Threats to Polish Democracy

After two decades of fairly widespread progress toward consolidated democracy, the last several years have brought some notable setbacks, linked to the election of conservative nationalist parties.

First, it was Hungary. A Christian nationalist party called Fidesz won a free and fair election in 2011, which granted it a supermajority in the country's unicameral parliament. The party then used its power to rewrite the country's constitution to permanently hardwire Hungary's political system in its favor. The reforms crippled the independent media and judiciary. They also changed the electoral system and redrew districts to make it extremely difficult for opposition parties to win a majority. Finally, they required 2/3s majorities for any future government to agree on replacing electoral commissioners, judges and other important officials. Read this post by Kim Lane Scheppele for a concise and depressing summary. 

Essentially,  the massive electoral victory allowed Fidesz to engage in a wholesale restructuring of the Hungarian state; the party then forced through a constitutional overhaul that locks those policies in place no matter what future  governing majorities might think.

Now Poland is exhibiting several alarming similarities to Hungary.

The newly-elected government of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) has pushed through reforms that limit the power of the Constitutional Court to review government policy for constitutionality and stack the court with PiS appointees.  A law cracking down on the independence of public media and making it more nationalist in scope appears to be next. We'll see where this goes, but the trajectory is not good.

Both Fidesz and PiS are conservative, nationalist, Christian-identified parties.

While both of these developments are alarming and discouraging, they do raise fundamental points in democratic theory: What issues should merely be "policy" issues that can be changed by regular order, and which ones rise to the level of needing enshrined in a national constitution and requiring supermajorities to change?

Does having a state-run exchange improve health insurance access under the ACA?

With the ruling in King vs. Burwell behind us, focus on the differences between state sponsored health exchanges vs. the federal exchange has fallen away. But as state-based data has been rolling in from Gallup, the CDC, and the Urban Institute on declines in people without health insurance, I began wondering whether providing a state-based exchange has any advantages over a the federal marketplace. Gallup’s comments and tables in particular seem to push the idea that states with state-based exchanges seem to have had more success with reducing the uninsured rate.

Of course, the real reason that state-based exchanges exist is political. The original House of Representatives bill had a national marketplace, while the Senate Bill incorporated state-based marketplaces. This particular breakdown shouldn’t surprise anyone, since Senators represent entire states, and all states are equally represented. The general state-based structure of the Senate bill won out. The final ACA incorporated a mechanism that defaulted to a federal backstop, but the markets themselves were still based on state boundaries.

However, despite that structural political reason, there might be some practical reasons why state exchanges might have superior performance to a unified federal exchange. First, commentators often refer to states as “laboratories of democracies” that can innovate and try numerous different ideas. Over time, the theory goes, good ideas from some states will diffuse across other states naturally and more quickly than if the federal government had installed and tried to improve a clunky national idea. Second, there’s the idea that differing conditions and preferences across states mean that state-based exchanges will allow individual states to customize their exchanges to best fit the needs of their state.

We would have to hold these potential advantages against some very real drawbacks. First, there’s administrative complexity and cost of constructing and running an exchange for a state-level. With federal grants to construct exchanges running out, several smaller states are already transitioning back to the federal marketplace, while others are having trouble paying the upkeep costs. Also note that there’s a question of whether several states even have enough potential subscribers to form a healthy individual insurance market to begin with.

With these ideas in mind, I used Gallup’s state-based data to build an extremely simple statistical model to predict the effects of a state-based exchange on improvements in health insurance coverage.  Follow me below the fold for more details.

Oregon's new motor-voter law drastically eases registration, but still leaves a few blind spots

Newly minted Oregon Governor Kate Brown kicked her administration off with a bang on March 16, signing a motor-voter bill on steroids into law.

The law is good policy and will remove some considerable hurdles to voting for a large number of people. However, it does leave out potential voters and may not in itself increase voter turnout all that much.

The bill makes voting registration automatic for any eligible potential voter existing in the Oregon State Department of Motor Vehicles database. This feature goes far beyond current federal requirements, which only make it mandatory to allow an eligible resident to register to vote while obtaining a driver's license or conducting business at a state DMV. According to Reuters, the bill could expand registration by 300,000 voters – an increase of about 13.7 percent over the most recent voter roll.  

That’s good news and brings Oregon’s policies much more in line with most other industrialized democracies, which automatically register voters whenever they move. Coincidentally, most of those countries traditionally have had higher turnout than the United States. Better yet is that these policies will automatically keep track of people who tend to move around a lot and who have their registration fall through the cracks, like younger people – particularly students – and working families.

But the law doesn’t cover everyone. People without driver’s licenses (who often will not be in the DMV’s files) likely won’t be automatically registered; and those individuals tend to be disproportionately poor and people of color as we know from the battles over voter ID in numerous states.

Additionally, political science strongly suggests that easing barriers to voter registration doesn’t necessarily increase voter turnout. Candidates and parties still have to give people a reason to vote and activelywork to effectively mobilize and get them to the polls.[5]

So raise two-and-a-half cheers for Oregon making it easier to participate in the democratic process.  Now progressives just have to make it worth the new voters’ time to actually, you know, vote.

Why I'm a liberal democrat (and a Liberal Democrat): respecting the rules of the game, election day edition

Permit me to open with a personal story.

About a decade ago, I was running a small weekly newspaper in upstate New York’s Wayne County. One day, I ran across an item in the neighboring town’s paper describing some complaints some fine upstanding citizens made at a school board meeting about the annual district budget vote (which had passed).

One of the residents, a woman named Penny Frederick, complained that officials weren’t vigorously checking voter eligibility of what appeared to be “high school students” in front of her.

That seemed a bit discriminatory, and raised my hackles – after all, 18-year-olds can vote, right? She then went on to suggest that voters should need to go through a “qualifying” process, which set me growling audibly in my office.

She then said the following:

"We believe that if school were not in session, there would be next to no students voting. We believe that students were excused from class to vote. What a shame that students who do not pay taxes are encouraged and frightened into voting for more spending."

Let that sink in for a few moments.

It sounds really similar to another rather infamous recent pronouncement, doesn’t it?

At the time, I wrote a furious column; pointing out that A. Ms. Frederick had no evidence that students were intimidated into voting for the budget and B. whatever stance they took was a moot point as 18-year-olds are entitled to the same voting rights as anyone else under the 26^th amendment of the Constitution. It’s a close cousin to the 15^th and 19^th amendments, which set the same parameters for race and gender. And oh yeah, you don’t have to own property or have tax liability to vote -- that’s the 24^th amendment, which dispatches with those pesky poll taxes.

(The column appeared in the July 8, 2004 edition of the Wayne County Mail, which is, alas, not online)

One thing that we emphasize in political science is the “rules of the game.” That is, in order to have a stable democratic government, we can disagree on policy, but we need to respect certain parameters: universal suffrage and other civil rights on one hand, and the legitimacy of duly elected office-holders or governments on the other.

It’s arguments like Frederick's that frighten me about the future of democracy in the United States, because they drip with contempt for the rules of the game. They think if you’re young, you’re too stupid to vote. They think if you receive welfare payments or don’t pay income taxes, you have too much of a conflict of interest to vote (Senior citizens who rely on Social Security or CEOs who take advantage of corporate tax breaks always seem to be exempt from this requirement, though). They think if you don’t have a driver’s license, you can’t be trusted to vote. They think if you’re a convicted felon, you don’t deserve to vote. In practice, all of these requirements seem to count double for the poor, for females, and for racial and sexual minorities.

We’ve seen these arguments come to a head over the last five years: the bizarre fixation on our president’s citizenship; the attack on community organizing groups like ACORN; the unprecedented obstruction of routine executive appointments to the cabinet, regulatory agencies and the court system; and the spread of voter disenfranchisement laws.

But as the statements I encountered above show, the sentiment isn’t new.  I discovered mild symptoms nine years ago in an upstate New York school budget election. But much more dangerous strains showed up in the hard-right reaction to Clinton’s presidency, the John Birch Society and the Jim Crow southern segregationists, and the pre-Civil War slaveholders, who plunged the country into Civil War rather than give up power to own their fellow human beings.

  

Fortunately, thus far, we’ve always had just enough citizens and leaders who have pushed back on these claims – radical Republicans during the Civil War, Liberal Democrats during the New Deal and Great Society, socialist labor organizers, populist farm organizers, and activists for any number of important civil rights causes.

Look, I’m a Liberal Democrat (capital letters) because I believe in a set of public policy goals: a well-run government, a clean environment, a fair shake for workers, universal access to quality health care, education, child care and employment, a constructive foreign policy, a fair tax system, and equal protections for all regardless of gender, race or orientation.

But more fundamentally, I’m also a liberal democrat (lower-case letters) because I believe in the rules of the game: the legitimacy of elected leaders and in the legitimacy of all citizens to choose those leaders and take part in the governing process.

Making some people (by which I mean "those people") jump through ridiculous hoops to vote is an affront to the rules of the game.

Participatory democracy is a fragile thing.  One of our goals as progressives (and Progressives) is to cherish it by making sure all citizens have the real right to participate in it. 

We can do better. We must do better. And that Journey starts on Election Day -- though it most certainly cannot stop there.

Low voter turnout in local elections: an analysis

During their "Houston Matters" weekday show on Monday Oct. 14, KUHF dedicated its first segment to the mayoral election. The station brought in three professors of political science -- Mark Jones and Paul Brace from Rice University and Renee Cross from the University of Houston.

Most of the segment was dedicated to analyzing the resumes and plans of each of the nine(!) candidates for mayor, which got to be a lot of fun when you moved down to the names of the people you had never heard of (who knew the socialist workers party even existed in Texas?).

But a large undercurrent of the show was dedicated to wondering why people don't vote in local elections. I don't disagree with any of the reasons the three gave, (less prominence, people

1. Lack of mobilization resources. Ben Hall and Annise Parker have considerable resources, their campaigns simply don't have the national prominence or organizing ability that a presidential or even a gubenatorial campaign might have to turn out voters.  Mobilization -- through advertisements, door-to-door visits, offers of rides to the polls -- lowers costs for voters

2. It's a non-partisan election. One of the simplest pieces of information to give voters is a Party ID, which cuts voting costs by giving you a cue about a candidate's positions on everything from gay rights and abortion to labor unions, the environment, mass transit and government regulation of the economy and jobs.

Don't believe me?

Take the following ballot:

1. Warner
2. Warner

Do you know what the candidates stand for? Do you know who you are going to vote for?

Probably not.

Now let's make it a partisan election

1. Warner (R)
2. Waner (D)

Now do you have a better idea of what the candidates stand for and who you are going to vote for?

I rest my case.

We love to decry excessive partisanship, but there is something to be said for both the mobilizing capacity and information-provision that well-organized political parties provide.

Houston mayoral poll doesn't tell us much of anything

At the end of last week, Rice University released the results of a polling it conducted on the Mayor's race for NPR's KUHF and TV station KHOU.

The poll, which interviewed 424 registered voters (margin of error of +/-4.76 percent) showed the following results:

48%: Undecided:
34%: Annise Parker
13%: Ben Hall:
5 %: other candidates

Based on these results, KHOU and Rice’s PR office both proclaimed respectively that a run-off election is likely, as Parker wasn’t close to the 50 percent mark necessary to gain a majority and win outright in the general election.

Here’s Rice’s subhead:

Despite lead, findings suggest a runoff election 

Here’s KHOU’s lede and follow-up grafs:

Annise Parker seems headed for a runoff in her campaign to keep her job, but she commands more than twice as many supporters as her leading challenger in a newly released poll commissioned by KHOU 11 News and KUHF – Houston Public Radio.

Still, just six weeks before Election Day, roughly half of all surveyed voters either didn’t know or wouldn’t say how they’re going to vote.

Parker leads the pack of candidates at 34 percent, with former city attorney Ben Hall at 14 percent. About 48 percent of voters are classified as undecided, indicating the incumbent mayor will have to fight to keep the post to which she was narrowly re-elected two years ago.

Ahem. (Patrick toggles controller to engage political scientist “beast mode”)

*HULK SMASH BAD HORSE-RACE REPORTING ON POLLING AAARGHHH*.

(Patrick jams large pins in Politico reporter Voodoo doll on desk, returns to human form. Takes deep breath, feels better)

Sorry about that. Rice’s PR office and KHOU way overplay these results. The poll itself has several very serious limitations that their reporting ignored.

Complaint 1: The poll is of registered voters

The sample size is OK, and I’ll assume the methodology to draw the sample is fine (Bob Stein knows what he’s doing and has a decent history of polling local issues within the constraints given him by his clients). But the poll talks to registered voters about a local race, where turnout is usually under 200,000 voters in a municipality with well more than a million registered voters (see the always-insightful Charles Kuffner on this point).  And we know from studying politics that those undecided voters generally aren’t thoughtful moderates agonizing over the issues. Instead, they often don’t have a clue as to what is going on and will probably sit the election out unless they can be reached by a good mobilizing effort.

So let’s assume for a second that none of the 48 percent “undecided” will vote and recalculate the numbers We roughly get:

65% Parker (34/52)
27% Hall (14/52)
8% Everyone else (4/52)

That would put Parker safely in the Mayor’s chair without a run-off (even with the larger margin of error created with the smaller sample size, see explanation below).  Of course, this still would leave us with a turnout rate of 52 percent of registered voters, which is far too high for even the most hotly contested local election. If we assume that the drop-off rate of supporters is roughly equal among candidates, then Parker still wins in a breeze. I certainly don’t endorse that assumption – turn-out operations are key in mobilizing voters and I don’t know enough judge the various campaigns’ abilities. (Though Hall hasn’t impressed me much in the little that I have seen.)

What the poll needed was a screening question or two that asked residents if they voted in the last municipal election, which would have sorted out likely voters from registered voters. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it I think it would have improved the results quite a bit. (I suspect that cost scuttled this idea, because it would have entailed another 1,000 phone calls or more.)

Complaint 2: The emphasis on subgroup reporting with small samples.

My second complaint about the coverage is its discussion of the candidates’ support. See Rice’s release:

Parker’s share of the vote by race and ethnicity is broad, according to the poll. She garnered 38 percent of the Anglo vote, 42 percent of the Hispanic vote and 24 percent of African-American vote. Hall, an African-American, has support from 29 percent of African-American voters. Parker garnered 27 percent of Anglo Republican voters’ support, compared with only 11 percent for Ben Hall.

Remember that margin of error for the total poll being 4.76 percent? Well, that’s based on the sample size of 423 respondents. When we’re talking about support among different racial/ethnic groups, we’re looking at the Anglo subgroup, the African American subgroup and the Latino subgroup. Each of these groups is probably between 100 and 200 people (except for Anglo Republicans, which is even smaller). Guess what? That means the margin of error goes up accordingly, roughly 7 percentage points for a sample size of 200 and 10 percentage points for a sample size of 100, which makes these subgroup analyses practically useless.^1,2

As usual, Kuffner is all over some of these points. He's kinder than I am to the poll's methodology, but his speculation is generally intelligent, appropriately cautious, and well-leavened with historical context.

The point is to be VERY WARY of extrapolating from a single poll, especially a small one conducted on a local race that doesn’t have a good likely voter screen.

1.  This assumes a confidence level of 95 percent
2. To pile on here, the Rice release also incorrectly states that Parker won narrowly against former City Attorney Gene Locke with 51 percent of the vote in 2011. She beat him in a runoff in 2009 with 52 percent of the vote. She avoided a runoff with 51 percent in 2011's general election against 5 relatively unknown candidates.

Houston Mayoral Election: Thoughts on Annise Parker's latest Ad

It's an off-year election, to say the season is heating up is perhaps a bit strong. However, the Houston Mayor's race has at least been thawing out a bit over the last month. 

Here's incumbent Mayor Annise Parker's latest TV ad, which I caught on Saturday during the Ohio State-Northwestern game. (Analysis and another Northwestern connection below the ad):

There's nothing particularly special here, though the ad does have a fairly high production value for a local race. (Both Parker and Hall have considerable resources, though).  The ad is negative, which isn't surprising. Most probably voters already know who Parker is, so there's really not much of a need to define herself. In contrast, Hall has gone negative on her in several ads, so this is a response to try and define him negatively. Parker's people probably aren't overly concerned about Hall --I'll try to break out some polling numbers later this week-- but in a low-turnout election there's a lot of give in the electorate, so this is a prudent defensive move.

As for the ad itself, note how its negativity actually provides some valuable political information. In particular:

1. There's this guy named Ben Hall running for Mayor (this is kind of essential for voters to know.)

2. Houston Teachers hate him (this provides a voting cue for people who might like teachers)

3. Ben Hall had delinquent property taxes on several occasions.

4. There's also this woman named Annise Parker who is mayor (hint: maybe you should vote for her)

Four facts. Two ID candidates running. One IDs an endorsement of a well respected group in town. One relates to the financial competence of a candidate. 

Many people deplore negative advertising, but I think it this case the negative advertising provides information to voters more than turning them off. This is a low-information, low-turnout election and any strand of info citizens get will lower their costs of making a decision and make it at least more marginally likely for them to turn out to vote.  In contrast, if likely voters already knew the candidates well, had made up their minds and were being bombarded with additional negative ads, the tone might make them tune out and less likely to vote (think about the saturation coverage of a presidential campaign).

The argument above is stolen, er applied, from the research of assistant Professor Yanna Krupnikov of Northwestern University. You can read some of her very sharp work on the impact of negative advertising on voters here and here.

Full disclosure 1: Yanna was a year ahead of me at Michigan. I consider her a friend. She has brought the Political Science doctoral program there much more honor than I ever will.

Full disclosure 2: Yanna has an adorable dog. Just saying.