Complexity and Social Networks Blog: Final thoughts for now on the Coburn attacks on the online townhall report

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5 November 2009

Final thoughts for now on the Coburn attacks on the online townhall report

This is hopefully my last post for a while on the online townhalls. I do think there is a value in dialog and discourse, and I wanted to excerpt the critiques from some of the more credible online sources and provide my responses, more for posterity than anything else.

I would first note that none of the posts responded to the findings that the online townhalls reached people who do not show up to regular townhalls (based on demographics), where, notably, people who were frustrated with the political system were more likely to show up. Further, none of the criticisms deal with the findings that the people who participated were subsequently more engaged in politics, more likely to vote, increased their knowledge of the policy, more likely to follow the election. These are the parts of the report that actually have normative bite; clearly, approval of Members of Congress by itself is neither here nor there normatively. These may be things that the bloggers below do not value (in which case they should explain why) or actively ignored.

In any case, here is what they did say.

First, the Heritage post, in its words:

[referring to the fact that the research methodology called for offensive questions to be culled] CMF does not say what qualifies as offensive, but if this summer is any indication that definition would include anything that the Congressman did not want to talk about. In other words, this report urges Congressmen not to actually interact with their constituents, but to avoid them altogether by holding safe townhalls they can completely control. And what did CMF find where the results of these Potemkin townhalls?

The online town halls increased constituents' approval of the Member. Every Member involved experienced an increase in approval by the constituents who participated. The average net approval rating (approve minus disapprove) jumped from +29 before the session to +47 after. There were also similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities - such as whether they were compassionate, hardworking, accessible, etc. - of the Member.

The lesson: avoid your constituents' inconvenient questions and your approval ratings will rise. And this is a taxpayer funded study. Here is the grant from the National Science Foundation.

Congress is actually using your tax dollars to pay social scientists to find ways they can avoid actually talking to their constituents while improving their chances of reelection.

Response: as noted in the report, the possibility of screening anything as "offensive" was theoretical. We did not actually exclude any questions for this reason (we did state this in a footnote rather in the text). We had pretty high (low?) standards for offensive--e.g., we would not post questions that included expletives. It was part of our research protocols, and thus our instinct was to mention it.

That said, it is worth noting that the medium is potentially manipulable, and there is nothing to stop someone who is doing an online townhall from excluding difficult questions. (Of course, all communication media are manipulable in some way, so it is not obvious that this is an advantage or disadvantage of online townhalls.) We had a neutral moderator, and included all questions that time would allow, in the order that were posted. This included some that were pretty hostile to the Member. Our assessment (and recommendation) was that these very confrontations made the events more effective, because they reflected the authenticity of the event. In short, the Members approval ratings increased because they had done the right thing.

The Wall Street Journal:

The National Science Foundation prides itself on making research grants that lead to path-breaking discoveries. So it seemed odd to Coburn, a physician known as the Senate's 'Dr. No,' that science foundation money was being used to show legislators how to exile angry town-hall mobs to cyberspace.

Response: It is unclear whether the blogger is speaking in her voice, or Senator Coburn's. In any case, the criticism that we were trying to eliminate traditional townhalls came up repeatedly through the blogs. We do not advocate this in the report (or elsewhere). But the online and tele-townhalls do allow Members to reach many more people than they can via traditional townhalls, and people they could not otherwise reach. Indeed, Senator Coburn himself has participated in many tele-townhalls, presumably without crowding out traditional townhalls.

From Fox (John Stossel's blog):

This summer's town hall meetings made many congressmen and senators uncomfortable. No worries. The sycophants they fund have used your tax money to fund a study that advises politicians how they can avoid seeing you altogether.

[The rest is just derivative from the Heritage blog]

Response: All of the NSF funded data collection was conducted in the summer of 2006, three years before the town hall meetings of this past summer. Further, the participating members included some conservative Republicans, i.e., there was no partisan or ideological tilt in this research.

Otherwise, I'd note that name calling is a poor substitute for a persuasive argument. 'Nuff said.

----------------------------
The more serious argument is the resource constraint argument that Coburn himself raises in the flyer below. Taxpayer dollars are wrested, involuntarily, from individuals who have worked hard for their money. Should these dollars be used to fund political science research, especially in these resource constrained times? Could these funds be used, for example, to help cure cancer (something that the Coburn amendment did not mandate, I should note). (NB: a useful fact, we currently spend more than 2000 times as much money on NIH than on the NSF political science program.) Does this research provide public value equal or greater than its cost?

This requires a more thorough answer than I can give here and now. The broad intellectual argument for giving even one penny for research from the government is that certain types of knowledge, for which there is no mechanism for intellectual property right protection, will be underproduced in our market system. And, to the extent it is produced, it might remain proprietary in a fashion that reduces its possible positive impact. For example, in the political arena, I am sure Senator Coburn (and every other Senator) has spent tons of money on politically related research by consultants, etc. (across all politicians, vastly more than is spent on the NSF Political Science Program). But little of that money is aimed at producing knowledge that might improve democracy, nor would any insights along those lines be made publicly available.

To take the boundary case for supporting political science research, say the authors of the Federalist papers, the inspiration for our research, had been drawing government salaries on the time that they were writing those foundational papers (if any readers of the blog can speak to this historical fact, I would be interested in knowing). Would Senator Coburn say that this had been a waste of taxpayer money?

So, in the case of our more modest research, we produced something of a model for how democracy could be done, with the Internet facilitating direct interactions between Members of Congress and citizens that they had, before, been unable to have a conversation with. We applied cutting edge scientific methods to test the effects--field experiments, with control groups, the whole nine yards. Any criteria you might throw out there regarding "scientific methods" we match-- rigor, research design, replicability, inferential power, etc etc. And we got some really compelling results from a normative point of view. I am not sure what the dollar value was, but I am happy for our report to be held out as a poster child for the public value that federally funded research for political science can produce. And on the more general issue, presumably enhanced understanding of the inner workings of democracy, the causes of war and peace, of the difficulty/challenges of institution building in damaged states, of the causes of the growth and decline of terrorist networks (all things that have been federally funded political science research) are all things that plausibly produce public value, and are worth more rigorous treatment than pundits and talking heads on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC might provide.

Posted by David Lazer at November 5, 2009 7:50 AM

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Final thoughts for now on the Coburn attacks on the online townhall report