Douglas Hibbs
2007 08 25c
Quarterly Journal of Political
Science:
Submission, Reviews, Re-submission
and Rejection History
1. Submission
From: douglas hibbs
[mailto:douglas@douglas-hibbs.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2006
9:12 PM
To: 'krehbiel@qjps.com';
'mccarty@qjps.com'
Subject: RE: QJPS inquiry
Dear Profs Krehbiel and McCarty (aka
Profs Keith and Nolan)
Attached please find my paper “The
Economy, the War in Iraq and the 2004 Presidential Election” which I submit to
QJPS.
Yours, Doug Hibbs
_______________________________________________
Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr.
Emeritus Professor of Economics and
Senior Research Fellow CEFOS
Göteborg University Box 720,
Göteborg 40530, Sweden
Web Page: www.douglas-hibbs.com
E-Mail: douglas@douglas-hibbs.com
douglas.hibbs@gmail.com
douglas.hibbs@cefos.gu.se
Worldwide GSM Cell/Mobile Tel.
Number: +46 70 559 0744
2. Cover Letter with Reviews
From: Nolan M. McCarty
[mailto:nmccarty@Princeton.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007
3:49 PM
To: douglas hibbs
Cc: admin@qjps.com; Keith
Krehbiel; Alan Gerber
Subject: QJPS Decision
Doug:
We now have two reviews on your
paper “The Economy, the War in Iraq, and the 2004 Election.” Both referees endorse publishing your piece
in some form. The editors’ preferences over
form are closer to those expressed by reviewer 2. In other words, we would be most interested
in publishing a shorter comment on Nordhaus.
The essence of the comment should be that if Nordhaus had used the
“Bread and Peace” model there would be no underperformance to explain. If you accept this offer to revise and
resubmit, we will evaluate the revised manuscript in-house.
The manuscript shoud be pared back
in a number of ways. The portion that explicates your original model and
details its performance can be substantially condensed. For example, Table 2
can be omitted. The discussion on pages 7-9 can be reduced to a footnote (or we
could publish it as an on-line appendix).
We also agree with R2 that the model cannot really say much about the
effect of the Iraq War, so that part of the paper should be deemphasized.
Regarding the comment on Nordhaus,
we ask that you omit editorializing and nonessential background tidbits. Simply
state each material erroneous claim and then say what you think the truth is
and why you think you are right. If verification requires information from
Nordhaus which he does not supply, please say so succinctly and avoid adding
unverifiable details. Please refrain
from speculation about what Nordhaus may have “just consulted” or whatever. If Nordhaus is not telling what he did, leave
it at that. Present your evidence and the readers can draw their own
conclusions.
Regarding the discussion of the Fair
model(s) you should condense your complaints into a couple paragraphs and refer
the readers to Bartels (1997). R1 might
enjoy the revised paper less, but we insist on keeping things civil.
We are including a copy of the QJPS Style
Guidelines. Adhering to its
provisions would ease the publication process if we decide in favor of the
manuscript. Pay particular attention to
the replication policies. A complete
replication by our replication editor is necessary prior to publication.
We appreciate your interest in the QJPS and look forward to seeing your
revised manuscript.
Best,
Nolan, Keith, and Alan
Review #1
Review of "The Economy, the War
in Iraq, and the 2004 Presidential Election"
I suggest QJPS publish this paper.
HIbbs' methodology for election forecasting is sophisticated, and certainly
better (and more prsimonius) than Ray
Fair's over-hyped quadrennial exercises in data mining.
Question: What does the number '400'
signify in the description of R in the equation on page 3?
I presume that lambda is estimated
based on the full model with KIA in
the equation. Hibbs' earlier estimates of the quarterly
weights
(e.g., 1982, 1984) obviously did
not. This point about lambda
should be made clear. I note that
lambda has grown from about .8 (Hibbs
'84) to .91, where higher numbers
approaching 1.00 suggest voters have
long memories. The shifting lambda and its implications
might be
worthy of a footnote.
I enjoy reading the catfight with
Nordhaus and I have no reason to
doubt Hibbs' position.
Review #2
Subject: The Economy, the War in Iraq and
the 2004 Presidential Election
The specific impetus for this piece
seems to be "Nordhaus on Hibbs vis-a-vis Fair." Since
Nordhaus's piece appeared in QJPS, Hibbs's response may be more
interesting to QJPS readers than it otherwise would be. Whether it is
interesting enough to warrant publication is less clear to me. Having disliked
Nordhaus's piece when I served as a referee (partly on the grounds that there
was too much Fair and not enough Hibbs) I haven't gone back to look at the
published version. If the comparison of Hibbs and Fair looms large, then a
detailed response may be appropriate. If not, then a very brief research note
may be sufficient to cover the most important points of contention. (In either
case, the substance of what Hibbs has to say about these points seems generally
convincing to me.)
The preceding eight pages of Hibbs's
piece provide a summary of the "Bread and Peace Model" and an
application to the 2004 election. The former is, not surprisingly, competent
and clear. On the other hand, it doesn't really add anything to Hibbs's
previous publications describing and justifying the model. The discussion of
2004, which focuses mostly on Iraq, strikes me as less successful. If one asks
how the economy influenced the 2004 election, it does not seem farfetched to
multiply the relevant economic indicators from 2004 by regression coefficients
derived from past elections (though perhaps not from 2000?). To apply the same
approach to Iraq, where the coefficient is estimated on the basis of three
previous cases, the most recent almost 30 years in the past (plus some suspect
fiddling with definitions of wars, "grace periods," and the
like) does seem farfetched. Hibbs (inspired by Nordhaus) spends a page
addressing whether casualties should be scaled to population. Fine. But what
about differences in mobilization patterns, budgetary impacts, media
coverage, political rationales, impressions of success or failure on the
ground? It is hard to believe that anyone interested in the political impact of
Iraq in the 2004 election would take this seriously.
What Hibbs can say, on the
basis of his calculations, is that Bush did not do much worse than one would
have expected on the basis of economic conditions. Perhaps he did not do much
worse because Iraq did not matter much. Perhaps Iraq mattered four times as much
as Hibbs claims (accounting for the -.92 prediction error). Perhaps it mattered
ten times as much as Hibbs claims (and the "real" residual,
attributable to Karl Rove's brilliance or John Kerry's hairstyle or whatever,
was +1.5 rather than -.92). All of these possibilities, and many more, are
perfectly compatible with Hibbs's results. There is just very little
information in this sort of analysis for answering questions about the
political impact of such specific events as the war in Iraq.
Perhaps the best solution would be
to shrink this manuscript down to five or six pages: two on the model, one on
its application to the 2004 election (including a very brief discussion of
Iraq), and two or three on the various sins of Nordhaus and Fair.
3. Re-submission
From: douglas hibbs
[mailto:douglas@douglas-hibbs.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007
10:11 PM
To: 'mccarty@qjps.com';
'krehbiel@qjps.com'
Subject: Hibbs QJPS Revision
Dear Editors
Attached in both doc and pdf formats
are the revision I submit to QJPS of “The Economy, the War in Iraq and the 2004
Presidential Election.”
I also attach the Figure appearing
in the paper in tiff format, and the Stata program and data files used to
generate all results. And I also attach an Appendix to the main paper which, as
noted below, I wish to have accessible at QJPS should you decide to publish.
Some remarks on the reviewers’
comments, the editors’ comments and on what I did and did not do in response to
same follow.
Concerning R1:
I spelled out the reason for
multiplication by “400” in the computation of/formula for quarter-on-quarter
real income growth rates ( the reason being that it makes the coefficient
interpretable in terms of annualized percentage points of growth).
I think it is clear enough from the
Bread and Peace equation that the Fatalities term (earlier called KIA)
is estimated in the presence of the lag sum of real income growth rates, so I
have taken no action about the remark on this point.
I add a mention of and a reference
pertaining to R1’s point about the increase to estimated lambda when the
variable Fatalities/KIA is included in the model.
Concerning R2:
I was somewhat confused by the lines about using coefficient estimates
excluding the 2004 observation (in order to generate an out-of-sample,
one-election-ahead prediction of the 2004 outcome). This just replicates the
procedure Nordhaus applied to Fair’s equations (which is quite standard) in
order to obtain a prediction from my model that was comparable to what Nordhaus
obtained for Fair’s equations. I still do not know for sure how Nordhaus got
the numbers attributed to me, but he clearly did not use the same procedure he
applied to Fair in generating the “Hibbs” numbers discussed in the text and in
his Figure 2 – a point I emphasize in my paper.
R2’s remarks about “farfetchedness” of saying anything about Iraq because of
the small number of prior cases (what my old econometrics teacher and thesis
advisor Art Goldberger calls “micronumerousity”) contributing to my estimate of
the electoral effect of Fatalities (a view endorsed by you – the
editors) is misguided. What matters for precision of estimates is not the
number of cases but the amount of independent information carried by a
variable. One sees this in the standard formula for the estimated variance of a
coefficient estimate (the square root of which yields the estimated coefficient
standard error that upon division into the point estimate gives the t-ratio
from which one can find the p-value), to wit:. 
.
As depicted in my Figure 1, the
large deviations of the vote shares one would have expected from the economy at
the (high KIA/Fatalities) elections of 1952 and 1968 mean that my Fatalities
variable carries a lot of information despite the small number of non-zero
cases – hence the low p-value of 0.003 reported in Table 1 of my paper. I have
added a note to the paper, however, that gives the 95% confidence interval for
the Fatalities coefficient estimate and I point out that even at the upper
extremity of the interval the Iraq effect was much too small to swing the
election.
As for other aspects of the Iraq
adventure – fiscal effects, media coverage and what not, well sure. Yet that single
variable is no weaker then any standard aggregate measure of economic
performance – unemployment, real output growth shortfalls, etc – which
summarize a whole range of underlying effects like fiscal costs, psychic costs,
lost human capital formation and so on. To target Fatalities/KIA along those
lines is again misguided in my view. Further, I could extend my paper by adding
a review of research done back in the 1970s and early 1980s by Kernell,
Mueller, Ostrom and Simon and myself about the effects of American military
fatalities on public opinion toward Vietnam and Korea and Gallup presidential
popularity ratings, but I do not think this would be of central relevance to
the present paper.
Concerning the Editors’ Remarks:
I believe I have gotten rid of all
bits of tid.
As you suggested, I have deleted
Table 2 and the discussion about and estimates of the effect of Fatalities/KIA
scaled to population and placed those in an Appendix. If you decide to publish
my piece I would like the Appendix made available at QJPS, as noted at the
beginning of my message.
Concerning my laundry list of Fair’s
re-specifications – and their implications for Nordhaus’ claims about the
superior fits and standard errors of Fair’s setups and the relevance of Fair’s
equations to the electoral effects of “fundamentals” – I have not
shortened. In fact that section now probably runs a bit longer than before. On
this score I am not willing to compromise. Although Larry Bartels’
correspondence to the JEP complains about Fair’s ad-hoc style of model
development, his main discussion is about the relevance of Fair’s orientation
to ex-post prediction and fit to what political scientists are mainly
interested in. And to my knowledge no one has ever listed out sequentially the
full catalog of changes to the various Fair equations as one election followed
the next. In fact when I pieced that sequence of changes together myself from
various documents at Fair’s web site I was surprised at just how many
modifications Fair had made, and I have been following this literature quite
carefully for more than 30 years. All by itself I regard this section of my
paper as providing useful perspective on the Fair equation(s) which economists
at least always take to be the benchmark model of the effects of fundamentals
on Presidential voting outcomes (well illustrated, of course, by Bill Nordhaus’
QJPS article).
A Small Error in Nordhaus’
Background documentation:
The Regression table at page 4 of
the document QJPS archived for Nordhaus’ paper (earlier posted also at
Nordhaus’ web site) should show “Sample 1916-2004” (yielding 23 observations),
not “Sample 1916-2000.” The Sample 1916-2000 (22 observations) pertains to the
Regression table on page 3 and is correctly labeled there.
I hope you will
come to a speedy decision so that I can expeditiously seek to publish elsewhere
if the QJPS sky falls down upon me.
Best wishes from the North, Doug
Hibbs
4. Rejection
From: Krehbiel, Keith
[mailto:krehbiel@stanford.edu]
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007
7:52 PM
To: douglas hibbs
Cc: Alan Gerber; Krehbiel;
McCarty; QJPS
Subject: QJPS manuscript [6058]
Dear Doug,
Thank you for the revision of “The
Economy, the War in Iraq and the 2004 Election.” The manuscript has
improved as a result of your responsiveness to referees and editors, but there
are two outstanding issues.
The first issue is the tone of the
manuscript which we continue to regard as unnecessarily acerbic. Although
this could probably be edited away in due course, we had hoped the problem
would have been taken care of in one revision. (And while we concede that
this matter is subjective, for what it’s worth, we three independently reached
the same assessments.)
The second issue is your decision to
decline our request that you cut back on the catalogue of Fair’s shortcomings,
an issue about which you write: “On this score I am not willing to
compromise.” We, of course, respect your autonomy on such matters and
regret that we may not have been sufficiently clear about our wishes to make
the comment shorter and more focused.
The upshot is that it seems
improbable that we can reach a state in which you can make the points you wish
to make the way you want to make them and in which we can publish a comment
that we regard as appropriately brief and Nordhaus-germane. We regret
that things did not work out as well as they might have, but we nevertheless
appreciate your interest in the QJPS and extend our best wishes as you pursue
publication of your manuscript elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Keith, Nolan, and Alan