I’ve been trying to figure out why my perception of last Thursday’s debate was not especially favorable to John Kerry, when various polls and focus groups have consistently declared him the winner. Note also that the big liberal bloggers were lukewarm about Kerry’s performance on Thursday night, but they have become more bullish since reading the polls. I suspect that the debate appeared very differently to people with different baseline assumptions about the candidates:

It’s easy to debate if you have a day to mull over the moderator’s questions and your opponent’s statements, you can look things up on the Internet, and instead of speaking before an audience of millions, you can compose your thoughts on a computer. With those huge caveats, here are some answers that I would have liked to have heard last night. (My inventions are in italics; the rest is real.)

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Matthew Yglesias bemoans the lack of blogs by specialists. Most bloggers who cover social issues and policy are generalists with opinions, not people with expertise (whether formal or informal) or new information to share. Of course, there are exceptions, and some good ones are listed in the responses to Yglesias’ post. For some reason, most of the exceptions are political theorists and constitutional law professors. There are very few blogs devoted to aspects of public policy (as opposed to electoral politics), other than the few listed on Crooked Timber. I do like these:

There are 3.6 million blogs, and some of them must be highly focused and well-informed. But they aren’t very prominent, and I’d be glad to know of more.

I keep encountering new reasons to be skeptical about survey results. The moral is not to dismiss everything you read that’s based on polling, but to use surveys very carefully.

1. We looked at the percentage of young people who said they were registered at several moments during each of the last four presidential campaigns. The results show lots of up and down movement, including quick declines of as much as 10 points. This doesn’t make sense, since people register during the campaign season and don’t lose or drop their registration in large numbers. Furthermore, self-reported registration rates at any given month do not predict turnout in November–at all. For example, self-reported registration rates were consistently the highest in 1996, the year when we saw the lowest youth turnout ever. September of 2000 looked terrible, but then the registration rate rose to the highest ever recorded in November of 2000–even though actual turnout was poor that year. The registration number seems to move randomly and isn’t meaningful.

Since all election polls use registration questions to screen voters, this finding should make one skeptical of horse-race polls.

2. Some states (e.g., Michigan and Minnesota) collect hard data about voters, such as their ages. In these states, one can compare the demographics of the actual voters against exit poll data. We have found striking discrepancies in past years. Presumably, problems arise because people are not equally likely to participate in exit polls, and many now vote absentee.

3. When pollsters call random phone numbers, in theory they should reach a representative sample of Americans. In fact, as I know from bitter personal experience, they tend to reach samples whose demographics differ greatly from the Census Bureau’s–and not in predictable ways. Therefore, pollsters almost always “weigh” their samples. If they reach half as many African American males as they should, then each Black man in the sample counts for two. But there are huge questions about which variables one should “weigh,” and by how much.

I put more faith in trends, rather than snapshots. For example, I’m very skeptical about claims like “Bush has 52% of the vote,” because they are based on calculations involving who is registered; but I’m more persuaded that Kerry has lost three points since the last Gallup poll. However, even an apparently identical survey does not give you comparable results if the sample is weighted differently each time.

One can improve the quality of a survey by spending the time and money necessary to reach a high proportion of the people who were on your original, random list of phone numbers; or even better, by supplementing phone calls with home visits. Such efforts will be reflected in a high “response rate,” such as we see in Census polls. But the response rates of other polls are rarely disclosed and vary enormously. Many respectable firms have disturbingly low response rates. I think the lesson is to distinguish between a few solid polls and many dubious ones, and to pay attention only to the former.

Just now, I heard my former student Joe Siegle give a sneak preview of a book that he has written with Morton Halperin and Michael Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace. The conventional wisdom among powerful experts holds that democracy arrives only at the end of a process of economic development. First, says Fareed Zakaria, a country must reach a per capita income of $6,000; then it can democratize. Below that level (allegedly), autocratic governments are better than democracies at marshalling resources, working for the long-term, suppressing conflicts, and thereby getting their countries to $6,000 per person.

Siegle et al. find that this is all thoroughly wrong. Among low-income countries over the last 40 years, democracies have grown as fast as autocracies. Most of the successful autocracies have been the “tigers” of East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, and the like). If you exclude them from the sample, low-income democracies perform much better than autocracies. The data would favor democracies even more clearly if we had economic statistics from all the dictatorships. The worst tyrannies are very secretive and don’t release plausible development statistics, but clearly countries like North Korea would pull the autocracies’ average down if they were counted.

One of the reasons for democracies’ strong economic performance is their consistency. Compared to autocracies, they don’t collapse as often, and they don’t collapse as badly. Of the 80 worst cases (losses of GNP within a single year), only five have been democracies.

If one moves beyond GNP per capita or GNP growth, the other human development statistics favor democracies much more. For example, in poor countries, democratic government seems to confer about 9 extra years of life expectancy, compared to autocracies. And citizens of poor democracies are 40% more likely than citizens of poor autocracies to attend secondary school.