Now You See It . . .

November 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the curtain calls for War Horse last night, the loudest applause was for the three people who operate the title character.  I suspect that the true object of the audience's admiration was The Handspring Puppet Company that created the fantastic creatures we saw on stage. 

The show makes an unusual choice.  The puppeteers have no real part in the play; they are not characters.  But the puppeteer who operates the horse's head is dressed like one of the Devon farmers.  So it's almost impossible for the illusion to take full effect. 

Seeing is believing.  An, as much social and cognitive psychology has shown, believing is seeing.  Or more importantly, not seeing.  The wonder of the illusion on stage comes when we see a horse and not merely a horse-shaped lattice of cane.  But if we continue to see the puppeteer, if we cannot unsee the puppeteer, we don't quite know what to believe. 

When the horse first eats oats from a bucket, you wonder: is the horse doing this, overcoming his reluctance to get near a human (as the story has it) or is the silent farmer leading the animal to lower his head to the oats? (A bit of that scene comes at about this 0:15 mark in this montage.)

In bunraku, by contrast, each puppet is operated by three people, but they are covered head to toe in black, though sometimes the head puppeteer wears a black kimono and no hood.  They are supposed be invisible, and soon they are.

At first when you see bunraku, it seems odd.  The three guys in black operating a puppet one-third their size are a distraction.  But after a while, you stop seeing them.  The stage usually has a dark background, but even when the scene is more brightly lit, you see only the characters in the play, not the puppeteers who operating them. 

Here's a bit of classical bunraku.  You don’t need to watch the whole two minutes to get the idea of seeing the operators.  But that’s much too short a time for you to literally lose sight of the puppeteers.  Believe me, in the real theater, you do.

And here's a more modern example.

Careers Night 2012

November 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Wednesday night, the Sociology department had its annual* career night. The featured speakers were four of our graduates from the last few years:

• Alis Drumgo
• Anna Lee Kelly
• Rebekah Rhodes
• Michelle Newton

Only Anna Lee has a job doing what is immediately recognizable as sociology.  She works at Mathematica organizing various research projects.  Alis studied regional planning and now works with a group trying to revitalize downtown Newark.  Rebekah is a teacher for autistic pre-schoolers.  And Michelle is clerking for a family court judge.  But they all credited their undergraduate training in sociology.  It gave them a respect for data.  As Alis said, “If you’re trying to get someone to open a business in Newark, you’ve got to know that the vacancy rate is 20%.”  Sociology also provided a valuable perspective for thinking about the lives of others – to see how their problems and reactions are part of social world they inhabit.

For the students who attended, I think the evening gave them a sense that world held more possibilities than they had imagined.  Our students didn’t have many questions during the official Q and A, but afterwards several stayed to talk with the speakers.  What I found impressive and encouraging was that our graduates were doing work that they truly liked and found rewarding.

 Rebekah talking about her career path that led her to pre-school teaching.

 

Anna Lee with Ian, who recently declared as a Sociology major.

Michelle explaining how family court combines law and sociology.

Alis and Victoria, who will be graduating all too soon.

--------------------
* Our previous careers night was in 2009, but in principle it’s an annual event even if the reality does not always conform to that principle.

Prophecy Fails Again

November 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

When the flying saucer didn’t come, when first one clock and then another ticked past midnight of Dec. 20th, when the world was not destroyed, the believers in Mrs. Keech’s living room were desperate for an explanation.  They had met and talked and planned.  They had listened to Mrs. Keech reading and interpreting the messages from Sananda of the planet Clarion, messages she transcribed in a trance. 

They had prepared themselves.  But nothing happened. 

For hours, the believers sat there, unable to produce a satisfactory account that would make sense of what had happened but that would not undermine their world view.  Their confusion was finally resolved  by a message from Clarion that Mrs. Keech received at nearly 5 a.m.

Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room and that which has been loosed within this room now floods the entire Earth.

The strong faith of that small group had saved Earth from the final cataclysm.

Most people who have taken a sociology course will recognize this 1954 scenario.  It’s the central moment in When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, published a year later. 

A similar failed prediction and self-serving explanation happened after Tuesday’s election – not on the right, but on the left.  Since 2008, Mark Crispin Miller has been warning that the Republicans would manipulate voting-machine technology to steal the election. The title of his book says it all: Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them).

Miller had been predicting a Romney win – a fraudulent win, but a win nevertheless.  As we know, Obama won.  He won the popular vote, the electoral vote, and every battleground state.

Miller’s first explanation, like those of Mrs. Keech’s group, did not quite hit the mark.  And, as if following the same script, hours later he came up with an account that echoed the “you saved the world” message from the planet Clarion.   (From the New York Times):

Having braced himself for a very different outcome, Professor Miller wrote an e-mail that sounded almost like a concession: “It simply is no longer possible to stage the sort of ‘upset victory’ that we’ve seen before, without inviting serious investigation.”

By the next morning, however, his pronouncement had shifted to one of victory.

“Score one (at last) for the Election Integrity movement!” he declared, back on message.

Miller and his group of followers, the Election Integrity Movement, had loosed such a flood of good and light upon the election that the Republicans could not steal it, and Obama was re-elected.

UPDATE: Robert Frank (here) suggests that there was in fact a plot to steal Ohio.  He bases his speculation on two observations.

1.     Karl Rove, as seen on Fox News, was genuinely surprised when Ohio was called for Obama.
2.     The Obama margin in Ohio was smaller than what the polls predicted.  In all other swing states, the Obama margin was similar to or greater than what was shown by pre-election polls.
   

   Either [Rove] is much less competent than anyone has reason to believe; or else he knew of some secret advantage that would tip the vote count in Romney’s favor by several points.

Here too, when the prophecy fails, a dissonance-reducing explanation preserves the belief.  In this case, the explanation is less self-serving – not the Good and Light of the believers but the incompetence of the vote-riggers.

Less Is More

November 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

[Note, Nov. 13:  Thanks to the comment from “maxliving” directing me to the Chen-Rodden paper, I have substantially revised this post.  Hat tip to Max.] 

In a democracy, all votes are created equal - one person, one vote – but apparently some votes are more equal than others.  Obama won the electoral college vote 62% - 38%, though his margin in the popular vote was much smaller: 51% - 48%.


A similar discrepancy happened in the vote for Congressional representatives.  The Republicans control the House of Representatives, where they have 54% of the seats. But if you add up all the votes for those seats, the Democrats come out slightly ahead (by about 500,000 votes).  More votes but fewer seats. 

That discrepancy arises from the distribution of Democrats and Republicans in a state’s Congressional districts.  Take a hypothetical state with four districts, each with 200 people.  The popular vote splits evenly – 400 Democrats, 400 Republicans. Here are the election results:

District Dem. Rep. Total 1 180 20 200 2 70 130 200 3 70 130 200 4 80 120 200 Total 400 400

The Republicans have 50% of the popular vote but get 75% of the seats. 

Less hypothetically, in North Carolina, Democratic candidates outpolled Republicans 2.22 million to 2.14 million.  But Republicans won 10 of the 14 seats.  The Democratic votes were crowded into four districts.  In three of those four districts, the Democrats won big – by an average of 133,000 votes.  (If the 7th district, where Democrats now have a slim lead, goes Republican, that average margin will be 177,000.)  Had some of the Democrats from one of those districts been mapped into the neighboring district, they might have won both, though by smaller margins.  The Republican districts had secure but smaller majorities.  Republican winning margins averaged 50,000 votes, less than half the margin where Democrats won.

My first thought was that this was pure Gerrymandering.  State legislatures get to draw the maps of their Congressional districts.  And many more state legislatures are controlled by Republicans.  In fact, some of the North Carolina districts have unusual shapes.  The NC-12, the thin blue line along Interstate 85 stretching nearly to the border, was created as a “majority-minority” district so that Black votes would not be diluted.  The downside for Democrats is that it packs those votes into that narrow corridor.  So the Democrats take that district by over 180,000 votes.  The Republicans win the neighboring districts but by much smaller margins - 23,000, 25,000, and 53,000.  In those four districts, the Democrats got 53% of the vote, but Republicans took three of the four seats.

The Democratic district snaking down through the middle of the state is the 4th, which contains “the Triangle” to the north, but now has that tail stretching down.  Democrats carried the district  by 170,000 votes.  Surrounding it is the 2nd (in pink), which Republicans carried by only 45,000 votes. 

Similar differences crop up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The popular vote is close, and in two of these states it goes to the Democrats.  But Republicans get most of the seats.  Republicans win their seats by less than half the margin of Democratic winners.  Here is a graph of the actual returns from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. (The Ohio total does not include the vote from the two uncontested districts, one Democrat, one Republican.  For the maps and election results, check out Politico.)

The Republican share of Congressional seats is far out of proportion to its share of the vote.  In Ohio and North Carolina, Democrats received more votes, but Republicans got 70-75% of the House seats.  It certainly is possible that Republican-dominated state legislatures drew the districts so as to cram Democratic voters into electoral ghettos.

I don’t know enough about the demography and geography of these states, but I do wonder why the districts are drawn this way.  A paper by Chen and Rodd (here) that uses 2000 election data argues that what looks like gerrymandering is in fact the result of “human geography.”  It’s not the legislatures that pack Democrats together, it’s the Democrats themselves.  They cluster in cities.  As for Democrats outside of cities,

many rural, small-town, and suburban precincts that lean Democratic are often subsumed into moderately Republican districts. . . . There are isolated pockets of support for Democrats in African-American enclaves in the suburbs of big cities and in smaller towns with a history of railroad industrialization or universities. However, these Democratic pockets are generally surrounded by Republican majorities, thus wasting these Democratic votes. As a result, the Democrats are poorly situated to win districts outside of the urban core.

Regardless of intent, the effect is to keep Democratic votes concentrated in the 4th.  If that blue tail of the NC-04 were subsumed into the pink NC-02, both districts might be blue.

In any case, Democrats have not always been on the wrong side of the seat/vote discrepancy.  John Sides at The Monkey Cage posted this graph showing the ratio for the last twenty-six elections. 

Sides quotes Matthew Green on the general trends:

• the winning party usually gets a “boost” in the number of seats
• that boost used to be much larger

That trend might fit with the deliberate-gerrymander explanation, provided that in the earlier decades more state legislatures were controlled by Democrats.  But I’m not sure how it fits with Chen and Rodden’s human geography idea of “unintentional gerrymandering.”

UPDATE (Nov. 15):  John Sides at The Monkey Cage has more data on the vote/seat discrepancy.  He calculates seats expected given the popular vote and compares that to the actual outcome.  Even in states where districts were drawn by a bi-partisan agency or the courts, the Democrats fell 7% below the expected number of seats.  In states where legislatures did the redistricting the differences were starker.

Republicans gained benefits across the board from controlling the redistricting process.  By contrast, Democrats exceeded their expected seat share only slightly in the three states where they controlled the process