The Sunlight Foundation brings us a nifty data animation presentation detailing the increase in contributions from the financial sector over the last two decades (HT: TechPresident). it’s worth a look. Particularly because it provides visual representation for the relationship between the increase in contributions to Congress and passage of the 1998 Glass-Stenghal legislation that deregulated the financial services sector. While political scientists debate the direction of the causal arrow: does money effect member ideology or does member ideology affect contributions, it does provide important context for understanding where we are today. let me know what you think.

In reading the McCain campaign’s latest gambit to suspend his campaign, cancel the debates, and fly to Washington to solve the financial crisis, my mind wanders to a conversation I had with a university president in which she references High Point University’s newly created Director of WOW! According to an NPR story on the school’s initiative:

The campus now features ice cream trucks, valet parking, a concierge desk, a hot tub and free snacks. Classical music wafts through the grounds.

While academics scoff at the “bread and circus” elements of this initiative, it certainly does help break through the clutter of universities competing for students. I think the McCain campaign understands that to break through the noise of popular culture, you need a “wow” campaign. The pick of Sara Palin was a WOW! pick. The move to suspend the campaign and cancel the debates is a WOW move designed to break through the noise.

I don’t know that I have a solid opinion of whether periodically shocking a voting public with brazen measures has a negative effect on American politics. I do wonder what effect it has on governance? The problem with the WOW! factor is that it’s short lived, fleeting and not akin to building sustainable governing coalitions. It might be able to sway a close election if a WOW! move happens days before an election, however

A big hat tip to my students in my Race and Politics class this semester for providing a set of outstanding resources on gentrification. For those interested in the topic, here are some useful tools to broaden your understanding. Please feel free to add any links you find:

This article from the Winter 2007 edition of On Common Ground, a publication seemingly associated with the National Association of Realtors, has a nice introduction to the debate over gentrification.

An interesting article from designer Charles Hughes Smith on the process of “de-gentrification” or neighborhood decline.

The WYCA Housing Initiative Action Plan of 2005 has some data on patterns of residential segregation.

This video on the gentrification of the Echo Park/Silverlake area in Los Angeles highlights the tensions inherent in improving a neighborhood while maintaining demographic stability.

This passage from an L.A. Weekly article on the phenomenon draws an interesting analogy:

Perhaps the best way to understand gentrification is to view it as something akin to a weather pattern, like a tsunami, a hurricane or a driving rainstorm. Like the storm systems that pass through Los Angeles each winter, gentrification starts with the ocean, where buyers have shown themselves willing to pay outrageous sums to live near the water. The most expensive property in Los Angeles — and in the United States as a whole — is along the coastline, where properties routinely run in the seven figures.

La Voz de Atzlan provides some wonderful maps on the geographic dispersal of the Latino population in Los Angeles over the last sixty years.

Scott Page says so (well not exactly):

New York City is the perfect example of diversity functioning well,” he said in an interview. “It’s an exciting place that produces lots of innovation and creativity. It’s not a coincidence that New York has so much energy and also so much diversity.

The University or Michigan Political Scientist recently wrote a book making the case for the productivity benefits of diversity.  This research underscores a growing body of literature extolling the benefits of diversity.   University of Illinois-Chicago’s Cedric Herring summarized in the Washington Post findings from his study of diversity in corporate America.  he found:

those companies that have very low levels of racial and ethnic minorities have the lowest profits and the lowest market share and the lowest number of customers.

It’s undeniable that all sorts of institutions are better because of diversity.    Sam Sommers at Tufts came to a similar conclusion about the role of diversity in group settings (per the same Washington Post Article):

Sommers asked all-white and diverse groups to read short passages and then asked them to answer SAT-style questions about the passages. When the topics touched on race — affirmative action, for example — whites who were part of diverse groups answered more questions correctly than people in all-white groups.

Page suggests that groups produce these better outcomes because diverse groups are more flexible at problem solving:

What the model showed was that diverse groups of problem solvers outperformed the groups of the best individuals at solving problems. The reason: the diverse groups got stuck less often than the smart individuals, who tended to think similarly.

But if all this is true, why do we still overwhelmingly choose to live in homogeneous neighborhoods?  If diversity enhances our workplaces, schools and military, then wouldn’t our neighborhoods be better off with more difference?  Is comfort and familiarity the enemy of productivity?

Chris Lydon has a great interview with Cass Sunstien on his new book with economist Richard Thaler called Nudge.

Their core argument is that the conventional view of economists and political scientists that we calculate costs and benefits in making decisions and choose those paths that maximize our utility is flawed. Sunstien and Thaler suggest that we have both a reflective rational brain and an impulsive emotional brain that often overwhelms our rational tendencies. For example, people often overemphasize recent events when assessing risk (think of fear of shark attack after the movie Jaws) Sunstien and Thaler invite us to consider doing social science by assuming that the impulsive emotional brain is making decisions. Sunstien uses the example of Homer Simpson trying to buy a gun and hearing about a three day background check and responding to the clerk “but I’m angry now!”

The idea that we are persuaded by emotional appeals might be nothing new for sociologists steeped in frame analysis. But in political science and economics, this is indeed a revolution. In popular parlance, Frank Luntz’ successful re-framing of the estate tax as the “death tax” is a classic example of the effect of the emotional brain at work in making policy assessments.

Sunstien and Thaler advocate the idea of constructing “choice architectures” that take people’s irrationality into account and creates policy systems that make people more likely to engage in beneficial behavior. A policy design in this vein is an automatic “opt-in” to a 401K plan that is voluntary because it can be opted out of but starts with an automatic withrdawal for retirement as a default rather than expecting people to deliberately put aside money for retirement.

Austin Goolsby, Obama’s chief economic adviser, is an adherent of this type of behavioral economics. It is a subtle change in our public policy approach, but has a great power to create effective outcomes. I do wonder if it’s smart politics to say that the public is irrational and thus we should structure policy to work again the public’s worst impulses.

New technologies such as social networking sites are bringing diverse cultures into contact as never before. Whether or not websites such as Myspace or Facebook help or hinder democracy is an open question, and a topic many journalists and scholars are still coming to terms with. Some view these sites as devices for amplifying narcissistic tendencies. Journalist Christine Rosen argues, for instance, that social networking sites are committed to the principle “show thyself” rather than “know thyself.” From a different perspective, the Los Angeles Times today posted an article exploring ongoing debates about religion (in this case, Islam) on Facebook (“Facebook reflects struggle over Islam’s role”: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-facebook19-2008sep19,0,1968535.story).

The story notes that young Muslims in the Middle East, in particular, have been using Facebook as a means to dialogue with others about religion and politics. Many are using the site to create a space for public argumentation largely denied in the social and political structures of their societies. Some are using Facebook to dispel myths about themselves and their faith with Westerners. Most want to know whether cyberspace could potentially act as a tool that might create change in their own social contexts.

While these questions remain open, and I think that scholars examining Web 2.0 have often been far too celebratory about its potential, these online debates and deliberations on Facebook appear to be a largely positive social phenomenon. Many young Muslims seem to be finding their rhetorical selves by engaging in an online dialectic between the local and the global. Facebook is becoming a means to traverse the very human constructions of borders and boundaries which have traditionally enveloped their lives. At the same time, Facebook is being used in these examples as a way to create attention structures that highlight the existence of both multiple viewpoints and embodied others.

As the devout and the secular battle it out online, are the sides having any effect upon one another? Only time will tell. But I can’t help but think that, as more and more viewpoints are competing for attention online, they are at least teaching the world that choice matters. Whether or not people are persuading one another in these matters, these online debates evidence various communicators (of both tolerant and intolerant orientations) colliding with the notion of “options”—that no one construction or interpretation is all that’s out there. As such, these young Muslims struggling over Islam’s role should realize that (as Marshall McLuhan once said) “the medium is the message,” and that above and beyond the content posted on the social networking site, it is perhaps the structure of Facebook itself, as a way to open communicative space, that holds the most promise for breaking down various societal boundaries.  

An AP poll found that more people wanted to watch a football game with Barack Obama (50%) than John McCain (47%). More than any other data point from this election, this reflects a serious changing of the guard. Since 2000, the Republicans have owned the affect war. In 2004, a Zogby poll found that 57% of respondents preferred having a beer with President Bush than with John Kerry. Why the shift in four years? Is Obama just that much “cooler” than Kerry. Probably, but here’s the money quote from the AP story:

Women, minorities, younger and unmarried people were likelier to prefer catching a game with Obama while men, whites, older and married people would rather watch with McCain.

Ruy Teixeira has repeatedly made the argument that Democrats have demography on their side. The U.S. Census department estimates that by 2050, self-identified whites will only account for 46% of the U.S. population. Latinos and African-Americans have consistently voted for the Democratic party and while both are socially conservative on many views, they tend towards fiscal liberalism.

I wonder what the football question would yield if it were Biden v. Palin?

Sociological images has a link to some great resources on residential patterns by race/ethnicity. Here are another interesting set of interactive maps by USC historian Phil Ethington for the Southern California region. Both sets of maps reveal persistent levels of residential segregation by race.

In Won’t You be my Neighbor, Camile Zubrinsky Charles does interesting research on why segregation persists. She challenges the idea that we settle in homogeneous clusters because we like being near people like us. She suggests that people report wanting to live near others like them not because of a sense of comfort with racial/ethnic peers, but rather to protect themselves from potential hostility from whites. However, across all groups, Whites are viewed as the preferred neighbors, followed by Asian-Americans, Latinos and African-Americans.

She finds the majority of Blacks in Los Angles would like to live in integrated neighborhoods. However other groups are not as willing to reciprocate. She finds that, on average, Latinos in Southern California have negative attitudes towards blacks in the U.S.. She suggests it takes five years of until anti-black attitudes to turn into action (i.e. decisions to move away from Black neighbors). Props to my California Lutheran University Race and Politics students for finding some interesting articles (here and here) on anti-black racial resentments in Mexico and Latin America generally.

I asked my Race and Politics students to take the Harvard Project Implicit test on race. For those not familiar with the test, subjects are asked to place photos of people into a black/white category, then asked to place words in a good/bad category and then asked to do both simultaneously, moving words or pictures to the right or left of the screen. The cognitive trick occurs when respondents are asked to put words into the Black/good category or the White/bad category. The longstanding negative associations associated with “blackness” are well documented.

In Black Visions, Michael Dawson cites 1990 General Social Survey that shows 54% of whites still believes that blacks are less intelligent than whites. According to the project implicit site, 75-80% of self-identified Whites and Asians show an implicit preference for racial White relative to Black.

To my great surprise, my own scores revealed an implict bias towards African-Americans Whites. My results read as follows:

Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for African American compared to European American.

The overall biases read accordingly:

Apparently my biases run in the opposite direction as predicted by my phenotype.  Has anyone else taken this test? What were your findings? Impressions?

Political Theorist Danielle Allen’s wonderful book, Talking to Strangers, is particularly compelling read at this point in the presidential election.

But it is a quote from an interview with Allen where she references the famous photos of Hazel Bryan and the desegregation of the Little Rock Public schools that has particular resonance for me in the current political climate:

If we believe Plato that the images and stories we feed our children affect them for life, then that photo is setting the coordinates of citizenship for the next generation.

As Allen reminds us, we still live in an area that is less characterized by overt racism and more reflected by a deep inter-racial distrust that prevents us from sacrificing for one another.  It’s hard to separate out the inter-cultural distrust that exists between so-called red and blue America.  Robert Putnam’s revealing work on inter-racial trust (which I’ve also done some work on ) uncovers a troubling, but intuitive, pattern: the greater the racial diversity of an area, the lower the level of social capital.

in her book, Allen cites the city of Charlotte, which is fourth in Putnam’s study of 40 regions in the level of church attendance, but 39th in the level of inter-racial trust.  This ability for in-group citizenship is offset by the inability to engage in inter-group citizenship.  The need to bridge these divides was an early theme of the Obama campaign.  It is probably what propelled him past his pastor problems into the Democratic nomination. I wonder whether that early promise could be realized if he managed to capture the white house. Would an Obama victory have any effect on inter-racial distrust? How?