Letter from the Director | Winter 2004-2005
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving: Here at ISERP we are planning our holiday party. The trees on college walk have their holiday lights. There is often something reassuring about continuity. But many of us had wished for some discontinuity in the government. So what went wrong for Kerry? A few days after the election James Moody came down from Ohio to run the social networks short course for the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars postdoctoral program run jointly with the Mailman School. In the days immediately following the election, we heard a lot about moral values but nothing about population density. Below is Moody's scatter plot for the proportion of Bush support by the log of population density per square mile. It is pretty clear that where there is a lot of elbow room, Bush support is strongest. In contrast, Kerry support is strongest where people are jammed up against each other. Ignoring the ecological fallacy, these data lead us to ask: what is it about the experience of emptiness that leads people to prefer Bush? If you have some ideas, we would love to hear them. A sample of succinct (one to two paragraphs) statements that are publishable will appear in the next newsletter. Send them to me at psb17@columbia.edu.
Poliltical Preference and Population Density: 2004 Presidential Election, by County
by James Moody
We have repeatedly heard it said that the Democrats lost the election because they had plans and policies and that the majority of Americans in the empty counties are not interested in policies. Rather than hearing about policies, Americans in the empty counties wanted to hear-the story goes-about values. Here at ISERP, we think it is not time to surrender, and so we have resisted calls to change our name (to ISERV). Instead of giving up on policies, we hope that this year will be marked by significant ISERP-led contributions to understanding the impact of social policy on our country and the world in which we live. Note in this context that seed funds for new research are available, especially for policy-related work. Please contact Kathryn Neckerman for more information before the next deadline, March 1, 2005.
In the spirit of focusing on policy, here are some reports on current policy-related work arising out of ISERP. One Bush-led policy has been to promote abstinence education. Vast sums of money have been dropped on programs that are designed to help kids say no to sex by making a promise to remain a virgin until marriage. How do these policies work? It depends on the goals one is trying to maximize. In the Adolescent Health Project, we have learned that 88% of promise-makers (pledgers) have sex before marriage, but they do have sex later, on average, than non-pledgers. Delaying sex is a reasonable goal. Despite the delay, pledgers are as likely as non-pledgers to have a current STD infection. Since HPV is the leading cause of adult cervical cancer, getting an STD is more than "a pain in the ass." It is bad for you. So if one wants to improve health, there seems to be little benefit to abstinence-only programs.
In other policy news, Sudhir Venkatesh has found that the recent transformation of public housing in Chicago has provided the opportunity for exit from gang membership. However, of those who do not exit, many are joining gangs in the private market communities to which they are being relocated. Given this opportunity, the city should implement intervention strategies to further facilitate departure from gang membership. Bob Shapiro's work on campaign finance reform has found that the public is troubled by the role of money in the political process, associates large campaign contributions with special interest influence and corruption, opposes large unregulated contributions to political parties, and supports reforms of the campaign finance system. There is still much work to be done. The Bush supporters at ISERP share the same commitments as the supporters of Kerry. For all of us, the main goal is to take seriously the complex world around us and to develop lines of inquiry which, by driving social science in new directions, can also help assemble policies that work to achieve substantive goals that enhance the world around us.
And now back to basics. ISERP has a new "Resources and Activities" guide and new working papers to check out, and we have formalized the establishment of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED). ISERP-sponsored conferences on Categories and Classification, Political Psychology, and the IGERT-IDG Interdisciplinary Symposium on Globalization and Development (featured in this issue) have brought speakers Rogers Brubaker, John Levi Martin, Jose Antonio Ocampo, and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr to our community.
Keep in touch. A number of our old friends wrote in after receipt of the last newsletter. We would love to be able to report more about our readers in these pages, so keep the notes coming. And don't forget, recent work on the structure of commitment to collective goods organizations suggests that effective fundraising strategies rest on creating two simultaneous-albeit contradictory-attitudes amongst potential donors: immediate impending crisis and success at achieving our goals. Need I say more? Your gift is tax-deductible. Funds go to enhance our activities-seed grants to faculty, graduate student fellows, and support for our infrastructure. I look forward to seeing you around the 8th floor in the months to come. In the meantime, we hope your Thanksgiving dinner was full of fun and moral values.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
