Andrew Gelman's Reading List

"Baseball and statistics traditionally go together. One of my inspirations to become a statistician was reading The Bill James Baseball Abstracts. I can’t remember what Bill James did before, but he had an unusual career: I believe he was a nightwatchman. He was not employed by any baseball team or academic organisation. He just, on his own, decided he wanted to study baseball statistics. He wrote a series of books called The Baseball Abstracts that became widely published, starting in 1982, and became cult classics. In these books he mixes in stories about baseball and goofy statistics – which in the pre-ESPN era weren’t widely available – with in-depth analysis of questions such as, which is more important: Speed or power? At what age are baseball players most productive? People had looked at that before, and apparently there was baseball lore which said baseball players are most productive between the ages of 28 and 32. Bill James looked at the statistics, and it did look like players between the ages of 28 and 32 were the best players. But then he looked more carefully and it turned out that that wasn’t really true, that there was a selection effect. That the players who were staying past the age 30 ­– which is actually an advanced age in baseball years – were actually the best players. And if you look at the individual players, it turned out that they were mostly peaking around the age of 27. The conventional wisdom was wrong, and it was wrong because people weren’t directly asking the question that they should have been asking. Bill James was amazing, because when he wanted to ask a specific question he focused right in on that, which is the opposite of how people used to do baseball statistics. He also studied – and baseball fans will care about this – the Chicago Cubs, who traditionally perform very badly, and whether that was because they are the only team that still plays a lot of day games. Was that hurting them? Most teams now play at night. Were the Cubs tired because they were playing a lot of day games? I think so. If it were true that the Cubs were getting exhausted from playing day after day in the hot sun, you’d expect them to perform worse nearer the end of the season. I think he did find that was the case. Yes. He just put a lot of effort into it and worked hard. I think it also helps, when you start to publish, that you become part of a community. In the early books he talks a lot about just getting the data. He created an organisation called Project Scoresheet, where all these people would gather the data on all the baseball games and send it to each other. It was only possible because he really cared. I’m a baseball fan but I don’t care like that. But it’s still worth reading: like any good writer, if they’re obsessed with something it’s fun to read and share their obsession. After a while his abstracts started to go downhill: I felt he started falling in love with his own voice. He started getting more about opinion and less about fact. Then he stopped with the annual Abstracts and started doing other things, which I think was a good decision."

"Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky were three psychologists who studied judgement and decision-making – how we assess uncertainty in our lives and how we make decisions based on that. That’s a topic that has been studied by economists and psychologists for a long time – but for the longest time people would study it with normative models. They would have a model for how people should behave and they would see if people followed the model. Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky did a series of experiments which started with studies that were pretty complicated. They asked professional statistical researchers and research psychologists who were doing real data analysis the kind of questions that might be conceptual questions on a statistics final exam. The kind of questions that might be hard if you don’t know statistics, but shouldn’t be hard if you’re a pro. What they found is that the pros were getting it wrong. This is always interesting to me. When someone who doesn’t know anything makes a mistake, it’s sort of boring. But when someone whose job it is to get things right, gets it wrong, that’s interesting. When someone who has every incentive to get things right gets it wrong, it makes you think there is something going on cognitively, that there’s a cognitive bias. They did a series of studies that started with fairly complicated questions about statistical significance that people were getting wrong and they boiled them down, over the years, to simpler and simpler questions that people couldn’t get, sometimes called cognitive illusions. This book was the first place that a lot of these things were published. It came out in the early 1980s, and it’s a collection of articles. It has about 25 different chapters by different people, the top people in the field describing all sorts of experiments. I like to say that this is the best-edited book that I’ve ever seen, at least since the New Testament. It has become gradually more popular over the last few decades; now it’s sometimes called behavioural economics , but it’s basically psychology. I think it’s just incredible – studies of overconfidence, of how people estimate uncertain quantities, the importance of the framing – I could give you a million examples of where if you describe a decision option in a different way, people make a different choice. The kind of questions they were getting wrong had to do with uncertainty. One question was – you have a large hospital, every month they have a number of boys and girls that are born, and there’s some variation in the percentage of boys that are born in each month. The basic statistical idea is that the larger the hospital, the less variation in the percentage of boys or girls that are born every month. A lot of people know that if you have a large sample, your standard deviation is smaller and more stable. But somehow they asked it in a very natural seeming way so that everybody would get it wrong. People were expecting a level of stability that wasn’t occurring. The naive thing is that people believe in the law of averages, so they think that if the roulette wheel goes black three straight times it’s likely to go red. We all know that’s not going to happen, unless it’s a rigged roulette wheel (and roulette wheels generally aren’t rigged because people don’t need to rig them to make money, so that’s not usually an issue). This is a more sophisticated version of this, in an experimental context. It turned out that psychologists were expecting that their experimental results would automatically balance out; in a way that someone with statistical training should know will not really happen. This is a different example from the babies – the mathematics is similar but it’s a different framing – and it had to do with, if you’re doing a research study and you’re expecting a certain result, how likely is it that you get something similar to what you expect? And people overestimated how similar it would be to their expectations. The researchers knew about the idea of uncertainty and statistical significance, but they tended to think of it more as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a true bit of uncertainty that they had to address in real life. Some of the more recent studies involved what they call almanac questions – for example, they’d ask people the date of an uncertain historic event, or the population of Saudi Arabia. They would ask, ‘In what year did the State of Tennessee join the United States?’ Well, you know it’s some time later than 1776, but you have to guess. Before giving people the question they prompt them with a number – but the number will be unrelated. They’ll mention 1822 in passing, but say either explicitly that it’s a random number or they just slip it in in a different way. Then it turns out people use that number. Not that they say Tennessee joined the Union in exactly 1822, but their answer will be closer to 1822 than if you give them a different prompt, say 1799. Our brains are just machines, so it makes sense that we just use whatever information is there. But it’s not really appropriate decision-making. This work started out as a bit of a curiosity in the field of psychology , but we get a lot of insight from it, it is absolutely essential to understanding how humans think. Just as visual illusions give you insight into how the brain sees things, cognitive illusions show us the shortcuts that our brain uses to make decisions. It is. It’s fun to read. I get a little upset that a lot of this has gone into, and people talk about, behavioural economics and nudging people. That stuff is fine too, but it’s really much more broad than that. Economics is on everyone’s mind right now, but it’s not just about economics. The phrase that Bill James has is that the alternative to doing good statistics is not no statistics, it’s bad statistics. Bill James had an on-going feud with various baseball writers who put down statistics. He would write about these people who would say, ‘Statistics are fine, but what you really need to do is see people play. Baseball is about athleticism and heart, and it’s not about numbers.’ What Bill James pointed out is that the people who said this, when they talked about their favourite players they would talk about their statistics. So and so batted .300. So they were relying on statistics, but just in an unsophisticated way. They’re still using the written record. To say that you don’t want to use statistics – that’s just not an option. I was at a panel for the National Institutes of Health evaluating grants. One of the proposals had to do with the study of the effect of water-pipe smoking, the hookah. There was a discussion around the table. The NIH is a United States government organisation; not many people in the US really smoke hookahs; so should we fund it? Someone said, ‘Well actually it’s becoming more popular among the young.’ And if younger people smoke it, they have a longer lifetime exposure, and apparently there is some evidence that the dose you get of carcinogens from hookah smoking might be 20 times the dose of smoking a cigarette. I don’t know the details of the math, but it was a lot. So even if not many people do it, if you multiply the risk, you get a lot of lung cancer. Then someone at the table – and I couldn’t believe this – said, ‘My uncle smoked a hookah pipe all his life, and he lived until he was 90 years old.’ And I had a sudden flash of insight, which was this. Suppose you have something that actually kills half the people. Even if you’re a heavy smoker, your chance of dying of lung cancer is not 50%, so therefore, even with something as extreme as smoking and lung cancer, you still have lots of cases where people don’t die of the disease. The evidence is certainly all around you pointing in the wrong direction – if you’re willing to accept anecdotal evidence – there’s always going to be an unlimited amount of evidence which won’t tell you anything. That’s why the psychology is so fascinating, because even well-trained people make mistakes. It makes you realise that we need institutions that protect us from ourselves… If you’re a research psychologist, you need the institution of formal statistics to protect you from your false intuitions, which if you’re not protected from, will lead you to make all sorts of mistaken claims. Similarly for medical research, it’s very easy to fool oneself – even if you’re well trained. This man didn’t realise that even if hookah smoking doesn’t kill every single person, it can, potentially, still be a problem."

"That’s about right. It’s statistical because it’s full of graphs. Schmidt-Nielsen’s books have graphs of metabolic rates versus running speed and flying speed for different animals, exhaled air temperature of lizards, all sorts of things. Yes, a graph of data is always a statistic. Most of this is not statistics, though, it’s really physics . How can birds fly and lift themselves up in the air? How do dogs cool themselves by panting? It sounds sort of obvious: They’re dripping water and as water evaporates it cools the tongue. But, as he points out, if you’re a dog and you’re panting to cool your tongue, you have to get the cool blood that’s in your tongue circulating to the rest of your body, you actually have to circulate all your blood through your tongue to cool it off. So how do you get it there? You have to move the blood fast. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The book has a lot of things like that. He’s looking at things that people take for granted, and saying, you can’t just take these things for granted, these are amazing feats of engineering. Another reason I connect it with statistics – it’s not only the graphs ­– is the fact there’s an interplay between physics modelling, real substantive modelling using the laws of physics, and data collection and statistical analysis. It goes back and forth. People gathered data that inspired him to come up with a physical description, and then he gathered more data – or other people gathered data – and sometimes it turns out the description works and sometimes it turns out it doesn’t. And that’s what statistics is all about – it’s about building real models, using real information."

"AJ Liebling was an old-time magazine journalist. This particular book was based on a bunch of articles about an old guy he knew, who went by the name of Colonel John R Stingo. It wasn’t his real name, but it was the name he liked to be called by. He had gone through life doing a number of things, including newspaper writing, and one of the things he had done was rainmaking. They would go to farm areas of the United States and make contracts with farmers, about how they would make it rain. Their entire rainmaking was based on actuarial principles. They worked out the frequency of precipitation and they would write very clever contracts – of the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose variety. So if it rained they would get all sorts of payments and if it didn’t rain they would have to pay. But they would somehow always set up the contract so they wouldn’t have to pay… Liebling is one of the great writers of all time and I felt that this particular book had strong statistical content. The statistical content is that you have to have a sense of the probability of rain for it to work out. They probably did, on occasion. That’s kind of the point – it’s this lovable rogue, this guy who was never as successful as all that, but he would somehow just manage to stay afloat. To me it felt very statistical, the whole book. There was something about it…but it’s basically story telling. Most people wouldn’t consider it a statistics book. Another book along the same lines that I’d recommend is Jimmy the Greek’s autobiography. Jimmy the Greek was a Vegas oddsmaker, he got famous in the 1970s when he was a TV football commentator, eventually got thrown off the air after making some vaguely racist comments. Anyway, his autobiography is great, it’s full of statistical stories, starting with how he made his first fortune taking bets on the 1948 election. But that’s another story…"

"Yes, perhaps the best book every written: How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. This was a book that I read years ago because it happened to be on my sister’s bookshelf, and it really did change my life. It has all sorts of practical advice. There are simple things like if a kid has to do something you offer them choices: Instead of saying, ‘We have to go now’, you say, ‘Do you want to go now or in five minutes?’ You don’t offer them a choice they can’t take. These tricks don’t work forever, of course. We started doing this with the kids and then of course they started saying, ‘Don’t give me choices.’ But I found it was useful in my life before I ever had kids. There are a lot of very clever ideas in there about the ways you can role-play and practice things. And it’s great to have tools like this when you teach. Every year there’s a new crop of students and the tricks will work like new. Like most skills, it seems very doable when you read the book. When you actually try to do it in real life it’s a lot more difficult, unless you’re naturally cut out to do it…which I’m probably not. The reason I think it’s implicitly statistical is because it’s really about what works and what doesn’t work. There probably is research on it – but if there isn’t, there could be research on it. It’s also sort of fascinating at a deeper level, in the sense of, if these ideas are so powerful, which I think they are, why are they so hard to do? Why is it so hard to do the right thing? It’s so true in many aspects of life. It’s easier to tick somebody off than to say something nice. Why is that? It doesn’t make sense, that it would be so difficult to do the constructive thing. Often it takes a lot of work. It’s just a wonderful book. As this is one of those rare occasions when I’m allowed to recommend books to people, I thought I’d better put it on the list. It definitely works with my students. It made a big difference to me. My wife is just good at this stuff naturally, she’s a social worker and she read the book and said, ‘Yes, this is very reasonable.’ She didn’t think it was so special, because she already knew it. But for me, it was very special. It’s hard for me to remember because with students I’ve developed my own thing. I wrote a book called Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks, which is all about how to involve students. But sometimes things come up, difficult situations. Also, when they’re in my office, I have to physically use my left arm to hold back my right hand, so I do not pick up a pen or chalk. I tell the students, ‘You hold the chalk, you go to the board.’ A lot of professors know that – but it’s just so tempting to start writing oneself. You have to really think from the other person’s perspective, and get them involved with solving their own problems. There are things in there like, when someone is supposed to do something and they don’t do it, you just have to tell them that it’s important to you – that kind of thing. Bill James once said that you can lie in statistics just like you can lie in English or French or any other language. Sure, the more powerful a language is the more ways you can lie using it. There are a bunch of great quotes about statistics. There’s another one, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know.’ And there’s Earl Weaver: ‘It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.’ There are a lot of sayings that emphasise that not only is uncertainty an important part of life, but that recognition of that uncertainly is itself an important step."

"This first came out in 1971 and it was written for many years by a journalist named Michael Barone. It was really an amazing book, especially when it first came out. It had 435 chapters, a little essay about each congressional district in the country, who lived there and what it was like. It’s a book that’s been very important to political professionals, but it’s almost like a bit of sociology. If you read a book about contemporary America it will focus on whatever it focuses on, whatever the interests of the author are. Even a book that’s more encyclopaedic, might talk about the 50 states. But the 50 states are different sizes, and some are much bigger than others. By being forced to write a little essay about each congressional district, this book created a geographically balanced portrait of America, which you just could not get anywhere else. And it was just fun to read. Now – you could always tell this but over the years it became more and more of a clear pattern – there is a bit of an ideological bias in the book. Barone is now an outspoken conservative – in fact he embarrassed himself a few years ago by saying that the liberal media had attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby. Then he apologised and said it was a joke. Going back to The Almanac of American Politics , you realise he has a little bit of a thumb on the scale. If he’s talking about a place where people vote for Democrats, it always seems to be a declining, rust-belt, corrupt area, and when it’s an area that’s voting for Republicans, it’s always a dynamic, exciting part of the country. But it’s still amazing. Go back and read some of the early ones especially, and then skip a decade and read it again, and you get a portrait of America that, even if it’s not perfect, is unique. In 1990 when I got my PhD I went to Berkeley into the statistics department. They offered me a few thousand dollars so I could buy a home computer. I said I didn’t want one – I would take the money and buy books instead. This was one of the books on the list. This was the book that, in the old days, every American political scientist would have on their shelf. There’s no substitute. Even Wikipedia is not really a substitute. If you want to look up any particular district, you can look it up, but having a book where every district takes up the same amount of space, there’s just something amazing about it. You might want to look up something you’re personally interested in, like where you live or where you went to college, or where your mother grew up. Or you might open up to anywhere. What’s the 19th district in Illinois like? And it would be this thumbnail portrait of this area of 700,000 Americans, and what makes them vote one way or the other. Of course it has numbers too. It’s a bit like one of these baseball statistics books. You have the description of the player and then his statistics. You can see how the Republicans and Democrats have done in elections in these districts. It is public information if people are registered for a party. If you’re a registered Democrat I should be able to find that out just by going and looking at the public records. I was just reading an autobiography of Ring Lardner Jr. He’s famous for writing the screenplay for M*A*S*H, and he was part of a Hollywood blacklist for many years. He had a story about how the FBI had been following him for decades because they knew how he voted. We’re supposed to have a secret ballot, but in his precinct in Los Angeles he was the only person listed who was neither Democrat nor Republican. When they posted the election results after election day, there were a certain number of people who voted for Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrat, and a certain number of people who voted for Alf Landon the Republican, and then there was one vote for the Communist."

"This is a novel that was written in 1964, by one of the authors of The Ugly American , which is a book you might not have ever heard of but you’ve heard the phrase. It was a cultural touchstone. It came out in the late 1950s, and it took place in a hypothetical, Vietnam-like country in Asia, and it’s about the Americans losing the war of hearts and minds to the Communists. The 480 is about evil political consultants who are manipulating the American public to vote for an empty-suit type of character for president. The number 480 referred to an actual analysis that was done by some political scientists, including a political scientist named Sam Popkin, who is now at the University of California in San Diego. They divided the population into 480 demographic and geographic subgroups, based on things like religion, age, sex, what region of the country and so on. The idea was that they knew how many people were in each group and they would pitch their messages to those groups. It’s a classic work in political science . I think they also advised the Kennedy campaign. Back then it was very impressive, but we can do much more now in terms of data analysis, we can get estimates for all 50 states now which they couldn’t do back then. But there was something funny about this book, about these backroom political consultants manipulating the election. It’s not at all realistic, though it’s much more realistic than a book like The Manchurian Candidate , which is a big joke. This book is a satire but it reflects serious concerns about politics. The idea is that these people know enough about us so that they can manipulate our vote. Realistically, political consultants nowadays know a lot about us, and they do try to convince us. There are two kinds of people they follow. One is people where they know who they’re going to vote for, but they’re not sure that they’re going to vote. The other is people who are very likely to vote, but you don’t know which way they’re going to vote. The first type of person they try to mobilise just to turn out and vote, and the second kind of person they try to persuade. They’re pretty good at knowing who people are. In fact, at this point, a lot of this is just a question of resources. To the extent they have resources they will go out to people and call you on the phone. If they think you’re already likely to vote for a certain candidate, they’ll try to find somebody to knock on your door and convince you that it’s an important election and it’s worth voting for. In some sense it’s not as mysterious or conspiratorial as it’s made out to be in that book. Yes, it’s expensive. It’s said to cost about $40 per vote. You have to get enthusiastic volunteers and really knock on people’s doors. They do play with the messages a lot. They do a lot of experimentation. I remember reading one paper that came out where they framed the same question in two different ways. They try to say things like, “Everybody votes, so you should vote too.” I don’t know how much I believe it, but from some experimental evidence they claim that certain phrasing is particularly effective. Of course both sides are doing it, which is what you’d want. It’s only fair for both sides to do it. A lot of the great inequalities arise before you get to the general election. Certain candidates just don’t have a chance in the primary because they don’t have the money. The two parties are more equally balanced. The other issues in unfairness come in what policies the parties consider. The actual election is not too far from a fair fight. I mean that there are policies that get proposed and policies that don’t get proposed, and the lobbyists have an impact. When the election year comes up, we think a lot about elections. But if you think about what issues get raised in Congress and what things the president does and doesn’t do, a lot of those are going to be affected by campaign contributors."

"The Rational Public was written by two political scientists, Ben Page and Bob Shapiro. Bob Shapiro has the office next to mine in the political science department here at Columbia. The book came out in 1992 and they found something in public opinion that my colleagues and I had already noticed in elections, which is something we call “uniform partisan swing”. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but the basic idea is that Americans are spread out on some left-right scale, and we are, of course, quite diverse in our opinions. But when there is a change in opinion it tends to move everybody together. Not always, but generally. For example, gay rights are more popular than they used to be, amongst pretty much all groups. Or attitudes about economic issues – Americans are more economically conservative and more socially liberal than they used to be. Things tend to move at a national level. Normally, when you have an election, it’s the same. Barack Obama is expected to get 4% to 5% less of the vote this election than last time. It’s roughly the same amount less in every state. Page and Shapiro looked at a whole bunch of issues and found that people were moving together. They also found that people’s attitudes were rational, they made some sense. There have been findings in public opinion literature about something called “non-attitudes”, which is that sometimes you ask people a question and you come back and ask them later and they seem to have a completely different answer. But on issues that people have thought about, people have fairly sensible views. Often people have reasonable views that are not always conveyed that well, because they contradict a larger story. For example, voters tend to be consistently willing to cut certain aspects of the budget, including the military. But cutting the military is never very popular in Congress. That’s something you don’t always hear about. Americans support the military but they don’t support such a high military budget. It’s a very impressive book. They go through every issue and it’s quantitative – they have a lot of graphs – but they look at every issue seriously on its own terms. That’s what they say. The public can be manipulated, but generally they feel that people have fairly consistent views. The ideological playing field is already laid out, so it varies. Sometimes an issue will become politicised. Take, for example, attitudes about climate change. That became very politicised – Democrats and Republicans moved in different directions. Most issues are already politicised. Once the politicisation has happened, once the issue has gone through that phase, then everybody tends to move together. You can even think about it in terms of attitudes to Obama. When he was elected, Democrats were very excited about him, and Republicans were sceptical. Independents wanted to give him a chance. Then, after some bad economic years, we have Republicans really detesting him, Independents not liking him – and Democrats not really liking him much either. The interesting thing is that a lot of Democrats say they don’t like Obama because they feel he’s not so liberal, he’s selling out, whereas a lot of Republicans don’t like Obama because they feel he’s an ideologue. I don’t buy either of those claims. What I think is happening is that fundamentally people aren’t liking Obama because they don’t think he’s performing well. They just have different storylines. The Republican storyline for someone who is a Democrat who they don’t like is that he’s an extreme liberal. The Democratic storyline for someone they don’t like is that he’s a weak sell-out. Even though it seems like they’re having opposite reactions, in reality it’s just the same reaction that’s being rationalised. It’s not that people are being irrational, it’s that the reason they give for their attitudes doesn’t always hold up. But the actual attitude is reasonable. Even if people get a lot of the facts wrong – and you can certainly do survey after survey, where you see people getting the facts wrong, and misunderstanding things – it is reasonable to say you’re less supportive of the president after some bad economic times. What’s rational in voting is not about your own personal economic interests. The main outcome of the election is not what affects you, it’s what affects the entire country. So there’s a lot of evidence that people vote for what they think is good for the country. Of course, if you’re personally unemployed and know a lot of unemployed people, then it makes sense that you will feel that unemployment is a big issue. On the other hand, if you have money in the bank, people are still somehow concerned about inflation. What you consider important problems are certainly impacted by your experiences. But, no, I don’t think it’s a matter of your direct economic interests. I would say it’s indirect. By the way, Bob Shapiro wrote an interesting paper in 2009 right after the last election where he talked about all the problems Obama would have passing healthcare reform. He was right. Everybody thought it would be easy, but he recognised from looking at the survey data, that things in 2009 with Obama were very similar to what they were in 1993 with Bill Clinton. He’s a very clear-eyed observer. He should be the guy on the TV they ask about public opinion, not all these other bozos. It’s hard to get from point A to point B. It would probably be hard to find many people who would argue that the American healthcare system is better than the French healthcare system, or even the Taiwanese healthcare system. What’s not obvious is how to get there. There are so many interests involved, so much money, so many companies. If they could somehow switch out the US system and switch in this other system – like they have in Taiwan or France – I think that would be wonderful. But it doesn’t seem that that’s considered an option. There are too many people who are doing fine from the current system. The argument made by the opponents of healthcare reform is that it would just be worse if you tried to get to that point from what we already have – we’d have the worst of both worlds. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s my answer. I don’t have a good answer to that. People sometimes say it has to do with geographical divisions. In the United States the lower-income parts of the country tend to be more politically conservative. This happens in other countries too. The idea is that the richer places within a country – or even within a continent like Europe – tend to be more cosmopolitan, more socially liberal and lower-income places tend to be more traditional. Look at a country like Finland – it used to be one of the poorest places in Europe and now it’s one of the richest places. Being richer is associated with more of an open, liberal social attitude. Economics is more complicated. Traditionally, lower-income areas support more economic redistribution. In Europe, for example, the Greeks are lower income and more supportive of redistribution, and the Germans are in the opposite position. In the US that was traditionally the case as well. But now the lower-income areas are less supportive of redistribution. This is one of the issues we explore in our book. We don’t have a complete story. Part of it is to do with racial politics. The South changed to the Republican Party, and there were changes that happened in the South – legal changes in the 1960s, where there was redistricting – and rural parts of the South got less representation and the cities and the suburbs got more representation. People from the cities and the suburbs tend to be more conservative on economic issues, and may be a better fit for the national Republican Party. Another thing is that the Democratic Party is very reliant on various groups of rich people. Even to the extent that they’re liberal rich people, they’re not extremely liberal economically. They’re very much supportive of free markets. A Silicon Valley millionaire who supports Obama is looking for a Bill Clinton-style economic boom – he’s not looking for some sort of traditional socialist party."

"This is just an amazing story. It’s written by a journalist from Chicago who was clearly very sympathetic to Harold Washington, who was mayor of Chicago in the 1980s. He was an African-American, he’d been a member of Congress, and after the end of the old Daley machine in Chicago he ran for mayor. Actually there are several amazing stories. First that Chicago is a majority white city and he won the Democratic primary election and then the general election. He took advantage of divisions among his opponents. It was a very racist campaign. Washington was saying his opponents were corrupt and that they needed new leadership; his white opponents were saying that he couldn’t be trusted, that he was corrupt and that you should stick with what you have. Then, after he became the mayor, there was just this amazing battle. The city council had 50 members and they were divided between supporters of Washington and supporters of his white opponents with a couple inbetween. Over the next couple of years, through a series of deals and elections, Washington and his allies ended up taking control of the council. It wasn’t just about winning the election, but this Stalingrad-type block-by-block battle afterwards. It’s just a very exciting story. And he won. You just don’t expect to see that. They managed to replace this alderman, then they managed to get this person to vote on their side, and eventually they twisted enough arms and did what they needed. Then Washington died of a heart attack. It’s a fascinating book because it’s not only about the election but also about the political manoeuvrings. I’m an expert on public opinion and elections but I don’t really have much understanding of political manoeuvrings. In university politics I always managed to piss people off. This is a readable book, very fascinating, and then at the end when he dies, it’s very sad. It’s got good guys and bad guys, and unexpected twists. Washington was a very tough guy. It would have been very tempting for him to just have given up, and say, “Well, I did what I could.” But he didn’t. At the national level, close to 90% of African-Americans vote for Democrats. For Obama it was about 96%. I think a lot of white people feel Democrats are the black party and don’t support them for that reason. Yes, though obviously it was also a big deal in Chicago. The assumption has always been that a black candidate could not win most of the white vote, so at first he was just not considered a serious candidate. It was just assumed that white people weren’t going to vote for this guy. No. He was in the lead, and the economy had not being doing well, so that meant the Democrat would do well. The stronger the partisan cues are, the less important other things are. People do argue about this. Some people claim – which may be true – that Obama maybe didn’t do as well as he would have done if he’d been white. He did about as well as predicted, based on the economy, but he outspent McCain. You could argue that Obama should have done a couple of percentage points better than forecast, because of the unequal campaign. It’s hard to say. People did some surveys where they claimed that some percentage of white people were less likely to vote for Obama because he was black. This kind of thing came up with Romney too. There were some people who said they wouldn’t vote for him because he’s a Mormon. People say all sorts of things in the abstract, but then when it comes to the election, they vote for him. I don’t really believe a lot of these things now, when people say “I won’t do x or y”. They won’t do it right up to the second they do it, and after they do it, they try to explain why it didn’t count. There is increasing partisanship, but it’s something that is happening gradually. Things that are happening in the timescale of a week or a month or a year, are pretty uniform. Long-term, though, the parties have been moving apart. Democrats are more and more distrustful of the Republicans and Republicans are more and more distrustful of the Democrats. So that is happening at the same time. You have the local uniform swings, within the context of the entire topography changing."

"This is by Kevin Phillips. I don’t know his exact job title, but he worked for Richard Nixon. This was a classic book from 1969, about how American politics were changing. The idea was that, partly as a result of the Democrats becoming more uniformly liberal and having more support of blacks, Republicans would soon be able to get the support of various groups of white people, such as urban Catholics, who had traditionally been very strong Democrats. Richard Nixon could get political success, basically, by convincing a lot of white people – not the white people who are traditionally in charge of the country but so-called ethnic white people – that the Democrats were not on their side. Their pitch was that the Republicans were the only truly national party and the Democrats were a sectional party. The Democrats were representing interest groups and only Republicans were representing America. This was seemingly a very successful pitch, and it really mapped a new populism. It wasn’t a new argument. Nixon was making this argument back when he was Joe McCarthy’s buddy in the 1950s. Back then he was already arguing that the Democrats were a bunch of Communists and elitists, but the message didn’t catch on so well in the 1950s. Somehow it became more convincing around 1970 when the economy wasn’t going so well, and when there was a war in Vietnam and fighting in the streets. In the last few years Phillips has written some very angry books . He really detests George W Bush, basically arguing that the Republicans have been captured by a mixture of rich elites and extreme religious groups. If you look at a book like The Emerging Republican Majority , it’s not about the rich, it’s much more the idea that the Republicans are the sane middle of the country. He became a bit disturbed. This doesn’t discredit the Republicans, the fact that one of their operatives think they went too far. He’s just one guy. But it’s a very important book historically. It’s about a tactic that was actually followed successfully. It has insights in terms of how we got to where we are. Looking back, there was no reason to think the Republicans would become this alliance between some very religiously conservative people and these very economically conservative people. It was a different era of what was possible. Various industrialists at the time would have loved to have very low tax rates, but I don’t think it would have been considered possible. There have been big changes in American politics – big moves to the right on economic issues and to the left on social issues. This interview was published in June 2012, as the race between Romney and Obama for the US presidency entered its final stretch."