Center Students Go "Behind the Numbers"

Dr. Jennifer Bachner is a faculty member in the MA in Government program at Johns Hopkins University.This semester, the Center offered a new course, Behind the Numbers: Polling and American Elections.  In addition to learning about survey methodology and the role of polling in recent elections, students had the opportunity to write and administer original questions for a class survey administered via Mechanical Turk (MTurk).  Through the use of creative and scientifically-informed questions, the students gained new insight into Americans’ opinions on timely policy issues, including defense spending, drone use, gay marriage, gun control, U.N. resolutions and immigration. 

Purpose and Methodology

The purpose of the survey was to threefold: (1) allow students to apply the skills they learned in class to the practice of survey administration, (2) give students the opportunity to collect original, empirical data for use in their theses or other research projects and (3) help students learn about public opinion on timely issues.  Students worked together to develop and revise their questions.  Several students constructed survey experiments, in which half the sample received one version of a question and the other half received an alternative version.  The survey was built in Survey Monkey and administered in MTurk, an online labor market run by Amazon that has gained increasing popularity among scholars of public opinion in recent years.  The survey was administered from March 9, 2013 – March 28, 2013; 305 U.S. residents completed the survey.  Students were provided with the raw data and asked to analyze the results in light of existing research and recent political events.

Findings on Defense Spending

Robyn Russell developed a battery of questions about the public’s opinion on defense spending.  Current research suggests that opinion on this topic is fairly volatile and quite split.  In a February 2013 Gallup poll, 36% of respondents indicated that the U.S. was spending too much on defense, 35% said the U.S. was spending about the right amount and 26% said the U.S. was spending too little.  Two years earlier, these numbers 22%, 35% and 39%.  

Russell theorized that one reason for the apparent volatility and absence of consensus is a lack of information about the topic.  To examine this issue, Russell devised a question that first informs respondents about the portion of the U.S. budget that is devoted to defense spending and then asks about their position on the issue.  The results are presented in Figure 1.  The top graph in Figure 1 displays the results for the Gallup question.  The bottom graph displays the results from Russell’s question.  Responses to this question, which provides respondents with information about the overall level of defense spending in the U.S., yielded a substantially different distribution.  According to these results, 75% of respondents favor reducing military spending while only 7% support increasing military of spending.  While the MTurk sample has limitations (most importantly, its generalizability to the U.S. population), Russell’s findings suggest that a lack of contextual information for thinking about proposed changes to defense spending accounts for the public’s seeming instability and disagreement on this issue.  

Findings on Gun Control

Doug Andres designed a survey experiment to examine support for gun control reforms proposed by President Obama in his 2013 State of the Union Address.  Andres was interested in examining whether respondents would be more likely to support gun reform laws if the response choices offered specific policy proposals.  Approximately half the sample (146 respondents) received a question that asked about support for new gun reform laws; the response choices were “yes,” “no,” or “not sure.”  The other half (158 respondents) were asked about their support for new laws that would require universal background checks, prevent the sale of guns to criminals, limit magazine capacities or “none of the above.”  The results from both questions are presented in Table 1.  Among those who received the first question, 28% indicated that they did not support new gun reform laws.  Among those who received the second question, 90% expressed support for at least one of three gun reform laws.  This suggests that, when asked about their support for specific laws, as opposed to their general support, far more respondent express a favorable opinion toward gun reform.

Concluding Thoughts

MTurk offers instructors of survey methodology an inexpensive tool for administering original surveys to large samples.  As with all internet surveys, selection bias and data quality are of concern.  Nonetheless, MTurk has been shown by other scholars to be particularly useful for survey experiments (see, for example, Berinsky, Huber and Lenz 2012).  Further, the sample obtained from MTurk has been shown to be far more valid and reliable than a typical convenience or student sample.  Most importantly, an MTurk survey is a feasible means of allowing students of public opinion to learn by doing; they can test new hypotheses using original data.

For more information about the course or the survey, please do not hesitate to contact Dr. Bachner (jbachner@jhu.edu).

Sizing up Pakistan before the election

Rameez Abbas is a faculty member in the MA in Global Security Studies at Johns Hopkins.

Elections are coming up in Pakistan on May 11.  When the Pakistan’s People’s Party (PPP) came to power in 2008, expectations for a durable democratic transition were pretty low due to the country's mixed history with democracy. 

The fact that Pakistan is now on the cusp of its first-ever democratic transfer of power is due in large part to the PPP’s commitment to the democratic process.

But a review of the PPP-led government's successes and failures is sobering. This post assesses Pakistan's state of affairs in three areas:  democracy building, energy, and militancy.  While the PPP has managed to realize one goal that Pakistanis have craved for decades--hope for a lasting democracy--it has mismanaged so much else in the country that this impressive achievement pales in comparison to the challenges it leaves behind for the next government.

Democracy

The most important piece of the PPP’s democratic record is the passage of the 20^th amendment, which established an independent election commission and a neutral caretaker government to oversee the next election.  The PPP-led government also passed legislation that devolved power to the provinces—an important effort in a multicultural country with provincial governments and populations that chafe against the center’s hegemony.  And the government reinstated powers to the Prime Minister that were transferred to the President under General Musharraf’s rule.

On the foreign policy front, too, the record is encouraging.  While the military continues to be firmly in control of Pakistan’s foreign affairs, there has been a greater civilian voice, epitomized by the PPP government’s willingness to engage with India and Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar’s active talks with the Afghan government.  While civilians still do not drive the outcomes in this arena, the motions of greater civilian participation may be a good first step toward loosening the military’s hold on Pakistan’s foreign affairs.  

Despite this positive record on the institutions of democracy, polls in Pakistan predict a PML-N victory.  This is not a surprise because the bright points of the PPP’s democratic record are far overshadowed by the country’s energy problems and militancy that has spread from rural areas and become firmly rooted in the cities.

Energy

Pakistan’s energy crisis is due to high demand, inadequate supply, and mismanagement at the highest levels of government.  It is perhaps the worst part of the PPP-led government’s record, and the biggest challenge to the stability of future governments. 

The mismanagement takes several forms:  insufficient coordination between the different ministries that control the energy sector, significant and ongoing electricity theft, and a shortage of revenue for supporting Pakistan’s energy infrastructure.

To top it off, the government cannot pay its energy bills.  Government regulators set energy prices for consumers to well below the cost of production.  However, since the government cannot pay for these subsidies, the result is a ripple effect of unpaid dues from the government to the distribution companies, to the generators, to the suppliers of energy resources.  As the goverment continues to miss payments, it amasses huge debts that are getting larger due to rising interest rates.

The fact that demand for electricity outstrips supply results in constant rolling power outages-- at about twice the rate than when the PPP-led government assumed power.  The shortages have caused the closure of hundreds of factories and decreased productivity.  By some estimates, they have cost Pakistan about 4% of its GDP in recent years.  They have also resulted in riots and violence.

Militancy

Most of the violence Pakistan has seen in recent years, however, has been a result of militancy and violent extremism in the country.  The militant group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) announced that it would target the major secular political parties before the election, and ordered candidates to abandon their campaign efforts.  As just one example of this threat having materialized, the TTP killed an Awami National Party (ANP) candidate in Karachi last week.  

Over the PPP's tenure, Sunni extremist groups have increasingly targeted Pakistan’s Shia minority.  One of the worst days of violence in Pakistan was January 10, 2013 when 115, including 93 Hazara Shias, were killed Quetta.  In 2012, over 400 Shias were killed by Sunni extremists.

Christians too have been targeted.  The attacks have ranged from raids on Christian homes in Lahore, to the targeting killing of politicians—such as Punjab governor Salman Taseer and Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti–who spoke out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

Historically, the secular Pakistan People’s Party has not supported extremist ideologies, and in theory, the Zardari government did not support the persecution of minorities.  In practice, however, PPP leadership has not challenged militant groups, fearing backlashes from the groups themselves as well as from the country’s security establishment for intervening in security matters.  The Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has been responsible for many of the Shia killings, but its leader Malik Ishaq has been arrested and released several times.  And human rights groups have accused the military of using Sunni extremimsts groups to help quell the insurgency in Balochistan, but the military has denied any ties to militants, arguing that it cannot afford to support them.  

Conclusion

On balance, the enduring legacy of the PPP-led government will not be its democratic achievements, but the mismanagement, and lack of political will and courage that has let both the energy crisis and militancy spiral out of control.  The next government will inherit the same structural problems that allow these crises to continue, and will face the same political pressures against reform efforts.  At least the PML-N has the most detailed energy platform of the three major parties, perhaps a hopeful sign considering its lead in the polls.

On militant extremism, the PPP's main crime has been its silence and impotence.  If the PML-N is elected, that party's closer ties to extremist elements--and need to pander to them politically--does not bode well for the law and order situation.

Assessing Iron Dome: What Makes a Weapon System Effective?

Mark Stout is a member of the faculty in the MA in Global Security Studies at Johns Hopkins.If a doctor feeds a sugar pill to a hypochondriac and the patient feels better because of the placebo effect, is the doctor guilty of malpractice?  Keep that question in mind as you consider the recent reporting  about the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system.  Israeli defense officials claim approximately 84% effectiveness  for the system which is primarily intended to stop primitive rockets launched from Gaza and southern Lebanon.  Now engineer Richard Lloyd at Tesla Laboratories in the United States has done research suggesting that the system succeeded only 30-40% of the time in detonating the Qassam’s warheads.  This has stoked great debate which was only invigorated by President Obama’s visit to an Iron Dome site.  There have even been accusations that the Israeli government has been lying to the US government about the system’s effectiveness, which is a potentially serious charge because the United States helped fund the system.

I can’t help but be reminded of a similar debate some twenty years ago.  During the Gulf War, also known as OPERATION DESERT STORM, the United States deployed Patriot anti-ballistic missile systems to Israel and Saudi Arabia to protect those countries against Saddam Hussein’s modified Scud missiles.  The United States military claimed 50% effectiveness for the Patriot system in Israel (and greater effectiveness in Saudi Arabia).  MIT physicist Ted Postol challenged these numbers and argued that the real effectiveness was close to 0%.  Eventually, the Defense Department lowered its estimates to 40%.  Postol has now emerged as a key ally of Lloyd and Tesla Laboratories in the Iron Dome debate saying that Iron Dome has destroyed Qassam warheads a mere 5-10% of the time. 

From one perspective, it doesn’t matter who is right.  Of course, engineers should continue trying to improve the system.  But, for both Iron Dome and Patriot, the debate has been all about the tactical trees.  Meanwhile, the strategic forest goes unremarked upon.

The simple fact of is that neither the Palestinian rockets nor Saddam’s Scuds were very physically dangerous.  (Had the Iraqi Scuds been armed with chemical or biological warheads that would have been different.  But they weren’t.)  While rocket attacks are undoubtedly frightening, injuries and even infrastructure damage from the Qassams and their cousins the Grad are extremely rare and they were even before Iron Dome came online.  In 1991, the story was much the same.  Thirty-nine Iraqi missiles landed on Israel.  The result: two deaths and one severe injury.  It is true that 231 additional people were admitted to emergency rooms for injuries directly related to the explosions and several hundred others had lesser injuries.  On the other hand, another 544 Israelis were admitted to emergency rooms for “acute anxiety.”  230 people harmed themselves by administering atropine—a standard treatment for nerve gas—when, in fact, no nerve gas was present.  Another 40 people hurt themselves getting to bomb shelters.

In other words, the threats to Israel from all of these rockets and missiles has been primarily psychological and hence political.  If Patriot and Iron Dome made Israelis feel more secure, then they succeeded at their most important task, keeping people feeling secure and thus tamping down pressures for my drastic military action.  That doesn’t look like malpractice to me.

Happy Earth Day – It’s the Narrative, Stupid!

Kathy Wagner is the Director of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins.Measuring the success of any policy or set of policies can be more difficult than one might assume – ask a group of academics, politicians or citizens and you will generate a lively debate over criteria to use and examples or exceptions, but rarely is there consensus.  This holds true with respect to the environmental policies since the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. 

Of the more than dozen major environmental laws passed within the first decade of the environmental movement, beginning with the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, it remains a boundless task to assess the “success” of the laws.  The pressing need though may not be to debate their success or how big certain environmental problems are  – whether global warming, the health of the Great Lakes, or the toxicity of our consumer products – but to reframe the narrative. 

Maybe the starting point now is not whether the Keystone XL Pipeline is necessary, but how to focus public debate of such issues again on why it matters to everyone.  Environmental protection advanced when there was broad-based bipartisan support for it in the 1970s.  Politicians acted on behalf of the public’s demands for a healthier environment because it was widely perceived as something that is in everyone’s interest.  No such narrative exists today – and no significant federal legislation has passed in over 20 years. 

Rachel Carson, widely considered to have launched the modern Environmental Movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, observed in it that, “Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.”  Yet, today’s reporting on a HuffPost/YouGov poll found that only 39 percent of those surveyed thought it is “very important to work to restore and enhance the national environment” compared to 63 percent back when the question was first posed in a survey conducted for President Richard Nixon in 1971.  Is that because we already have adopted so many of the goals and actions advocated by the movement that it has become a part of our consciousness?  If so, is that success or victory at some level?

The same survey group notes that although approximately the same number of people report walking or riding to work rather than driving (22% in 2012 and 21% in 1971), nearly twice as many report that they eat organic food (27% today compared to 15% in 1971), more than double report they have cut down on their use of electricity (50% compared to 20% then), and nearly 2/3 as many report recycling now than then (79% compared to 26% previously).  Some of these shifts are likely to be the result of particular policy efforts, such as laws and policies adopted and implemented in recent decades which established recycling goals and programs at the national, state, and local levels.  Others reflect the result of more knowledge, awareness, and availability of alternatives to conventional methods of producing food or products that led to a shift in consumer interests and increased demand for “green products.” 

So, Earth Day passes rather quietly now  – not like the original one with 20 million demonstrators which has been described by the American Heritage chronicle as “one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy” -- but maybe that is because what it sought to achieve then in terms of societal consciousness has largely happened.  The challenge now is for a new narrative to be articulated that will reclaim for today’s daunting environmental and energy issues the consensus and priority necessary for bipartisan action.  Thomas Edison said, “If we did all the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”  It is time to astound ourselves again if we are to protect our natural systems out of “prudent concern” for our future generations.  Americans still want this, but no longer connect this with their political agenda in a nonpartisan way.  Perhaps a first step is a narrative re-connecting the dots to make sure we are fully aware of what we ALL support with respect to a healthy environment and why.              

Relativism and Political Justice: An Ancient Problem Comes to the Modern Age

Dr. Alexander Rosenthal is a lecturer at the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins.The ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells a famous story of the Persian king Darius who one day decided to summon a group of Greeks to his court to ask them a very strange question; for what price would they eat the bodies of their dead parents? The Greeks respond with horror, and say there is no price on earth that would lead them to do such a thing. Darius then summons members of a tribe known as the Callatiae who DID eat the bodies of their kin and asks them for what price they would cremate their dead – the practice of the Greeks. They respond with equal horror. Herodotus concludes:

So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar’s poem that custom [Gr. nomon] is lord of all.–Herodotus. The Histories III.38.

This early Greek recognition that what is obviously evil and repugnant to one culture may be regarded noble and pious in another stimulated a crucial advance in thinking about the central problems of political justice. As long as the ancestral customs of one’s own people - whatever they happen to be - are accepted unreflectively, one cannot inquire as to whether they have sound and rational foundations. At the same time if Pindar is correct that morality is simply a matter of custom we have the problem of relativism-  the idea that no moral absolutes exist and so things can only be judged wrong relative to a certain time, place, or even individual.

 Some moral and legal rules certainly  are conventional. No one I should think argues that running a red light is inherently wrong. It is not hard to imagine a culture in which “red” signifies “go” instead of “stop” and in such a context driving through red lights would be the norm.

But let us take for example the practice of human sacrifice which has been long regarded with horror in the West, yet was seen as a noble and pious act in certain cultures (e.g.  the Aztecs of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica). Is the moral revulsion to human sacrifice essentially the same in character as traffic light rules? Does it have any foundations beyond the basically arbitrary conventions of given societies?

This problem of relativism disquieted the Greek mind, and in the classical age the philosophers began to search for deeper and more rational foundations of ethics.  In particular Plato and Aristotle opposed to the idea of relativism the idea of natural justice. This is the idea that principles of justice are grounded in nature (physis) and not merely in convention (nomos).  What belongs to nature unlike what belongs to custom is true for all. Aristotle explains the distinction with his usual perspicacity:

Political justice is of two kinds, one natural, [physikon] the other conventional [nomikon]. A rule of justice is natural that has the same validity everywhere, and does not depend on our accepting it or not. A rule is conventional that in the first instance may be accepted in one way or the other indifferently…-Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics III.7

So in our example if human sacrifice is wrong only according to conventional justice, it is not wrong for any culture which believes it is not wrong. There is no absolute, independent criterion by which one culture’s convention can be judged better or worse than any another.

 But if human sacrifice is wrong according to natural justice than it is wrong in an absolute sense independent of whatever a given culture (or individual) may believe. In short if natural justice exists than there is an objective moral truth against which the moral beliefs of persons and cultures (including our own) can be evaluated as right or wrong.  

This idea was carried forward by the Greek and Roman stoics in the form of natural law theory.  Later in the medieval period the idea of natural law was developed and incorporated by the scholastic philosophers of the Roman Catholic Church from whence it passed into the modern epoch.  Under the twin influences of religion and philosophy, the problem of relativism lost its force and seemed more or less banished from Western culture for centuries.

In our time however relativism has returned – with a vengeance.  The idea that “truth is subjective” is one that is much in our modern zeitgeist. As Alan Bloom claimed in the 1980’s

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of; every student believes, or says he believes that truth is relative. –Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind, 25

 From Nietzsche to the post-modernists and positivists of our own time relativism has acquired broad currency in modern intellectual life. But one needn’t turn to ivory tower elites – relativism has entered popular culture. In one Star Wars film the good character Obi Wan says “Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”  Since the Sith are represented in the film as the epitome of evil, this is as clear an illustration as could be imagined of Pope Benedict’s notion of a “dictatorship of relativism.”   Sometimes it seems the only viewpoint which is condemned as absolutely wrong is the view that good and evil are absolute.

Precisely why relativism has returned is a complex question. Some have pointed to the question of tolerance which for very historically intelligible reasons has been elevated by modern liberalism to a high value. If one believes in moral truth than one can judge some beliefs false and some actions evil. Is this not likely to make one intolerant of what one regards as false or evil?  If on the other hand one treats claims to moral truth with skepticism then it is argued than it is argued one will be more tolerant. Relativism thus emerges as the sine qua non of the tolerant civil society.

But is it?  None would say tolerance was a signature value of Fascism, Nazism, or Communism.  Yet historians have noted that totalitarian regimes enthusiastically adopted the modern idea of the “subjectivity of truth” arguing that truth was nothing else that whatever the party decreed it was.

The avowed philosophy of totalitarian regimes (like much of modern thought) was basically subjective. Whether an idea was held to be true depended on whose idea it was. Ideas of truth, or beauty or right were not supposed to correspond to any outer or objective reality…the totalitarian regimes did not simply declare, as a dry finding of social science that peoples’ ideas were shaped by environment. They set about shaping them actively…the very idea of truth evaporated.-R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton. A History of the Modern World.

If there is no absolute moral reference frame than what are the grounds for condemning Hitler or Stalin’s ethics as more good or evil than any other?  Perhaps this is related to what Leo Strauss wrote:

Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance…but in itself it is the seminary of intolerance.-Leo Strauss. Natural Right and History

But Americans need not go abroad for examples. Consider the once common practices of racial segregation. If indeed “custom is the lord of all” then this means there is no external standard of right and wrong by which the Jim Crow South’s “customs” of racial segregation could be judged. It is for this reason in supporting his right to contest the racist laws of his community, Martin Luther King turned to St. Thomas Aquinas and the natural law tradition:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man -made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. –Martin Luther King, Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail.