Pilnmēness nogurdinātie - Komentāri

Stīvens Levits, šur tur visai pazīstams ekonomikas profesors (patlaban Čikāgas universitāte, pāris runas ari TEDā, utt.), kopā ar žurnālistu Dabneru savā grāmatā Freakonomics piemin vienu no Levita sākotnējiem ekonomikas pētījumiem, kas secina, ka vēlēšanu kampaņās iztērētās naudas ietekme ir aptuveni 10x mazāka nekā parasti uzskata.

Then he happened upon a political-science book whose authors claimed that money wins elections, period. "They were trying to explain election outcomes as a function of campaign expenditures," he recalls, "completely ignoring the fact that contributors will only give money to challengers when they have a realistic chance of winning, and incumbents only spend a lot when they have a chance of losing. They convinced themselves this was the causal story even though it's so obvious in retrospect that it's a spurious effect."

Obvious, at least, to Levitt. Within five minutes, he had a vision of the paper he would write. "It came to me," he says, "in full bloom."

The problem was that his data couldn't tell him who was a good candidate and who wasn't. It was therefore impossible to tease out the effect of the money. As with the police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data.

Because he himself had typed in the data, he had noticed something: often, the same two candidates faced each other multiple times. By analyzing the data from only those elections, Levitt was able to find a true result. His conclusion: campaign money has about one-tenth the impact as was commonly accepted.

http://stephenjdubner.com/journalism/economist.html


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Steven Levitt, “Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effects of Campaign Spending on Electoral Outcomes in the U.S. House,” Journal of Political Economy 102 (1994): 777–798.