For whatever reason, I’m on a “data is complicated kick.”

So, this story is one of many today discussing the gender gap in wages in ‘Merica. In a nutshell, President Obama pointed out “that women make, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar that a man earns.”  Critics (most notably the American Enterprise Institute) immediately pointed out that “the median salary for female employees is $65,000 — nearly $9,000 less than the median for men.”

There are LOTS of angles on this thorny issue.  I want to raise the specter of social choice theory as a mechanism by which we can understand why this debate goes around and around.[1] The basic idea is that aggregation of data involves simplification, which involves assumptions.  Because there are various assumptions one can make (properly driven by the goal of one’s aggregation), one can aggregate the same data and reach different conclusions/prescriptions.

To keep it really simple, consider the following toy example.  Suppose that a manager currently has one employee, who happens to be a man, who makes $65,000/year, and the manager has to fill three positions, A, B, and C.  Furthermore, suppose that the manager has a unique pair of equally qualified male and female applicants for each of these three positions.  Finally, suppose that position A is paid $70,000/year, position B is paid $60,000/year, and position C is paid $45,000/year.

Now consider two criteria:

(1) eliminate/minimize the gender gap in terms of average wages,[2] and
(2) minimize the difference between proportions of male and female employees.

How would the manager most faithfully fulfill criteria (1)?  Well, if you hire the woman for position B and the two men for positions A and C, then the average wage of women (i.e., the woman’s wage) is $60K, and the average of the three men’s (the existing employee and the two new employees) wages is $60,000.  This is clearly the minimum achievable.[3]

How about criteria (2)?  Well, obviously, given that one man is already employed, the manager should hire two women.  If the manager satisfies criteria (2) with an eye toward criteria (1), then the manager will hire a man for position B and women for positions A and C.

Note that the two criteria, each of which has been and will be used as benchmarks for equality in the workplace (and elsewhere), suggest exactly and inextricably opposed prescriptions for the manager.

In other words, the manager is between a rock and a hard place: if the manager faithfully pursues one of the criteria, the manager will inherently be subject to criticism/attack based on the other.

Note that this is not “chaos”: the manager, if faithful, must hire no more than 2 of either gender: hiring three men or three women is incompatible with either of these criteria.[4] But the fact remains—and this is a “theory meets data” point—one can easily (so easily, in fact, that one might not even realize it) impose an impossible goal on an agent if one uses what I’ll call “data reduction techniques/criteria” to evaluate the agent’s performance.

In other words: real world politics is inherently multidimensional.  When we ask for simple orderings of multidimensional phenomena (however defined, and of whatever phenomena), we are in the realm of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.

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[1] This argument is made in a more general way in my forthcoming book with Maggie Penn, available soon (really!) here: Social Choice and Legitimacy: The Possibilities of Impossibility.

[2] Here, by “average,” I mean arithmetic mean.  Because this example is so small, there is no real difference between mean, median, and mode in terms of how one measures the gender gap.  If these differ in practice, then the problem highlighted here is merely (and sometimes boldly) exacerbated.

[3] To be clear, I am setting aside the issue of “how much does a gender make if none of that gender is employed?” While technically undefined, I think $0 is the most common sense answer, and I’ll leave it at that.  

[4] Of course, as Maggie Penn and I discuss in our aforementioned book, there are many criteria.  Our argument, and that presented in this post, is actually strengthened by arbitrarily delimiting the scope of admissible criteria.

In this post, Larry Bartels provocatively claims that Rich People Rule! In a nutshell, Bartels argues (correctly) that more and more political scientists are producing multiple and smart independent analyses of the determinants of public policy, one of which, by Kalla and Broockman, I have already opined on (“Donation Discrimination Denotes Deliverance of Democracy“).

Bartel’s motivation for bringing this up is essentially this quote from this forthcoming article by Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.

The Gilens and Page is an interesting read, if only because the data on which it is based is very impressive.

Unfortunately, the theory behind the work is not nearly as strong.  In particular, the study is based on comparing observed position-taking by interest groups with (solicited) individual feedback on various surveys.[1]  So what?  Well, there is at least one potential problem, containing two sub-points, the combination of which I’ll call the Pick Your Battles Hypothesis.

Pick your battles.  Interest groups do not randomly announce positions on public issues.  Rather, any interest group of political interest presumably attempts to influence public policy through strategic choices of not only what to say, but when to bother saying anything at all.  While the mass public opinion data was presumably gathered by pollsters in ways to at least somewhat minimize individuals’ costs of providing their opinions, the interest groups had to pay the direct and indirect costs of getting their message(s) out. There’s two sub-points here, one more theoretical interesting than the other and the other presumably more empirically relevant.

Sub-point 1: Pick a winner. The theoretically interesting sub-point is that an organized “interest group” is/are the agents of donors and supporters.  To the degree that donations and support are conditioned on the perceived effectiveness of the interest group, (the leaders/decision-makers of) an interest group will—ala standard principal-agent theory—have a greater incentive to pay the costs of taking a public position when they perceive that they are likely to “win.”  If there is such a selection effect at work, then the measured correlation between policy and interest groups’ positions will be overestimated.

Sub-point 2: Only Fight The Fights That Can Be Won. The more empirically relevant sub-point is that, even if one thinks that interest groups don’t fear being on the losing side of a public debate, the simple and cold reality of instrumental rationality is that, if making an announcement is costly, any interest group should make an announcement only when the announcement can actually affect something.  Moving quickly here, this suggests that interest groups should be taking positions when they believe decision-makers might be persuaded.  To the degree that these decision-makers are presumably at least somewhat responsive to public opinion (however measured), instrumentally rational (and probably asymmetrically informed) interest groups will be more likely to make announcements that run against relative strong public opinion than to join the chorus.[2]  If this is happening, the question of whether interest groups have too much influence depends on whether you think they have better or worse information and on the types of policies that their views are influential on.

Conclusion. As political scientists know, observational data is tricky.  This is particularly true when it is the result of costly individual effort in pursuit of policy (and other) goals.  I really like Gilens and Page’s paper—the realistic point of scholarly inquiry is not to be right, it’s to get ever closer to being right, and this is even more true with directly policy-relevant work.  I just think that great data should be combined with at least a modicum of (micro-founded, individualistic) theoretical argument.  Without that, we might think umbrellas cause rain, hiring a lawyer causes you to go to jail, or chemotherapy causes death from cancer.  In other words, the analyst has simultaneously more data and less information than those he or she studies.

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[1] Gilens and Page also compare responsiveness to mass opinions of economic elites (i.e., those in the 90th percentile in income) versus those of the median earner.  While I have some issues with this comparison (for example, I imagine getting a representative sample of the 90th income percentile is a bit different than getting one of the median income earner and, as Gilens and Page acknowledge, the information held by and incentives of the rich are plausibly very different from those of median earners), I will focus on the interest group component of the analysis in this post.

[2]  That this is not just hypothetical crazy talk is indicated by the relatively strong negative correlation (-.10***) between the positions of business interest groups and the average citizen’s preferences.

It’s been too long since I prattled into cyberspace.  This Monkey Cage post by Kyle Dropp  Joshua D. Kertzer & Thomas Zeitzoff caught my contrarian attention.  In a nutshell, it says that those who are less informed about the location of Ukraine are more likely to support US military intervention.  This is an intriguing and policy-relevant finding from a smart design.  That said, the post’s conclusion is summarized as: “the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily.”  The implication from the post (inferred by me, but also by several others, I aver) is that this is an indication of irrationality.  I hate to spoil the surprise, but I am going to offer a rationalization for this apparent disconnect.

First, however, the study’s methodology—very cool in many ways—caught my eye, only because (in my eyes) the post’s authors imbue the measure with too much validity with respect to the subjects’ “knowledge.”  Specifically, the study asked people to click on a map where they think Ukraine is located.  The study then measures the distance between the click and Ukraine.[1]  Then Dropp, Kertzer, & Zeitzoff state that this

…distance enables us to measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.

I disagree with the strongest interpretation of this statement.  While I agree that people who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe are probably (not clearly, because some might guess/click randomly on Eastern Europe, too) more informed than those who “believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean,” I would actually say that the example chosen by the authors suggests that distance is not the right metric.  For example, someone who thinks Ukraine is Brazil is clearly wrong about political geography, but someone who thinks that Ukraine is located in the middle of an ocean is clearly wrong about plain-ole geography.

More subtly, it’s not clear that the “distance away from Ukraine” is a good measure of lack of knowledge.  In a nutshell, I aver that there are two types of people in the world: those who know where Ukraine is and those who do not.  Distinguishing between those who do not by the distance of their “miss” is just introducing measurement error, because (by supposition/definition) they are guessing.  That is, the true distance of miss is not necessarily indicative of knowledge or lack thereof.  Rather, if you don’t know where Ukraine is, then you don’t know where it is.

Moving on quickly, I will say the following.  It is not clear at all that not knowing where a conflict is should (in the sense of rationality) make one less likely to favor intervention. The key point is that if anyone is aware of the Crimea/Ukraine crisis, they probably know[2] that there is military action.  This isn’t Sochi, after all.

So, I put two thought experiments out there, and then off to the rest of the night go I.

First, suppose someone comes up to you and says, “there’s a fire in your house,” and then rudely runs off, leaving you ignorant of where the fire is.  What would you do…call the fire department, or run through the house looking for the fire?  I assert that either response is rational, depending on other covariates (such as how much you are insured for, whether you live in an igloo, and if you have a special room you typically freebase in).  The principal determinant in this case in many situations is the IMPORTANCE OF PUTTING OUT THE FIRE, not the cost of accidentally dowsing one too many rooms with water.

Second, the Ukraine is not quite on the opposite side of the world from the US, but it’s pretty darn close (Google Maps tells me it is a 15 hour flight from St. Louis).  So, let’s think about what “clicking far from Ukraine when guessing where Ukraine is” implies about the (at least in the post) unaddressed correlation of “clicking close to the United States when guessing where Ukraine is”?  This picture demonstrates where each US survey respondent clicked when asked to locate Ukraine.  Focus on the misses, because these are the ones that will drive any correlation between “distance of inaccuracy and support for foreign intervention” correlation. (Because distances are bounded below by zero and a lot of people got Ukraine basically right.)

There are a lot of clicks in Greenland, Canada, and Alaska. I am going to leave now, but the general rule is that the elliptic geometry of the globe (and the fact that the Ukraine is not inside the United States[3]) implies that clicking farther away from Ukraine means that you are, with some positive (and in this case, significant) probability clicking closer to the United States.

So, suppose that the study said “those who think the Ukraine is located close to the US are more likely to support military intervention to stem Russian expansion?”  Would that be surprising?  Would that make you think voters are irrational?

Look, people have limited time and aren’t asked to make foreign policy decisions very often (i.e., ever).  So, let’s stop picking on them.  It is elitist, and it offers nothing other than a headline/tweet that draws elitists (yes, like me) to your webpage.

Also, let’s not forget that, as far as I know, there is no chance in the current situation of the United States government intervening in the Ukraine. So, even if voters are irrational, maybe that’s meta: we have an indirect democracy for a reason, perhaps?

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[1] If I was going to get really in the weeds, I would raise the question of which metric is used to measure distance between a point and a convex shape with nonempty interior.  There are a lot of sensible ones. And, indeed, the fact that there isn’t an unambiguously correct one is actually an instantiation of Arrow’s theorem.  Think about that for a second.  And then thank me for not prattling on more about that.  [That’s called constructing the counterfactual. –Ed.]

[2] And, as the authors state, “two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,”

[3] Just think about conducting this same survey with a conflict in Georgia.  Far-fetched, right?  HAHAHAHA

A recent paper by Joshua Kalla & David Broockman has attracted some attention (for example, in this Washington Post story, Monkey Cage post, and this excellent, reflective post on Mischiefs of Faction by Jennifer Victor).  In a nutshell, the paper reports the results of a well-designed field experiment that provides evidence that donations to a Member of Congress “open doors” in the sense that being a donor promotes access to more high ranking officials in the Member’s staff, including possibly the Member of Congress himself or herself.

I am not going to critique the study. Jennifer does that well in several ways.  Unrelatedly, I am also not going to doubt (or cast doubt upon) the results.  Rather, doing what I do, I am going to make a quick point about the question at hand.

We have a situation in which a (quasi-)monopolist (the Member) has a “good” to sell (access/face time).  Simply put, let’s suppose this good is valuable to some people and, similarly, that donations are valuable to the Member.  Then, it follows from a classic corner of social science known as price discrimination that the Member (in self-interested terms) should privilege those who are willing to pay for it.  That is, those who want access most will be willing to pay more than those want access less, and an efficient means to allocate the scarce/costly resource of access is to give to those who are most willing to pay.  Is this normatively disturbing?  Hell, yes.  Is it troubling even in everyman’s language?  Oh, for sure.  Is it inevitable?  Well, yes, that too.

Here’s another, more methods-meets-theory take on it.  Suppose that a Member imposed a policy where donations did not offer an advantage in obtaining access.   Now, think about your position as a constituent/citizen seeking access.

What would you do?

Let’s suppose that you like money. We’ve already supposed you seek access.  Now, finally, put those two together in the face of the hypothetical Member who does not reward donations with preferential access. … You should be very happy as you realize that you can have your cake and eat it, too, as you keep your money and waltz into the Member’s office, swilling sherry and talking Grand Strategy into the wee hours.

The summary of this hypothetical is this: if you believe that is plausible (1) that members don’t reward donations with preferential access and (2) that potential donors like money, then the predicted level of donations to any members is zero.[1]

We know that people give money to campaigns.  We also know or at least strongly believe that people expect something for their money.  Putting these together, I will simply say that the conjunction of these makes me feel better, not worse, about our democratic system.

Paraphrasing at least an apocryphal version of Churchill, democracy is better than every system we’ve ever tried, but it’s still only capable of delivering second-best…at best.  The Kalla & Broockman results, as clean as a whistle, further confirm my belief in this.

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[1] This is a blog post, and I’ve been away for a while for many reasons, including that these take me a lot of time.  Accordingly, I’ll simply note that other motivations for giving (e.g., financing reelection campaigns in a purely instrumental fashion) can be accomplished by other routes in the Federal campaign finance system (party committees, other PACs, etc., and unless you are really focused on a given Member’s reelection (but why, except for access?), these routes have transaction costs/flexibility advantages over direct giving to a single Member’s campaign).

I’ve joked before with people that I liken social science models to rock songs.  My actual mapping is horribly incomplete.  So I’ll set that chatter to the side.

That said, the practice of modeling, in my experience, is a lot like rock ‘n roll.

You give me a topic, and I’ll think for a minute, make an awkward joke to stall, and then say, “well…I think we can throw in a bit of Romer-Rosenthal, maybe a touch of Crawford & Sobel, plus a flourish of valence, and Voilà! … We have a model.” (Participants at EITM 2013 can vouch for this…for better or worse.)

But….I’m serious. Modeling is a delicate balance of divine insight and practice.  And, given the relative and regrettable scarcity of divinity in practice, more practice than insight.

Modeling requires balancing (1) a substantive question, (2) generality, (3) the finitude of time. It lies at the heart of both what are putatively purely-empirical and purely-theoretical enterprises (the only class of social science theory that is “not-putatively-but-actually-purely-and-absolutely-theoretical-and-therefore-unambiguously-correct-and-applicable” is social choice theory.)  Methodologists, game theorists—they all rightly make assumptions to get to the point of their argument.

This is ROCK AND ROLL: YOU HAVE TO FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO MODEL.

If I said, “tell me how to make a yummy dish,” you’d ask “what’s yummy?” If I, being as obstinate and/or distracted as I usually am, did not answer—you’d have to make some assumptions about what I might like. If you assumed that I liked what everybody else liked, you’d probably hand me “Joy of Cooking.”  On the other hand, if you assumed I asked because I’d looked in the Joy of Cooking and not found what I liked, you would appropriately presume that I wanted something other than “the normal,” and you’d then be  seen by the outside world as playing punk. You’d probably (rightly) take off-the-shelf tools, utilize standard analogies, and leverage structure that threatens few to provide me with a new conclusion. That’s punk.

[During the perhaps overly-artsy bass solo, let me confess that not all punk is good. But all punk is, tautologically, punk.]

…Cue big build, drum crescendo, and….harmonic ending that sends crowd into rhapsodic frenzy…

Ok, What I’m saying is a short thing: good (formal/stat/etc) modeling is punk: it takes “old” tools, “expected” tricks, and combines them to “make the house rock,” or “get the message across.”  (Lucky are those situations when “the house rocks to the message.”)

Does the Pixies anthem “Gouge Away” address every possible situation?  Is it robust to every ephemeral, existential robustness barrage one might throw at it?

Hell no. That’s why the phrase “holy fingers” is so haunting. After all, “holy fingers” are rare unless you count Chicken Fingers ™.

So, when you want to say “well, your explanation for that is just an example, I’ll just say `Get Over It.’ … And then I’ll be gone, making more noise pop, playing a flying Fiddle to the Quotidian.

With that, I leave you with this.

This post by Michael Moynihan, responding in part to this post by Thane Rosenbaum, asks how “free” free speech should be.  The question of discriminating between different forms of speech—based on questions such as “is it knowingly false,” “how likely is it to incite violence,” and “is it political”—is an instantiation of an aggregation problem, exactly the type of problem that motivates the analysis and arguments in the forthcoming book I penned with Maggie Penn, Social Choice and Legitimacy.

But, aside from the question of how one would (or could) construct meaningful and coherent “bounds” on “free” speech, I was led to think about the instrumental nature of speech by the following quote from Moynihan’s post (which includes a quote from Rosenbaum’s post):

“Actually, the United States is an outlier among democracies in granting such generous free speech guarantees. Six European countries, along with Brazil, prohibit the use of Nazi symbols and flags. Many more countries have outlawed Holocaust denial. Indeed, even encouraging racial discrimination in France is a crime. In pluralistic nations like these with clashing cultures and historical tragedies not shared by all, mutual respect and civility helps keep the peace and avoids unnecessary mental trauma.” So one would assume that racial discrimination has been dumped on the ash heap of history in France, considering racist thoughts and symbols have been made illegal. How, then, does one explain that the National Front, whose former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was found guilty of Holocaust denial, is now the most popular party in the country?

The math of politics point here is both simple and arguably subtle.  Basically, speech limitations are not imposed at random, and citizens should draw inferences about the motivations of, and information held by, whoever imposed them.

Consider the classical “marketplace of ideas” justification for strong free speech rights.  In a nutshell, this argument says that free speech is socially beneficial because it does minimizes the probability that a “true” (and, by presumption, socially beneficial) argument will be prescreened or forestalled by speech limitations.  (Consider, for example, the creationism vs evolution debate.)

My argument here, though in favor of strong speech rights, is slightly different. Specifically, it focuses on constraints imposed by the government.  This is an important qualification.  In particular, democratic governments are in the end chosen or “produced” through collective action.  If “ideas matter” (as the marketplace justification justifiably presumes), then evaluating the policies of the government and its potential successors matter.  Then, the transmission of ideas between citizens might lead to changes in/pressures on the government.

Accordingly, if one presumes that governments prefer to maintain power, ceteris paribus, then a policy that discriminates between speech based on content can arguably be informative in its own right.

Here’s a quick sketch:  suppose that a government favors some policy that may or may not be socially suboptimal and people have variously informed opinions about the social optimality of that policy.

Suppose that people are prohibited from talking “negatively” about that policy.  If people don’t consider the government’s motivation to choose/support such a prohibition, then the prohibition would—for the sake of argument—tamp down dissidence regarding that policy.  However, if the citizens think about the government’s motivations—regardless of whether they be policy-based, reelection-focused, or a combination thereof—then the government’s imposition of the prohibition would justifiably lead to the citizens suspecting that not only was the policy in question more likely to be suboptimal, but also that the government does not have the best interests of the electorate at heart. (NO WAY!)

In short, all governments are at least practically dependent upon their citizens’ support. If speech “matters,” then governmental limits on speech—perhaps especially those accompanied by the purest of putative motives—should be viewed with suspicion.

Note that this logic gets even “stronger” once one considers the timing of the limitations: that is, if one thinks about a government considering the (per se) costly imposition of speech limitations that might potentially (in a naive world) mitigate agitation against the government, the fact that the government is willing to incur the costs of imposing such limitations in a particular policy area should make one consider whether the government was alerted to an increased frequency of individuals unhappy with the government in this realm.  This “strengthens” the conclusion about the effects of the ban—arguably mirroring the Le Pen example above—-because savvy citizens would infer that the imposition of a limitation on speech on a particular topic is itself indicative of citizen unrest on that issue.

With that quick post, I leave you with this reminder of the most eternal right.

The debt ceiling drama is inexorably drawing to its next installment, and the question remains: when and, more importantly, how will a deal get done?  To keep matters simple, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have stood by the long-standing pledge to not negotiate on the debt ceiling, but some Congressional Republicans have been pushing for concessions in return for a debt ceiling increase—in particular, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The State Department released its final report on the environmental impact of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline (fact sheet here) last week.  In a nutshell, the report is a “win” for pipeline supporters.  The idea of a “Keystone approval in return for debt ceiling increase” deal is not new, of course.  What I want to discuss briefly is the procedural details of the deal and their strategic (electoral) implications.

A key question in this game is whether Congress explicitly attaches Keystone XL approval to the debt ceiling increase or not.  Congress could pass a combined bill, or perhaps an implicit deal will be struck: President Obama approves Keystone XL and Congressional Republicans approve a “clean” debt ceiling increase, without (too loudly) claiming a quid pro quo.

I have reason to suspect that President Obama is trying to set up exactly such a deal: he said in June that the criterion for approving the pipeline is that is “not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”  The State Department report provides an argument that it won’t.  Furthermore, President Obama said that “the net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project is allowed to go forward.”

However, White House press secretary Jay Carney said today that Obama’s decision on the pipeline would be free from “ideological or political influence.” And the current spin regarding Secretary of State Kerry is that (1) Obama has asked him for a recommendation on the project and (2) that Kerry may be conflicted regarding his principles and partisan motivations.

The strategic question here for my purposes today is

Does Obama value “not bargaining” over the debt ceiling—a signaling of resolve, etc. that I have touched upon in various other posts (such as here)—more than the potential gain from allowing moderate Democratic Senators to vote for a bill (perhaps with a debt ceiling increase too) mandating approval of the project? [1] [2]

With respect to the first point, I think all three sides (Democrats, Republicans, and Canadians) are playing a bit of a game of chicken: nobody wants to be seen as “giving in” if they don’t have to.  I won’t work this through in detail, but the basics of “chicken” as pretty simple: each player would prefer to look tough (not give in) and have one or both of the others give in.[3]  At the same time, each player would prefer to give in if they knew that neither of the others were going to give in.  The best case scenario in this situation, it seems, is the “win-win” scenario of (1) Obama looking “presidential” and “job-creating” by solemnly approving the Keystone project at the same time as (2) Congress passing a “dirty” debt ceiling increase that mandates approval of the pipeline.

The devil, of course, is in the details: the timing has to be managed appropriately so that neither side is “clearly” trying to save face.  I think this can be accomplished by having the Senate vote for a Keystone approval and clean debt ceiling increase separately, then have the House vote under a special rule to approve both and send them to the President, during which time the President would unilaterally approve the pipeline, so that he could explain that he was essentially signing a clean debt ceiling increase.

Will it work out this way?  Oh, I’m sure it will be different.  But with the benefit of being “up close” in temporal terms, I would be somewhat surprised if we don’t see action on both the debt ceiling and the Keystone project in the next week.

With that, I leave you with this.

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[1] In 2012, a majority of the Senate voted in favor of such an approval, though it failed to get the 60 votes required to move forward.

[2] I thought about discussing why Obama might want a visible and positive Kerry recommendation, versus why he might want a negative and visible one.  The basics of one such argument are provided by my colleague Randy Calvert’s seminal article from 1985, entitled “The Value of Biased Information.”  I’ll come back to this argument at another time, I’m sure.  (And, to be honest, I have already stood on Randy’s shoulders elsewhere.)

[3] Usually, “Chicken” is described as a two-player game.  With more than 2 players, it becomes clear that Chicken is really just “private provision of a public good,” or the “who takes the trash out game.”  This is not the same as the Who Let The Dogs Out? game, which has no pure strategy equilibria (Baha Men (2000)).

All is not well in Thaliand, where the opposition Democrat Party is calling for its supporters (some of whom have been actively protesting for months now) to boycott today’s parliamentary elections.

Boycotting elections is not uncommon: indeed, opposition parties have recently boycotted elections in Bangladesh and the main Islamist opposition party is calling for a boycott of upcoming elections in Algeria. The point of this post is, from a strategic standpoint, why would a party call for its supporters to not only not vote for it, but to not vote at all? [1]

I will discuss two theories that can justify election boycotts.  The first concerns the opposition party’s strength, and the second concerns the ramifications of an election result being overturned.  In general, the two are distinguished by whether the boycotting party expects to “win” the election or not.

In both cases, to make the stories succinct, suppose that some proposed “reform” is the main political issue and, without any loss of generality, let’s suppose that the ruling party is proposing the reform and the boycotting party opposes it. (This labeling doesn’t matter, but keeps the language simple.)  I’ll start with “opposition party strength” explanation.

I’m So Popular…Nobody Showed Up.  For the first explanation, suppose that the opposition party expects that it will lose the election—it suspects its supporters are outnumbered by the other party, and suppose that the ruling party will press ahead with the reform if it believes that (say) 60% of the citizens support the reform.

If the opposition party does not boycott, and the ruling party wins with (say) 62% of the vote, then the ruling party will proceed with the reform.  The opposition party loses both electorally and in policy terms.

If the opposition party does boycott, then, while the ruling party will still win, the election result is less informative about the true latent support for the reform.  In particular, as opposed to the baseline case—where abstention by a voter is more than likely due to indifference about (say) the reform—each “non-vote” might represent opposition to the reform.  Thus, boycotting the election can lead to the ruling party being less certain about the underlying support for the reform and either modifying, or demurring from, the reform. [2]

Notice that this justification is based on signaling, and the logic is clearest when there is essentially no hope for the opposition party to win the election.  If the opposition party might win (i.e., it has nearly the same number of supporters as the ruling party), then it must trade-off the potential increased probability of stymieing the reform (in the case of a loss) against the reduced probability of both winning office and stymieing reform.  The second justification is more applicable when the opposition party suspects that the election won’t matter in any event.

It Didn’t Have to Play Out This Way. Sadly, election results are not sacrosanct.  Suppose that the opposition party suspects that, if it wins the election, the ruling party might disregard the election result and impose the reform anyway.  Such an undemocratic move might lead to various ancillary “bad” things unrest and/or a coup.  To keep it simple just suppose that the opposition party prefers the reform to be implemented after being “ratified” (even in a boycotted election) rather than implemented against a contrary election result.  In this case, because voting is costly, voting for the ruling party is otherwise distasteful, or for the purpose of recording an implicit score of (non-)support for the reform, the opposition might benefit from boycotting precisely when it suspects it might “win” the election. [3]

Elections Aren’t Just About Winning. Each of the arguments sketched out above rely on a key characteristic of elections: they aren’t the end of the game.  Rather, an election results is always to some degree a signal about the electorate’s preferences about the issues being confronted at that time.  Of course, the arguments also highlight how the proper interpretation of the “signal sent” by an election result need not be straightforward: as is usual, the fact that something might serve as a signal can infect the incentives of those sending it (in this case the opposition party) in counterinitutive ways (for example, see this point here).

More generally, the arguments provide two alternate routes to understand the legitimating power of participation.  That is, many people understandably say that free, open, and active elections are a foundation of a healthy and legitimate government.  This argument is often (to me, at least) based on the idea that people don’t want to participate in something that they don’t feel connected to and/or “served well by.”  This isn’t a silly argument—it does have a self-enforcing quality that is reminiscent of equilibrium.  But even if one is happy to accept that logic as “just so,” the next step is to examine incentives that logic provides to political actors in pursuit of policy and office.

With that, I leave you with this.

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[1] Especially in multiparty systems (especially with nontrivial electoral “thresholds” for representation and/or public financing), there are clear reasons for a party to call for it supporters to vote for a different party.  This phenomenon, known colloquially as strategic voting, is about coordination, and I will note it and set it to the side: strategic voting does not justify abstention unless there is some type of quorum/participation requirement.

[2] I’ll keep moving, but a moment’s thought suggests that, in some circumstances, this argument also suggests an incentive for the boycotting party to call for a boycott but send some of its supporters to the polls anyway.  The details are a bit complicated, and such an incentive (or, “comparative static of the ruling party’s beliefs as a function of the actual turnout”) might not work out in equilibrium, because the ruling party’s inferences get complicated and depend upon what it knows/believes about the opposition party’s gambit in this regard.  Nonetheless, it is a neat possibility.  TO ME.

[3] One could embellish this argument quite easily (to account for smaller parties also subscribing to its logic) by having the opposition party increasingly dislike the reform being implemented over larger proportions of votes “against” the reform.

President Obama’s SOTU speech has revived interest in Presidential power.  Erik Voeten (here) and Andrew Rudalevige (here) argue that Presidential unilateral action has declined in recent years, while Eric Posner argues here that “executive power has increased dramatically since World War II.”

The question of presidential power is a classic one in political science.  The recent debates illustrate three important problems one confronts when trying to measure it, one conceptual, one practical, and one theoretical.  Before considering each of these in turn, it is useful to summarize Posner’s already-succinct point.  In a nutshell, Posner’s argument is that “more pages of regulation produced per year” implies greater executive branch power.

I consider three issues with this in turn.

The Executive Branch Is a “They,” Not a “He.” The Federal Register is essentially the daily record of executive branch actions, somewhat analogous to the Congressional Record.  In it, the various agencies and bureaus within the executive branch publish all sorts of things.  The highest profile (but by no means the only) category of these are what are known formally as rules, or colloquially as “regulations.”

The problem with equating regulations with presidential action is that they are almost never initiated or even approved by the president.  That is, the theoretical gold standard for a rule’s legal standing (i.e., why citizens and firms ought to follow them) is that they are exercising/instantiating statutory authority delegated by Congress to the agency or agencies in question.  The sometimes byzantine fashion in which a policy becomes a regulation is beyond the scope of this post, but it is not uncommon for the process to span multiple administrations.  That is, the action or policy embodied in a rule may very well have been initiated while “the other party” controlled the White House.[1]

Thus, as I will come back to below, regulatory action is (at least arguably) the executive branch doing the work that Congress has requested in terms of “filling in the details” of statutes passed by Congress.

Additionally, at least in de jure terms, the power to promulgate (publish) a regulation is generally held by someone other than the president.  That is, the president does not “sign” regulations.  Rather most statutes with regulatory impact direct a specific official to issue regulations in furtherance of the statute’s goals.  Indeed, one of the most important developments of presidential power since World War II, known colloquially as preclearance, consists of a largely unilaterally-asserted power by the President’s appointed official, the director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).[2] What is somewhat notable about preclearance in this context is that, when this executive power is “exercised,” it usually keeps pages from being added to the Federal Register. But in any case, the existence of preclearance is an acknowledgment of the practical difficulties any president faces when trying to manage the incredible breadth of agencies with at least de jure regulatory autonomy.

Another way of putting this is that executive power and presidential power are related, but not equivalent.

All Pages Aren’t The Same. Of course, some regulations are important and others are unimportant.  But, more to the point, the Federal Register contains more than just rules.  For example, today (1/30/2014)’s Federal Register contains [3]

• 4 Rules,
• 6 Proposed Rules,
• 131 Notices.

Thus, the (vast) majority of the pages of today’s Federal Register are not policy. Rather, they are things like “Notice of Request for Extension of Approval of an Information Collection; Accreditation of Nongovernment Facilities.”  That is, they are notifications of government agencies actions, many of which are trivial.  More importantly, it is distinctly unclear that these filings—many of which are required (somewhat ironically) by statutes such as the Paperwork Reduction Acts of 1980 & 1995—represent nimble and potent executive power.

Is that a Congress Behind the Curtain? I’m definitely not one to argue that executive power has not grown steadily since World War II (in fact, you can read how Sean Gailmard and I narrate and explain part of this rise in our book, Learning While Governing).  But Congress still matters.  And, as I mentioned above, the canonical story of administrative legitimacy (which Maggie Penn and I discuss in our forthcoming book, Social Choice and Legitimacy) begins with the agency issuing the regulation with authority granted by Congress.

As many political scientists have noted in various ways and forms, procedure can be (and, in my experience, often is) politics.  That is, Congress and the president often fight most bitterly over procedure (see executive privilege, fast track authority, filibusters, notice and comment, impoundment, etc.)  A lot of the Federal Register is filled with paperwork that was required of the executive branch by Congress and, furthermore, by Congress under both Democratic (e.g., 1969-1972; 1976-1980) and Republican (e.g., 1995-96) majorities.

As a closing note, if you look at Posner’s graph for a second:

Credit: Eric Posner

I’ll note three features:

1. The really big jump occurs between 1970 and 1975.  The cause of this jump (during Nixon’s Administration):

• The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,
• The Clean Air Act of 1970,
• The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, and
• The Clean Water Act of 1972,

I’ll just note that Nixon did not get “exactly what he wanted” from the Democratic controlled Congresses in those statutes.

2. President Carter presided over an acceleration, and President Reagan immediately succeeded him with a dramatic pulling back, of the production of Federal Register pages.  I would definitively characterize the first term of the Reagan Administration as more “powerful/effective” than that of Carter’s.[4]

3. The (smaller but still big) jump is around 1990 and corresponds to the regulatory actions required to implement the Clean Air Act Amendments and Americans with Disabilities Act, each passed by Democratic Congresses with a Republican president.

Conclusion…? I guess the basic point of this post is that no single time series is going to capture presidential power.  There are a lot of specific reasons for this, but a major theoretical point is that, if there was, then Congress could leverage that number to “rein in” the president (we see this with the budget/debt ceiling every month or so these days).  Thus, a power-seeking president would attempt to find substitute ways to exert/exercise (truly) unilateral power.

With that, I leave you with this.

____________

[1] A famous (and unusual in other respects) example of this was the ergonomics standard, a history of which is presented here. Note that the linked history was written in 2002, right after the standard was repealed under the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (to my knowledge, the only regulation so far to have been overruled by Congress under the CRA)—things have evolved since then.

[2] OIRA was established by Congress in 1980 and is located within the Office of Management and Budget.  The Administrator of OIRA is subject to confirmation by the Senate.  OIRA’s main statutory mandate is reviewing agency’s requirements for information collection. However, the real “juice” of OIRA review is based on its presidentially crafted mandate to review draft regulations under Executive Order 12866, signed by Clinton and tinkered in minor ways by both GW Bush and Obama.  EO 12866 replaced EO 12291, signed by Reagan, which really established the preclearance regime.

[3] The Register is published daily, Monday-Friday.

[4] Before one says, “well, Reagan was pushing a deregulatory agenda,” I’ll note that (1) deregulation can require as much, if not more, notification and revision (i.e., pages) than regulation and (2) “yeah, that’s kinda my point.”

This Op-Ed in Forbes, “Almost Everything You Have Been Told About The Minimum Wage Is False,” by Jeffrey Dorfman, argues that increasing the federal minimum wage (1) would not affect as many people as you might think and (2) would not help the working poor as much as (say) teenagers.

The first half of Dorfman’s Op-Ed is misleading in important and ironic ways.[1]  I will detail three significant logical failures in it, and then provide a more transparent accounting of how many people’s wages would be directly increased by an increase of the federal minimum wage to $10.10/hr.

Three Failures. First, Dorfman either misunderstands or misrepresents the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions when he writes:

First, people should acknowledge that this rather heated policy discussion is over a very small group of people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 3.6 million workers at or below the minimum wage (you can be below legally under certain conditions). 

Dorfman should acknowledge that raising the federal minimum wage would affect not only those who earn a wage less than or equal to the current minimum wage.  The data that Dorfman is discussing excludes anybody who receives $7.26/hr or more.  Thus, Dorfman should acknowledge that the “small” group of 3.6 million people he is considering compose the relevant basis of discussion if we are considering a one cent increase in the federal minimum wage.[2]

Second, Dorfman starts comparing apples and oranges, writing

Within that tiny group, most of these workers are not poor and are not trying to support a family on only their earnings. In fact, according to a recent study, 63 percent of workers who earn less than $9.50 per hour (well over the minimum wage of $7.25) are the second or third earner in their family and 43 percent of these workers live in households that earn over $50,000 per year.

This is apples to oranges because the data in the (linked) study is from 2003-2007, before the Great Recession, but the BLS data is from 2012. Furthermore, Dorfman doesn’t take the time to actually report what the study does say (on page 593):

Of those who will gain, 63.2% are second or third earners living in households with incomes twice the poverty line, and 42.3% live in households with incomes three times the poverty line, well above $50,233, the income of the median household in 2007.

Let’s think about this for a second: ~20% of those who made less than $9.50/hr in 2007 lived in a household with an annual income (it turns out) of somewhere between $41,300 and $61,950.  I mean, seriously, helping this kind of household—you know, hard-working and distinctly middle class—that would be a ridiculous outcome.

In addition, I’m going to be quick about Dorfman’s faulty (and, I think, disingenuous) logic in his implication that people poorly paid job “… are not trying to support a family on only their earnings” just because others in the household are working, too.

Namely, if you are the second or third earner in a family, that does not imply that you don’t need the money.  In fact, I am going to blatantly assert that it’s probably the case that the number of “voluntarily non-working” 16+ year-olds in an American household is positively correlated with the household’s income.  After all, many people work a job for, you know, the money.  But, of course, some people might take near-minimum-wage jobs just to keep themselves busy.

Next, Dorfman starts making descriptive statements out of the blue:

...Thus, minimum wage earners are not a uniformly poor and struggling group; many are teenagers from middle class families and many more are sharing the burden of providing for their families, not carrying the load all by themselves.

The closest thing Dorfman putatively offers as evidence for the conclusion that these are teenagers (there is no evidence from what kind of families these teenagers come in the BLS data) is the BLS data, which again is constrained only to those earning no more than the minimum wage of $7.25/hr.

Finally, Dorfman says

This group of workers is also shrinking. In 1980, 15 percent of hourly workers earned the minimum wage. Today that share is down to only 4.7 percent. Further, almost two-thirds of today’s minimum wage workers are in the service industry and nearly half work in food service. 

But again, the point is that raising the minimum wage to (say) $10.10/hr, as President Obama has called for, would help more than only those who earn the minimum wage.

I’m not just going to point out Dorfman’s mistakes.  I have done a little digging (it took me about 15 minutes, to be clear, to get real numbers), and I’ll give a better estimate of how big that “very small group of people” really is.[3]

The Occupational Employment Statistics Query System, provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, provides a different picture of how many people would be impacted by a change in the federal minimum wage to $10.10/hr.

The most recent data, from May 2012, is displayed at the end of this post.  The points I’d like to quickly point out are as follows:

• In Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations, 50% of 11,546,880 workers receive less than $9.10/hr, and 75% receive less than $11.11/hr.  Thus, somewhere around 62.5% of these workers, or about 5.75 million people would receive a higher wage.
• In Sales and Related Occupations, 25% of 13,835,090 workers receive less than $9.12/hr, and 50% receive less than $12.08/hr.  So, conservatively, about 3.5 million people would receive a higher wage.
• In Transportation and Material Moving Occupations, 25% of 8,771,690 workers receive less than $10.06/hr.  Thus, over 2.1 million people would receive a higher wage.
• In Healthcare Support Occupations, 25% of 3,915,460 workers receive less than $10.03/hr.  That’s nearly a million people who would receive a higher wage.
• Overall, 10% of all workers (across all industries) receive an hourly wage lower than $8.70/hr, and 25% of all workers receive an hourly wage lower than $10.81/hr.  A rough estimate, then, is that at least one out of every six workers would receive a higher hourly wage if the federal minimum wage were raised to $10.10/hr. To put that in absolute terms:

Over 21,500,000 Americans would receive a higher wage.

…or, about 6 times as many as Dorfman implied.

With that, I leave you with this.

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[1] I will not address the second part of Dorfman’s piece about productivity shifts in the food service industry, and the “ironic” aspect of the mistakes in the piece is the conclusion of the first paragraph, where Dorfman informs the reader that “much of what you hear about the minimum wage is completely untrue.”

[2] I am setting aside the question of how many people who currently earn less than minimum wage would be affected by an increase in the level of the wage.  This is a complicated matter for a variety of reasons.

[3] I, like Dorfman, will leave aside the question of overall impact of a minimum wage hike on employment.  I am not advocating for or against a minimum wage hike—rather, I am advocating against those who argue that very few workers make very low wages.

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BLS Data: