Dec 19, 2017 | APSA, Elections, Innovative Methodology
Post developed by Catherine Allen-West
Election forensics is the field devoted to using statistical methods to determine whether the results of an election accurately reflect the intentions of the electors. Problems in elections that are not due to fraud may stem from legal or administrative decisions. Some examples of concerns that may distort turnout or vote choice data are long wait times, crowded polling place conditions, bad ballot design and location of polling stations relative to population.
A key component of democratic elections is the actual, and perceived, legitimacy of the process. Individuals’ observations about how elections proceed can provide valuable, on-the-ground insight into any flaws in the administration of the election. In some countries there are robust systems for recording citizen complaints, but not in the United States. So, a team* of University of Michigan researchers led by Walter Mebane used Twitter to extract observations of election incidents by individuals across the United States throughout the 2016 election, including primaries, caucuses and the general election. Through their observations, the team shows how reported phenomena like waiting in long lines or having difficulties actually casting a vote are associated with state-level election procedures and demographic variables.
The information gathered is the beginnings of what Mebane is calling the “Twitter Election Observatory.” The researchers collected tweets falling within a ten-day window around each primary/caucus election day and collected tweets continually during the October 1- November 9, 2016 lead up to the general election.
Mebane and his team then coded all of the tweets to extract the “incident observations” — tweets that mentioned an issue or complaint that an individual may have experienced when casting their vote. From the Twitter data, the researchers found that incidents occurred in every state during the general election period. Among the tweets that had recorded location information, the highest count of tweet observations occurred in California, Texas, Florida and New York and the smallest amount in Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.
Additionally, the researchers calculated the rate of incidents relative to the population of the each state. On a per capita basis, the District of Columbia stands out with the highest rate of incident observation followed by Nevada and North Carolina with Wyoming as the lowest.
Every indication is that Twitter can be used to develop data about individuals’ observations of how American elections are conducted, data that cover the entire country with extensive and intensive local detail. Mebane notes that the frequency, and likely the diversity, of observations may vary depending on how many people care and want to participate in, observe and comment on an election. Ultimately, Mebane would like to dig further into the geolocation information of these tweets to try and pinpoint any incidents with exact polling locations.
*University of Michigan team includes: Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Alejandro Pineda, Logan Woods, Joseph Klaver, Patrick Wu and Blake Miller.
Link to full paper presented at 2017 meeting of the American Association for Political Science.
Nov 15, 2017 | APSA, Foreign Affairs, Race, Social Policy
Post developed by Catherine Allen-West
There is a long, documented history of large opinion gaps along racial/ethnic lines regarding U.S. military intervention and humanitarian assistance. For example, some research suggests that since minorities are most likely to bear the human costs of war, African Americans and Latinos might be more strongly opposed to foreign intervention. Additionally, research conducted during the Iraq war found that the majority of African Americans didn’t support the war effort because they believed that they would be the ones called upon to do the “fighting and dying” and that the war would tie up resources typically used for domestic social welfare programs, programs upon which the group depends.
One obvious explanation for these opinion gaps is simple group interest. Americans are more likely to intervene to protect the lives and human rights of victims of humanitarian crises or genocides when the victims are “like us” and this narrow racial or ethnic group interest may be what drives racial/ethnic differences in support for foreign intervention or immigration policy in the U.S. This is important because public support for military and humanitarian interventions is crucial to not only the quantity of aid but also its quality and effectiveness.
But this simple in-group, material interest explanation doesn’t always hold up empirically. African Americans were more protective of the rights of Arab Americans after 9/11, even though they perceived themselves to be at higher risk from terrorism.
In a new paper, presented at the 2017 APSA annual meeting, Cigdem V. Sirin, Nicholas A. Valentino, and José D. Villalobos examine variations in political attitudes across three main racial/ethnic groups — Anglos, African Americans, and Latinos — regarding humanitarian emergencies abroad. The researchers tested these differences using their recently developed “Group Empathy Theory” which states that “empathy felt by members of one group for another can improve group-based political attitudes and behavior even in the face of material and security concerns.” Essentially, the researchers predict that a domestic minority group can empathize with an international group experiencing hardship, even when the conflict doesn’t involve the domestic group at all and when extending help oversees is costly.
The researchers tested their theory with a national survey experiment that assessed support for pre-existing foreign policy attitudes about the U.S. responsibility to protect, foreign aid, the U.S. response to the Syrian civil war, as well as the Muslim Ban proposed by Donald J. Trump.
First, they measured levels of group empathy and found that African Americans and Latinos both display significantly higher levels of general group empathy and support for foreign groups in need.
Next, to measure opinions about the U.S. ability to protect, they provided participants with a pair of statements about the role the U.S. should plan in international politics. The first statement read: “As the leader of the world, the U.S. has a responsibility to help people from other countries in need, especially in cases of war and natural disasters.” The second statement was the opposite — denouncing such responsibility to protect. Their results show that African Americans and Latinos are likely to attribute the U.S. higher responsibility to protect people of other countries in need as compared to Anglos. Furthermore, when asked about their opinion on the amount of foreign aid allocated to help countries in need, Latinos and African Americans were more strongly in favor of increasing foreign aid and accepting Syrian refugees than were Anglos.
The researchers further examined potential group-based difference in policy attitudes regarding Trump’s controversial “Muslim ban” which called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. Again, both Latinos and African Americans exhibited significantly higher opposition than Anglos to the exclusionary policy targeting a specific group solely based on that group’s religion.
Further analyses also supported the researchers’ claims that group empathy is a significant mediator of these racial gaps in support for humanitarian aid and military intervention on behalf of oppressed groups oversees.
This research brings into focus some of the dynamics that shape public opinion of foreign policy. Given the role of the public in steering U.S. leadership decisions, especially as the current administration seeks to implement deep cuts to foreign aid, investigating the role that group empathy plays in public responses to humanitarian emergencies has important broader implications, particularly concerning U.S. foreign policy and national security.
Oct 30, 2017 | APSA, Gender, Social Policy
Post written by Solmaz Spence
In almost half of two-parent households in the United States, both parents work full-time. Yet when a baby is born, it is still new moms who take the most time off work. On average, new mothers take 11 weeks off work while new dads take just one week, according to a 2016 survey carried out by the Pew Research Center.
In part, that is because many new fathers in the U.S. don’t have access to paid paternity leave. Paid maternity leave is rare, too: in fact, the U.S. is the only developed nation that does not provide a national paid family leave program to new parents.
Only three states (California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island) have their own paid parental leave policies, as do some companies. In Silicon Valley, tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter offer gender-neutral paid parental leave policies that can be taken by new moms, dads, and adoptive parents. But that’s not the norm. According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2016 Employee Benefits research report, only 18 percent of U.S. organizations offer paid maternity leave, 12 percent provide paid paternity leave, and 17 percent have a paid parental leave plan that can be taken by either parent.
More commonly, birth moms with short-term disability insurance receive some pay for six to eight weeks following childbirth. If new moms want to take more time, or if dads, adoptive parents, or moms who didn’t give birth themselves want time off to bond with a new baby, those eligible under the Family and Medical Leave Act can take unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks.
But even if new fathers had access to parental leave programs, they might not take advantage of them. A survey by Deloitte found that 36 percent of men would not take advantage of their paid parental leave benefits because they worried it might jeopardize their position at work. And parental leave programs that offer more benefits to moms than to dads only reinforce the stereotype of the female caregiver and male breadwinner.
How is support for parental leave policies structured by attitudes about traditional gender roles? To assess this relationship, a team of researchers including Stuart Soroka, faculty associate at the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies, along with Allison Harell, Shanto Iyengar and Valérie Lapointe, surveyed 3600 people across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The results of the survey* were recently published as a chapter in the book, Mothers and Others: The Role of Parenthood in Politics.
The authors came to the study with mixed expectations for how gender role ideologies would influence support for parental leave. On the one hand, because parental leave programs give working mothers time at home after the birth of a child, they can help new moms balance work and motherhood—a struggle that is at the heart of traditional gender role ideology.
On the other hand, women must be employed to access maternity leave benefits, and the central goal of these policies is for women to return to their careers—facts that could conflict with conservative gender role attitudes.
Expanding parental leave to new fathers also has the potential to make men more involved in childcare, women more engaged in their careers, and workplaces friendlier for parents of all kinds. Thus, those holding more traditional views might be less supportive of parental leave policies that can be applied to male recipients.
This study assessed gender role ideology by asking participants how strongly they agreed or disagreed with four statements related to women’s roles in the home and as mothers:
- A woman’s place is in the home, not in the office or shop.
- A mother who carries out her full family responsibilities doesn’t have time for outside employment.
- The employment of mothers leads to more juvenile delinquency.
- Women are much happier if they stay at home and take care of their children.
In general, respondents rejected the view that a woman’s employment is detrimental to her perceived duty at home—but there were clear variations in responses. Largely in line with expectations, demographic factors such as being female, having a university education, and being employed were associated with more liberal views; those who are married, have children, and are older had more conservative views.
Next, the researchers investigated whether citizens are more or less generous toward parental leave takers based upon their gender role attitudes as well as the gender stereotypicality of the leave takers.
The researchers presented survey participants with fictional stories that described the situation of several potential parental leave takers: a married female, a single female, a married male, a single male. In each case, respondents were told the amount of leave to which the new parent is entitled in their country, and were asked how much he or she thinks the recipient should receive in monetary benefits.
Across all respondents, there was strong support for more stereotypical leave takers, with respondents opting to give the female parents in the fictional situations about $175 more in benefits than the male parents. The marital status of the leave taker was also important, with married leave takers receiving about $70 more than single parents—despite the fact that one might assume that single parents would be more in need of state support. There thus was a general tendency to enforce gender norms in terms of who benefits from family leave policies.
This figure shows the relationship between gender role attitudes (plotted on the x axis), and cash support for parental leave policy (show on the y-axis). Across all respondents in the U.S., UK and Canada, support is strongest for more stereotypical leave takers (married females), and least generous for single men.
That said, the researchers found that those who hold more conservative gender role attitudes in the UK and U.S. tended to be less generous toward leave takers overall. Among US survey participants in particular, those with the most conservative gender role attitudes reported giving the fictional recipients about $124 less than respondents who held more progressive attitudes. This was after controlling for the characteristics of the fictional leave takers, and also for the ideological orientation of the respondent with respect to government benefits.
Moreover, those with more traditional gender norms tended to be particularly punitive to non-stereotypical leave takers. (This is clear in the figure above.) The most conservative respondents reported giving single male recipients about $330 less than they would give to married women leave takers. In contrast, for respondents with more progressive gender role ideology, the difference in benefits between married women and single men was about $230.
These results highlight a good deal of complexity in the structure of support for parental leave policy. It is not necessarily the case that women are more supportive of parental leave policy than men, for instance. Although women are more likely to reject traditional gender roles, women who are married with children tend to believe more strongly in the gendered division of parenthood, and thus, are less willing to extend parental leave benefits to men. In the U.S., and also Canada and the UK, support for parental leave policy reflects a set of complex and often counteracting ideas about gender, parenting, and work.
*Race, Gender, and the Welfare State survey (RGWS)
Sep 2, 2017 | APSA, International
ICYMI (In Case You Missed It), the following work was presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The presentation, titled “Big Data Innovation Transfer and Governance in Emerging High Technology States” was a part of the session “The Role of Business in Information Technology and Politics” on Friday September 1, 2017.
Post developed by Nadiya Kostyuk and Muzammil M. Hussain
On August 24, 2017, India’s highest court ruled that citizens have a fundamental right to privacy. Such a ruling may serve to slowdown the government’s deployment of the Aadhaar national ID program, a robust relational database connecting each of India’s 1.3+ billion citizens with their unique 12-digit identity aimed at centralize their physiological, demographic, and digital data shadows — minute pieces of data created when an individual sends an email, updates a social media profile, swipes a credit card, uses an ATM, etc. While the government has presented the Aadhaar system as an improved channel to provide social security benefits for its nationals, India’s civil society organizations have protested it as a means of furthering government surveillance. India’s trajectory in ambitiously modernizing its high-tech toolkit for governance represents a rapidly spreading trend in the contemporary world system of 190+ nations.
Take China as an other example. China has recently mobilized its government bureaucracies to establish the worlds’ first ever, and largest, national Social Credit System covering nearly 1.4+ billion Chinese citizens. By 2020, China’s citizen management system will include each Chinese national’s financial history, online comments about government, and even traffic violations to rank their ‘trustworthiness.’ Like India’s, these unique ‘social credit’ ratings will reward and punish citizens for their behavioral allegiance with the regime’s goals by scientifically allowing the state to operationalize its vision of a “harmonious socialist society.”
Yet, the implementation of state-sponsored and ‘big data’-enabled surveillance systems to address the operational demands of governance is not limited just to the world’s largest democratic and authoritarian states. This summer, at the annual meetings of the International Communication Association (May 2017, San Diego) and the American Political Science Association (August 2017, San Francisco), the project on Big Data Innovation & Governance (BigDIG) presented findings from the first event-catalogued case-history analysis of 306 cases of mass surveillance systems that currently exist across 139 nation-states in the world system (Kostyuk, Chen, Das, Liang and Hussain, 2017). After identifying the ‘known universe’ of these population-wide data infrastructures that now shape the evolving relationships between citizens and state powers, our investigation paid particular attention to how state-sponsored mass surveillance systems have spread through the world-system, since 1995.
By closely investigating all known cases of state-backed cross-sector surveillance collaborations, our findings demonstrate that the deployment of mass surveillance systems by states has been globally increasing throughout the last twenty years (Figure 1). More importantly, from 2006-2010 to present, states have uniformly doubled their surveillance investments compared with the previous decade.
In addition to unpacking the funding and diffusion of mass surveillance systems, we are also addressing the following questions: Which stakeholders have most prominently expressed support for, benefited from, or opposed these systems, and why? What have been the comparative societal responses to the normalization of these systems for the purposes of population management in recent decades?
The observed cases in our study differ in scope and impact.
Why do stable democracies and autocracies operate similarly, while developing and emerging democracies operate differently? Access to and organization of material, financial, and technocratic resources may provide some context.
While nations worldwide have spent at least $27.1 billion USD (or $7 per individual) to surveil 4.138 billion individuals (i.e., 73 percent of the world population), stable autocracies are the highest per-capita spenders on mass surveillance. In total, authoritarian regimes have spent $10.967 billion USD to surveil 81 percent of their populations (0.1 billion individuals), even though this sub-set of states tends to have the lowest levels of high-technology capabilities. Stable autocracies have also invested 11-fold more than any other regime-type, by spending $110 USD per individual surveilled, followed second-highest by advanced democracies who have invested $8.909 billion USD in total ($11 USD per individual) covering 0.812 billion individuals (74 percent of their population). In contrast to high-spending dictatorships and democracies, developing and emerging democracies have invested $4.784 billion USD (or $1-2 per individual) for tracking 2.875 billion people (72 percent of their population).
It is possible that in a hyper-globalizing environment increasingly characterized by non-state economic (e.g., multi-national corporations) and political (e.g., transnational terror organizations) activity, nation-states have both learned from and mimicked each other’s investments in mass surveillance as an increasingly central activity in exercising power over their polities and jurisdictions. It is also likely that the technological revolution in digitally-enabled big data and cloud computing capabilities as well as the ubiquitous digital wiring of global populations (through mobile telephony and digital communication) have technically enabled states to access and organize population-wide data on their citizens in ways not possible in previous eras. Regardless of the impetuses for increases in mass surveillance efforts, our research aims to provide empirical support to advance theory and guide policy on balancing security needs and privacy concerns at a time where many governments are ambitiously upgrading their governance systems with unbridled hi-tech capabilities.
Sep 3, 2016 | APSA, Elections
Post developed by Catherine Allen-West and Ozan Kuru.
ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) the following work was presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The presentation, titled “Motivated Reasoning in the Perceived Credibility of Public Opinion Polls,” was part of the session “Surprises: A Magical Mystery Tour of Public Opinion and Political Psychology” on Saturday, September 3, 2016.
Polls have been an integral part of American democracy, political rhetoric, and news coverage since the 1930s. Today, there are new polls reported constantly, showing public opinion on a range of issues from the President’s approval rating to the direction of the country. Polls remain relevant because numbers and statistical evidence have always been regarded as sound evidence to support one’s beliefs or affirm their affiliations; similarly, polls are supposed to provide relatively objective information in politics.
However, despite their importance and ever-increasing prevalence, polls are often heavily criticized, both by the public and politicians, especially when they fail to predict election outcomes. Such criticisms and discounting of poll credibility is important, because people’s perceptions of polls matter. In such an environment, the perceived credibility of polls becomes an important issue for the public’s reception of poll findings, which then determines the likelihood of any meaningful impact of their results.
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Sep 2, 2016 | ANES, APSA, Elections
Post developed by Catherine Allen-West and Arthur Lupia
ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) this post details the Election Research Preacceptance Competition, organized by Arthur Lupia and Brendan Nyhan. Lupia discussed this initiative at the “Roundtable on the CPS Special Issue on Transparency in the Social Sciences” at APSA 2016 on Friday, September 2, 2016.
How can scholars study politics most effectively? The Election Research Preacceptance Competition (http://www.erpc2016.com) is an innovative initiative that will test a new approach to conducting and publishing political science research during the 2016 election.
Entrants in the competition will preregister a research design intended to study an important aspect of the 2016 general election using data collected by the American National Election Studies (ANES). A condition of entering the competition is that entrants must complete and register a design before the ANES data are released. Many leading academic journals have agreed to review scholarly articles that include these research plans and to review them before the data are available or results are known.
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