The UT/TT Texas Poll published their November 2015 poll. The party identification of registered voters hasn't changed much, which is expected. The percentage of strong Republicans remains at about one-fourth of the registered voters. Strong Democrats are a little more than one-sixth of the registered voters. Depending on how one categorizes "leaners," Texas is either nearly a majority Republican or an equally-divided electorate: one-third Republican, one-third Democratic, and one-third independent.
Ideas are the bases for government and politics; Institutions are the means of achieving public policy
Monday, November 16, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Same Song, Different Verse
Recently, Steven Greene, whom I admire as a political scientist and whose blog I follow closely, posted on "Why Asian-Americans Are Democrats." I went to the original source, a SSRN article and sent this in an email to Steven:
I
checked the article that you referenced by the political scientists and found
it lacking. First, most of the support for Asian Americans being Democrats is
based on the voting behavior of Asian Americans rather than their party
identification. The support for Asian Americans identifying as Democrats from
the ANES is based on extremely small samples (42 and 107). Furthermore, their
statement about Asian Americans’ party identification is not supported by at
least one of the sources they cite. Here is their quote:
Kuo,
Alexander, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, “Why Do Asian Americans
Identify as Democrats? Testing Theories of Social Exclusion and Intergroup
Solidarity.” SSRN. Feb 25, 2014: 11.
“More recent empirical work using larger, nationally
representative or diverse samples of Asians, confirms that Asians are more
likely to identify with the Democratic Party (Wong et al. 2011; Hajnal and Lee
2011).”
This
is what Hajnal and Lee actually note about partisan attachments of Asian
Americans:
Hajnal,
Zoltan and Taeku Lee, Why Americans Don’t Join the Party, p. 158.
Table 5.4: (Non)Partisanship Among Hispanics and Asian
Americans
Hispanics
|
Asian
Americans
|
|
Democrats
|
34%
|
30%
|
Republicans
|
10%
|
14%
|
Independents
|
17%
|
20%
|
Nonidentifiers
|
38%
|
36%
|
Source: 2006 Latino National Survey and 2008 National
Asian American Survey
“In both the 2006 LNS and the 2008 National Asian American
Survey (NAAS), only 44 percent of all respondents identified with one of the
two major parties. For Latinos and Asian Americans, the two categories that
studies of partisanship largely concentrate on are only a minority of the
population. The response categories that are usually treated as a residual and
dropped from a detailed analysis—which we pool together under the label
“nonidentifiers”—are in fact the modal kind of response for these groups. This
finding, importantly, is not limited to just these two surveys. Most previous
surveys of Latinos and Asian Americans—for example, the 2001 Pilot National
Asian American Survey, the 1989 Latino National Political Survey, and the Pew
Hispanic Center’s 2002 National Survey of Latinos and 2004 National Survey of
Latinos—all find that a majority or near-majority of respondents are either
nonidentifiers or Independents.”
What
Hajnal and Lee actually note is that Asian Americans are independents or
nonidentifiers. Their voting behavior is not their party identification since
only 30 percent identified with the Democratic Party in 2008, but 63 percent
voted for Barack Obama in 2008. The statement by Kuo, Malhotra, and Mo is
“true” but not really “accurate.” It neglects the fact that a majority of Asian
Americans were independents or nonidentifiers—“no preference,” “none,”
“neither,” “other,” “don’t know,” or some other mode of refusal to
self-identify as Democrat, Republican, or Independent.
Here's his response:
Interesting
points. That said, I'm pretty sure you know where I stand on
self-identified "independents." Most of them are-- for all
intents and purposes-- partisans. And that very much seems to be the case
with Asian-Americans.
I'm troubled by the response. The table, which is also the table used in Wong et al. cited above, states that 36 percent of Asian Americans are nonidentifiers. How are these partisans? The article is really about voting behavior of Asian Americans--not party identification. How does conflating the two concepts--party identification and voting behavior--help us understand contemporary political behavior?
Friday, November 6, 2015
My Prediction of November 2015 Turnout
I wasn't even close with my prediction. My low prediction was 1,834,185, which is 251,039 more votes than were cast (1,583,148). That is an error of almost 16 percent. Why was it so far from the actual. My prediction was predicated on the early vote in the 15 largest counties in Texas making up 26.39 percent of the total vote. In reality, the early vote in those counties made up almost 32 percent of the total vote. My bad!
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