Labor Force Realignment and Jobless Recoveries

The US economy is currently experiencing its third "jobless recovery." However, this term is an incorrect description of the employment situation. Instead, the US labor force is going through a structural alignment where the amount of labor inputs necessary to produce durable goods is decreasing, despite an increase in overall output. This has important long-term ramifications for the labor market.

The Early 90s Recession

The NBER dates the early 90s recession as occurring between 7/90 and 3/91. Let's take a look at GDP growth before, during and after the recession:



Above is a chart of the percentage change in GDP from the previous quarter in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP. First, notice that in two of the four quarters preceding the recession the growth rate was below 2%. Also note that for the three quarters after the recession the growth rate was weak as well, with two of the three quarters printing growth rates below 3%. This graph illustrates that the quarters of the recession aren't the only quarters that experience slow growth. Instead, the official dates of the recession usually state when the growth was slowest with those dates surrounded by slow growth as well. Let's take a look at the post recession employment picture.


For nearly a year after the recession ended, initial unemployment claims remained between approximately 420,000 - 460,000, indicating that after the recession the employment market was still weak. In addition,


notice the unemployment rate rose after the recession ended.

Let's take a closer look at the establishment job data:

Above is a chart of the seasonally adjusted total establishment jobs in the economy. Notice that after the recession ended there was essentially no job growth; it wasn't until about a year after the recession ended that employers started to add jobs. Secondly, notice that it wasn't until about two years after the recession ended that the total number of establishment jobs reached their pre-recession peak. The total number of jobs lost from the peak to trough was approximately 1.6 million.


Above is a chart of total durable goods manufacturing jobs. Notice that like total establishment jobs, this chart dropped after the recession. However, while total establishment jobs started to increase in early/mid 2002, durable goods manufacturing jobs did not grow. From their peak in 1990 to their trough in 1993, this sector of the economy lost a little over 1 million jobs, meaning durable goods manufacturing jobs accounted for about 60% of jobs losses in the early 90s recession. Also note that while total establishment jobs began increasing in early/mid 1992, durable goods manufacturing employment stalled over the same time period.

The Early 2000s Recession

The NBER dates the early 2000s recession as 3/01-11/01.


Above is a graph of the percent change in real GDP from the previous quarter. This was a mild recession, as GDP during the recession turned positive for one quarter. However, like the early 1990s, this entire period -- roughly 3 years -- is characterized by weak growth before, during and after the recession.

Above is a chart of initial unemployment claims before and after the recession. Notice that initial claims remained elevated for over a year after the recession ended.


Above is a chart of the unemployment rate before and after the recession. While the unemployment rate was low -- peaking at just above 6% -- it remained elevated after the end of the recession.

Above is a chart of total establishment employment before and after the recession. Notice that total job losses were about 2.4 million (a drop from approximately 132.4 million to 130 million) from January 2000 to December 2003.


Above is a chart of total durable goods employment before and after the recession. Notice that total durable goods manufacturing employment dropped by about 2 million from January 2000 - December 2004. In other words -- like the early 1990s -- the "jobless" recovery was really caused by a structural realignment in the US economy as it slowly lowered the number of employees in the durable goods manufacturing section. Finally, consider these charts:

Above is a chart of total durable goods manufacturing employment in the US going back to 1939. I've circled the periods before the 1990s and placed rectangles around the 1990s and 2000s recessions. Notice that before the 1990s, durable goods manufacturing snapped back after a recession very quickly; the employment lines form a "v" shape. In contrast, durable goods manufacturing after the 1990s and 2000s recession comes back extremely late in the recovery (in the 1990s) or not at all (in the 2000s). The decrease in durable goods employment has led some commentators to argue the US manufacturing sector is deteriorating. This is not the case.


Above is a chart of industrial production for durable goods manufacturing. Notice that during the 1990s and 2000s expansion this number increased at strong rates, indicating US manufacturing was creating a large number of goods.



Above is a chart of output per hour of employee in the durable goods area. Notice that it has continually increased for nearly 30 years with a few dips. This chart indicates that US manufacturing employees have continually made more "stuff" per hour worked. This chart also partially explains the continued drop in US durable goods manufacturing employment: the US economy is making more with less.


Above is chart of manufacturing output, which confirms the output per hour of work chart above -- US manufacturing output is increasing. It is simply doing so with fewer labor inputs.

Conclusion:

The "jobless recovery" is in fact a realignment of the US labor force. Fewer and fewer employees are needed to produce durable goods. As this situation has progressed, the durable goods workforce has decreased as well. This does not mean the US manufacturing base is in decline. If this were the case, we would see a drop in both manufacturing output and productivity. Instead both of those metrics have increased smartly over the last two decades, indicating that instead of being in decline, US manufacturing is simply doing more with less.

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Capturing the Cape

Massachusetts is the largest state in America with a uni-partisan House delegation: All 10 seats in the Bay State are held by the Democrats. This November, however, that may change. The 10th District seat vacated by retiring Rep. Bill Delahunt--which in 2008 was Barack Obama’s least competitive of the state’s congressional districts -- is up for grabs.


And this race is not just competitive, but is arguably hard to handicap. Indeed, David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report rates it a “toss-up”; Crystal Ball's Isaac Wood rates it more favorably as "lean Democratic"; and just this week Stu Rothenberg upgraded it from "lean Democratic" to "Democrat favored." Though each of these rating services issues updates at different times each month, and each uses slightly different language and categories--there may be some gap, say, between what merits a "lean D" for Crystal Ball compared to a "lean D" for Rothenberg--the point I'm trying to make here is that it's unusual to find the three rating newsletters with three different assessments of the same district, as they do here. (At least for the moment.)

Demographically, MA-10 is overwhelmingly white, has a median household income about one-fourth higher than the national average, and its median age (42) is considerably above the national average (36), due in part to it's sizable senior citizen cohort (17.2 percent; national average: 12.6%). Geographically, the district includes all of Cape Cod (Barstable County) and the Islands (Dukes & Nantucket counties), plus a significant chunk of what's known as the "South Shore"--the part of Massachusetts south of Boston but not including the Cape, in this case starting around Quincy and heading southward toward the Sagamore and Bourne Bridges that link the Cape to the rest of Massachusetts over the Cape Cod Canal. For history and culture buffs, the district is home to Plymouth Rock, The Kennedy summer compound, Provincetown, and the fictional airport set from the television sitcom Wings. (Remember Joe, Brian, Helen, Roy and Lowell?)

Two things draw my attention to this District. The first, as a matter of disclosure, is that I spend some time in the district (on Cape) during the summers, and am here right now. The second is that the Scott Brown special Senate election this past January provides us a set of electoral data points intervening between the 2008 election and the upcoming 2010 midterm.

Best I can tell, the MA board of elections did not aggregate votes in the Brown-Martha Coakley race by congressional district. But DavidNYC of Swing State Project produced a colorful, town-level map of the Brown-Coakley results, and one of his plucky bloggers, "jeffmd," a reliable person I've gotten to know a bit offline who has previously appeared here at 538, did everyone a further solid by aggregating the results by CD.

As you can see from the map above, Brown basically carried every part of the district except for the sparsely-populated towns at the tip of the outer Cape (Truro, Provincetown), and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket...and simply crushed Coakley in the working-class towns of the South Shore. And as you can see from the district-wide results, for the towns wholly included in districts, Brown performed better in the 10th than any of the other nine districts, with an estimated 60 percent of the vote. I have to say "estimated" here only because, as I gather from jeffmd's table, where towns are split across two districts he was unable to separate out the precincts; nevertheless, you can see that those few towns split between the 9th and 10th districts were also Brown's best performing split-towns statewide, too. In any case, it's safe to say the 10th was definitely among Brown's top two best-performing House districts, and probably his overall best. In sum, although Delahunt of late carried MA-10 with about two-thirds of the vote (when challenged), Republicans have reason to be very bullish about this seat: Delahunt's gone, Obama squeezed by, and Brown crushed Coakley here.

The Massachusetts primary is not until September 14, when one of the two declared Democrats and one of the three Republicans will be chosen for the general. So the candidate dynamics of this race still have not come completely into focus, and the ratings may change as a result of those primaries and the quality of the two nominees who emerge. I'll check back in on MA-10 after we know their identities.

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Australian Labor Party in Pole Position

Campaign season is heating up in Australia, following the call of a snap election by Prime Minister Julia Gillard last weekend. With voting scheduled take place on 21 August, many questioned whether the ruling Labor Party, who rather suddenly ousted former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in late June would be able to recover from sagging approval numbers, a largely stalled agenda, and an unexpected coup at the top.


In fact, since the announcement of the August poll, things have improved substantially for new Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Labor Party. The boost in the polls is quite natural at this point, in part because of Gillard's own positive approval ratings (currently at +19, with 23 undecided), and in part because the leader of the opposition Coalition, Tony Abbott ( of the Liberal Party, in an alliance with the National Party) , is nearly as unpopular as Rudd was (sitting on -15, with 13 undecided)*.


Australia uses the 'Instant Run-off' form of voting to election Members of Parliament from 150 single-member districts across the country. In practical terms, this means that voters rank the available candidates in their district, in a fashion almost identical to the proposed Alternative Vote in the UK. If no candidate receives a majority of first choice votes, the candidate finishing last is eliminated and his or her votes distributed by the second-choice marked (if no second choice is marked, the vote is removed Voters must mark a preference for every candidate, or the vote is removed immediately). Candidates are removed and their votes redistributed until a candidate reaches a majority, at which point they are declared the winner.

Accordingly, polling for Australian parliamentary elections must account for not only the first choices of voters, but also preferences down the ballot. With different numbers of candidates running in different constituencies with varying ideological positions, however, and only a partial connection between national political alternatives and local MP choices, doing effective national level polling for Australia is a challenge.

In a similar challenge to the one we had for the UK election earlier this year, taking sporadic national level data -- and we have even less for Australia than we did for the UK -- and estimating what exactly will occur at the individual constituency level is quite tough.

However, the instant run-off system in Australia makes it fairly easy for pollsters to simply add a second line of questioning regarding their preferences among the top two parties or coalitions -- the two who will in most cases end up pulling nearly all the votes after second, third and fourth choices have been factored in.

As a result, the pollsters (except for Neilson, who was quite far off) performed remarkably well on the final two-way numbers, with lower total errors than any pollsters from the UK, for example (the Brits had to account for three final parties rather than two, so we can discount the industry averages by 2/3, with the Aussies still performing better). I guess we should expect that the British polling industry will among those lobbying to adopt the Alternative Vote.


With a month to go in the election campaign, there is still plenty of opportunity for the Liberal/National coalition to pull back into the lead, a position they enjoyed briefly in the last few weeks of Rudd's ill-fated Premiership. Prime Minister Gillard remains only partially defined, and with nearly a quarter of Australians unable to make a positive or negative decision about her, some serious negative campaigning could bring down her now strong approval ratings.

That said, Tony Abbott and the Coalition will have to simultaneously revitalize their own image, and recover from a period of near domination by Labor of the media's election storyline, something that will be quite challenging to do alongside mudslinging political attacks. As a result, unless something dramatic occurs, we should expect to see Labor coast to victory.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

* Approval ratings use the figures of The Australian's pollster, Newspoll, who have been taking approval data since the mid 1980s.

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Geography, Ideology and Endorsements in Georgia

In the runup to the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, a lot was said (by myself, among others) about factors like ideological differences (real or perceived) between the candidates on abortion and gay rights, and also about the surrogate battle being waged between 2012 presidential possibilities Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich in the latter's home state. Since Palin's candidate, Karen Handel, is now facing Gingrich's candidate, Nathan Deal in an August 10 runoff, we'll probably hear more on this subject.

But a close look at the results seems to indicate that geography more than ideology--and far more than big-name endorsements, may have influenced the results, and could be determinative in the runoff.


Nathan Deal represented North Georgia's 9th congressional district in the House for eighteen years (the first three as a Democrat). Before her election as Secretary of State in 2006, Karen Handel chaired the Fulton County (Atlanta) Commission. So you'd figure that Deal would do pretty well in the 9th and Handel would have an advantage in Atlanta.

That turned out to be very true. According to my own calculations (see this nifty results map from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), in a field with four viable statewide candidates, Deal won all but one county in the 9th, and took 46% there overall. In the 26 metropolitan Atlanta area counties that are not in the 9th district, Karen Handel won 39%.

In looking at the impact of big-name endorsements, it should be noted that Newt Gingrich's home county, Cobb, is in metro Atlanta, and also happens to have cast more Republican primary votes than any other of Georgia's 159 counties. It does not appear Newt was able to do much for Deal: Handel won 41% in Cobb to 20% for Deal, who was actually edged out for second place by Eric Johnson.

How do things look for the runoff? Well, Deal's lucky that 9th district congressman Tom Graves, who won the seat in a special election (and runoff) after Deal resigned, was narrowly knocked into another runoff by the same candidate he beat previously, Lee Hawkins. So turnout in the 9th will be relatively high.

But in metro Atlanta, Handel's stomping grounds, there's a hot congressional runoff in the heavily Republican 7th district, centered on Gwinnett County, where Handel beat Deal 38-23 in the primary. (There's also a Republican runoff in the Atlanta-area 13th district, though not a lot of Republican voters there.)

Now it would be easy to say that with Deal being strong in North Georgia and Handel strong in Atlanta, the runoff will be determined by the rest of the state. And that seems to be the take offered by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Analysis of Tuesday’s primary showed that the candidates both played to their constituencies and triumphed in their strongholds – Handel in metro Atlanta and Deal in Northwest Georgia. But voting patterns also showed that to win the Aug. 10 runoff, one of the candidates will have to forge a coalition with downstate rural and Savannah.

The analysis goes on to suggest that Savannah-based third-place finisher Eric Johnson could make a huge difference with his endorsement, if he makes one.

That could be true, but there are three other factors that make Handel the strong favorite no matter what Johnson does. First, her Atlanta area base represented almost exactly half the statewide Republican vote, while Deal's 9th district accounted for only 13%. Second, Handel did better in Deal's home ground than Deal did in hers: Handel won 26% in the 9th, winning one big county (Forsyth) and finishing second everywhere else, while Deal won only 16% in metro Atlanta. And third, in the rest of the state, which accounted for 36% of the statewide vote, Handel won 32% while Deal won only 24%. In fact, in Eric Johnson's southeast Georgia base, Deal was in single digits in most counties, and won only 4% in the biggie, Chatham (Savannah). Handel managed to win 14% even there, and generally showed a statewide appeal.

Endorsements by other candidates could matter. Perhaps Gingrich or Palin will kick out the jams and get really active, or other presidentials could weigh in (Handel's already been endorsed by Mitt Romney for the runoff). And maybe Deal's efforts to position himself as the "true conservative" in the race, with an intensive emphasis on immigration and with help from the state's anti-abortion lobby, which has been feuding with Handel, will make a big difference in a low-turnout contest. And who knows, it's conceivable that Handel's support for abolition of the state income tax will get her in trouble given the state's very serious budget problems.

But at this juncture, geography seems to have been the key to Tuesday's results, and should matter most on August 10.

UPDATE: As Harry Enten notes over at pollster.com, the four polling firms in the field (Insider Advantage, Mason-Dixon, Magellan Strategies and Rasmussen) during the final week of the Republican gubernatorial primary did a good job of picking up late surges by Handel and Johnson and the fatal swoon by long-time front-runner John Oxendine. Given the instability of the race, and the traditional difficulty of polling southern primaries, congrats are in order. It will be interesting to see if they venture back out for the runoff.

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House Majority Tipping Point

There is no set division of labor around here, but Nate generally tracks the Senate and Ed tends to monitor key gubernatorial races, leaving me to keep tabs on the much murkier set of House contests that will determine whether the Republicans have enough political-electoral momentum to dethrone Nancy Pelosi. I've written three posts already this month (here, here and here) about House midterm elections, so count this one as the fourth in what will be more or less an ongoing, sporadic series of posts running from now through November.

The impetus this time is pretty straightforward: The "big news" this week that the Democrats seem to be gaining ground in Gallup's General Congressional Ballot. As Gallup's Lydia Saad writes in her summary of the results, "The Democrats' six-point advantage in Gallup Daily interviewing from July 12-18 represents the first statistically significant lead for that party's candidates since Gallup began weekly tracking of this measure in March."

OK, what to make of this? What might explain the Democratic bump, will it last, and is it enough to mitigate their expected losses this November?

To begin, loyal 538 readers know that as a general rule of thumb we should use +2D as the GCB "zero point" because of the way Democratic respondents (mostly as a result of racial redistricting) are distributed across House districts. So the good news for Democrats is that the latest generic ballot is above +2; the bad news is that it's not much above it, particularly when polling margin of error could account for most of that net 4-point spread. One spike up does not a trend make.

However, for the sake of argument let's presume that Democrats have finally hit bottom and are now starting to surge toward a comeback that will limit their losses to something closer to the historical midterm average loss of about 16 seats, rather than closer to the 39 seats they'll need to recapture the majority. (Related note: As the National Republican Congressional Committee recently and quite correctly pointed out, some national Democrats are trying to move the goalposts a bit to raise expectations about the number of seats the GOP should gain, so they can spin the results in November.)

In any case, let me spitball a few possible explanations for the turnaround:

1. The poor House Republican response to the BP spill, particularly the whole Joe Barton episode, seriously damaged the Republican momentum by portraying Republicans as elevating big business interests over the national interest;

2. The financial reform debate shifted the national conversation away from difficult economic topics for Democrats like unemployment, stimulus, and bailouts;

3. The painful fight over health care reform is over, and voters are starting to come around a bit on the idea of reform;

4. The national Democratic campaign to depict the GOP as a the "party of no" or "new no ideas"* is starting to gain traction; and/or

5. Anti-incumbent sentiment is subsiding.

I listed these in what I suspect is descending order of contribution to the Democratic surge--again, presuming there is one in the first place. (There doesn't seem to be much evidence of #5, but I threw it in there anyway.) If I'm right about this ordering, the Democratic advantage may be fleeting and mostly a result of self-inflicted damage by the Republicans. If, however, voters are starting to actually re-assess the accomplishments of Democrats in the 111th Congress, and note the Republicans' resistance to that progress--in other words, if voters are making substantive, positive evaluations of the Democrats--then the shift could be more real, and lasting.

[*On this question of making hay by depicting Republicans as either having "no ideas" or that they will return America to the Bush era--talking points the DNC is pushing heavily this week--the Gallup survey was in the field before the much-maligned Sunday Meet the Press appearances by the Republican leaders Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. John Cornyn. Even the National Review lambasted their performances and warned against the GOP trying to run out the clock until November in the hope that anti-Obama, anti-incumbent and/or anti-Democratic sentiment carrying them into the majority.]

Which brings me to my final point: If, in fact, voters are coming around to the idea that the GOP is an obstructionist, idea-less minority that belongs out of power, that sentiment may be reflected in future generic ballot results. But I'm not convinced the national narrative has suddenly done a 180, or that Democratic talking points have gained that much traction. Labor Day is just around the corner, and I think we will have a much better sense then whether the Gallup numbers out this week are an aberration or a tipping point.

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Friday's Election in Precarious Burundi

This coming Friday, the last of three national elections will take place in the small East African nation of Burundi, marking the end of a precarious and occasionally explosive election period. Following local elections at the end of May, which were won convincingly by the ruling NCDD-FDD party, and Presidential election on 28 June -- boycotted by the opposition parties -- that reaffirmed President Pierre Nkurunziza, the upcoming legislative ballot on 23 July may end up being only partially conclusive.

In Burundi, which emerged in 2005 from more than a decade of armed civil conflict, every step in the electoral process has been a battle. Where previously issues were argued by the sword on the battlefield, the political stage has finally taken over as the main forum. However, extralegal political maneuvering, intimidation and sporatic violence have challenged the legitimacy of these processes, illustrating the perilous peace that exists within the country.


The 1993-2005 Burundi Civil War pitted Hutu paramilitary groups against the Tutsi-dominated Burundian military, after which Hutu groups began fighting with each other. The majority group in the country, making up about 85 percent of the population, the Hutus had in 1993 finally been able to get a Hutu elected President through the first democratic election since independence in 1962. Up until the 1993 election, a series of Tutsi military leaders had effectively run the country, though a series of coups, uprisings and an attempted genocide in 1972 (à la Rwanda in 1994) meant that Tutsi (about 14 percent of the population) hold on power was almost always tenuous at best. It was the assassination of this first Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, by Tutsi soldiers, that sparked the conflict.

At the same time as internal discord tore into the social, economic and political fabric of the country (today, Burundi is one of the five poorest countries in the world), Burundi's official military (mainly Tutsi at that time), as well as several rebel groups, took part in two massive regional conflicts known as the First (1996-1997) and Second (1998-2004) Congo Wars. At first a relatively straightforward operation by Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Angola to dislodge the longtime US-backed dictator of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko, the conflict quickly deteriorated into a bloodbath of fighting and displacement between armies, rebel groups, thug-like gangs, and privateers from the seven countries in the volatile region.

This year's elections in Burundi, the first full election cycle since the peace process concluded in 2005, inherits much of the pain, resentment, poverty and loss of the past 15 years. Though things have moved a long way from the worst periods of internal and external violence in the early 2000s, with committed Burundians and internationals struggling year in and year out to push peace forward, without the common enemy of a 'Tutsi hegemony' to united them, Hutu political and paramilitary forces have been slow to reconciliation and power-sharing among themselves.

It became clear, however, during local level elections that the incumbent party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy – Forces for the Defense of Democracy (NCDD-FDD), led by President Nkurunziza, are the dominant political force in the country. While the opposition leveled accusations of fraud, violence and intimidation and held several protest rallies around the country against the results, international observers cautiously confirmed that the election "met international standards."
It is, however, undeniable that violence and political shenanigans remain the name of the game in Burundi, as monthly updates and periodic special articles from the well-reknown International Crisis Group have confirmed. Regardless of whether it is because they lost in the local elections and are using the well-worn tactic of discrediting the election as a way to stave off defeat, or whether more principled views dominate, the main opposition FNL (along with all others) eventually decided to boycott the presidential election of 28 June as well this Friday's legislative ballot.

The international and regional community, including a personal visit from the Secretary General of the UN have tried to mediate the dispute, encouraging a decisive and peaceful political process. At this point, however, it seems that Friday's semi-boycotted parliamentary vote will offer more questions than it answers about Burundi's peace consolidation process.

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Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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My Life on the J-List

I can’t say that I hold the Daily Caller in much esteem for making a business model out of publishing the contents of supposedly private e-mails from the list-serve Journalist. I have about 10,000 Journolist e-mails in my possession from the roughly 20 months that I was a member of the group. It goes without saying that an organization in possession of these e-mails, as Daily Caller is, would have nearly unlimited degrees of freedom to cut-and-paste evidence together with the aim of either perpetuating a certain narrative or trying to undermine the integrity of a particular journalist. The fact that their revelations seem to be getting more and more trivial perhaps tells you something.

I haven't been a target of any of their criticism. I'd like to think this is because everyone thinks I'm super awesome and fair-minded, but it's probably just because they have bigger fish to fry. Nevertheless, I’d rather approach this with as clear a conscience as possible, so as not to enable the person whom I happen to offend in the wrong way at the wrong time. Therefore, even though it's not really anyone's business, I’ve decided to review my own contributions to Journolist, which I was invited to join in September, 2008. If this happens to provide our audience with a more prosaic and realistic view of what Journolist was really like, that’s all for the better.

I made on the order of 150 posts to Journolist while I was member of the list-serv, most of which were on the short side. I rarely write long posts on discussion lists -- and for that matter I rarely write long e-mails – because I figure if I have something coherent and substantive to say it should probably go on my blog. Most of the posts were banal. They might involve things like: asking for advice on book-writing, seeing if anyone had contact information for a person I was trying to reach for a story, or clarifying a point of Senate procedure. Other posts involved "off-topic" threads on subjects like food or sports.

A lot of the other comments involved discussions of Democratic or Republican political strategy. Almost always, I made exactly the points in these discussions that I made on FiveThirtyEight. Sometimes, I used the phrasing "we" when participating in these discussions, which I would not ordinarily use on the blog. I’ve disclosed from the first day of FiveThirtyEight’s existence that I’m usually a Democratic voter, and Journolist’s membership consisted of mostly Democrats, so this seemed fairly natural.

In general, I don’t do a lot of name-calling, even in private, and there was very little of that in my posts. I can be sarcastic and I certainly tweaked a few people here and there. But essentially without exception, they were people who I’ve also tweaked in public at FiveThirtyEight.

There were a handful of times when I engaged in discussions about the economics of online media. This is a topic about which I almost never write about publicly because it’s not my "beat" and I assume that my thoughts aren’t very interesting to people. Probably the most provocative thing I said, ironically, is that I thought Daily Caller had a questionable business model because it was poorly differentiated.

Finally, there were two passages out of my 150 or so posts that I'd probably cite if I were trying to create headaches for myself. Both concerned my disagreements vis-à-vis other Democrats, and both reflected positions that I had taken publicly.

In one post in July 2009, after a favorable employment report had come out, I wrote that "liberals are going to need to learn to be more willing to promote good economic news". There "have been a lot of positive economic signals for the past 3-4 weeks”, I wrote, and commentary from the right "certainly isn't going to do us a favor and talk about them on our behalves."

The reference to liberals was intended rather broadly, i.e. to liberal politicians as well as liberal authors, and nobody much responded to the comment. This argument reflected one that I made in public on several occasions throughout 2009, such as here ("If An Economy Recovers and No One Cheers It, Does it Make a Sound?"), here, here, here and here. Nevertheless, it can imagine it being characterized as evidence by a person attempting to prove the existence of a cabal or conspiracy.

The other example is from December, 2009, and demonstrated a more explicit awareness of the role that blogs might have in shaping the media narrative. The post came after I had done a segment on Hardball with Darcy Burner, in which I took the position that the health care bill under discussion advanced liberal policy goals (in spite of lacking a public option, etc.) and she took the opposite stance. This was at a time when some liberal websites were seeking to "kill" the healthcare bill.

In the post, I reported that Darcy and I had a conversation after the segment, and that she had noted to me that it was probably a good sign that the lead segment on Hardball had featured two liberals fighting against one another – that is, it suggested that the Overton window had shifted, and it was no longer a matter of whether a health care bill would pass (this was before the Massachusetts special election) but what its contents might be. “Do you think she's basically right?”, I wrote to Journolist. “What I know is that it's very important for Ezra, Cohn, Krugman, myself et. al. to be pushing back against the claims of the kill-billers. What I don't know is whether the kill-billers are making things better or worse.”

The post elicited a dozen or so responses on the list, the first couple of which concluded that Darcy’s position was incorrect and that the actions of the kill-billers were not helpful to Democrats. Then the thread drifted off into various unrelated tangents.

I doubt that this would be cited as a sign of a "vast left-wing conspiracy", mostly for the obvious reason that it reflected a debate among different groups of liberals, rather than between liberals and conservatives. Still, it certainly reflects an awareness of the role that prominent commentators can have in shaping the media narrative.

But the fact is that I took an aggressive stance on the healthcare bill is no secret; quite to the contrary, I had written a deliberately provocative post entitled post entitled "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill" several days earlier, which motivated the Hardball segment. I also engaged in many public arguments with other Democrats over the merits of the health care bill over the course of 2009.

I’ve since debated with myself whether this was a wise thing to do. It was one of the very few circumstances in which (i) I took a rather explicit advocacy position and (ii) directed my arguments fairly explicitly toward a liberal rather than non-partisan audience. My feeling at the time was basically that it probably wasn’t optimal from a branding standpoint, but that this was a sacrifice I was willing to make because I’d thought very deeply about my position and thought it was too important an issue not to speak up about. I’m quite honestly not sure whether I’m happy about that decision in retrospect.

The bottom line is that there’s nothing in the posts I made to Journolist that would surprise regular readers of this blog -- the positions I took in private were consistent with the positions that I took in public. For the most part, this is true of other Journolist members as well. People who branded themselves as opinion journalists tended to have strong opinions, consistent with the opinions they expressed publicly. People who branded themselves as straight reporters were quieter, mostly using the list as a means for professional networking.

Over the past several months, I’ve come to the position that I want this blog to speak more explicitly toward a broad and non-partisan -- rather than liberal-leaning -– audience. Certainly, this was a precondition of my deciding to work for a major media organization and of their decision to hire me. This does not mean that I won’t have opinions, or that I won’t take positions on occasion. It does not mean that I won't, personally, be a liberal. I don’t expect the blog to become sterile or dull. But I intend to be fairly explicit about disclosing where I’m coming from, and to make some effort to demarcate which of my conclusions are based more on objective evidence (such as our forecasting models), and where my biases and preconceived notions could potentially come more into play.

At the same time, I’m with Jay Rosen: this stuff is complicated, and one has to work hard at it. I certainly don’t always expect to get it right, and I'm sure that I'll hear from my readers when I don't. As a practical matter, one “strategy” this is likely to entail is that when the dominant political stories are partisan fights that aren’t suitable to objective analysis, I might concentrate somewhat more on areas outside of politics, such as sports, statistics, econometrics, or “culture”. Obviously, however, our focus will be overwhelmingly on the midterm elections between now until November, which should be a lot of fun.

__

p.s. This is pretty much my final "say" on this topic, so please don't anticipate any follow-up, or any response to media requests, etc.

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In Recent Japanese Elections An Unequal Electoral System Explains the Government's Defeat

On July 11th, voters went to the polls in Japan to elect members to the upper house of the legislature in what was the first major election in Japan since the opposition Democratic Party of Japan ousted the Liberal Democratic Party last summer. The LDP had, with a one-year interruption, held power since its creation in 1955. In Japan, the House of Councillors performs a similar role to the US Senate in that its members are intended to represent local governments rather than the people directly. Its members serve six-year terms, with half of the chamber elected in staggered elections every three years.

Of those 121 seats up for election in each cycle, 73 are elected from 47 Prefectures, while 48 are elected proportionally on the basis of an open-list system. And while the Prime Minister is elected by the Lower House of the Diet, which also maintains sole authority over the budget, on all other issues the upper house has the right to block legislation, which can only be overcome by a two-thirds vote of the lower house.

As a consequence, control of the upper house is vital for governments, and more than one Prime Minister has fallen after a poor result. And in the elections held on the 11th of July, the one-month old government of Naoto Kan suffered what is already being heralded as a serious defeat. Rather than gaining two seats as they hoped, they instead lost 8, and the 44 they won were eight less than the 52 won by the formerly dominant Liberal Democratic Party and its allies.

It is important however, not to overstate the results, as the outcome of the elections had as much to with the nature of the Japanese electoral system as with a shift in public preferences. While the Democratic Party performed significantly worse than in 2007 when it won 40% of the vote and 62 seats, the 39% of the vote it won this time was substantially greater than the 33% won by the LDP. Most of its losses, which took place in multi-member districts, owed more to the bias of the electoral system than they did to a major change in voter preference nationwide.

This bias exists due to the dynamics of multi-member districts. While there are 73 FPTP seats but only 49 Prefectures. One of the major differences between the US Senate and the Japanese House of Councillors, is that in Japan regional representation is balanced with population. While every Prefecture is guaranteed at least one seat each cycle, the remaining seats are distributed according to population. As a consequence, while the ancient capital of Nara only elects a single-representative each cycle, Tokyo elects five.

In theory this guarantees a degree of proportional representation. Due to the nature of multi-member constituencies in which each voter receives a single vote, an overwhelming advantage in support is required to win both seats. In fact in a two party system, if one party declines to run two candidates, 67% is required, and in regions where that threshold is not reached, the minority party is practically guaranteed a seat.

In practice therefore, the system is rigged for the formerly-ruling Liberal Democrats, because the single-member districts tend to be in less populous areas where its support is concentrated, while the multi-member districts ensure that it is guaranteed near equal representation in urban areas where the various opposition parties have their base.

The difficulties this represents for the DPJ or any other party is apparent when one examines the results of the Miyagi Prefecture this year.

Candidate	Party	% of the Vote
Yutaka Kumagai	LDP	26.83% Elected
Mitsuru Sakurai	DPJ	24.41% Elected
Hiromi Ito	DPJ	16.46%
Ichiro Ichikawa	Independent	11.04%
Fumihiro Kikuchi	Your Party	10.78%
Tetsuo Kanno	Communist	5.41%
Mikio Kato	New Renaissance	4.55%

As is apparent, the DPJ had a significant lead in voter preference, 41% to 27%. Nevertheless, the 41% of voters who chose the DPJ ended up with the same representation as the 27% who voted for the LDP. Because the major parties are strong enough to win at least one seat in every multi-member district, this means that the winner of a House of Councillors election will always be determined in the single-member districts. And they favor the LDP as is made apparent by the chart below of where each party won last weekend.

Party	Single	Two-Seat	Three-Seat	Five-Seat	Total
DPJ	8	12	6	2	28
LDP/NK	21	12	7	2	42
Your Party	0	0	2	1	3

As can be seen, the multi-member districts were largely a wash with a one-seat advantage for the LDP-New Komeito grouping (counted together because New Komeito only ran three candidates and backed the LDP elseware). By contrast, the single-member districts provided virtually the entire LDP margin in the election. In a touch of irony, the DPJ actually suffers from the greater representation granted to regions based on population. If the House of Councillors was like the US Senate, with each Prefecture receiving one-seat, the LDP’s lead would be cut to a 25-22 margin, rather than the 42-28 margin that currently exists.

The fruits of such a system are fully apparent when we examine the “popular” vote in Japan, which has been won in every election since 2004 by the DPJ.

Party	2004 Prefectural Results	2007 Prefectural Results	2010 Prefectural Results	Seats 2004	Seats 2007	Seats 2010
DPJ	39.1%	42.4%	39.0%	31	41	28
LDP	35.1%	31.4%	33.4%	34	24	39
New Komeito	3.1%	6.0%	3.9%	3	2	3
Communist Party	9.8%	8.7%	7.3%	0	0	0
SDP	1.8%	2.3%	1.0 %	0	0	0
Your Party	N/A	N/A	10.2%	N/A	N/A	3
Others	10.4%	9.7%	5.3%	5	7	0

As is clearly demonstrated, the DPJ faces an enormous structural bias. Only in 2007, with a lead(including the then independent People’s New Party) of 11% were they able to comb together a significant majority of the Prefectural seats.

The introduction of proportional representation for a little over a third of the seats was intended to mitigate the harms of the system. But the proportional system, rather than being compensatory like that used in Scotland or Germany(ie. One in which seats are distributed to parties that underperformed in FPTP relative to their vote total), is normative, with the result that it hardly impacts the seat totals. This year the DPJ won four more proportional seats than the LDP, but this hardly moved the totals, as is demonstrated below.

Party	2004 Proportional(2010 seats)	2007 Proportional Vote	2010 Proportional Vote	Seats 2004	Seats 2007	Seats 2010
DPJ	37.8%	39.48%	31.56%	50	62	44
LDP	30.0%	28.0%	24.07%	49	37	52
New Komeito	15.4%	13.18%	13.07%	11	9	9
Communist Party	7.8%	7.48%	6.10%	4	3	3
SDP	5.2%	4.58%	3.84%	2	2	2
Your Party	N/A	N/A	13.57%	N/A	N/A	10
Others	3.6%	7.28%	7.7%	5	8	2

As can be seen, by making the proportional seats a minority of the total, and allocating them strictly according to a separate list system, any equalizing effect was reduced to a minimal level at best.

Therefore what really happened two weeks ago was less a massive shift in voter preference than a smaller shift that was sufficient for the LDP to hold onto its lopsided advantage in the single-member districts. In reality, the DPJ only lost 6 seats, three of which were prefectural and three proportional.

Appearances however, are different, as political realities also often are. Whatever the merits of the Japanese electoral system, the DPJ suffered a major setback two weeks ago, one that will make governing extremely difficult in the future. And whatever the actual merits of its performance, the LDP held together contrary to expectations it would collapse in opposition, meaning that Japan’s current two-party system is likely here to stay.

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