Political Science Bitches

Everything is horrible and I'm freaking out.  Here's hoping political science can save us.  Or at least give us something to read through the apocalypse.

[politicalsciencebitches]

Air Pollution Doesn't Care Whether It's Pittsburgh or Paris

There’s a big debate in international relations about whether international treaties, like the Paris Climate Agreement, actually do anything for anyone.  They aren’t really enforceable, many don’t even have formal monitoring procedures, and, as we are witnessing today, leaders can back out of them whenever they damn please.  

The Paris Agreement is even less formal than many.  It’s a bottom-up agreement where states come to a consensus about targets and then do their best to reach them.  According to the irrefutable Wikipedia, the climate goals are “encouraged, rather than legally bound.”  This amounts to an organization that sounds more like a book club than an international treaty.  

The US could easily stay in this Climate Book Club and just be that person who never does the readings but comes for the free wine.  Especially given the US’s (waning) international status, there would be no punishment for not reaching emissions targets, we would still get to hypocritically demand that other countries try to meet their targets (someone has to read the damn book), and, most importantly from an international cooperation perspective, we would create focal points, generate norms that are good for the environment, and potentially even help create economic incentives for greener business.

I will write another time about these more formal international relations cooperation concepts as they pertain to this (and NATO, and whatever other organizations Trump decides he’s too good for), but today I want to talk about something more personal: Air pollution.

I know the Paris Agreement isn’t specifically about air pollution.  I know neither Pittsburgh nor Paris suffer too much right now from air pollution.  But I lived in China for 3 years and one of the major reasons I moved back to the US was air pollution.  Reduced emissions, and other policies encouraged by our Book Club Paris Agreement, all fall under what my undergrad economics professor calls a “no regrets policy”.  Regardless of whether climate change is real (it pains me to write that, but let’s say for the sake of argument), here is what is real: People in China, including me, are and were and have been and will be dying because the air is thick with poison from emissions from things like cars and factories and heaven only knows what else (literally, because I assume the fumes eventually make their way up there).

We can argue for the rest of our lives about climate change and about whether international treaties are good for anything and even about whether the US economy will really get any better if we pull out of this thing, and maybe somehow that short-term improvement will allow us to do something else to stave off the horrors of environmental degradation that I have witnessed firsthand for a very long time.

But we cannot argue about pollution.  It’s there.  It’s coming here.  In fact, part of the reason Pittsburgh is apparently so clean these days is because manufacturing all went overseas, taking jobs, but also air pollution, with it.  

Here’s what it’s like living in air pollution:

Your throat and lungs hurt all of the time, even on relatively clear days, to the point where, when you go back to cleaner cities, it feels weird that it DOESN’T hurt to breathe.

You forget how far humans can see and you how high resolution the world is.  When you go back to cleaner cities like New York you blink and blink and are stunned by how much further you can see and how much clearer the picture is.

You get fucking angry anytime anyone dares suggest New York is polluted.

In the early days you wear a mask, but because it’s a huge pain you stop doing it, and others stop doing it, which means you’re all exposed even more than you should be.

The air doesn’t smell like seasons (spring! fall! winter!).  It smells like chemicals (China) or diesel (India).

You check your Air Quality Index app way more than you check the weather.

Unlike the weather, there are no forecasts, so you can’t plan anything outside because you don’t even know a probability surrounding whether the air will be jet black.

In the winter you debate whether to freeze to death or turn on the heat and pump in polluted air.

You delude yourself into thinking that the windows of your apartment will protect you from pollution, and go around like a crazy person checking them a thousand times to make sure they’re sealed.

You cough and you cough and it feels like there’s something in your throat most of the time and everyone around you smokes because, fuck it, the air is poison anyway.

It’s bad.

I know the Paris Agreement isn’t specifically about air pollution.  But it’s all connected.  As is this planet.  As we speak, huge pollution clouds are marching from China toward the US.  It’s coming for us, and we need to do something.  

One of the most important things I learned in China is that all the environmental horrors we’ve been worrying about for our children and our children’s children are already here.  And I haven’t even gotten to water pollution, trash, and other related byproducts of civilized society.

I’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, and at the risk of giving away one of the big moments, I feel like Trump is the leader who shouted, “There’s no such thing as giants,” only to have his city attacked by giants.  Mr. Trump: There are giants.

And they are coughing.

Fig. 1. What the air is supposed to look like.

Fig. 2. What the air often looks like.

Fig. 3. A pretty good day, actually.

Fig. 4. The weather no longer seems relevant.

Fig. 5. The good news is I didn’t have to change my outfit to rob a bank later.  

[politicalsciencebitches]

45. Why I’m Nervous about North Korea (It’s Not Nuclear Weapons or Madmen)

“The central puzzle about war, and also the main reason we study it, is that wars are costly but nonetheless wars recur.”

So begins one of the greatest political science papers ever written.  James Fearon divides the universe of explanations for war into three camps.  The first camp argues that war happens because crazy leaders can do whatever they want.  The second says war happens because even non-crazy leaders might be tempted into it, as they reap the benefits (these days mostly in terms of public opinion) without incurring the costs (apart from in Game of Thrones, leaders aren’t on the battlefield anymore).  The third says that “even rational leaders who consider the risks and costs of war may end up fighting nonetheless” (p. 379).

Fearon focuses on the third camp.  He shows that there are conditions under which even two leaders who actually do not want war might end up in a war.  It’s this logic that makes me most nervous about the standoff between the US and North Korea.

Most news stories about North Korea focus on the first two arguments.  According to the first camp: Trump is crazy!  Kim Jong-un is crazy!  They’ll do it for attention or for fun, or whatever!  They play international relations like Andrea Jones-Rooy, Ph.D., plays chess (she gets bored immediately and starts sacrificing players just for the drama).

According to the second camp: Both leaders depend on public approval for ego and actual leadership survival reasons (more on this in a future post, but see here for a preview), so they are willing to take the gamble of war in exchange for the possibility of being national and historical heroes.

Let’s unpack the third camp.

Fearon argues that all wars are ex post inefficient.  He uses math to prove this, but the idea is as follows.  Suppose all wars end in a negotiated settlement.  This means that there must exist a range of outcomes that leaders of both sides (he assumes two players; I’d be curious to explore more) prefer to the cost of war.  Why?  Because they wouldn’t stop fighting if they didn’t prefer that negotiated settlement to war. What if they actually cannot keep fighting and there’s nothing left?  I argue that we’ve never seen that, as all sides capitulate before (think Japan in WW2) complete annihilation.

Thus, there logically must be some range of outcomes that both sides prefer to war.  (A diagram of this range is the header of this blog!!)

Fearon makes a second assumption that all wars are costly.  I used to challenge my students to come up with examples of exceptions to this, and and over eight semesters of Fearon, no one did.  Just like there’s no such thing as a free lunch or a selfless good deed, I think there’s truly no such thing as a cost-free war.  Combine this with the above and we see that if war is costly and there is always a range of alternatives to war, then leaders should all be able to identify a Zone of Agreement and just settle on it ahead of time without incurring the cost of war.  Why?  Because: 

OUTCOME OF WAR > OUTCOME OF WAR - COST OF WAR.

But remember the puzzle from the first sentence!  Wars are costly but nonetheless recur.  This means something is getting in the way of leaders reaching an agreement a priori.  What could that be?  Fearon offers three mechanisms:

Incentives to Misrepresent Private Information

Commitment Problems

Issue Indivisibility

I’m going to focus on the first one because I think that’s what’s at play in the North Korea situation.  I’ll write about the second two another time, as they’re important.  (Cliffhanger!)

All leaders have private information about two things: Their true willingness to fight and their true military capability.  Only Trump knows how much he’d really be willing to fight and really could throw at NK (well, I’d argue Trump doesn’t know, but presumably someone does).  Only Kim Jong-un knows his true willingness to fight and his true military capabilities (indeed, the whole world is obsessed with finding out precisely this).

Both sides, recognizing there’s a zone of agreement where both could shake hands and walk away (maybe NK dismantles its nuclear program in exchange for the US buying all of its vile liquor from its DMZ tourist shops (don’t worry, I got us a head start on that in 2012)), have an incentive to make it look like they’re more likely to win the war so that they can negotiate a better deal in the settlement.  Because there’s a range of outcomes they could agree on, there’s still room to negotiate over which outcome is chosen.  If the US can demonstrate it’s more likely to win the war if it broke out, then they have more bargaining power at the negotiating table.

This means both sides have incentives to make themselves look stronger and more willing to fight than they really, truly are.  How do both sides do that?  By generating costly signals, like shows of military strength, public statements that will be hard to back down from (audience costs), and mobilized forces (even Russia is doing this).

Real costly signals are just that: costly.  This means that the costs each leader is generating to get themselves a better negotiated deal instead of war might eventually exceed the actual costs of war.  And thus it becomes rational to choose war.  In other words:

OUTCOME OF WAR - COSTLY SIGNALS > OUTCOME OF WAR - COST OF WAR.

In sum, I’m nervous about the US-NK standoff because the acts of chest pounding on both sides that could just be meant to get the other side to back down may be the very thing that triggers the war we are all afraid of.

There are lots of exceptions we might make to this logic.  1) The leaders still might be crazy, so just add that to the mix.  2) Maybe there truly is not range of agreed-upon outcomes (that’s “issue indivisibility”).  3) Maybe these costs aren’t as great as we think they are, or Trump or Kim are immune to audience costs/public opinion.  Or 4) Ugh, I just don’t trust either of them to not do it just because being a part of WWIII will cause both of them to be remembered forever and they’re selfish jerks who would totally do that.  All of these just make me more pessimistic.  Basically Fearon’s logic says even under the best of circumstances we’re running a real risk of war.

Finally, what about the nuclear weapons themselves?  While I think political science doesn’t do nearly enough to understand the actual issues over which wars are fought (we tend to focus instead on the mechanisms and assume a disagreement), I think in this case the nuclear weapons play two roles: (1) They’re part of Kim’s attempt to misrepresent private information, and (2) If war breaks out, it’s going to make it all the more costly.  Maybe that’s some hope the costly signals won’t get high enough.  Or it’s a reason we’re all f*cked.

Fig. 1. Fearon would not be impressed by this.

Main Work Cited

Fearon, James D.  1995.  “Rationalist Explanations for War.”  International Organization 49(3): 379-414.

[politicalsciencebitches]

44. What Would a Travel Ban that Worked Look Like?  Lessons from Global Health

One of the major policy moves of Trump in his first 100-or-however-many days has been his travel ban against predominantly Muslim countries.  Both the ban and rhetoric around it are still causing all kinds of problems.  Never mind the effect on other countries (limits on electronic devices being one tiny inconvenience among many others), the US is already being hurt by the ban because of reduced tourism and a shortage of doctors in rural areas.

My instinct is to say this is horrible and xenophobic and entirely against the spirit of inclusion that makes me proud of the US -- and never mind probably makes us worse off from a security perspective.

But let’s imagine that Trump is identifying a legitimate concern.  Europe, after all, has been dealing with massive immigration inflows that are straining their communities and resulting in increased terrorism, real and perceived).  The Schengen agreement is under threat as a result.  

Plus, while Trump’s executive orders seem extreme, he’s not even close to the first US president to block nationalities (we’ve blocked Chinese workers, Jewish refugees, communists, and people with HIV).  

This brings up two questions.  First: Do any of these bans ever “work” -- where work is lead to a safer America?  Second: Are there some times, some conditions, or some types of bans, where travel bans do make sense?

I did some research to find evidence of how and when they might -- perhaps like sanctions they don’t usually work, but might if they’re threatened or super targeted.  Maybe we’re just thinking about bans too broadly. 

My first step was to think about how there are lots of different kinds of bans out there.  Even immigration bans are a pretty blanket statement.  One version is no one from a particular country can enter -- as a tourist or otherwise.  Another way is to increase visa requirements, thus ruling out all but the most vetted citizens (something we’ve been doing to China forever).  Another is heightened security against particular groups in airports (as the sister of someone with a perpetual tan, I’ve witnessed this bias firsthand).  Finally, an indirect kind of ban is also possible where you just fuel people with so much fear or hatred against another group that we make the climate so inhospitable that no one wants to come anyway.  And, our old favorite: we can threaten to build walls, too.

There are other varieties of keeping foreigners out, too.  Those all point to people coming in.  But we can also drive them away: Arrests, expulsions, imprisonment, investigations without reason.  

So, the question is: Do travel bans work?  And if so, when?

The biggest lesson I learned from scanning the literature is that ... they don’t.  The most obvious place where they have been used, and with far less political divisiveness, is in response to disease outbreaks.  For all our anti-ban rhetoric these days, in 2015 and 16 when Zika was a huge threat Americans had no issue restricting travel between the Americas.  

More contentiously, we also restricted travel from west Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.  On the one hand, this made sense, as we were all understandably terrified.  On the other hand, this was horrible to people in west Africa who were not affected and wanted to seek safety.

The health case is a good comparison to our terrorism.  With pandemics, our goal is to keep out the sick, but in the process we can really ruin lives of those just seeking safety.  With the muslim ban, we want to keep out those who would kill us, but in the process we can really ruin lives.  And in both cases we might make the problem worse: With disease, forcing everyone to stay where the outbreak is can make it worse, and with terrorism, forcing people to stay in the environment that gave them the terrorism ideas in the first place will just make their desire to do harm stronger.

A study by Paolo Bajari et al. (2011) of the 2009 H1N1 travel restrictions examined flight and travel data against outbreak data between Mexico and the US and Europe.  The problem is this: trying to decrease travel to/from infected countries in order to reduce the number of infected people reaching the non-infected area.  It’s been really hard to measure this, but the H1N1 case was better documented.

They find, alarmingly, that even though travel bans led to 40% reduced travel between countries, it did almost nothing to stop the outbreak from spreading (there was a delay of 3 days).  They conclude that basically it was too little too late.  They do some forecasting modeling where they find that even a 90% reduction in travel would have delayed an epidemic by two weeks.

They also consider the problem of containment: Horrible as it is to keep people in an infected zone, it can be easier to manage a disease that’s just in one place, so maybe people should stay at home in the infected area.  They find that travel within one place (Mexico City) operates in a similar fashion -- it still spread between subpopulations, too.

Their overwhelming conclusion is that air travel restrictions do little to curb pandemics.  In the case of international relations and travel restrictions, it may not do much to keep people out, but in this case where disease comes not from viruses but from anger, we may be making it worse.

Another study -- this one in 2014 about Ebola -- found the same thing.  These restrictions delay, rather than prevent outbreaks.  The rule of thumb they offer is that “a 50% travel reduction leads to a delay of the doubling time of the number of cases”.

The other issue is other effects that the restrictions impose.  They can cause shortages of food, energy, and health worker resources, “with the potential to severely compromise local economies.”  Like disease, terrorism grows in bad conditions.  This could make people angrier, more desperate.  In the short term it’s so hard to say do one over the other, because we get it -- it’s scary to have diseases come wipe us all out.

The connection to disease, too, is that the problem is people don’t know they’re sick, or we can’t tell.  Terrorism could be like that, too.  We don’t know who’s already here.

So what do we do, if anything?

Health recommendations are to invest in health system preparedness -- strengthen your own capacity to deal with outbreaks.  Given we can’t effectively keep them out.  What does this mean for terrorism?  Better local police and security here.  China screens on subways (poorly), maybe that’s the price we pay now.

With illness there’s also treatment and vaccines.  Applying the SIR model, we have two options: people could be “infected” with terrorism, in which case we could hope to treat it through education, tolerance, anti-violence rhetoric.  Giving people economic tools and opportunities.  The vaccine equivalent is to make people not angry at the US or impoverished in the first place.

We have a long way to go on that.  But like disease, where travel bans can work a little but not really, they may do more long term harm than good.

Fig. 1.  My official policy recommendation.

Works Cited

Bajardi, Paolo et al.  2011.  “Human Mobility Networks, Travel Restrictions, and the Global Spread of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic.”  PLOS ONE.  

Poletto, Chiara et al.  2014.  “Assessing the Impact of Travel Restrictions on International Spread of the 2014 West African Ebola Epidemic.”  Eurosurveillance 19(42).

[politicalsciencebitches]

43. Arrow’s Theorem Attempts to Solve Everything

Today we are going to get into Arrow’s Theorem further and see if we can learn anything about our f*cked up political system.  I have no idea if we will or if this is even relevant.  The fun we have!

As I introduced yesterday, Arrow’s theorem tells us that there is no system of voting that satisfies basic requirements of fairness and also gives results that are rational.  This isn’t just to say that there is no system currently in place that can do it -- it’s deeper.  It says we can’t do it.  In principle.  In logic.  Oh, goodness, he’s good.

Let’s break this down.  First, we’ll talk about these fairness conditions.  There are five.  I’ll break them down and apply them to us.  Then we’ll return to rationality.

1. Universal Admissibility: Every individual voter has a set of rational preferences.

Assessment: So far so good.  The idea is that as long as you have a rational set of preferences over the things you’re choosing between, then your choices are valid.  Your therapist may tell you that your non-rational preferences are valid, but he/she is wrong.

Applied: Rationality is a tricky thing to apply to real life.  At first glance it would seem voters follow this.  All we are really saying is you can’t have transitive preferences, or any that aren’t logical.  E.g., you can’t prefer Repeal ACA>Keep ACA but at the same time also prefer Keep ACA>Repeal ACA.  But, look, humans ARE irrational, and Americans famously have all kinds of conflicting views about politics.  So already this assumption may break down in real life.

2. Positive Association of Individual and Social Values: If individuals start to like one choice more, that will be reflected in the group preference.

Assessment: I previously knew this one to mean something broader, which is that generally speaking the group preferences should map the individuals’. But I read Arrow’s original paper for this post and it seems he only cares about the group preferences for one option INCREASING if the individuals’ preferences for that option increase.  He says it’s because they only care about social “welfare” not “illfare”.  He could have been a rapper.

Applied: I’m ok with applying this to us.  If most individual Americans prefer Do Nothing>Repeal ACA>GOP Health Plan, but then most individuals change their preferences to Repeal>Do Nothing>GOP Plan, then the social preference should reflect that promotion of “repeal”.  I don’t think that’s problematic.  I accept counterarguments.

3. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: This one is my favorite!  If you’re choosing between A and B and you prefer A>B, adding choice C doesn’t make you suddenly prefer B>A.  

Assessment: This sounds like it would never happen, but an example from my advisor makes it seem plausible: Suppose you’re on a plane and the flight attendant asks if you want chicken or beef and you say beef.  Then you find out there’s a vegetarian option, which reminds you that you were going to try to be healthier.  So you change your vote to chicken.  Applying this to politics, suppose you prefer Sanders>Clinton.  But then you add choice Trump.  Now you prefer Clinton>Sanders.  This would violate IIA.  Arrow demands this of the social choice, too.

Application: Now I’m wondering what makes something “irrelevant”.  I think Arrow is saying that the group choice should always reflect the true preference of the body, regardless of the order or range of choices given.  That’s a tall order, actually, because humans are irrational and weird.  We for sure are violating this.

4. The Social Welfare Function is not to be Imposed: Stick that on your t-shirt!  This one says you can’t limit the social choice set (every option should be allowed at the group level).

Assessment: This seems reasonable, though Arrow says it’s actually stronger a condition than is needed.

Application: I’m really going out on a limb here, but wouldn’t the DNC throwing its support behind Clinton > Sanders be a form of social welfare constraining?

5. No dictators!  You can’t have someone sweep in and make the choice for everyone; that is, the group choice shouldn’t just reflect the preference of one man.

Assessment: Makes sense for what we’re trying to do here.

Application: We violate this.  Arrow’s theorem applies to cases where there are three or more options to choose from.  In our presidential elections we only choose between two candidates.  This is because we have a whole primary and party system that rules some of this stuff out.  In a way, it’s a kind of dictatorship.  Also, I’m wondering now if the median voter theorem violates this -- the idea that in some conditions the tie-breaker voter is the one who gets his way.  Isn’t that a kind of dictator?

Rationality: Arrow says you cannot have all of these conditions and guarantee against cycling, or irrational, group preferences (the whole A>B>C>A thing).  This doesn’t mean you definitely will get cycling.  It just means you can’t protect against it.

UNLESS

You are willing to violate some of these.  You could impose a dictator.  You could constrain the social choice set.  You could restrict the preferences individuals are allowed to have.

And in fact: ALL VOTING SYSTEMS DO THIS!  ALREADY!

That’s why there are so many different kinds of democracy out there.  Just like snowflakes, no democratic regimes are alike.  And just like snowflakes, if there are too many of them they will eventually kill you.

Back to my original reason for wanting to do this: I am frustrated by our country’s seemingly worse ability to make choices that reflect the preferences of the group.  I was curious whether it’s individual preferences or something in the structure of our decision-making that’s making it seem more extreme.  I think from this exercise I now lean more to the side of our preferences just being so extreme that if about half of us VASTLY prefer A>B and the other half VASTLY prefer B>A, then (1) even a fair choice that reflects the will of the group won’t feel fair, and (2) the possibility of cycling preferences means that it will seem arbitrary which side is winning when.

That feels consistent with my experience as an American voter.

Solutions?  Adjust our preferences.  Think about restricting them in different ways.  Choose a better dictator.

Send help.

Fig. 1. Carrot Therapy.

Main Work

Still our gorgeous paper from Arrow!

Read Further

“Arrow’s Theorem Proves No Voting System is Perfect,” The Tech, Feb. 28, 2003.

Clark, William R., Matt Golder, and Sona Nadenichek Golder.  2017.  “Chapter 11: Problems with Group Decision-Making,” in Principles of Comparative Politics, 2nd Ed.  CQ Press.

[politicalsciencebitches]

42. Arrow’s Theorem Explains Everything

The purpose of government is to aggregate preferences.  All nations are just groups of people who live together under some agreed-upon set of decision-making rules.  We call these groups nations or countries, but we might as well call them clubs or societies or cults.  

Aggregating individual preferences for a group in a way that reflects what everyone actually wants is really hard.  Think about the last time your group of friends tried to decide on a restaurant.  It was probably infuriating as you cycled through options until someone took charge and just picked a place. And half of you probably hated it.  Is this how friendship works?  I have no idea.

Authoritarian governments solve this problem by having one guy in charge who makes all the choices for everyone (or to be more precise: makes them in a way that satisfies the small body of people who keep him in power (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2004)).  Democratic governments do this by having people vote on things or vote for people who decide things.  

Here in the US we love our democracy and think it’s amazing.  But according to a very smart man named Kenneth J. Arrow, there’s actually no way to aggregate group preferences through voting in a way that guarantees results that are both fair and rational.  Oh, Christ.

Ken Arrow was a Nobel Prize laureate, brilliant social scientist, and, according to my advisor who was friends with him, a kind man.  He passed away recently, so I want to use Political Science Bitches to talk about his contributions.

Arrow is behind something we now call Arrow’s Theorem.  He originally called it a Possibility Theorem.  But social scientists (pessimists) somehow warped it over the decades to call it his Impossibility Theorem.  

The theorem is from a beautifully written, math-heavy paper (two qualities that rarely go together; when they do we must celebrate) called “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare.”  Hell, yes.

Arrow says that when a group of people in a capitalist democracy want to decide on something, they have two ways of doing it: market mechanisms or voting.  For political things like policy choices, markets don’t make a lot of sense, so we vote.  The problem is, just adding up votes and picking the one with the most doesn’t always work.  Why not?

If you have two or more voters trying to choose over three or more things, there’s a chance that adding up their votes will get you something called cyclical preferences.  Each individual may prefer a>b>c, but the group could add up to prefer something that doesn’t make any sense, like a>b>a.  And, no clever way of adding up votes (majority rules, ranked preferences, etc.) gets us around this problem.  And so if we have a vote, the result may not really reflect what anyone wants (sound familiar?).

If you want to avoid this irrationality, this means we need to impose rules that restrict the fairness of the election.  We’d need to do something, for example, like impose a dictator (someone to make the choice for us; a.k.a. our bossy friend in the group or Kim Jong-un) or restrict the choices people can make (hello DNC and RNC!).

I’ve been thinking about Arrow’s Theorem a lot lately -- not just because Arrow has been on my mind -- but because when I look at the fury that is the US political system, I cannot help but worry that we are doing an extra bad job compared to usual at aggregating our individual preferences.  I can’t decide if that’s because our choice sets have gotten harder, or because we are less informed, or because the people we elected to make choices for us can’t add up to anything.  I think I need to dig through Arrow’s Theorem some more and see if I can learn anything.

And so I will.

Thanks for reading -- let’s call this the introductory essay.

Hang in there, everyone.

Fig. 1. How do you like them arrows?  (Irrationally.)

Main Work

Arrow, Kenneth J.  1950.  “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare.”  Journal of Political Economy 58(4): 328-346.

Other References

Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow.  2004.  The Logic of Political Survival.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

[politicalsciencebitches]

41. Why It Matters How We Treat Our Neighbors

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out And to whom I was like to give offense. -Robert Frost (1914)

Coverage of Trump’s executive order for a wall between the US and Mexico is exploding.  There have been articles on the devastating consequences of the wall for Mexico’s economy (FiveThirtyEight).  There have been stories about the winners and losers from the import tax proposal to fund the wall (winners: export-oriented US producers (thanks, protectionism); losers: basically everyone else) (LAT, NYT) and on broader national tax consequences (there are some benefits, but they could be offset by higher prices) (The Washington Post, Forbes).

Other reports say maybe we shouldn’t freak out just yet.  Trump is signing a bunch of executive orders (more on those soon), but actually putting them into action will take some time.  And as we all know, taking time is what the American government does best.  Our own inefficiency may be on our side for once.  And maybe, just maybe, all of us panicking and posting angry things on the Internet (like this) is exactly what Trump wants us to do.

While this realization might offer some relief (as well as gross feelings of being manipulated), it’s missing a deeper, more troubling point: There are real consequences to even saying horrible things to or about a neighboring country. To understand this, let’s turn to some classic (oh my heavens, am I referring to the ‘90s and early 2000s as classic?) international relations thinking.

Hurting Mexico hurts us

Even if Trump never gets anywhere with his wall or any other punitive tax or tariffs against Mexico, it’s still bad news that he’s taken such an extreme public stance against our neighbor.  

Just saying horrible stuff about what we will do to Mexico is already negatively affecting its economy and launching it into uncertainty.  This is bad for Mexico, which we should care about from an ethics perspective (they are people, too, everyone).  

But we should also care about it for our own prosperity and security.  One of the most firmly established empirical regularities in international relations and comparative politics is that economic performance is connected to political stability (Ades and Chua (1997), inter alia).  The worse one gets, the worse the other gets.  And, the political stability of our neighbors affects our own political stability.  Specifically, instability leads to lowered production of goods as well as higher violence and military expenditure (Ades and Chua). 

All of this means that harming Mexico’s economy -- whether indirectly through threats, or directly through carrying out any of them -- just reduces the goods available in the world while increasing more guns and angry people into it.  

To go to an extreme: just like instability in Syria is affecting all its neighbors, no wall will protect us from all the political ramifications that may fall from a spiral in Mexico.  Suppose Mexico goes all the way to a failing state.  Now we’re looking at a hotbed for terrorism.  Thanks, Trump.

International Relations is zero sum if we choose it to be

A related major regularity in international relations is so obvious it seems pointless to mention: Geographic contiguity matters.  Stuff that happens in countries close to us affects us more.  War is more likely between countries that are next to each other.  There’s more over which we might disagree (territory, immigration, drugs, trade).  It’s cheaper to send armies there to fight those wars.  

Contiguity also empirically plays a massive role in enduring rivalries (which constitute most of the interstate wars in the world).  We don’t see countries far away from each other blowing each other up at the same rates as those next to each other.

Stinnett et al. (2002) give us hope.  They remind us that neighbors can also be a source of cooperation.  While most wars are between enduring rivals, and most enduring rivals are next to each other, the vast majority of countries next to each other are not at war!  Hooray!

Think about the US and Canada.  We have our trade disputes and our ongoing disdain for their kindness (they actually play cooperate in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like domains, which drives us selfish Americans insane).  But the better Canada gets -- the more secure, the more economically prosperous -- the better we’ll get.  We aren’t worried about Canadian immigration.  We don’t spend a fortune defending our borders against it.  It’s great!  

It’s the difference between having a roommate you like and one that you hate.  Life is just better, less exhausting, and more productive in the former.

We have a choice with Mexico.  It’s not a foregone conclusion that they are our enemy.  We don’t have major territory disputes, we have a good history of trade, we have tons of economic interdependence.  We can help boost them up, and in turn make ourselves more secure and more prosperous.

Ok, but the EU ....

What I’m describing sounds a little like the vision for the European Union that hasn’t totally come true.  Germany and France footing the bill for other countries isn’t exactly a model that’s going to inspire many Americans suspicious of (or anxious about) Mexico.  I get it, but I’m not arguing we go that far.

There’s a huge spectrum between the EU and building a wall or launching a trade war (or actual war).  I’m just arguing we land somewhere in the middle, like being nice.

And in the long run, being nice will make us all better off.  It’s just GAINS TO COOPERATION BITCHES.

So how do we be nice?  It starts with language

International relations is based on trust.  

We don’t worry about every move the UK makes because we don’t think they have reason to take military or economic action against us.  Part of the reason we think that is because they aren’t going around shouting that they’re going to.  If they started to, we’d get defensive (literally and figuratively) in a hurry.  

Every time Trump signs an executive order against Mexico, however meaningless, he breaks that trust.  Broken trust means every action we take seems like a threat, which is going to get people in Mexico understandably afraid, which will make them take action against us, and on we will spiral down (Fearon and Laitin (1996)).

On the other hand, if we could signal tiny things saying: Hey, Mexico, we’re in this together, we can all grow economically and also hopefully not kill each other, then maybe that will come true instead.

Fig. 1. Don’t You Dare

Political Science (and friends) Cited

Stinnett, Douglas M., Jaroslav Tir, Paul F. Diehl, Philip Schafer, and Charles Gochman.  2002.  “The Correlates of War Project Direct Contiguity Data, Version 3.0.”  Conflict Management and Peace Science 19(2): 59-67.

Ades, Alberto and Hak B. Chua.  1997.  “Thy Neighbor’s Curse: Regional Instability and Economic Growth.”  Journal of Economic Growth 2: 279-304.

Work Hinted At And To Be Further Discussed

Fearon, James D. and David D. Laitin.  1996.  Explaining Interethnic Cooperation.  The American Political Science Review 90(4): 715-735.

Anything at all on the point of executive orders or why they are used (Readers: if you have a tip, please send them to me!)

[politicalsciencebitches]

40. Anxiety May Be Behind Trump’s Wall

Like many, I am troubled by the news today about Trump moving forward on his claims to build a wall separating the US and Mexico.  I never thought he would actually do it.

I was so shocked by this that I decided to revive (and “rebrand” — gross!) Political Science Bitches, mainly for lack of an idea of what else to do to help.  I anticipated writing an article about why immigration is actually good for the US, and set about looking for some political science research on the subject.

Instead, I found mostly papers on what causes people (mainly Americans and Europeans) to have negative opinions about immigration.  Lots of studies talk about perceived economic threat.  Many talk about group identity (us versus them!).  But one talked about something I’m very familiar with: anxiety.

In 2015 the talented (and friends of #PSB) Ted Brader, Nicholas Valentino, and Elizabeth Suhay published a precociously relevant paper, “What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration?  Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat.”  

According to Brader et al., immigration has been an issue of increasing and decreasing salience over many, many decades, if not forever, in American history.  What causes it to be a big deal sometimes and not others?

One obvious answer is the economy — and one I’ve been telling myself as I observe my country fall to pieces.  People are worried they can’t get jobs, or maybe they aren’t making enough money right now.  In particular American unskilled labor may be increasingly worried about an influx of unskilled labor from somewhere else.  

The second obvious answer is racism.  Many Americans have negative stereotypes of Latinos, so that would explain why they’d like to keep them out.  (Apparently the second-most-hated are Asians.)

Economics concerns and racism are complex, enduring, and not to be discounted.  But they may not be the only things going on.  And neither of these factors tend to be quite as volatile as opinions about immigration.  That is, if they were the only causes, apart from a major economic crash moment or some kind of race riots (maybe?), public opinion about immigration should hold fairly steady, as neither the economy nor a deep-seated value like racism should swing that much in a few months or years.  

In other words, these explanations cannot explain the variance in anti-immigration public opinion in terms of strength or salience.

Brader et al. (2015) tap into a literature in political psychology to develop and test their suspicions that emotions, particularly anxiety, in conjunction with the above factors, may explain why we see such volatility in public opinion about immigration.  

They argue:

Reactions to news about immigration depends on who the immigrants are (so there is some racism: white immigrants tend not to trigger as much reaction among whites).

When this news comes from elites and media outlets people trust (groups with which they identify) this can cause them to think that the problem is more severe than it really is.

But much more importantly these group cues trigger anxiety (this is independent of beliefs about how serious the problem is (p. 960)).

Anxiety has been shown elsewhere to cause people to get worked up and seek out more information and take political action.

For awhile political scientists thought this was a good thing.  Hooray — a more informed public!

Uh OH!  Not so fast.  There’s no rule that says they need to seek out valid information.  If they seek out more information from incorrect sources (probably the one that originally triggered the anxiety) they are just going to become further convinced there’s a huge problem.

Anxiety also triggers action in a way that other political emotions and belief changes don’t.  This can motivate political action, like turning out to vote (sounds familiar).

There you have it.  Anxiety has caused people to support something as monstrous and authoritarian as a wall.  

Let’s do a quick review of other walls in history: Great Wall … Berlin Wall … Mall on the Wall in Millbury, Massachusetts that I visited last week.  

Right.  

The only solace is maybe centuries from now Chinese tourists will think it’s really cool to visit the Great American Wall and take photos on it and tell people it was on their bucket list and exclaim inaccurately that it’s the only wall you can see from space, and will forget the real story of the wall, which is that it caused way more harm than good, and actually never fulfilled the purpose it was supposed to, anyway.

But, hey, some American peasants might make some money selling postcards and Snickers.

I feel officially horrible for ever climbing the Great Wall.  But I do feel a little bit like I understand where pro-wall Americans might be coming from.

Two final thoughts:

Shoot, is this all the media’s fault … again?

I’m talking about supporters of this wall as OTHERS.  I need to accept that I also am susceptible to the above causal mechanisms, as are we all.  While I firmly believe the wall is a bad idea, I recognize I have anxiety about it, which may well be caused by what my trusted elites are saying to me.  I feel like this can’t possibly be the case, though, as surely my side is right.  Surely that’s what the other side thinks, too.

Yours, Troubled in Tucson (and not Tucson, and everywhere else)

Fig. 1. The argument in rabbits.  My favorite part is the ballot that just says “vote” on it.  My least favorite part is everything else.

Main Work Cited

Brader, Ted, Nicolas A. Valentino, and Elizabeth Suhay.  2015.  “What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration?  Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat.”  American Journal of Political Science 52(4): 959-978.

[politicalsciencebitches]

39. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

My dear bitches, with the election upon us, I wish to turn our attention to one of the most important models in political science (and organizational science, among others).  It’s my second favorite model after the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and I’ve used it to solve actual dilemmas in my life.  It’s called EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY, and it is all things wonderful in social science.

Today, I share it with you.  May it give you great help should things turn out horribly tomorrow.  (Also, it’s a book, not a paper, but you know what?  Rules were meant to be broken.  (Note to self: this is probably not as true as I like to think it is.))

The entire model rests on the premise that sometimes we find ourselves in situations we don’t like -- this can be true in a social group, the firm where we work, or our country.  Particularly, the model is interested in times when the LEADER of this group we’re in does something we don’t like.  Like, hypothetically speaking, get elected tomorrow.

In response to this, we citizens/employees/friends have three options:

EXIT: Get the f*ck out of the country/company/group.

VOICE: Speak up!  Tell the leader why you’re upset, be it through protest, complaining on Facebook, or smashing one thousand car windows.

LOYALTY: Shut up and just go with whatever the new crappy situation is.

EXIT is what democrats threaten to do every election if the republican candidate wins.  VOICE is what most of us do for awhile but then usually shut up eventually and just put on bumper stickers that say “not my president.”  LOYALTY is what many people do, especially those of us who are either jaded and/or patriotic.

When do we do which?  What are the consequences?  Well, the model is super elegant in that we can map out all possible versions of the game and find out what the citizen and the leader will each do (the leader can choose to ignore/repress or back down to the citizen).  If we map it all out, including what we think the leader will do, it can help us choose the best course of action.

For example, if we think the government will back down (or issue a vote recount, hypothetically speaking) if we complain enough, then we better complain.  If we think they won’t then we should save our energy and be loyal or exit.  If we don’t really have an exit option, then, shit, we’ll be loyal.  If we do, then China/Canada/Rwanda here we come!

I’ll spare you the math, but another fun insight that comes from this in addition to being able to solve all your life’s problems is that a credible exit option is a major part of what makes citizens’ voices effective.  If the leader knows the citizens can’t leave, then they can just ignore the citizens (that is, unless their ability to use voice is huge, but I think in the US that’s unlikely).  Thus, the whole “it’s hard to get a visa to work in Canada” thing is really working against us here.  The other catch is that the leadership has to give a sh*t if we leave (it has to be “dependent” on the citizen), so even if we can leave, maybe they won’t care.

The entire point of this model is to try to understand who has power, when -- the leader, or the citizen?  Depending on how things go tomorrow, we may be about to find out.  Until then, steel yourselves, my beloved bitches, and just remember we have VOICE and EXIT.  And a fourth option that we can use concurrently with all of them: MARTINIS.

Fig. 1. “C” is “Citizen” or “Chump”.  “L” is “Leader” or “Lunatic”.

Main Work Cited/Main Source of Hope

Hirschman, Albert O.  1970.  Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[politicalsciencebitches]

38. Polls, bitches

Political Science Bitches is freaking out.  As I’ve done in the last two elections, I will be spending the next six days hitting refresh on FiveThirtyEight.com hoping for solace.  And as I swore in the last two elections, this time I’m more nervous than I’ve ever been.  Fuck!

For help today, I looked for an article on polls.  When are they right, when are they wrong, why is everything shifting all the time, why are elections such a hard thing to predict even though partisanship and party ID mostly tend to be consistent over time -- all of that.  (Alas, Political Science is stuck studying only the past, so I don’t have articles on what the fuck happens if an FBI probe gets involved in an election with one week left.)

The title of today’s paper struck where it hurts: “How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter Intentions (2013).”  It was written by a group of scholars in Sweden -- many with cognitive science affiliations, but #PSB will allow it today -- including from Lund University, where a friend and supporter of #PSB is currently located!  The paper is also published in a strange journal -- PLoS One -- whose virtues include that it’s disciplinarily agnostic (again #PSB allows it today in these dire times) and open source.  Working against it are the awful pun in the title, the fact that there’s a manuscript fee, and the fact that I’ve never heard of it until now (information shortcuts are real, man).

Nevertheless, the title urged me on, and the study itself involves -- the authors’ words -- “sleight-of-hand”, so I was going to read it no matter what.  I also like the fact that it focuses on Sweden rather than the US because I’m going to throw up if I think about the US for even one more second right now.

Alright!  So, these guys are trying to figure out how the fuck polls work not just in outcome (do they get the election day prediction right?  Short answer: the poll aggregators do tend to) but in process, which brings us right back to swing voters.  Are most people locked into their views?  Should candidates only focus on the swing voters, who seem to ebb and flow with each day’s new rounds of polling?

This paper suggests no -- that actually more people are open to changing their views than we previously thought.  The authors discover this by finding voters who claim a firm vote choice.  They ran the study a week before a highly contested Swedish election.  Sweden -- fun fact -- is up there with the US as one of the most divided electorates in the world.

They asked these voters to state which party they were going to vote for.  Then they gave these voters a survey of divisive issues (health care, taxes, all our old frenemies here), where they had to say how they felt about each on a left-right scale of 0 to 100.  Then while the survey takers were paying attention to something else, the authors returned them with slightly different scores (SLEIGHT-OF-HAND ALERT!) on these issues so that their OVERALL preference came out to support the OPPOSITE party from what they usually stated.  Christ almighty.

This strikes me as cruel and unusual, but hats off for being fucking aggressive, guys (and high five to the Lund University Ethics Board for approving a study that would have caused me an actual personal breakdown).

Here’s the result: Most people didn’t even notice their views had been altered!  Then, the authors -- who can’t leave well enough alone -- asked the voters to justify these NEW FAKE views!  And most of them did!  God damn it.  What’s more, these voters then allowed that maybe they would vote for the opposite party the next week after all.

Alright.

The authors conclude from this study that it means we haven’t been sensitive enough to how open voters might be to persuasion and that we’re wrong to assume most members of partisan populations are locked into their views.

I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw.

I think the authors missed the fact that lots of survey biases may be playing a role here (they don’t address them in the paper, which would have been helpful).  The main one that comes to mind is that if you’re in the middle of having to explain your views to someone out loud in a survey, and you have no reason to suspect you’ve been given the wrong results, you may just not want to sound like an idiot.  (My survey expert readers: what is the name of this bias?  I’m thinking acquiescence bias, but I’m not sure)  And your stated updated voting intention may have nothing to do with how you’re actually going to vote in secret at the polls.

But this isn’t a bad result for the paper per se -- it still suggests we shouldn’t trust polls even though they can correctly report views stated in the moment.

It’s that the process by which the information is obtained may matter a lot.  How are people being asked in these polls?  Is there any priming going on beforehand?  Are the pollers aggressive?  Are they asking a question immediately after a major event in a way that may not be so salient come election time?  Are they being asked in private?  Are people stating their true preferences?

All of this is why polls aren’t perfectly predictive.  

And this is why I can’t sleep.

Help.

Fuck.

Thanks for reading.

Fig. 1. This is no time for humor.

Main Work Today

Hall, Lars, Thomas Strandberg, Philip Pärnamets, Andreas Lind, Betty Tärning, Petter Johansson.  2013.  “How the Polls Can Be Both Spot On and Dead Wrong: Using Choice Blindness to Shift Political Attitudes and Voter Intentions.”  PLoS One 8(4): e60554.

Related Posts

Do People Have Belief Systems?

Age, Period, Cohort!

Party Brands

Are Swing Voters Real?

Are Polls Pointless?

[politicalsciencebitches]

37. F*cking Debates (and f*cking “trust”)

I hate the debates.  I used to like watching them -- back in the Obama candidacy days -- but now they are stressful and awful.  I avoid them.  I get angry seeing people argue pointlessly.  

I also avoid most other political messages and TV and everything else because it’s unbearable to me to hear people yelling at each other all the time.

Am I a totally irresponsible citizen, choosing to ignore what’s going on because it stresses me out to watch people fight with each other?

Maybe not.

According to “The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust”, I actually might be doing everyone a favor!  

The authors of today’s magnificent (in terms of ideas; sadly fairly boring in presentation, if I may get all Critic’s review on you) paper argue that candidates being horrible to each other on television has real, negative consequences on how citizens who watch this garbage feel about our political system.

This conclusion may feel like it falls under the “obvious” category of, but this paper makes two contributions that I love.

First, until this paper there was no real understanding not just whether uncivilized television made American viewers less trusting of politics, but also why it might.  Remember, “Why” is the holy grail of scientific inquiry -- f*cking important, and f*cking impossible to pin down.

For the “whether” question, the authors make an important distinction between conflict and incivility.

Conflict is disagreement -- that’s not so bad.  Democracy is based on disagreement -- a point I forgot to appreciate.  They describe how actually when Congress is most at gridlock we all should be most grateful -- that’s a sign democracy works.  Discourse, baby!

Incivility on the other hand is just people being mean and rude.  And with the rise of TV, we poor Americans now get to watch our candidates be more rude to each other in more real time.  They posit that while we don’t know whether candidates are more horrible to each other than they used to be (question: why don’t we know that?  I feel like people have research this -- note to self!!), we do know that TV has risen hugely as the medium by which we get information about candidates.

So now the question is about whether something with TV makes us more distrusting of politics.

And this brings us to the why component.  The authors give a reason why specifically TV portrayal of incivility might make us all less trusting of politics: “because its images and sounds more completely mimic conflict in real interpersonal situations” (p. 3).  That’s kind of cool -- so it’s not that we’re necessarily more mean (though we may be) -- it’s that we’re exposed to meanness in a raw, personal way that is missed in print or maybe even radio media.  Maybe even Twitter!

They run some experiments and, yadda yadda yadda, they find support for their theory.  What’s interesting, though, and unclear to me right now, is what the quite precise causal mechanism between televised incivility and trust is -- why not make it just TV and general negative feelings?

This is where we get to the second major contribution of this paper that I like: A f*cking definition of trust.  All the arguments against Hillary Clinton that are based on trust drive me insane.  And, trust is a concept I’ve been exploring in my personal life, too, so ... you’re welcome for oversharing.  Here’s trust:

“To trust is to assume that a person or institution will ‘observe the rules of the game’ (Citrin and Muste 1999) and to believe that those involved will act ‘as they should’ (Barber 1983)” (p. 3).  

And here’s that causal link: They argue that people expect candidates to behave on TV in a way that abides by social norms (the “shoulds”).  And then when they don’t, this means they violate the norms, and so do not act as they “should” and thus violate trust.  All of this assumes people react to TV like they do real life (apparently other evidence supports this).

This is a messy definition of trust in my view, and it also doesn’t help me understand why, despite the fact that Trump is so horrible on TV, Clinton is the one being called not trustworthy.

And this is why I cannot study American politics without getting angry.  You see now why I can’t handle the debates!

Good luck, everyone!  We’ll need it tonight.

Fig. 1. Steve the Nail, rejected again.

Magnificent Paper

Mutz, Diana C. and Byron Reeves.  2005.  “The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust.”  The American Political Science Review 99(1): 1-15.

[politicalsciencebitches]

36. Irrational Bitches

Kim Jong-un.  Pol Pot.  Saparmurat Niyazov.  Donald Trump.

Many people think these people are crazy.  We bat around the word “irrational” to refer to humans who seem to say or do erratic, unusual, or extreme things.

But we mean very specific things when we say “irrational”, which begs the question: are these people crazy, or are they up to something that we would consider “rational” even if we don’t agree with it.  Note: This article is going to be hard for me to write because I think Donald Trump is a monster, but we need to apply a RIGOROUS social scientific lens to ALL THINGS if we wish to find truth (hint: we’ll never actually get there).

Our guide today is one of my heroes, if not my ultimate hero: Herbert A. Simon. Simon is a Nobel laureate in economics, though he was a trained political scientist, which is something no political scientist will ever let you forget.  We’re reading his 1985 paper, “Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science.”

Simon does a number of nice things in this paper, but what I want to focus on is his discussion of two kinds of rationality.  At the time he wrote this paper, Political Science had progressed from a field of arguments to a field of empirics and logic -- we’d adopted formal mathematical modeling from economics and controlled experiment and structured interviews and surveys from psychology.  We were well on our way to putting the science into political science.

But we were -- and in my view still are -- at a crossroads.  Political scientists couldn’t decide, says Simon, whether to think of human nature in terms of how economists think of us, or as how psychologists think of us -- Homo economicus and Homo psychological, respectively.

The difference comes down to two different kinds of rationality: substantive vs. procedural (or bounded).  In general, rational means “behavior is appropriate to specified goals in the context of a given situation” (p. 293).  Substantive rationality means we can ignore the characteristics of the individual actor and just know the constraints and payoffs of the choices and know what the right thing to do is.  The expectation that demand would go up as prices drop no matter who is making the choice is a decent example of this.  The key is the outcome looks rational and it doesn’t matter your personal background.

Procedural, or bounded, rationality means your methods for making the choice are good, but you’re limited in your ability to understand all options available to you.  You’re constrained by both your environment (confusing!) and your brain (not capable of infinite memory and computation).  The good news is we can call you rational, but the bad news is it’s super hard to predict what you’re going to do (perhaps as price goes down your demand also goes down, as you only like buying expensive things because you grew up poor and now are really rich due to a life of very well calculated crime).

What makes me nervous about this one is that bounded rationality can make anyone seem rational.  Trump says and does all kinds of horrible things, but maybe his ability to understand the world is just super limited (doesn’t inspire confidence, but it doesn’t mean he’s irrational).  Simon gives us even more help in understanding irrationality: perhaps your behavior looks irrational because it’s inconsistent with your other goals, even if it satisfies one.  Or you’re ignoring relevant facts.  Or you’ve just failed to consider other alternatives.  Or your expectations for the future aren’t particularly accurate.  Or all kinds of things.

The problem?  This shit is also bounded rationality.

The article leaves me wondering what on earth irrationality is.  I think it must be something like, willfully ignoring facts so as not to feel wrong.  But even that feels like it could be well-calculated.  I thus draw a hasty, though depressing, conclusion that Trump is so far fairly rational.  God damn it!

Finally, three nice quotes:

1) “People are endowed with very large long-term memories, but with very narrow capacities for simultaneous attention to different pieces of information” (p. 301).

Why I like it: Hell yes, this is our whole problem.

2. “In particular, the question of where political ideas come from is not only highly deserving of study, but also within the competence of our contemporary research techniques.  I join Bill Riker in commending it to you as one of the truly exciting and significant areas of research in our field” (p. 303).

Why I like it: Holy heavens, I agree, and, wow, I think there’s still so much work to do on this.

3. Anthony Downs’s Economic Theory of Democracy, published in 1957, may be used to date the first nudgings of this new camel into the tent” (p. 294).

Why I like it: Since when is this an expression?  No matter -- I’m using it all the time now.  Including on stage tonight, where I am about to do standup.  GOODBYE!

Fig. 1. Nothing irrational about this.

Paper Today

Simon, Herbert A.  “Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science.”  American Political Science Review 79(2): 293-304.

[politicalsciencebitches]

35. R=PB-C+D, But Also I’m an Idiot

I realized this morning that I forgot to register to vote.  

I think I missed the deadline.

I used to vote in Michigan, because that was where I lived (clever).  Then I lived in China for a few years, where you can’t vote, which was blissful and wonderful, and I’ll never think of it any other way (hello, McCarthy!).  Now I’m back in the boiling mess of democracy that is the United States and we have an election coming up and I would like to vote in it, despite the fact that, as we have discussed, it may be irrational to do so (the cost of voting > the probability my vote will make a difference in the election).

I live in New York and I would like to vote here, for further irrational reasons, mostly that it would help me feel like an engaged member of a community, which is something I’ve never wanted before in my life.  But, to register, I needed to either show up in person somewhere or mail a form to a place.  To mail the form, I would have had to print it, but I couldn’t get my office printer to print the irregular sized form, so I couldn’t do any of it.  Then I got a form from someone at a booth outside NYU but they said it was too late to mail it in.

They suggested I vote absentee in Michigan.  I hemmed and hawed about that for awhile, thinking, well, there’s more of a chance my vote will matter there (for president, anyway) than New York, but I would rather vote in person because I like voting.  It’s fun!  And I like the sticker.  

Now, because of my indecision, though, it may be too late to vote in either place.  I think I better move back to China.

What’s the point of all this, you ask?  Today’s article is by Riker and Ordeshook and it’s from 1968 and it offers a reason why voting may be rational despite the fact that Anthony Downs rained on everyone’s parade in 1957 by pointing out the whole voting is irrational thing.  Downs said we are all idiots to vote because:

R = BP - C

Where R is my reward for voting, B is how happy I am if my preferred candidate wins, P is the probability that MY vote will bring about the success of my preferred candidate, and C is the cost of voting.  P is obviously basically zero all the time for any given voter.  B right now is infinity, but back then wasn’t likely so high.  C is usually the cost of showing up at the polls (getting there, waiting there, actually voting, dragging yourself home).  Or if you’re a dummy like I am, it’s the enormous cost of figuring out how to print and/or mail some kind of form.

Given this, no one should ever vote.  Riker and Ordeshook say, fuck you guys, this theory is garbage because a good theory should explain what ACTUALLY happens, not try to tell everyone they’re wrong.  Nice point, boys!

They add two things to the theory to make it explain the world better.  The first is they fuck with what P means: They say that it goes up the closer the race seems.  This is interesting because you can imagine the pressures pushing two ways -- the more contested the election gets, the more likely people are to vote, thus making the outcome overall less close (potentially).  Or it could go the other way -- the more obvious I think it is my candidate will win, the less likely I am to vote, which may cause them to lose.  There’s an analogy in here to the stock market, where my behavior is based on what I think will happen, but then by behaving that way, I undermine the possibility of that actually happening.  But it’s too early in the morning and my brain is too feeble to explore that thought further.

The other thing Riker and Ordeshook do is add a variable D for Civic Duty.  Thus:

R = BP - C + D

This suggests I’ll vote regardless of what the hell is going on in the rest of the right side of the equation as long as my sense of duty is greater than the cost of voting.  Right now I personally do have a high sense of civic duty (Why?  Let’s explore that another day!), so I do really want to vote.  But on the other hand, I am genuinely afraid of both printers and the mail, so I honestly don’t know if I will.

That said -- let’s go back to B and P.  B is crazy high for me right now because if Trump is elected I think we all might as well kill ourselves.

Ok, fuck it, I’m going to city hall.  They can help me, right?

P.S. I can’t tell if I should be worried that a Political Scientist can’t figure out how to vote, or if I shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that someone with my training is one of the least competent people in the world when it comes to real life matters like the post office and deadlines.

Fig. 1. I’m told some people have jobs.

Main Work of Beauty for Today

Riker, William H. and Peter C. Ordeshook.  1968.  “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.”  The American Political Science Review 62(1): 25-42.

Or, Fuck it, Just Get the Main Idea Here.

See Also: Downs, Anthony.  1957.  An Economic Theory of Democracy.  New York: Harper.

[politicalsciencebitches]

34. Leader Culpability and Vulnerability

Today we bring you political science HOT OFF THE INTERNET PRESSES!  I am thrilled to share the work of Sarah Croco and Jessica Weeks that was published THIS VERY WEEK in World Politics.

Sarah was my graduate student instructor at Michigan -- she guided a pack of terrified and confused (well, at least I speak for myself) first year grad students through the famed one-year stats sequence, keeping us calm by making us chant, “grades don’t matter in grad school” and encouraging us to visit her office at any hour where she would reliably be blasting The Killers like the cool person she is.

Sarah helped me out a lot over the years -- she let me sit in on her classes when I started teaching and had no clue what to do besides take attendance and then blink at my students for the remaining 46 minutes of our Introduction to World Politics discussion section.  Years later she talked me through career decisions -- even after she graduated she was always only a phone call away.  She also kept it real -- telling and showing us that personal life stuff matters, and reminding us that we are whole people, who have friends and family we love and that grad school, and academia, aren’t everything.  It was huge.

She also always read my dumb cartoons and read my Shanghai blog, so I am extra grateful for that.

I don’t know Jessica Weeks personally, but, hi, Jessica!  I cited you like crazy in my dissertation so I feel like a super fangirl.

In “War Outcomes and Leader Tenure” Croco and Weeks attack the ridiculously important question of when leaders are held responsible for losing wars.  The thinking in International Relations (IR) is that leaders choose to go to war when it might help them stay in office.  This is true for democratic leaders and non-democratic leaders (dictators, tyrants, and so on) alike.  The problem is that war is a gamble -- leaders run the risk of losing the war, and thus having their citizens be super mad at them, and thus risk losing office.

For a long time it’s been standard practice to divide the world into two categories: democracies and non-democracies.  For good reason many scholars thought that whether you were a democratic leader would affect your decision-making when it comes to choosing war.  Because democratic leaders have to face the public during elections, they should be constrained to be more selective in the wars they enter, favoring wars they are more likely to win, as a loss could cost them the next election.  Many of the empirical patterns that should come from this -- democracies typically pick wars against much smaller countries, for example -- were borne out in the historical record.

Unfortunately, while some historical patterns are consistent with some of the predictions from the democratic leader sensitivity argument, no one has been able to empirically demonstrate the core -- that democratic leader tenure is indeed sensitive to losing wars.  In fact, Croco and Weeks point out, some recent work even finds the opposite pattern (p. 578, citations below).  

Croco and Weeks say -- you guys, we’ve been doing it all wrong.  It’s not democratic vs. non-democratic.  It’s leader culpability and vulnerability!  Leader culpability is the extent to which citizens in a country want to punish the leader and vulnerability is the extent to which they actually can.  An unpopular democratic leader might be both culpable and vulnerable, while a personalistic dictator with a cult personality following might be neither culpable nor vulnerable.  Croco and Weeks offer a sweet 2x2 matrix (one of my favorite diagrams after the Venn) where the world falls into four categories, not just two.

Many of the empirical predictions that come from the older democratic/non-democratic divide still hold, but this more nuanced view makes much more accurate predictions and in fact holds up under the own empirical effort.  I was concerned when I started the paper about whether they’d be able to measure culpability or vulnerability (measurement is a major constraint in political science when it comes to our ability to imagine explanations for things), but they do it.  The measure culpability by whether a leader was in power when the war started and vulnerability by polity scores (a measure of how democratic a country is) mixed with more sensitive measures, such as whether a non-democratic regime is personalist (p. 592).  I had expected them to use public opinion data here -- but I think there are serious limits in terms of availability, issues with cross-national comparison, and endogeneity.  Other than that, you know, it would have been a perfect solution.

Croco and Weeks conclude that democratic leaders are sensitive to war outcomes only if they’re culpable.  They also underscore the importance of understanding the variety of non-democratic regimes out there.  In terms of connection to right now -- this continues to cast doubt on the promise of democracies as the full stop harbingers of peace we (or at least those enacting American foreign policy) long thought they were.  It also shows -- convincingly, I think -- that as long as we continue to treat countries like China, Iran, and North Korea as the same, we are all effectively sitting around with our heads in the sand.

The sand may or may not be filled with turtles.

Fig. 1. Solving War One Terrapin at a Time

Fig. 2. Not on a Turtle, But Still Solving War

Read The Paper!

Croco, Sarah E. and Jessica L. P. Weeks.  2016.  “War Outcomes and Leader Tenure.”  World Politics 68(4): 577-607.

Soundrack

The Killers, obviously.

See Also

Chiozza, Giacomo and H.E. Goemans.  2004.  “International Conflict and the Tenure of Leaders: Is War Still Ex Post Inefficient?” American Journal of Political Science 48(3): 604-19.

Debs, Alexandre and H.E. Goemens.  2010.  “Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War.”  American Political Science Review 104(3): 430-45.

[politicalsciencebitches]

33. Ye Olde Double Standards of Women and Negative Campaign Ads

Are women judged more negatively for using negative campaigns when they run for office?  Krupnikov and Bauer (2014) say: Yes, but not always.

The Huffington Post published an article today saying people are coming up with lots of reasons to hate Hillary Clinton, but no one is admitting the real one, which is that she’s a female authority figure who actually can and should lead our country.  The article is impassioned and made me feel all kinds of riled up -- I wanted to shout AMEN from the rooftops because I’ve felt this to be the case this whole time.

On Monday night Trump criticized Clinton for her negative campaign ads against him.  I think negative campaign ads are nauseating and would like to see less of them, but it struck me as odd that he would call her out on this, as it’s a common part of most campaign strategies.

It was tempting after these two observations to say CASE CLOSED!  Americans hate women leaders, and then continue being the super angry feminist that I am.  But, in the spirit of science and objective reasoning, I wanted to find out what the research has to say.

Krupnikov and Bauer (2014) empirically examine whether women are punished more than men for using negative campaign ads, with the primary thinking being that women are expected to be nurturing and kind, and all those other dreadful gender stereotypes (p. 168), so voters should be less tolerant of them being mean on television.

Is that the case?  As with most good questions, there’s evidence to support both sides -- some studies find that women are disproportionately punished, while others find that when it comes to some issues female candidates may actually have an advantage.  Krupnikov and Bauer offer us a guiding light through these muddy waters by studying the conditions under which gender affects the effectiveness of negative campaigns.

The authors pull insights from psychology to develop hypotheses that they test empirically.  The main idea is conditional stereotype use, which says we don’t always apply stereotypes all of the time.  Some research, for example, shows that we don’t apply negative stereotypes against women until they criticize us directly, then the stereotype gets activated (Kunda & Sinclair (1999 and Kunda & Spencer (2003).  Interesting!  I had never heard of that, and already feel self-conscious about whether I’ve done that in my life (towards women or men).

The primary finding of this research is that there is a double standard when female candidates use negative campaign ads, but only when two conditions are met: the female candidate is perceived to be the person who instigated the negativity and when she and the voter are from different parties.

This implies that when Clinton uses negative ads against Trump, she isn’t judged more negatively by voters from the Democratic party, only the Republican side.  And, it only counts against her when she’s the one we think is starting the fight.  I don’t know whether she actually does instigate the negativity in real life -- but it sounds like it matters more whether the other side perceives her to have started the fight, which I am sure they would.  Our side is always right, after all, and the other side is always wrong.

More on this tomorrow!  Until then, I’m going back to being angry and information-seeking.

Fig. 1. My pen name is Jackson Pollock.  Literally, it’s the name of my pen. WHAT?  I’ll see myself out now.

P.S. Yanna and others run an outstanding website and public service called Women Also Know Stuff and you should go there immediately.

Main Work Cited

Krupinkov, Yanna and Nicole M. Bauer.  2014.  “The Relationship Between Campaign Negativity, Gender, and Campaign Context.”  Political Behavior 36(1): 167-188. 

Other Work Considered

Craig, Stephen C. and Paulina S. Rippere.  2016.  “He Said, She Said: The Impact of Candidate Gender in Negative Campaigns.”  Politics & Gender 12(2): 391-414.

These Seem Cool

Kunda, Z., & Sinclar, L. (1999). Motivated reasoning with stereotypes: Activation, application, and inhibition. Psychological Inquiry, 10, 12–22.

Kunda, Z., & Spencer, S. (2003). When do stereotypes come to mind and when do they color judgment?  A goal-based theoretical framework for stereotype activation and application. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 522–544.

[politicalsciencebitches]

32. Anger and Mobilization

The most important thing when it comes to the election this November is mobilization: who and how many of us get involved in the campaigns will determine our next president.  

This is also one of the most emotionally charged presidential races I’ve experienced, which is saying something because all of them have been pretty damn emotional for me.  This is one of the reasons I don’t actually study American politics myself -- I cannot be objective when it comes to my own country.

One of the most salient emotions in this election is anger.  Yes, we’re also anxious.  We’re afraid.  We’re frustrated.  I’m certainly impatient and sick of this horrible “campaign” of vitriol and near absence of actual ideas.  But most of all I’m angry.  I started this blog because I was angry.  I was angry that our country actually supported a nightmare tyrant enough to make him the Republican candidate.  I’m angry that there’s all kinds of sexist stuff going on regarding Clinton.  I’m angry that the media talk about the horse race, at the expense of the issues.  I’m angry that things are crumbling all around us -- we face police brutality, drugs, failing schools, international conflict and terrorism -- and the media (and our candidates) are talking about emails and birth certificates.

The possibly good news is that according to some super smart people (Nick Valentino, Ted Brader, Eric Groenendyk, Krysha Gregorowicz, and Vince Hutchings), anger might be just the thing to get us to get involved.

In “Election Night’s Alright for Fighting: The Role of Emotions in Political Participation,”  Valentino et al. (2006) discover that “anger, more than anxiety or enthusiasm” will mobilize voters.  By mobilize they mean literally do anything -- from wearing a button to attending a rally to donating money to a campaign (p. 162).

It may seem obvious to us casual observers that some sort of emotional force might motivate us to vote, but emotions are very hard to study scientifically.  Until we could do that the role emotions play in elections -- including what kind of emotions lead to what kinds of outcomes -- was doomed to be a mystery.

Valentino at al. relieve us of this doom by conducting three tests of the role anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm play in people’s political participation.  First, they ran an experiment where subjects were assigned to one of the three emotions, asked to write about a time they felt that emotion in conjunction with the current election, and then indicate the likelihood they would participate in a campaign.  

Our scholars also built a panel survey surrounding the 2008 campaign where a representative sample of voters across the country were asked to answer questions about their emotions surrounding the election in the week before the 2008 presidential election and for a week after, as well as report on their political activities.

Finally, they conducted a statistical analysis of survey results form the American National Election Studies (ANES) to test the relationship between self-reported emotions toward a political party and intentions to engage in cheap (wearing a button, talking to others) and costly participation (attending a protest, helping people get to the polls).

The world is a messy place and the results of course are a little different for each study, but the “strongest finding across these three studies is the consistent positive impact of anger” (p. 168).  Enthusiasm can drive participation but not as much or as consistently.  Anxiety had no effect in the first study, a negative effect in the second, and a positive effect in the third, suggesting it can play a role, but interacts with circumstances and resources and is more nuanced in terms of the kinds of political participation to which it gives rise.

Finally, I want to talk about the most important thing here for me in terms of scholarly contributions.  The beautiful thing about this paper is that it demonstrates the scientific method in one of the most elegant forms I’ve seen yet.  It begins from a very clear empirical observation: Emotions show up in campaigns (see all recent elections as examples).  And, these emotions vary widely.  And, hey, you know what else varies widely?  Political participation.  In some elections we see Americans crazy mobilized, and in others we don’t.  WTF?

Then, the paper says that most explanations (theories) of participation focus on resources: Do voters have the time?  Money?  Transportation?  Education and skills?  If yes, then we expect people will get involved.  But here’s the problem: didn’t we just get through noticing that not everyone participates all the time.  Why, then, would people who CAN participate not necessarily do so (p. 157)?

Holy shit, I’m catching my breath I love this so much.

Then, the paper says, hey, we are going to combine these observations -- the fluctuation of emotions during campaigns and the resource models of mobilization -- and see if we can better predict participation.  They pull from two theories of how emotions drive behavior, Affective Intelligence Theory and cognitive appraisal theory, and make predictions about whether emotions like anger, anxiety, or enthusiasm will mobilize people.  They then test them, as described.

Voilà!  We know something now that we didn’t know before.  Now that’s satisfying politics -- no, political science (bitches).

Fig. 1.  We Americans are some emotional f*cks.

Main Paper

Valentino, Nicholas A., Ted Brader, Eric W. Groenendyk, Krysha Gegorowicz, and Vincent L. Hutchings.  2006.  “Election Night’s Alright for Fighting: The Role of Emotions in Political Participation.”  The Journal of Politics 73(1): 156-170.

Appendix 1: Here’s Another Reason I’m Angry (Thanks for Asking!)

I’m angry that my field -- Political Science -- is not a more active part of the debate.  There was all this fact checking going on during the debate on Monday night, but there was no idea checking: why are we talking about these issues and not others?  What could be the causal link between immigration and violence?  Why is it a big deal (or not) if a personal email account is used?  I’m sick of facts.  Facts get thrown around.  I want ideas. 

[politicalsciencebitches]

31. What Terrorists Want

Terrorists are depicted in the media as rogue actors who engage in extreme behaviors in order to generate fear to get people to do what they want them to do.  But what do terrorists want?

Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter wrote a paper in 2006 titled, “The Strategies of Terrorism” that attempted to answer this question -- or at least help us organize our thinking around it.  The paper came amidst a lot of attention to terrorism by political scientists, especially those studying international war.  One of the biggest moves in our understanding of terrorism was to see if existing thinking about the causes of war (traditional, old school, formal interstate military conflict) could help us understand the causes of terrorism.  With war, understanding the causes of it can also help us understand the consequences of it, how to prevent it, and how to manage it, and we all hoped the same might be true for terrorism.

The other major vein in this research about terrorism that shaped how we thought about it was to think about terrorists as rational actors.  Part of the motivation was, again, that many advances in our understanding of war came when we started to think of state leaders as rational (more on that amazing paper soon).  Assuming leaders chose war on purpose marked a big step forward in our ability to tease out why, under what circumstances, and with what costs leaders were willing to engage in something so horrible.  We again hoped this could be true for terrorists.

This change to focus on rational choice wasn’t just limited to conflict -- as we’ve seen across this blog, scientists moved to rational choice models to understand why humans vote, for whom they vote, and even why they’re racist (or stop being so).  Now, switching to rational choice models was not a cure-all -- and it leaves a lot of important things out (like emotions and context), which we know also drive behavior.  What I love about rational choice models is they strip complicated human behavior down to the barest of bones and allow us to examine why, without emotions or contexts, people might choose certain actions over others.  Then, having understood it in the simples sense, we can situate these actors in real human brains, bodies, and societies.

Kydd and Walter represent this effort for terrorism, and as I’ve been saying a lot this week, they help us understand how to think about terrorism by breaking it down into pieces that we can investigate on their own.  Kydd and Walter divide terrorism into four questions: (1) What are terrorists’ goals?  (2) What strategies do they adopt to achieve those goals?  (3) Why do the strategies sometimes work and sometimes not?  (4) What are the best government responses to prevent and protect citizens against these strategies (p. 50)?  I don't know about you, but I feel like if we could answer these four questions we could solve terrorism forever.

The authors divide terrorist goals into five categories: regime change, territorial change, policy change, social control, and status quo maintenance.  That sounds pretty good to me (and sounds a lot like what we’d want out of war, too).  Note that they leave out anything like we might see in popular media like “to terrify people and cause destruction”.  My dear friends, those are strategies not goals.  We’re getting somewhere already!

The effort to understand strategies is where Kydd and Walter appeal to conflict literature.  Decades of thinking about the causes of war have led us to focus on uncertainty and costly signaling (related posts: audience costs and credible signaling).  Uncertainty is central.  War happens because we think we’re more likely to win than the other side.  Or we’re not sure, but the only way to find out is to challenge them. Or because we’re willing to take some kind of risk -- a gamble -- in order to get a goal (territory, policy, etc.) that we really want.  (Note we’re leaving out the question of why there’s a dispute in the first place.)

To overcome uncertainty -- whether we’re terrorists, state leaders, or just a person in an argument -- we engage in costly signaling, which is just doing a thing that requires effort, money, time, or risk to show we really mean what we say -- that it’s not “cheap talk”.  Terrorists do just this, and thus the five major strategies emerge: attrition, spoiling, intimidation, outbidding, and provocation.  Hey!  We talked about those yesterday.

Kydd and Walter give a thorough discussion of when these strategies work better than others, and I encourage you to read the paper directly (this one is linked to a free PDF!), as we’re out of time here.  But a major punchline I want to bring to your attention is that, now, given we know about these strategies, we (the non-terrorists -- sorry, terrorist readers, you’re being left out here) can start to think about how best to respond to those.  This gets into game theory -- the idea that my best response to your action depends on what action you choose.  Counterterrorism procedures work better as policies tailored to specific kinds of threats -- not just blanket policies we throw at the world.  

The idea is there’s no panacea when it comes to counterterrorism.  That said, there are also economies of scale in that we can’t develop and implement specific policies for every single threat (or can we?  The fact that one shoe bomber has now meant all of us take off our shoes at every airport in the US for years suggests maybe we can).  This leaves us with a broader question: Are US counterterrorism policies appropriately targeted?  Should they be more specific to each threat, or is it impossible to anticipate them all, thus leaving the better policy to be broader ones that prevent or respond to a wider variety of terrorist strategies, even if it means leaving us vulnerable to a few specific ones?

I do not know.  No one knows.  This is one of the many reasons terrorism is hard.  Have a great weekend, bitches!

Fig. 1.  I love this paper because it’s like the container store of ideas.  Of terrifying, terrifying ideas.

P.S. For the Astute Student: Kydd and Walter define terrorism as “the use of violence against civilians by non state actors to pursue political goals” (p. 52).  Compare this to Page Fortna’s definition we read yesterday.  What are the main differences?  What are these implications for these two differences in terms of how we identify terrorism, how we study it, and the policy prescriptions we derive from it?

Main Work Cited

Kydd, Andrew H. and Barbara F. Walter.  2006.  “The Strategies of Terrorism.”  International Security 31(1): 49-80.

[politicalsciencebitches]

30. Hey Terrorists, You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Once upon a time a group of people were angry with their government.  They were so angry that they were in the midst of a civil war.  They had two options available to them to defeat the government: they could engage in military warfare or terrorism (they were way past protests or other forms of dissent).  They decided on terrorism.

Why?

Because terrorism -- a deliberate campaign of indiscriminate violence performed by groups against public civilians in order to influence a wider audience (Page Fortna 2015, p. 522) -- seemed like it would be the most effective way to get what they wanted.  This was especially for a group like theirs, where they couldn’t engage in less-extreme protests forms like voting or writing letters to the editor due to the authoritarian nature of their government.

They had good reason to believe in terrorism’s effectiveness.  Terrorism seemed powerful -- it’s both random and outrageous, in that it could happen anywhere and strike innocent people (p. 522).  It doesn’t require whole armies, either, so it’s a super cheap way to terrify everyone and make them do what you want.  In this view, terrorism was more cost effective than Wal-Mart (which they also begrudgingly admitted they loved).

There were other advantages, too.  They thought they might win against their government through attrition -- they were certain they could weather this longer than the government, slowly beating them down into giving them what they wanted.  Terrorism also had the advantage of seeming like it might generate costly signals, which are a way for the group to show they really mean what you say.  Would they really be blowing up this bus full of children if they didn’t stand for their mission?

The benefits didn’t stop there -- because it’s so horrifying, it’s an amazing way to get everyone to pay attention to their cause.  Try getting international news outlets to pay attention to a peaceful sit in!  Terrorism might also provoke the government into overreacting, which could make other citizens sympathetic to the terrorists, thus making them even larger and more powerful!  What a great way to recruit.  Terrorism was a way to outbid other groups with a similar grievance, again getting more sympathizers on their side.  And last, but certainly not least, terrorism was just a great way to spoil everything (Kydd and Walter 2002).

The group’s main goal was complete victory over the government, with the second best goal being some kind of negotiated agreement with the government outlining a new status quo.  Third best would be the war just goes on and on.  This would mean they don’t lose or stop existing as a group, even if it’s costly and horrible.  The worst two outcomes would be their rebellion just fizzles out, and horror of horrors, the government defeats them.

What happened to our dear group?  They were so optimistic going in -- thinking that for all these reasons they would definitely defeat the government.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.  The terrorists did not get what they wanted.  The government was strong enough to keep them from winning.  But the government wasn’t strong enough to keep them from surviving.  The group had just enough resources to keep the war going way longer using terrorism -- these random, relatively cheap though deadly strikes -- than they would have using conventional warfare against a real military.

But the story is not so sad for our terrorists.  The primary goal of any political actor (leader, voter, country, terrorist) is to survive -- first and foremost.  And survive they did, these terrorists, on these little sparks they kept flaring every now and again.  And the war dragged on and on, for far longer than it would have or even should have.

And so the terrorists did not get what they wanted, but they got what they needed.  And the war continues on even today.

The end.

Fig. 1.  The terrorists could be anywhere.

Main Paper

Page Fortna, Virginia.  2015.  “Do Terrorists Win?  Rebels’ Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes.”  International Organization 69(3): 519-556.

Also

The Atlantic Summarized it Nicely: David A. Graham, “Does Terrorism Work?” The Atlantic, May 25, 2015.  (In other news, I have no idea how to cite non-academic articles.)

Other Reference: Kydd, Andrew H. and Barbara F. Walter.  2002.  “Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence.”  International Organization 56(2): 263-96.

Special Thanks: Christine Renee Miller and Matt Hoverman of Go Solo and Betsy Capes of Capes Coaching.

Soundtrack: An obnoxious amount of Philip Glass.

Crazy New Age Thing I Procrastinated by Reading: David Stipp, “Beyond Resveratrol: The Anti-Aging NAD Fad”, Scientific American, March 11, 2015.

Fig. 2.  Terrorists’ goals should be SMARTE (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Time-Based, and Exciting).  (Capes Coaching.)