Author Archives: Peter Levine

too close to call

I’ve previously advertised this impressive article by Larry Bartels and John Zaller, which finds that the change in real personal disposable income is the best predictor of an incumbent president’s share of the vote. The ethical implications of this model bother me–rational people shouldn’t vote for the incumbent just because their spending power has grown during a short period in the recent past. However, I can well believe that the Bartels/Zaller model accurately predicts mass behavior.

So who will win? As I calculate it (and my math is fallible) the annual change in real disposable income during the first five months of 2004 was 2.3%. Bartels and Zaller’s regression line (see their figure 1) predicts that 2.3% growth would buy the incumbent just over 50% of the popular vote. But there’s a substantial margin of error (because the model is based on a small number of cases). Besides, we don’t know what will happen to real disposable income between now and November. Thus we ought to expect a very close and uncertain contest, but if current economic conditions are sustained, Bush has the edge. Most other election models give him a bigger margin.

(An interesting footnote: Bartels and Zaller claim that if Clinton had spent the federal surplus in the form of a tax cut, thus raising disposable incomes, Al Gore would have been elected in 2000. Policy won over politics.)

the Institute of Development Studies

Almost two weeks ago, I attended meetings at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (England). I’ll write about the content of those meetings at some later point. For now, I’d simply like to draw attention to IDS as an institution–and what it represents. The Institute says that it employs “some 40 full-time Fellows [and] nearly 20 Research Officers and Research Assistants.” It also enrolls more than 110 graduate students, almost all experienced, mid-career people from the developing world. That’s an enormous number of mature and sophisticated people who have come together to study and conduct research on international development. Core funding from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) keeps the place afloat.

DFID’s American counterpart, AID, makes no such investment in research. Should it? IDS alone has an annual budget of about $22 million. That’s money that could otherwise directly assist poor people around the world. However, the bulk of development assistance since World War II has been counterproductive and sometimes even catastrophic. Some has been badly intentioned–designed to prop up dictators or to subsidize special interests in the donor country. But even the well-intentioned aid has often been very unwise. So it seems to me that research is essential; we need to know what works before we spend millions.

Of course, everything depends on whether the research is good. A center could spend $22 million a year on jargon and fads. Some of the foolish aid decisions of the past were bolstered by sophisticated-looking academic research. My impression of the current work at IDS is extremely favorable, partly because there’s so much consultation with the poor themselves.

assessment woes

I?m on the advisory board of a program for adolescents that?s organized by Temple University in Philadelphia, the Middlesex County Community College in New Jersey, and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. I went to Temple today to help plan the program?s evaluation.

This group faces the same problems that bedevil my colleagues and me when we try to evaluate our work with kids in Maryland. Their program is too short (at 50 total hours) to cause substantial changes in the kind of indicators that CIRCLE has collected. With so little instructional time, no one wants to spend hours on evaluation. Because it’s a fairly small group of students, any changes in their responses to a questionnaire between the start and conclusion of the program are unlikely to meet statistical tests of significance. The population in the three sites ranges from adolescents with criminal records (in DC) to 5-to-12 year olds (in New Jersey), so it makes no sense to combine all the sites? data. If students do improve, it?s impossible to tell whether the program is responsible. The best way to tell would be to recruit a larger group of students and to randomly assign some of them to participate in the program and some (the control group) to be assessed without participating. But there?s neither the money nor the will to organize a control group.

The goal of the project?s organizers is to make students more capable of sticking up for themselves politically. They want their students to become confident and to know where to go for political help. Graduates of the program should also be able to work effectively with peers in a political context. With these goals in mind, I suggested conducting the same educational exercise on the first and last day of the program, videotaping the results, and asking an outsider to reflect on any differences. Students would be asked to work in small groups to plan a response to a hypothetical local problem, such as a dangerous street corner or a lack of basketball courts. The small groups would report their plans to the whole class both in writing and orally. Between the beginning and the end of the 50-hour program, we would expect the students? political plans to improve; we would hope that they would become more optimistic about their chances of success; and we would expect them to share the planning, writing, and oral presentation more equitably within their small groups.

back from France

We spent last week in northern Burgundy. We chose our location because we had found a nice and affordable house to rent for the week. It?s a fairly typical corner of rural France, not an area that’s especially famous for its art and history. I don?t mean that it?s remote or ?undiscovered.? Tourists travel there for the Chablis wine, to ride by rented houseboat along the Burgundy Canal, and to see the old villages. Nevertheless, it?s not one of the top destinations in France; it?s less popular than Paris and its environs, the Loire valley, Provence, Normandy, and probably even Languedoc and Alsace. Within Burgundy, the most impressive and popular destinations are Dijon and Beaune, but those cities were too far south for us to visit. Almost all the other tourists we saw were French; there were virtually no Americans.

Yet, by driving within a 30km radius of the little town of Noyers, we were able to see (listed roughly in chronological order of their creation): Cro-Magnon cave paintings of human hands and wooly mammoths deep underground ? Alesia, where Caesar defeated Vercingetorix?s 250,000 Gauls and mastered France (later the site of Gallo-Roman city whose excavated ruins we visited) ? a 7th century Christian church nearby, heavily restored but largely intact after 13 centuries of continuous worship ? the great pilgrimage church at V?zelay, where medieval Christians believed that St. Mary Magdalen?s bones were kept; this is a vast, austere, but light Romanesque basilica with more than 100 vivid scenes carved on its capitals, also the venue of major sermons by St. Bernard (declaring the Second Crusade) and St. Francis ? the monastery of Fontenay, built according to Bernard?s wishes without any decoration except one statue of the Virgin, God?s light streaming through its windows, and its pure, legible mathematical proportions ? the medieval walled hilltop town of Flavigny-sur-Ozerain, with its steep streets and stone buildings (where the movie ?Chocolat? was filmed)? the medieval walled town of Noyers, half-timbered like a fairy-tale illustration and bordered by a lovely placid river ? the little church at St. Thibault, lofty and lace-like with two layers of intricate Gothic stonework inside ? the perfectly symmetrical, soberly classical Renaissance Chateau of Ancy-le-Franc, the only building actually constructed by Serlio, who was one of the most important architectural theorists of the age ? the French baroque chateau of Tanlay, with its steep roofs and conical towers ? and the substantial towns of Avallon, Semur-en-Auxois, Tonnerre, and Auxerre, each one rich in medieval architecture. These are the sites we saw; we passed by many more.

There are parts of Western Europe that are less dense with old art than this part of Burgundy. Northern France was more heavily industrialized (which makes it less beautiful but not necessarily less interesting than Burgundy) and was then battered by the two world wars. Germany sustained even more damage. Nevertheless, our week in an almost-random corner of France reminded me of the amazing density of beautiful and interesting sites throughout Europe. If I had barrels of money and not much civic responsibility, I could easily continue last week?s journey for the rest of my life, traveling slowly from Gibraltar to St. Petersburg (or from Oslo to Istanbul). That kind of life would contribute nothing to the world, but it would be endlessly interesting.

gone until July 12

I’m going to Europe tomorrow, for two weeks, and I won’t have Internet access. That’s a choice rather than a technological necessity: I need a brief break. So no posts until July 12, but I hope you’ll come back then.

The trip, by the way, is mostly fun–a family vacation in London and Burgundy. But I’ll also be at the University of Sussex/Institute of Development Studies for four days. It promises to be a really interesting visit, and I’ll report on it in July.