On Jun 15, 2011, at 12:37 PM, SA wrote:
> I thought you were going to bring up that study. Sorry, but as I said before when it came up, it's a lame and shoddy argument wrapped around a good piece of research. Heaney found that demonstration turnout fell precipitously starting with the Obama campaign, lasting through the Obama presidency, and that it was precisely those who ID'd as Democrats who stopped going to the demos. He therefore concluded that correlation was causation and that Obama caused self-identifying Dems to stop turning out to demos. What is never mentioned in the paper (as far as I saw) is that simultaneous with the drop in demo turnout was (a) a precipitous drop in violence in Iraq, (b) a precipitous drop in media coverage of Iraq and (c) a precipitous drop in the salience of the Iraq issue in national polls. Once you allow for the possibility that demo turnout was falling in response to the Iraq war losing mass salience (rather than from the Obama Effect), it makes perfect sense that it would be the more mainstream Dem identifiers who would drop away and the more hard-core third-party types who would keep turning out.
The study is based on surveys and interviews with actual demonstrators and coalition leaders. And at the same time violence in Iraq was declining, Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, which produced nary a peep of protest. From the paper:
> An obvious answer to our question is that the composition of protests changed. People who approved of Obama stopped showing up, so protesters who continued to turn out were proportionately more anti-Obama in their orientation. The interesting question, however, is how did the composition of protests change? What explains which people stopped showing up and which kept coming? We argue that partisanship helps to answer this question.
> We asked survey respondents to indicate if they considered themselves to be a member of a political party and, if so, which one.4 Based on this question, we graph changes in the partisan composition of antiwar protests in figure 3. The results show that self-identified Democrats were a major constituency in the antiwar movement during 2007 and 2008, during which time between 37 percent and 54 percent of antiwar protesters thought of themselves as Democrats. In contrast, members of third parties were relatively less common in the movement, falling between 7 percent and 13 percent of participants.
>
> However, after Obama’s election as president, Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009, and registering 22 percent in December 2009. In contrast, members of third parties became proportionately more prevalent in the movement, rising from 16 percent in January 2009 to a high of 34 percent in November 2009, and registering 24 percent in December 2009.
>
> Since Democrats are more numerous in the population at large than are members of third parties, the withdrawal of Democrats from the movement in 2009 appears to be a significant explanation for the falling size of antiwar protests.5 Thus, we have identified the kernel of the linkage between Democratic partisanship and the demobilization of the antiwar movement. In the following section, we examine environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms for this linkage using a simultaneous equations model of protest participation.
The CP Dems in UFPJ lost heart when it came to protesting their guy.
> That's why I noted that in the late 60's the antiwar movement grew by leaps and bounds even though the president was a liberal Democrat who was always trying to cover his left flank and portray himself as a peace-loving soul.
I asked Heaney about that. He said the draft had a lot to do with it.
You could do something similar with unions and green groups. They've gone largely silent with their guy in the WH.
Doug