U.S. politics

Why getting your way as president isn’t just a numbers game, by Matt Bai

Election debriefing, by Larry Bartels

Last of the culture warriors, by Peter Beinart

The emerging center-left majority, by Robert Borosage and Stanley Greenberg

Darkness at dusk, by David Brooks

Two cheers for American democracy, The Economist

Who cares whether there’s an electoral realignment?, by Henry Farrell

Nonblack voting for Obama by region, by Andrew Gelman

Red/blue/rich/poor: 2008 update, by Andrew Gelman

Data matter, by Howard Gleckman

Why the rich voted for Obama against their own economic interest, by Daniel Gross

America the liberal, by John Judis

A conservative nation, by Ezra Klein

The next center, by Ezra Klein

Rambling about Kansas, by Ezra Klein

Obama and the war on brains, by Nicholas Kristof

The Obama agenda, by Paul Krugman

Palin’s rising star?, by Josh Marshall

Presidential candidates’ share of white vote, 1968-2008, by Timothy Noah

Matt Bai wrong on demand for government, by Brendan Nyhan

Dissecting the changing electorate, New York Times

Margins of victory, New York Times

The fundamentals mattered, by John Sides

There is no realignment, by John Sides

The Obama challenge: make four transformations work together, by Theda Skocpol

How did Obama win over white, blue-collar Levittown?, by Michael Sokolove

The realignment opportunity, by Paul Starr

Digging into the 2008 exit polls, by Ruy Teixeira

U.S. economy

Capitalism is more than a spectator sport, by Alan Blinder

Panic in Detroit, by Jonathan Cohn

Restore confidence first, by Tyler Cowen

The New Deal didn’t always work either, by Tyler Cowen

Why I was wrong, by Brad DeLong

Putting the air back in, The Economist

How to get a bang from the stimulus buck, by Justin Fox

Debt man walking, by John Judis

Let’s have another cup of coffee, by Michael Kinsley

Depression economics returns, by Paul Krugman

The lame-duck economy, by Paul Krugman

Top priority is stabilizing the patient, by David Leonhardt

What would Keynes have done?, by Greg Mankiw

Americans have lost their appetite for spending, by Floyd Norris

Why America needs an economic strategy, by Michael Porter

The mini depression and the maximum-strength remedy, by Robert Reich

No more economic false choices, by Robert Rubin and Jared Bernstein

Regulation should be international, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff

A darker future for us, by Robert Samuelson

A $1 trillion answer, by Joseph Stiglitz

Slow recovery of labor markets, by Mark Thoma

Obama’s economic challenges, by Martin Wolf

Living standards, poverty, inequality, well-being

U.S. intragenerational economic mobility from 1984 to 2004, by Gregory Acs and Seth Zimmerman

Social mobility: an uphill battle, by Chris Dillow

The poverty of the official poverty rate, by Nicholas Eberstadt (via Will Wilkinson)

Where has all the income gone?, by Terry Fitzgerald (via Greg Mankiw)

Unions seek new rules, by Steven Greenhouse

Will the safety net catch the economy’s casualties?, by Steven Greenhouse

100 days for the middle class, by Anne Kim and Jim Kessler

Who is in the middle?, by Eduardo Porter

Bridge the wealth gap, by Robert Shiller

Trapped in the new “you’re on your own” world, by Robert Solow

Rein in chief’s pay? It’s doable, by Andrew Sorkin

Equitable and efficient redistribution, by Mark Thoma

Meet the HENRYs (high earners, not rich yet), by Shawn Tully (via Justin Fox)

The economic decline of America’s middle class, 2000-2006, by Jennifer Wheary, Thomas Shapiro, Tamara Draut, and Tatjana Meschede

The economic downturn takes its toll on well-being, by Justin Wolfers

Taxes

A consumption tax, by Robert H. Frank

A few tax policy suggestions for our new president, by Jeff Frankel

Health care

President Obama’s path to greatness: health care as stimulus, by Dean Baker

Five myths about our ailing health-care system, by Sharon Brownlee and Ezekiel Emanuel

The beginning, not the end, by Ezra Klein

Why does U.S. health care cost so much? Parts one and two, by Uwe Reinhardt

Education

Obama and our schools, by Nicholas Kristof

Why universal pre-K?, by Sara Mead

Importance of test scores in college admissions increases, New York Times

Environment

The climate for change, by Al Gore

Abroad

Why the Germans just hate to spend, spend, spend, by Bertrand Benoit

The problems, and benefits, of urbanisation on a vast scale, The Economist

Rejoin the world, by Nicholas Kristof

Stunned Icelanders struggle after economy’s fall, New York Times

Miscellaneous

Gay marriage and a moral minority, by Charles Blow

Professors’ liberalism contagious? Maybe not, New York Times

The loving decision, by Anna Quindlen

The other side, by Mark Thoma

Following up a previous post on political opportunity in the United States and Europe, this graph shows the share of seats held by women in the main legislative body (parliament’s “lower” house) in the U.S. and nineteen other rich democracies. The data are from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Though not far behind France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, America’s share is one of the lowest. When the new Congress convenes in January, women will hold just 17% of the seats in the House of Representatives (and 17% in the Senate). The figure for Germany is 32%. In Sweden, at the high end, it’s 47%.

A report on how women fared in the 2008 U.S. elections is here. A good introduction to cross-country differences and over-time developments is Women, Politics, and Power, by Pam Paxton and Melanie Hughes.

The best no argument I’ve seen.

The best yes argument I’ve seen (more here).

Has the 2008 election ushered in a new era of Democratic hegemony, akin to those enjoyed by the Democrats beginning in 1932 and the Republicans beginning in 1980? Two considerations suggest yes.

First, a Republican president is presiding over a deep economic crisis. The early-1930s and late-1970s crises scarred the party in power for a generation, and this one has the potential to do the same (John Judis makes a similar point).

Second, Barack Obama won big among young voters; according to exit polls, he got 66% of the votes of those age 18 to 29. This is important because while our party preference can in principle change at any time, we tend to stick with the party we identified with when we first became politically aware.

The following two charts show the role this played in the partisan shift that occurred around 1980. Both use data on party identification from the National Election Study (NES) and the General Social Survey (GSS). In the first chart, we see that among all American adults Democrats held a large advantage until the late 1970s, after which their edge diminished sharply. The second chart shows the trend for people who turned age 20 between 1978 and 1990. The formative political years for this cohort were ones of economic crisis under Democrats in the late 1970s followed by improvement (after 1982) under a Republican president and Senate in the 1980s. Among this group the party identification gap started small and had virtually disappeared by the mid-1980s. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s this cohort has slowly replaced an older generation of Americans who continued to identify with the Democrats. This process of cohort replacement is a key driver of the shrinking partisan gap among all adults that we see in the first chart.

Are we in the midst of an enduring shift in favor of the Democrats? We’ll only be able to tell in retrospect, of course, and I suspect much hinges on what the Obama administration can accomplish. But the groundwork appears to have been laid.

Lagging in one respect, but in another perhaps not so much.

Earlier this week the New York Times ran a piece highlighting skepticism about whether a black or other racial minority politician could replicate Barack Obama’s feat in the not-too-distant future in France or Germany or the U.K. There’s a good bit of truth in this.

But then in today’s NYT I notice photos of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s finance minister Christine Lagarde, and this reminds me that the U.K. elected a female prime minister nearly thirty years ago.

Vote choice in presidential elections is strongly influenced by voters’ perceptions of their financial situation, according to exit poll data available since 1992. More than 65% of those who feel their situation has gotten better typically vote for the incumbent party’s candidate, versus fewer than 35% of those who say their finances are worse.

A key factor in election outcomes, then, is how many voters feel their financial situation has gotten worse. As the following chart suggests, when that share reaches about a third of voters, as it did in 1992 and 2008, it spells trouble for the incumbent-party candidate.

Two good posts: here and here.

Arizona stayed red in this year’s presidential vote. It is, after all, John McCain’s home state.

But like southern California, Arizona has been shifting steadily from red to blue as urban areas — especially Tucson, which went for Obama — and Hispanics increase their population shares. McCain won the state only 54% to 45%. And five of Arizona’s eight House members will now be Democrats, up from one of six during the 1990s and two of eight in the early 2000s.

If Barack Obama wins the election, many analysts will attribute his victory to campaign strategies and events: Obama’s money advantage, the Obama campaign’s superior organizing effort and execution, the candidates’ debate performances, McCain’s choice to go negative relatively early, McCain’s message incoherence, and McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for vice president, among others.

Meanwhile, Doug Hibbs’ “bread and peace” model predicts a popular vote share for the incumbent-party candidate (McCain) of 46.25%. This translates into about a 7-percentage-point win for Obama, which is almost exactly what poll averages compiled by Pollster.com, RealClearPolitics.com, and fivethirtyeight.com are suggesting as of today.

The Hibbs model is striking for its simplicity — its predictions are based on a single indicator of economic performance, supplemented by one foreign policy measure (see here) — and its effectiveness. The model’s track record since 1952 and its prediction for this year look like this:

As Brendan Nyhan points out, other predictions based on the “fundamentals” are in the same ballpark.

Campaigns surely do matter, but probably less, in this year and quite a few others, than we tend to think.