is a strong positive relationship--increases in spending go with higher growth.  I downloaded the data and tried to reproduce his analysis.  There are some small discrepancies, but the figure I got is almost identical to his.  There is a strong and highly significant positive relationship--cuts in government spending go with lower economic growth.  

However, the figure represents spending and growth in the same year.  Suppose you take a person whose income goes up and down from year to year and look at spending in some area, like food and drink.  You'd expect a substantial positive correlation between income and spending--when people have more to spend, they spend more.   The same would apply to governments--when tax revenue rises, governments are likely to introduce new programs and give government employees generous raises; when they fall, they'll cut programs and impose hiring and pay freezes.

   So if you want to know whether government spending affects growth, you need to look at spending in year x and growth in year x+1.  The Keynesian argument is that there should be a positive relationship (government spending saves or creates jobs, people with jobs spend money, and the economy grows), the "austerian" argument is that there should be a negative relationship (government spending inhibits private spending and investment).  The figure:  

The relationship is weaker, but still pretty evident (and statistically significant).  But growth may also depend on last year's growth, not in a causal sense, but in the sense that much of what was happening last year, for good or ill, will probably happen this year too.  If you add last year's growth as a control:

growth=.4+.55*lgrow+.05*lgov

The estimate for last year's growth (lgrow) is statistically significant (t=6), and the estimate for last year's spending growth (lgov) is nowhere near significant (t=0.5).  That isn't proof (or even evidence) that government spending doesn't matter--it basically means that anything is possible:  it could help, hurt, or make no difference.  

Krugman says, "you can, if you like, try to argue that this relationship is spurious, maybe not causal."  Actually, I liked his original figure, since I agree with Krugman on economic policy.   But thinking about the possibility of spurious correlation isn't a matter of liking--it should be pretty much automatic.  

I refute it thus

Although things have picked up recently, the recovery from the 2007-8 recession has been slow. Why?  One answer is offered by Edward Lazear, a well-known economist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business:  "Threats of higher taxes, the constantly increasing regulatory burden, the failure to pursue an aggressive trade policy that will open markets to U.S. exports, and the enormous increase in government spending all are growth impediments."   Obama's economic policies have been aimed at "promoting social agendas" rather than "creating conditions that are favorable to investment."   Of course, other equally distinguished economists, like Paul Krugman, say that this explanation is all wrong.  You might hope that people would have measured the sort of things Lazear talks about and analyzed their relation to growth rates over time, but by and large that hasn't happened.  For example, I don't know of any serious attempt to measure the extent of the "regulatory burden" or the "threat of higher taxes."*

However, it seems safe to say that there's a systematic difference between Democratic and Republican administrations.  Ever since the 1930s, Democrats have stood for more social spending and regulation of business, and Republicans for less.  So Lazear's explanation implies that growth will tend to be higher under Republican administrations--for example, George W. Bush's, which had the benefit of Lazear's advice as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.  As I observed a couple of posts ago, that's not true--it's been much higher under Democratic administrations.  

But as I also observed, growth is affected by "luck," so maybe Republicans have had better policies but worse luck.  I took a closer look at that possibility by distinguishing three categories:  Democrats substantially better, Republicans substantially better, and both about the same.  I defined "about the same" as a difference of less than 0.1% a year.  Using the prior distribution discussed in that post, we get a 71% probability that the Democrats are substantially better, 23% chance that the two parties are about the same, and only a 6% chance that the Republicans are substantially better.    Those conclusions depend on the particular distribution, but if you start with a symmetrical distribution (that is, no initial bias in favor of one party) the chance that the Republicans are substantially better is invariably small.  

Blinder and Watson also look at Canada, France, Germany, and the UK.  Although specific policies differ, the general distinction between policies of the left and right applies in all of them.  They find that growth is higher under governments of the "left" in Canada, but conclude that probably reflects the influence of the US (Canadians happen to have had Liberal governments when the American has grown more rapidly).  They find no significant difference in the other nations.    Taking everything together, there is room for doubt about whether governments of the left are better for economic growth or whether left and right are about the same.  But it's pretty safe to say that governments of the right are not substantially better.   

*Actual marginal tax rates on top incomes are a lot lower today than they were 50-60 years ago,  but I understand Lazear as saying that proposals for higher tax rates deter investment, even if they are not eventually enacted. 

Good and bad influences

In a recent post, I discussed a Pew survey of eight nations in 1994 that asked whether various things were good or bad influences "on the way things are going in this country" (people could volunteer "neither" or "both").  Americans were unusually positive about religion (73%-15%, more favorable than all except Mexico), computers and technology (85%-7%, also second after Mexico) and the military (71%-18%, most favorable).

Americans were unusually negative about some things:  movies (27%-54%, least favorable), rock music (21%-64%, least favorable), and TV shows (25%-53%, also least favorable).*  This is even more striking because the United States has a disproportionate influence on popular culture, so that nationalism is not a potential reason for opposition.

*in some nations, they asked about "TV variety shows," but the documentation doesn't specify which ones.

What's a Democrat worth?

When straightening up my office at the end of the semester, I ran across a paper by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson that came out this summer.  It points out that since the 1940s the American economy has grown faster under Democratic presidents than under Republicans--a lot faster.   If we restrict it to the complete presidential terms in the data (starting with Truman 1949-53 and ending with Obama's first term), per-capita GDP growth has averaged  12.4% per term under Democrats and 5.7% under Republicans.  

The ranking of individual terms is shown below--the worst performance among Democrats (Obama) is almost equal to the Republican average.

*Truman          21.2%
*Kennedy/Johnson 17.4%
*Johnson         14.9%
Reagan-2         12.2%
*Clinton-2       10.7%
Nixon            10.6%
*Clinton-1       10.5%
Reagan-1         10.3%
GW Bush-1         7.4%
*Carter           6.7%
*Obama            5.5%
Nixon/Ford        4.6%
Eisenhower-2      3.4%
GHW Bush          2.8%
Eisenhower-1      2.3%
GW Bush-2        -2.4


As Blinder and Watson observe, the difference "while hardly a secret, is not nearly as widely known as it should be."   Ironically, the magnitude of the difference is probably part of the reason that it's not well known.  Given that the American economy is large and complex, and that presidents don't have total control over government policy, it's hard to believe that presidents could make this much difference.  So any reasonable person has to say that a lot of it is "luck"--growth varies in mysterious ways, and the Democrats just happened to be there when growth was stronger.  Once you've allowed a lot of it was luck, it's easy to assume that it was all luck.  So even people who know this fact don't talk about it, because they assume that it's just a fluke (that was my first thought when I encountered it in Larry Bartels's Unequal Democracy).

But this is not a reasonable conclusion.  The reasonable conclusion is a compromise--that the observed difference is partly luck and partly "real" (that is, the result of differences in economic policies). More precisely, you can obtain a Bayesian estimate by specifying a distribution that represents your prior beliefs and combining it with the evidence of the data.  For a prior, I took a normal distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation of 1.  That amounts to assuming about a 67% chance that any real effect over a term is less than 1%, 95% chance that it's less than 2%, and almost no chance (less than 1 in a billion) that it's as large as the observed difference of 6.7%.  So this distribution amounts to a strong prior belief that any difference will be small.  Since the normal distribution is symmetrical, the chance of an x% difference in favor of the Republicans is the same as the chance of an x% difference in favor of the Democrats.

Given this prior distribution, after observing the data there is about an 85% chance of a real difference in favor of the  Democrats.  The most likely value is a 0.9% difference in favor of the Democrats.  That doesn't sound like much, but for someone earning $50,000 a year, it would mean they could expect to earn about $450 more at the end of a Democrat's term than at the end of a Republican's term (and given that growth compounds, $450 a year more for the rest of their life).

On the other hand, there's a 15% chance of a real difference in favor of the Republicans--that is, that Republican policies were more effective in producing growth, but because of bad luck they ended up with worse performance.  So the data don't give a definitive answer, but if you're betting, 85% sounds pretty good.

Of course, you don't have to accept my prior distribution, but the point is that luck vs. a real difference isn't all-or-nothing choice.

Police, blacks and whites, 1981-2000

A few days ago, I saw an article that referred to a survey question on "confidence in police officers in your community to treat blacks and whites equally."  That question has been asked seven times starting in 1995, most recently in December 2014.  Among whites, confidence rose substantially between the last two times it was asked, September and December 2014, and the level of confidence in December 2014 was the highest ever.  

 

This led me to look for other questions on the subject--specifically, for questions about police in the country as a whole rather than your own community.  The good news is that there are some, and that they go back to 1981.  The bad news is that they stop at 2000.  The two questions that were asked multiple times:  [agree or disagree that] "these days police in most cities treat blacks as fairly as the treat whites" and "do you think the police in most big cities are generally tougher on whites than on blacks, or tougher on blacks than on whites, or do the police treat them both the same?"  I summarize the results as percent favorable (agree or treat both the same) minus unfavorable.  (The percent saying they were tougher on whites ranged from 0 to 2--I combined them with treat both the same).  

Between 1981 and 2000, there was a substantial move towards seeing treatment as less fair.  The figures are for blacks and whites combined, but given that blacks are only about 12 percent of the population, there must have been a substantial move in this direction among whites.