Citizens United means the Koch brothers are not breaking the law anymore

[Thailandnotes]

This New Yorker profile of the Koch brothers published half a year ago is worth rereading. (long)

“The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical..Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all

[Shakespear]

Re: Citizens United means the Koch brothers are not breaking the law anymore

Yes, that was an interesting article.

I do not have a sense of where New Yorker stands so as to interpret what I read in it. In other words, what is the meat and what is just smoke.

My sense of New York Times and Wall Street Journal is that it is toeing the line of Wall Street and D.C. Political Corp. Elite. So "uncomfortable" facts will be left out or deformed.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Citizens United means the Koch brothers are not breaking the law anymore

To me one of the more fascinating aspects of the Citizens United case is how it is portrayed in the U.S. mainstream media.

For example, MSNBC appears to want their viewers to believe that big money didn't influence politics before the decision came down and the 2010 election.

[mikedev10]

Re: Citizens United means the Koch brothers are not breaking the law anymore

in regards to that, what do you make of this paper?


"Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House." Journal of Political Economy, 1994, 102(4), pp. 777–98.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...engers1994.pdf

[c1ue]

Re: Citizens United means the Koch brothers are not breaking the law anymore

in regards to that, what do you make of this paper?


"Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House." Journal of Political Economy, 1994, 102(4), pp. 777–98.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levi...engers1994.pdf

Levitt always does some interesting work.

In this case, however, I think the conclusions drawn are more than a bit stretched.

Basically his methodology is to use identical opponents to cancel out personal impact, then to look at how spending affects vote result.

The problem is that whether in the broad or the specific sampling - the incumbents win almost all the time: nearly 95% in the broad and just under 90% in the 'direct competition' subsample.

This would appear to bias the results heavily - for example if the biggest issue is name recognition, clearly the incumbent isn't going to gain more name recognition no matter how he spends.

Furthermore the incumbents outspent the challengers broadly: nearly 2 to 1 in subsamples and more like 2.5 to 1 overall.

The methodology for cancelling out systemic effects - i.e. economy is good/bad, Republican/Democrat surge year, etc etc also is interesting but problematic.

Taking all the above into account, a finding that shows challengers' spending of $100,000 yields 2.7% of the vote vs. a nearly zero impact for incumbents isn't necessarily significant given that the incumbents pretty much always won anyway.

Examining the cases where the challenger outspent the incumbent would be probably more illuminating.

The trouble arises later on when Levitt then uses the conclusions from his analysis to deride campaign spending limits.

There are numerous problems with his assertions, for one thing he assumes that spending has a linear impact on votes. This is quite unclear.

Another example of systemic bias would be perception of winning chances: it is quite possible that candidates which are viewed more likely to win will get more money to spend, as it is a safer 'investment'.