Sisters and partisanship

In summary, we find that having sisters makes males more politically conservative in terms of their gender role attitudes and their partisanship. Particularly for gender role attitudes, we find that these political socialization effects persist until respondents are well into adulthood. Since sibling gender is randomly assigned, we can interpret our results as causal evidence that the household environment (cleaned of genetics, the external environment, social forces, and other such omitted variables) influences political attitudes. 

Source: Healy, Andrew and Neil Malhotra. 2012. “Childhood Socialization and Political Attitudes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment,” (revise and resubmit, Journal of Politics). You can find a link to the paper here. See other papers by Andrew Healy here. 

Imagine the implications for the political future of China . . . 

"Why Nations Fail" and Ideology

What I really like about Why Nations Fail is the large number and diversity of well crafted cases on how institutions are important for prosperity or economic failure. The cases are rich geographically and chronologically.

One theme that receives little attention in the book (and the authors accept it) is ideology. For instance, in the discussion of Guatemala the authors do not mention the foreign intervention that led to the killing of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Also, in the case of the Congo there is no discussion on the killing of first-elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. One can think that these events were beneficial, or that they were very harmful for democracy in these countries. But the issue remains that ideology is an important force behind development trajectories [and ideological forces do not necessarily come from within]. The question is: what is the relative importance of incentives versus ideology in the failure and success of nations? [Of course ideology is complex, it can be a very good, or a very bad thing].
Arbenz (from Wikipedia)

Lumumba (from Wikipedia)

Party manifestos and economic growth

In a new published paper, "Words speak louder than actions: The impact of politics on economic performance" (Journal of Comparative Economics, August 2012) Steffen Osterloh writes:

In this paper, a new approach to disclose the impact of politics on economic growth is presented: data derived from content analysis of party manifestos is used as measures of party preferences. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, a positive impact of party support for various market-liberal policies on economic performance can be detected. In particular, I show that parties which were more concerned with market interventions and – to a lesser extent – welfare state policies impacted on growth negatively; those which proposed incentives for business as well as technology and infrastructure had a positive impact. Moreover, the robustness of the results is demonstrated in a model averaging framework.

Osterloh concludes: 

First, although we found that party preferences for certain policy areas turn out to have a significant impact on economic performance, we could not detect an impact of party ideology based on the party family approach. Hence, growth-stimulating economic policy does not depend on the question whether a left-wing or right-wing party is in office. It rather depends on the actual programmatic profile of the party, although it cannot be denied that the identified growth- enhancing policies can be broadly categorized as economic liberal policies. Second, we analysed the effect on short-term economic performance and not on long-term economic growth, which would require a completely different research design. Thus, positive effects of certain policies only accruing in the long-term perspective, which for instance can be expected of investments in education, cannot be captured by our analysis.

A draft of the Osterloh's paper (November 2012) is here.  

Where does political orientation come from?

Twin studies within political science consistently indicate that 40–60% of the variation in adult political orientations is heritable. The notion that this variance being attributed to genes is in reality entirely due to a combination of nonpolitical early childhood environmental similarity (i.e., being dressed alike or sharing a bedroom), the mutual influence of a sibling, prepartum in utero environment, physical appearance, and the seemingly inherent tendency to treat others differently based on these (biologically based) appearances strikes us as extremely unlikely. But even if it is, key elements of this argument—in utero environment, the genetics of physical appearance—automatically bring its adherents into agreement with our central point: that political science must increase the absorption of biological variation into its epistemology. Critics and proponents of twin studies are in general agreement that a wholly nonbiological paradigm for the acquisition of political attitudes will unnecessarily limit progress. Our analysis here certainly reinforces that conclusion while also advancing empirical support for a model of gene-environment interaction that gives both nature and nurture their due.

That is from the article "Biology, Ideology, and Epistemology: How Do We Know Political Attitudes Are Inherited and Why Should We Care?" by Smith et al. (American Journal of Poltical Science, January 2012).
More on the topic is here. 

Ideological openness

A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey, which asked: “Suppose you are reading or listening to an economist, and he discloses his own ideological proclivities. Which best represents your attitude toward his doing so:” The results surprised us. Sixty-three percent of respondents chose “I welcome it,” twenty percent chose “I am indifferent,” and only ten percent chose “I dislike it.” Most economists, it appears, welcome ideological openness, and only a small minority dislikes it. Follow-up questions asked reasons why the respondent liked (or disliked) it. These results suggest that economists – or, at least those inclined to complete a survey – are quite inclined toward natural discourse.

That is from the interesting new paper "Most Economists Welcome Ideological Openness, A Survey Indicates" by Klein et al (April 2012). 

There are exceptions, but when it comes to considering the role of markets, probably most economists tend to think alike. It is also likely that most economists are suspicious of government interventions, although there are well known exceptions. Ideological openness, therefore, might be desirable by other economists because of belief confirmation. For the same reasons (but probably different believes) ideological openness might be desirable among anthropologists or sociologists. However, ideological openness might not be desirable when the population is more ideologically heterogenous, for example among social scientists in general. 

HT: @mercatus

The shortest essay to explain what my ideology is

For what is worth, this is it:


I am a fox, most likely.