Unrepresentative information - The case of newspaper reporting on campaign finance

This article examines evidence of sampling or statistical bias in newspaper reporting on campaign finance. We compile all stories from the five largest circulation newspapers in the United States that mention a dollar amount for campaign expenditures, contributions, or receipts from 1996 to 2000. We compare these figures to those recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The average figures reported in newspapers exceed the figures from the FEC by as much as eightfold. Press reports also focus excessively on corporate contributions and soft money, rather than on the more common types of donors-individual-and types of contributions-hard money. We further find that these biases are reflected in public perceptions of money in elections. Survey respondents overstate the amount of money raised and the share from different groups by roughly the amount found in newspapers, and better-educated people (those most likely to read newspapers) showed the greatest discrepancy between their beliefs and the facts

Partisan Bias in Economic News: Evidence on the Agenda-Setting Behavior of U.S. Newspapers

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias -- or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy -- for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.

TESTING MODELS OF DISTRIBUTIVE POLITICSUSING EXIT POLLS TO MEASURE VOTERPREFERENCES AND PARTISANSHIP

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distributionof federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve onprevious work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that areDemocrats, Republicans, and independents, or liberals, conservatives and moderates. Wefind no evidence for the "swing voter" hypothesis { that is, no significant associationbetween the amount of federal funds a state receives and the fraction of independents ormoderates in the state. We also find no evidence for the "battleground state" hypothesis -no significant association between the amount of federal funds and the degree of partisanbalance in a state. Modest support is found for the \partisan supporters" hypothesis, whichconjectures that politicians will favour areas that contain a large percentage of their coresupporters.Electoral competition, swing voter, partisanship, election closeness, USFederal Spending.

Partisan Bias in Economic News: Evidence on the Agenda-Setting Behavior of U.S. Newspapers

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro- Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias - or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy - for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.

Fairness, Self-Interest, and the Politics of the Progressive Income Tax

All advanced democracies have adopted income taxes with considerable progression in marginal tax rates. To explain this we examine the nature of individual and collective preferences over alternative tax schedules, in the context of a simple two-sector model. We first consider the case of altruistic or "sociotropic" citizens who view the income tax as a means of achieving a fairer or more egalitarian distribution of income. We show that greater marginal-rate progressivity may well be less fair; that a "fairest" tax, however defined, is always a linear or "flat-rate" schedule in which all incomes are taxed at the same marginal rate; and that with a purely sociotropic electorate there exists a flat-rate schedule which is a majority equilibrium. We then show that with "self-interested" voters who seek to minimize their own tax burdens, greater marginal-rate progression may well be preferred by middle-and upper-income voters; that for middle-income citizens the optimal schedule is a sharply progressive one; and that within the set of individually optimal schedules there exists a majority equilibrium, which is a progressive schedule which minimizes the burden on median-income or middle class citizens, at the expense of lower-and upper-income taxpayers

Introduction to Special Issue of \u3ci\u3eJournal of Defense Modeling and Simulation\u3c/i\u3e: Novel Approaches to Defense and Military Modeling and Simulation

Developing solutions to complex problems in government and industry is a daunting task that often requires tremendous investment in time and resources to solve. Modeling and simulation (M&S) has incredible potential to streamline development and cut costs by conducting virtual experiments that give insight into performance under various test conditions. As many program managers in the federal acquisition process can attest, realistic testing of live equipment in an operational environment can be some of the most expensive parts of a development program. M&S can provide insight into mission success of yetto- bedesigned systems without the need to actually build and test the system in the real world. Similarly, M&S tools can evaluate human effectiveness under various scenarios while only risking the virtual lives of avatars. When properly applied, M&S capabilities provide critical insight that allows leaders to make smart decisions about how to accomplish the mission and increase human performance more quickly and at lower cost and risk than reliance on real-world testing. Throughout this special issue, we examine a variety of novel M&S concepts that promise to deliver simulation results to the defense and military community that positively impact system-level mission studies and human effectiveness research. These M&S tools not only affect the defense and military community, but can also have application to a wide variety of government and industry users with needs to solve similar problem sets. Whether the end goal is cost savings, operational analysis or refinement of sub-components, the M&S concepts described in this special issue testify to the power that these tools can provide to help decision makers efficiently allocate scarce resources and provide improved performance of humans and the systems that they operate in the long run