Links for January 15-21, 2023 | "Zero-sum" politics; new evidence on digital ads; drinking and democracy; and how not to write a poll question

I'll take my whiskey like American democracy (on the rocks)

Happy weekend, subscribers.

This is my regular weekly roundup of articles/books/charts etc. I’ve read or media I’ve watched that I think are interesting and worth a fun discussion. We talk about the value of digital advertising and what to do if you feel democracy is dying.

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1. Democrats are more “zero-sum” thinkers than Republicans? Maybe, but this smells like p-hacking.

A new paper analyses responses to a survey of over 15,000 Americans to analyze correlates of what the authors call “zero-sum” attitudes; those that correspond to views of a world “of limited good.” They design a poll to measure such zero-sum beliefs in terms of conflict for resources along four dimension: (1) ethnic groups in terms of wealth; (2) U.S. citizens and non-citizens in terms of economic well-being; (3) countries in terms of economic gains from trade; (4) income classes in terms of wealth. Responses were provided from an online survey provider called Respondi/Bilendi, which I have not heard of and assuming is a low-cost provider.

The questions go something like:

• Citizenship: “In the United States, there are those with American citizenship and those without. If those without American citizenship do better economically, this will generally come at the expense of American citizens.”

• Trade: “In international trade, if one country makes more money, then it is generally the case that the other country makes less money.”

• Income: “In the United States, there are many different income classes. If one group becomes wealthier, it is usually the case that this comes at the expense of other groups.”

Using these questions the authors find that the young, the poor, Black Americans, men and Democrats think about politics and society more along “zero-sum” lines than other groups. People in the south are also more prone to such attitudes. There is an interesting U-shaped curve for education:

Here are the graphs of zero-sum thinking by political party identification and ideology. Note the gaps between the blue and red bars at the highest end of the index:

These figures were presented online to imply that Democrats harbor some degree of selfish resentment against their neighbors that Republicans do not. That is certainly one interpretation of the graph. But here is another: zero-sum thinking is more common among people who sympathize with the Jan 6 insurrectionists and those who believe in QAnon! So maybe the partisan angle is not s clear-cut:

The authors, however, suggest a few alternative (and more sympathetic) explanations for these beliefs. People whose ancestors experience less economic mobility or were enslaved are more likely to agree with the statement that “if one group becomes wealthier, it is usually the case that this comes at the expense of other groups.” And doesn’t that make sense?

2. Digital advertising causes turnout increases (for voters in information silos)

Another paper published last week finds evidence that exposing potential GOP voters to negative information about Donald Trump made them less likely to vote for him in the 2020 election, particularly if the individual in question was an early voter. Biden voters, meanwhile, were activated by the campaign. Here is the main image:

This is an interesting study. It is a large one (the N is nearly 2m people) and uses a large real-world field experiment to measure effects—and it finds effects that other studies haven’t been able to, either because they were under-powered or looking at the wrong variables. But the study is also interesting for what it does not find.

Due to the experimental design, the study is not able to detect any effects of persuasion on people changing their vote choice. That is, there is no evidence that exposing Trump to negative ads about their candidate convinces them to vote for Biden. The only evidence in the study is that it convinces some of them not to vote at all. So this is a paper about turnout but not about persuasion, an important distinction.

The study also finds that the effects are small—“much smaller than pundits and media commentators often assume,” they write, though effects are “distinguishable from zero. The authors find that the most Trump-leaning voters saw turnout fall by 0.3 percentage points after explore, while Biden voters turned out at a rate 0.4 points higher than if they had not seen the ads in question. That is not an earth-shattering effect. It is, in fact, quite small.

And how small would the findings be if voters were exposed to both pro-Trump and pro-Biden messages? The study only looked at effects in one direction! If we hypothesize that they are symmetrical, then they cancel out.

Of course, if ad spending did not matter at all, then candidates wouldn’t spend money on ads. But if they matter a little in a close election, that could make a big difference.

3. Drinking with friends fosters trust, community and democratic discourse

Here is a fun paper, albeit it goes a bit over my head at times. Author Eno Trimçev writes about lessons from Plato in how citizens of a democracy are supposed to “be engaged, informed, passionate, reasonable, willing to speak up, ready to listen, and militant but also restrained,” as traditional theory stipulates they need to be to uphold the principles of their government. The article is a deep reading of Plato’s Laws and other texts, showing “how extrapolitical and even disreputable social practices can not only help prepare citizens for political life but also enable them to deal with the inequalities that inevitably contaminate it.”

Trimçev writes:

The symposiasts are thus, on the one hand, free of the very real psychological burdens of politics—burdens of hierarchy, roleplaying, and exclusion as well as responsibility, decision making, and justice. On the other hand, their engagement occurs in a context of preexisting friendship that allows differences of opinion to be treated as a condition for the enjoyment of the practice. The symposium thus creates a safe space for the intense dialectical movements of the psyche that simulate what ought to occur to a citizen in a democracy over time.

But he is careful not to suggest democrats ought to binge drink. Indeed, the evidence of history — from the salons of France to coffee houses of England — suggests healthy citizenship may come with different types of drink, so long as you are sharing in camaraderie. Of course, the dulling effects of alcohol may have some benefits, given the high stakes of politics. Still the advantage of the symposium is not about politics at all; “Whether participants discuss politics or not in the symposium,” Trimçev says, “is entirely immaterial because its civic usefulness is psychological.”

I will continue patronizing the neighborhood pub, for the sake of my democracy!

4. Mark Penn “write a fair poll question” challenge

Someone on Twitter recently shared this poll from Mr Penn as proof that the average American “thinks Twitter employees engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election”:

There is a big problem with this, however. Can you spot it?

There is no option to indicate the respondent has not attitude! I can guarantee you that the average American does not know what “shadow banning” on Twitter is. They should be given the option to say so. Otherwise the poll is just propaganda.

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That’s it for this weekly edition of my top links. Thanks for reading and being part of the community that supports this newsletter.

Drink (coffee or tea or wine or beer) and be merry,

Elliott