With Rick Perry now in 4th place in GOP polls, I wanted to share this reminder of his glory days in Texas gubernatorial politics before it was too late. The attached radio ad comes from his 2006 reelection campaign against former congressman Chris Bell. Perry won 39%-30% (with two strong independent candidates, bizarrely including Kinky Friedman, garnering 30% of the vote between them.) Part of Perry’s theme: “this ain’t Taxachusetts!”

I enjoy the London Review of Books but I’m not a fan of their policy of hiring English people to write about U.S. politics. In theory it could work just fine but in practice there seem to be problems. Recall the notorious line from a couple years ago, “But viewed in retrospect, it is clear that it has been quite predictable.”

More recently I noticed this, from John Lanchester:

Republicans, egged on by their newly empowered Tea Party wing, didn’t take the deal, and forced the debate on raising the debt ceiling right to the edge of an unprecedented and globally catastrophic US default. The process ended with surrender on the part of President Obama and the Democrats. There is near unanimity among economists that the proposals in the agreed package will at best make recovery from the recession more difficult, and at worst may trigger a second, even more severe downturn. The disturbing thing about the whole process wasn’t so much that the Tea Partiers were irrational as that they were irrationalist: they were consciously pursuing a course of action which made no economic sense, as part of a worldview which is essentially theological [emphasis added]. They know that everyone else knows that they truly don’t care about the consequences of their actions, and the prospect of the Tea Party wing being in government is truly frightening. ‘Sane Republican’ is not an oxymoron, not yet – but we’re heading that way.

There’s apparently a meme developing in the early general election reporting that goes like this: I know Obama is in a difficult position heading into 2012, but I can’t just report on the poll numbers or the fact that everyone knows incumbents have a difficult time getting re-elected when the economy is doing poorly, so I’m going to seize on some piece of information that’s out of context to be “another sign” that Obama is in trouble.

Earlier this week, I raised the issue that there might be some tension between the sudden savior status of technocratic government and traditional notions of democratic accountability. Thus it was with great interest that I read the lead to the AP story on Italy’s likely incoming new – “TECHNOCRATIC” – Prime Minister, Mario Monti:

Italy’s Senate approved crucial economic reforms demanded by the European Union on Friday, the first step in paving the way for Premier Silvio Berlusconi to resign as early as this weekend and a transitional government to be formed. The 156-12 vote took place after respected economist Mario Monti – widely expected to become the interim prime minister – was welcomed with applause in the Senate chamber, where he was officially designated senator for life. [emphasis added]

Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery talk sense here. I am perhaps too influenced by Steven Rosenstone’s 1983 book, Forecasting Presidential Elections, which is the first thing I read on the topic. In any case, I agree with Nyhan and Montgomery that the difference in vote, comparing a centrist candidate to an extreme candidate, is probably on the order of 1-2%, not the 4% that has been posited by some.

We are delighted to welcome back UCSD professor Barbara Walter and her colleague, professor Alberto Díaz-Cayeros.  Professor Díaz-Cayeros is an expert on Mexico and professor Walter is an expert on insurgency. Below they combine their respective sources of expertise and analyze the violence in Mexico as a form of insurgency.

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This is a guest post from my colleagues Brandon Bartels and Jake Haselswerdt, which is substantially more interesting than the title that I gave the post:

In response to Suzanne Mettler’s post on Monday, commenter Josh asked for clarification regarding the importance of policy delivery mechanism (e.g., direct cash payment vs. tax break) to citizen understanding and support of government programs.  As Mettler noted in her response, the focus of her and Guardino’s experiment is not the effect of the delivery mechanism but the ways in which providing additional information can impact citizens’ evaluations of indirect or “submerged” programs.

In a new paper (available upon request) inspired in part by Mettler’s work, we tackle the effect of delivery mechanism directly with a survey experiment of our own.  Our findings confirm that the way a policy is delivered to beneficiaries can have a profound impact on public support for that policy, and that this effect is conditioned by ideology.

We presented survey respondents with a description of a federal housing program, after which they were asked to rate their approval of the program on a seven-point scale.  About half of respondents received a description of the real-life Home Mortgage Interest Deduction:

“We’re going to ask you your opinion on a government program intended to help Americans afford to own homes. Under this program, individuals who take out a mortgage to buy a home are eligible to deduct the monthly mortgage interest from their taxable income, thereby reducing their tax burden. The total savings for individuals under this program are estimated to be $94 billion for fiscal year 2011.”

The other half of the respondents were shown a description that differed in two respects: first, the words “eligible to deduct the monthly mortgage interest from their taxable income, thereby reducing their tax burden” were replaced with “eligible for a grant from the federal government to help them afford the monthly payment;” second, the words “The total savings for individuals under this program…” are replaced with “The total government expenditures to individuals under this program…” We believe these contrasts in language were reasonable given the way these types of programs are often framed by elites.

The effect of this manipulation of delivery mechanism is displayed in this bar graph, which displays the percentage of respondents in each treatment group who expressed at least some approval of the program.  The effect is considerable, as support drops by about 24% when the program is described as a grant.

The effect of this manipulation was especially pronounced for conservatives.  Conservatives appear to be just as willing as liberals to support a government program, provided that it is delivered through the tax code, but less willing to support this program when described as a “grant.”

Is the extra support we observe for the tax expenditure due to a lack of understanding about how such programs actually work?  Here our findings are less clear.  We included a second experimental factor that varied the amount of information provided, though we focus on program cost rather than distributive impact (Mettler and Guardino’s focus).  About half of the respondents in both experimental conditions described above were shown an extra sentence at the end of the program description: “It is estimated that this program will add around $390 billion to the national debt over the next four years.”  We expected that this information would come as a bigger revelation to respondents in the tax expenditure group due to the opaque nature of tax expenditures as a policy tool, and that this would reduce the advantage of the tax expenditure.  There was little evidence of this when we examined all respondents, however; the debt information reduced support across the board, but no more so for the tax expenditure than the grant, as shown in this graph.

Examining conservative respondents specifically, we do find some evidence that providing debt information modestly tempers the strong positive effect of the tax expenditure condition.  In substantive terms, this suggests that while conservatives are much more likely to support a tax expenditure than a comparable direct spending program, this difference is due in part to a lack of understanding about the fiscal impact of tax expenditures.

There is clearly more at work here than conservatives’ failure to account for costs, however.  The positive reaction to a tax break as compared to a functionally equivalent grant is present even for liberals, and remains strong for conservatives even in the presence of extra information about program cost.  It is quite possible that what we are observing here is a general American antipathy toward “government,” or at least government that looks like government.  Alternatively, perhaps it’s about the beneficiaries; Americans may look more generously upon “taxpayers” than they do upon other potential recipients of policy benefits.