[lbo-talk] Tell them we are democrats (was: freedom to swim)

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Sat Jun 27 16:13:16 PDT 2009


On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:41:05 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> On Jun 26, 2009, at 7:46 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> >
> > I... found [the Chatham House tract]
> > quite unconvincing -- an exercise
> > in tendentious, parti-pris statistical thumbsucking.
>
> Could you, as they say in academia, unpack this? It looks like very
> standard electoral analysis, and quite convincing. Perhaps you could
> identify what's "tendentious" and thumb-sucky about it?

What was tendentious about it was that they were very clearly trying hard to construct a case out of whatever materials they could find or contrive.

I'm not sure it would repay the time and effort it would take to deconstruct this polemic in statistics' clothing. But maybe if the itch persists I'll write a blog post about it and copy here.

The short, broad-brush response would that all these statistical arguments depend on a number of assumptions. They key one for the Chatham House (CH) tract is that large numbers of people in many different places couldn't possibly have changed their minds this much in the course of four years. Then there's all this smoke and mirrors about aggregate "conservative" and "reformist" votes -- which assumes that Iranians map the political space the same way we do, a very large assumption indeed.

Quite apart from selling people's agency a bit short, the '05-'09 comparison is a bit of an apples-and-oranges argument. In 2005, Ahmadi wasn't the incumbent. In the first '05 electoral round -- which seems to be the basis for CH's 2005 per-province numbers -- A. was one of 7 candidates. He got about 20% of the vote nationwide, coming in second to Rafsanjani's 22%.

In the second, runoff round in '05, A. got 63% of the vote -- about what he is said to have received first time around this year.

I haven't found a provincial breakdown for the second round in '05 -- and strangely, the all-knowing Chatham House fails to provide one, unless I've misread their treatise. If anybody has that info, send it along. More data is always good.

Meanwhile, the guy has been the incumbent for four years. He's taken his case to the country.

Assumptions, assumptions. It's been fun to read some of the recent arguments on lbo-talk. We had at least one contributor who felt that the Iranian results were suspect because they didn't look more like results in India. We've had several others who thought they should have looked more like results in the US. Doug, you appear to be suggesting that the Plain People of Iran ought to have turned A. out based on the poor state of the economy -- but this assumes both that the economy matters more to them than anything else, and that they believe A. is responsible for the poor state of the economy, the way Americans tend to do wrt their president.

Any or all of these assumptions may or may not be true -- though they certainly can't *all* be true, since some of them are contradictory -- but none of them appears self-evident.

--

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org



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