Summaries of Important Research

 

POLITICS

Will Latinos Always Be Democrats?
James Gimpel and Karen Kauffmann, Impossible Dream or Distant Reality? Republican Efforts to Attract Latino Voters. Center for Immigration Studies, 1522 K Street N.W. #820, Washington, D.C. 20005 

Republican political strategists are trying to figure out policies that will nudge Latino voters toward the GOP. But University of Maryland political scientists Gimpel and Kauffmann suggest that it’s far more likely that Hispanics will become increasingly Democratic. “Prospects of a widespread Latino conversion to the Republicans,” they write, “are more fantasy than reality.”

It’s true that, by attracting 35 percent of the Latino vote, George W. Bush did better than any Republican presidential candidate during the past 16 years. But Bush failed to do as well as Ronald Reagan, who attracted 37 percent of Hispanic votes in both the 1980 and 1984 contests. Moreover, with the exception of Texas and Florida, large states with substantial Hispanic populations are becoming Democratic strongholds. According to Voter News Service exit polls conducted last November, the margin by which Hispanic voters prefer Democrats over Republicans is 60-26 in California, 48-29 in Illinois, and 72-13 in New York.

Most Latino voters who say they’re “independent,” Gimpel and Kauffmann believe, in fact “vote predictably Democratic.” Only Hispanic voters who say they’re Republicans are actually likely to vote for the GOP. According to a 1999 Washington Post poll, 17 percent of Mexicans (the largest bloc of Latinos) say they’re Republicans, as do 20 percent of Puerto Ricans and 21 percent of Salvadorans. Only Cubans, with 38 percent GOP support, form a substantial Republican bloc, and even those voters are likely to become more Democratic as the anti-Communist Cuban immigrants of the 1960s and ’70s age.

The same poll shows Latinos lopsidedly favoring Democrats in all ages, education levels, and annual incomes below $200,000. Given that Democratic advantage, Gimpel and Kauffmann believe it folly for the Bush administration to pursue policies designed to attract Latino voters, such as allowing more immigration, providing amnesty to illegal aliens, or enlarging the welfare state. Such moves, Gimpel and Kaufmann warn, could end up repelling core Republican voters while failing to attract Hispanics, “leading to another one-term Bush presidency.”

 

Do-It-Yourself Defense
Robert M. Jiobu and Timothy J. Curry, “Lack of Confidence in the Federal Government and the Ownership of Firearms,” in Social Science Quarterly (March 2001), Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, Massachusetts 02148 

Despite government efforts to control or ban the sale of guns, there’s evidence that American gun ownership is rising. American Enterprise Institute fellow John Lott calculates that the number of American adults owning guns grew from 27 percent in 1988 to 37 percent by 1996.

There are many reasons why Americans are buying more weapons, but one of them, according to Ohio State sociologists Jiobu and Curry, is that a rising number of Americans don’t trust the government to protect them or their families.

Jiobu and Curry examined two decades of data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a long-running public-opinion survey of social trends. They compared questions about trust in government with questions about gun ownership, and found a strong correlation between lack of faith in the state and gun ownership.

Over the past two decades, on average, about 44 percent of Americans surveyed by the GSS said they “had hardly any confidence in one or more of the three branches of the federal government.” And while only 23 percent of Americans who said they strongly trusted the state had a weapon, 37 percent of those who distrusted the state were gun owners. In addition, the authors found that gun owners were more likely to be WASPs, male, married, live in the country or a town, and live in the West or South.

Jiobu and Curry conclude that, given the large numbers of voters who distrust Washington, federal efforts to tighten gun control might backfire. “To mandate decreased gun ownership through gun control legislation,” they write, “might only encourage those people who have little faith in the federal government to stockpile weapons.”

 

ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS

Chaining Entrepreneurs
James DeLong, “Old Law vs. the New Economy,” in Reason (August/September 2001), 3415 South Sepulveda Boulevard #400, Los Angeles, California 90034 

In 1997, a gentleman named T. Trahan of the CSC Credit Service wrote to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), asking which federal regulations would apply to employees who worked in home offices. Two years later, OSHA responded that, under existing federal law, home offices had to meet federal standards for clutter, lighting, furniture, and exit signs.

When the Washington Post made this letter public in January 2000, Congressional outrage prompted OSHA to reverse its decision. But the original regulations remain in place. Whenever OSHA wants, it can require employers to prove to the government that home offices meet federal standards.

OSHA, reports Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow DeLong, is not the only federal agency which puts roadblocks in the way of New Economy-style business. The Employment Standards Administration (a branch of the U.S. Department of Labor) issued a regulation about stock options in 1999 that declared stock options were pay, and would have (had Congress not blocked it) made it extremely difficult for employers to issue options to workers. The Internal Revenue Service regularly tries to reclassify independent contractors as employees, or force employers to hire only through temporary agencies (who then take a hefty amount of a worker’s wage as a commission).

“Most of the structure of labor law,” DeLong reports, reflects “thinking of the New Deal,” and is inclined toward unionism, “old concepts of class conflict,” and other assumptions that fit poorly with our new, fluid economy. Among other things, these regulations discourage self-employment, which has stalled.

Eventually the dream that the Internet and other high-tech tools will enable Americans to work from anywhere may become reality. But that won’t happen without labor-law deregulation.

 

SOCIETY

Psychologically Unbalanced
Richard E. Redding, “Sociopolitical Diversity in Psychology: The Case for Pluralism,” in American Psychologist (March 2001), 750 First Street N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002 

It’s clear that the social sciences, including psychology, are dominated by the Left. Redding, of the University of Virginia Law School, reports that “conservatives and conservative views are vastly underrepresented in psychology.”

Redding conducted a content analysis of articles in American Psychologist and the Journal of Social Issues (a public-policy journal for psychologists) between 1990-99 and found that over 95 percent of the articles in both journals were liberal. Issues of the Journal of Social Issues devoted to affirmative action and the death penalty, for instance, had no contributors who support the death penalty or oppose affirmative action, even though these are “hotly debated social issues in the larger society.”

Psychologists express ideological liberal uniformity on a range of issues. Most psychologists seem to believe that teenagers are fully competent to make their own medical decisions (e.g, about abortions) without getting parental approval, yet are immature juveniles in need of protection when charged with major crimes such as murder or rape. Many believe that people who oppose affirmative action, school busing, and welfare are “symbolic racists.” And one American Psychological Association president called on his colleagues to adopt radical left-wing positions and “explicitly blend our data and values in order to make strong arguments for the kinds of change we think is necessary.”

But such reflexive liberalism may discredit psychology itself. Some judges are now reluctant to admit psychologists as expert witnesses for fear that the “evidence” presented may be doctrinaire liberalism instead of social science. There’s also some evidence that liberal therapists may have “less empathy for conservative clients” than for liberal ones.

In psychology, Redding argues, conservative views should “be sayable (comfortably so), seriously considered, and seen as respectable alternative perspectives. An abundance of diverse views is preferable for education and scholarship, clinical practice, and professional integrity.”

 

Merit Pay Gets a Test
Steven Malanga, “Why Merit Pay Will Improve Teaching,” in City Journal (Summer 2001), Manhattan Institute, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, New York 10017 

One of the long-running debates in education is how teachers should be paid. Teachers’ unions argue that teachers, like other senior civil servants, should be paid more the longer they teach. Advocates of “merit pay” argue that the best teachers should get better pay than teachers who do a poorer job.

Although reformers have advocated “merit pay” proposals for the past 20 years, they’ve never been implemented, partly because no one has come up with a way that determines who the best teachers are in any school system. But now, reports Manhattan Institute fellow Malanga, some schools have figured out a way that could make merit pay work.

Cincinnati was the first city to test merit pay, beginning in 1999 with ten schools. Unions agreed to the proposal because it is teachers who evaluate other teachers’ competence. Unfortunately, the teachers’ union blocked use of student test scores as a measure in most cases. But at least there will be some procedure for assessing the quality of an instructor’s classroom presentations. Cincinnati began evaluating new teachers and one-fifth of the old ones this year, and merit pay will begin in 2002.

Another reform is taking place in Iowa, where the state legislature recently allocated $40 million to move better teachers to the highest pay levels faster than poorer ones. As in Cincinnati, test scores aren’t used to help determine superior teachers, although teachers whose students do well on tests will get bonuses.

Unfortunately, most big-city school systems maintain a “we don’t do windows” union obstructionism against any form of merit pay, says Malanga. The hope is that the Cincinnati and Iowa experiments might eventually lead to more efforts to reward excellent teachers.

 

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

Property Owners Clean Up
Roger Bate, Saving Our Streams: The Role of the Anglers’ Conservation Association in Protecting English and Welsh Rivers. Institute of Economic Affairs, 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3LB, England 

What’s the best way to fight polluters? Environmentalists often call for stringent government regulation. But Bate, of the Institute for Economic Affairs Environment Unit, thinks that private groups do a better job. He cites the efforts of the Anglers’ Conservation Association (ACA) in using property rights to fight water polluters.

The ACA was founded in 1948 by lawyer John Eastwood. Under British common law, owners of river banks have “riparian rights”: While they don’t own a river, they can take a reasonable amount of water out of streams that flow through their land, as long as they return clean water. Owners of downstream property can sue polluters for water damages caused by any pollution.

Since anglers and angling clubs often leased fishing rights from landowners, Eastwood realized that if they united, they could sue polluters and force them to clean up the messes they caused. Between 1946 and 1948, Eastwood sent out three thousand letters to angling clubs to create the association. Government-owned industries ended up being one of their first targets. “Had it not been for ACA lobbying,” Bate writes, “government Acts between 1953 and 1985 would have protected nationalized industries from all liability for pollution.”

Bate calculates that in its first 50 years the ACA had about 2,000 court actions. Most of the time, cases were settled out of court, largely because polluters wish to avoid publicity. Bate estimates that the fines polluters paid as a result of ACA cases amounted to 32 million pounds (adjusted for inflation). In its 53-year history, the ACA has only lost three court cases.

Bate notes that the ACA tries to avoid legal action as much as possible, even offering expert advice to polluters about what they could do to clean up rivers. When the ACA does go to trial, it does not ask polluters for punitive damages.

The story of the Anglers’ Conservation Association, Bate concludes, shows how property rights can protect the environment. “Where rights are clearly defined, as with anglers and rivers, potential polluters know exactly what they can and cannot do.”

 

OTHER COUNTRIES

El Castrocito
Mark Falcoff, “Viva Chŕvez!” in The International Economy (May/June 2001), 1133 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 

In the 1990s, democracy seemed to be thriving in Latin America. But now the pendulum is shifting back toward rule by strongmen. American Enterprise Institute scholar Falcoff looks at recent developments in oil-rich Venezuela.

Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chŕvez, a one-time lieutenant colonel who tried overthrowing the government in 1992. After that coup failed, Chŕvez was elected president in 1998 under a “Revolutionary Movement” banner. He then held five elections in two years, in which Venezuelans approved abolishing the existing national assembly, replacing it with a legislative body largely composed of Chŕvez’s cronies, holding new elections for mayors, governors, and the presidency, and abolishing labor unions. In the process, a new constitution was implemented which allows the Venezuelan president to serve two six-year terms instead of one five-year term.

Chŕvez is an admirer of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro; he has brought in hundreds of Cuban doctors and teachers, and has adopted Castro’s technique of routinely giving multi-hour bloodthirsty speeches. When the unions were abolished, Chŕvez said that protesting labor leaders were “like pigs squealing on the way to the slaughterhouse.” Chŕvez has a weekly call-in radio show and gives a half-hour television address every Thursday.

To stay in power, Chŕvez has repoliticized the Venezuelan military. In 1958, the Venezuelan army, in return for retiring from politics, was given substantial pay increases and other perks. In 2000, Chŕvez announced Plan Bolivar, which funneled massive amounts of money to the army to build or fix schools, hospitals, roads, and houses. Since most soldiers have no experience in construction, generals subcontract most work to construction companies linked to retired Venezuelan military officers. Chŕvez’s goal, according to Falcoff, is to make “the armed forces complicit in corruption” and thus tightly linked with him.

Polls suggest that the Venezuelan electorate is evenly split between strong supporters of Chŕvez, strong foes, and a middle third that weakly backs him. Should the price of oil remain high, Chŕvez will likely be re-elected. But if oil prices fall, Chŕvez will probably be defeated. But having obliterated the opposition and corrupted the armed forces, Falcoff says, “it is difficult to see what institutions will remain to pick up the pieces when popular faith in Chŕvez as a miracle worker has dissipated.”