Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:32 I'm joined today by Paul Beck, who is currently an Academy Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, College of the Arts and Sciences, and Co-Coordinator of the Comparative National Election Project, which we'll be hearing more about. Before retiring in 2012, he was Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Science and Professor of Political Science, with courtesy appointments in the School of Communication, and the Department of Sociology. He has published widely on topics ranging from voting behavior to political parties to public opinion. He chaired the Department of Political Science from 1991 to 2004, and was Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences from 2004 to 2008. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Beck. Paul Beck 1:16 Good to be with you. David Staley 1:18 So let's start with the Comparative National Election Project. What are the goals of this project? Speaker 1 1:23 Okay, this was a project that studies elections based on national surveys of voters. And we're doing it across the globe, we now have surveys completed in 53 different elections, on five continents, so with Asia, Africa, Europe, the United States or North America, and I'm forgetting one, there's one other in there, I sound like Rick Perry. It's really cross national, we do these election surveys based on the work of teams that are anchored in those countries. And so we now have probably, I don't know, 30 to 35 members of the Comparative National Election Project, we have two surveys going on right now, one in South Africa, one in Indonesia, and those will be folded into the database that we create, and disseminate to all the members. The database is important, because what we do is we sponsor these surveys, they are done according to the same questionnaire in each of the countries that is doing the survey, of course, translated into its language or languages, and that way, we're able to compare questions across surveys. And then we pull all of these data together into what we call a merged file. But it's a massive file of people who were respondents to surveys, right now in 53 different elections across the globe. And then we can do analysis. Right now I'm doing something on partisan polarization, so I'm able to compare the levels of partisan polarization across, in this particular case, 44 different elections. The United States, by the way, is a winner. There, we lead the way in the amount of polarization. The only country that comes close to us, and it's actually a little bit ahead of us is Mozambique, which was just coming off a civil war when we did the surveys, it was the first election after the Civil War, and so emotions ran really hot in that election. The project began, actually when I was at another university, some colleagues and I got together and we thought, wouldn't it be nice to be able to compare elections across countries? And nobody had really done this before, because they didn't have master questionnaires that were the same. You could compare some items, certainly the vote and a variety of demographic items, but you couldn't compare other things. After we sort of initiated this, I moved to Ohio State, the first survey we did was of the 1992 US election. We also did a survey before that, or at least one of our team did in Germany in 1990. And that was an iconic election because it was the first election since the 1930s that was an all Germany election. David Staley 4:04 So it was after the unification. Paul Beck 4:05 Exactly, exactly. And that was a very interesting study. But we started out with the United States, we added Germany, we added Britain, we added Japan, so it started as a four nation project. And then gradually over time, more national election teams wanted to join in, they had their own questions, but they also wanted to add the CNEP, as we call it, Comparative National Election Project questions, and it's just proliferated over time. I now am the co-coordinator of the international project with my colleague, Dick Gunther, who was also at the Mershon Center, but was a colleague of mine in political science. And we kind of mastermind the surveys, we pay attention to the questionnaire to make sure that it's updated, we recently added items on immigration and populism that are now being asked in all the countries, so we're able to compare them, I just wrote a paper with a colleague in Mexico on attitudes towards populism and nativism, as we call it in Mexico, and compared it with some of the Western nations. So we're able to do those kinds of things from the podium of the CNEP. Other things we're doing, we have a conference coming up in August., In Indonesia. I hesitate to say where, it's in Bali, Indonesia, which is a wonderful resort spot, and the way we finance these conferences, we don't really have a lot of money to run this enterprise, we're very dependent upon individual country teams to raise their own money for the surveys, and then to get to the places where we're having these conferences. In Bali, one of our colleagues, an Indonesian is the head of Indonesia's largest public opinion polling firm, and has done very well. And so, in fact, he's an OSU graduate. And so Saiful Mujani, who is the Indonesian partner for us, is paying all the local costs for the conference. And he also has had enough money and is willing to invest it to bring some of the younger members of our teams into Indonesia, and they don't really have university money or any kind of travel money to be able to get there, and so we will have a total of about 18 people there in Bali for a two day conference. It will be front-ended by several of us going there early to talk about democratic consolidation and deconsolidation across the world. And my role in that particular conference it will be one of the local universities in Bali, will be to talk about the United States and what's happened to democracy in the United States. The Indonesians who are hosting it were very eager to both talk about Indonesian democracy, which they see as having improved over time, still problematic in some ways, but very much improved, and US democracy which they see as threatened. And of course, players on the world stage do indeed perceive that threat in the United States, and are very concerned about it, very attentive to it. David Staley 7:10 Is that what you mean by deconsolidation? Democratic deconsolidation? Paul Beck 7:14 Yes. David Staley 7:15 Tell us more about what this means. Paul Beck 7:16 The idea behind democratic consolidation was that when you begin to have democratic elections, the iconic example is Spain, Franco dies in Spain. David Staley 7:27 1974? Paul Beck 7:28 Yeah, I think that's right. And the first election in Spain that is a fully democratic election is soon thereafter. All the political elites in Spain, the party leaders, join forces to say we want to move away from an authoritarian system to a democratic system. And then the question becomes, how long does that last? And there were times, you know, if you go back into American history, our 1800 election was a pivotal election, because it was the first time there was a real threat, that the other side would take power. And the other side was Jefferson and Madison, who had had a falling out with the Washington administration, and certainly with John Adams, who was the president. So the incumbent administration, in the latter part of the 1700s, did all kinds of things to try to suppress the opposition and the growing opposition. One was they passed a series of laws called the Alien and Sedition Acts. And that allowed them to shut down newspapers that were in any way supporting France, in its efforts in fighting the British overseas. And of course, France had been our ally. So we went through this period where our democracy wasn't really consolidated until, in the first instance, you allow the opposition to take power. Some political systems never make it past that point, where the incumbent authorities simply just deny the opposition the ability to take power, you know, maybe by not giving them any media coverage, but there are a whole variety of other ways, just by not moving out on the presidential mansion, for example. And so we were consolidated not in 1800, that was the first step, but gradually, over time, as more and more Americans, white males, were given the right to vote, our elections became more democratic. And by the 1830s, we in that sense, were pretty much consolidated. Even though of course, former slaves couldn't vote, and women of course, couldn't vote until the 1920s. So we've had even those more recent chapters in the furthering consolidation. So consolidation was felt to be by scholars who have studied it, to be sort of a one time movement, that once you're consolidated, democracies sustain themselves over time. Now we have some examples on the world stage. The most prominent one probably is Hungary right now, of countries where or the ruling authorities have done all kinds of things to undermine the opposition, and to deconsolidate the democracy. And of course, there are threats of that kind here in the United States, as well. And so there's a worry about that, it's playing with the electoral rules, trying to bend the electoral rules, for example, in a way that benefits only your side and disadvantages the other side. And so it's a real question, you know, is American democracy deconsolidating? I don't think it is. David Staley 10:32 That was going to be my next question. Do you think it is? Paul Beck 10:34 I don't think it is, but I think there were some signs that it could and usually, at least in terms of the research literature, there's a great book by two Harvard professors Levitsky and Ziblatt, where they talk about the four signs of democratic decay. One of them is to attack the opposition as enemies, and to actually refer to locking them up or imprisoning the opposition. Some of that happened, by the way before the 1800 election in this country, so there's a worry about that, another one is attacking institutions that are seen as foundations for our democracy, the media, being one of them, the rule of law, the independence of the courts being another one, maybe the balance of power among Congress, the courts, and the presidency, being another one. So there are these kinds of things that I think are warning signs, but the point I was starting to make is that the feeling is certainly in this Levitsky and Ziblatt book, that the most dangerous time is in the re-election of the authoritarian prone ruler of the country, whether it's a parliamentary leader or president, because once that happens, they feel that their efforts have been vindicated. And then they're able to go ahead and do other things that protect themselves from ever being defeated, ever been being thrown out of office. And so the 2020 election is going to be very important in terms of democratic deconsolidation as it may apply to the United States. David Staley 12:15 So you and the team have been conducting these surveys from the early 1990s? Paul Beck 12:19 Yes. David Staley 12:20 The implication being that you've developed quite a lot of global longitudinal data. Paul Beck 12:25 Yes. David Staley 12:25 Aside from deconsolidation, what other sorts of trends have you been able to track over these nearly 30 years or so? Paul Beck 12:33 Well, up until this century, and maybe up until 2010, in fact, there was growing democracy, particularly in what we would have called before, third-world countries, where authoritarian elites were kicked out of office, democratic politics was moving forward, more people were voting, people were freer. We have a battery of questions that has to do with electoral integrity, and elections were cleaner than they had been, in the past. The last probably 5 to 10 years have not seen a continuation of that. Some countries have slipped, there, there are some dangers in Western nations that we tend to pay more attention to just because we're Western ourselves, where there have been some declines in democratic practices, and that becomes a real worry. I just did a paper with my colleagues that looks at populism and what we call nativism, but it's really kind of anti immigrant and anti migrant attitudes, across five different countries. And we have the advantage of having done our own surveys, which we fully controlled, actually, where we have a team in another country that's doing a survey, sometimes they don't add all of our questions, have many of their own that they need to ask, but we had done surveys in the United States in 2016, and then in France, in Britain, in Germany, and later, Italy added on. So we have these five countries, where we can compare them in terms of the levels of populism, the levels of nativism, and how they related to how people were voting in those elections. It developed in a very interesting way. We did the US study, and then we had money leftover from local sources here, College of Arts and Sciences was very important in helping us find the money, as was the Mershon center. So we did a study in France. And they had that very interesting election that had a second round between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. So we did a survey there, and then we thought, Wouldn't it be neat to have a survey in Britain? Theresa May had just called a snap election, but we had no money. So we thought, Well, where can we get money? And it turns out that the National Science Foundation has a program that allows you to apply for money that you need almost right away. And we applied, probably not being confident that we would get the money, and they indeed not only funded the British study. But they also gave us enough money to be able to be a companion in the German study that was being conducted in that same year. And then, of course, Italy added in 2018, so we have these five countries where we can look at populism, we can look at nativism. They, by the way, look very much the same, in terms of the kinds of attitudes that go together in all five of those countries, which was a remarkable result, actually, because usually you look across countries, and we build scales of populism on the one hand, which is based on four items, and nativism, on the other hand, that is based on three items, and they have the same, we would call it dimensional structure, which means they hang together, in the same way across all five, what explains that? You know, I think it's the same phenomenon everywhere. In terms of populism, it's a reaction against the establishment, a feeling that the establishment is not served the interest of the people well, and then the emergence of politicians who are saying that in campaigns. And so what you have in Western Europe, is a revolt against the established parties, all of whom had declines in their vote to fringe parties, both on the left and on the right. And in the United States, you know, the great example, is Bernie Sanders wanting to campaign against the Democratic establishment, particularly Hillary Clinton in 2016, and doing remarkably well, in the primaries and the caucuses. And then, of course, the prime example, is Donald Trump attacking the Republican establishment, all of them on the stage, or at least those running for president with him. He's attacking all of them, and saying, I am the change candidate. I'm the anti establishment candidate, and it was pure populism, whether he's a populist himself, and whether his policies have been populistic in orientation, it's a very different question, but in terms of campaign strategy, he was able to do that. Italy is another prime example of that, where two minor parties won the party that was founded by a comedian, David Staley 16:16 Right, yuppo, something Paul Beck 16:30 Yeah, beppo, agrippa is it grippa? Oh, I can't remember the name, but nonetheless, had been a comedian. And then the other one, a party that was founded as an Anti-Southern Italy party, and then kind of transformed itself into an anti-migrant party, and was able to kind of steal votes as a result of this wave of migration that had hit Italy, and the reaction of the Italian electorate to it. So that's been a very interesting paper to have done, and it's now sitting out there in a journal being reviewed, and our hope is that they will publish it. Speaker 2 17:47 I'm Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Interim Executive Dean and vice provost for The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences. Did you know that 23 of our programs are nationally ranked as top 25 programs with more than 10 of them in the top 10? That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college at artsandsciences.osu.edu. David Staley 18:12 So I know that part of what you've been examining through the election project is the impact of so called fake news. Paul Beck 18:17 Yes. David Staley 18:18 What have your findings been here, and not just simply in this country, but globally? Paul Beck 18:21 Well, we did it first here in the United States. And we added, because of the nature of the 2016 campaign, we added a series of items that were fake news items. And these were prominent items that were being peddled on the internet, one of them clearly by the Russians, but two of them coming from probably alt right websites, and just being spread like wildfire on the internet. So we had those three items on the questionnaire. And then the question we asked ourselves after the election, which had a surprising outcome, I think, to everybody, including many of the Republicans and maybe even the Trump campaign, the question was, what role might this fake news have played in leading voters not to vote the way they otherwise might have? And what we thought we would do is look at people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. And in our sample, there were 585 of them, who sometimes voted for Trump sometimes voted for Jill Stein, or to Johnson, who was the Libertarian candidate, sometimes just didn't vote at all. And the question we asked was, okay, did fake news impact their desertion of Democratic candidates? And we found that they did. The hard thing to do in any kind of a result of that kind is to say, well, okay, we need to rule out all the other reasons they might have defected. And so we build a model of the vote that has all the traditional predictors in it, as well as some things that were new to the 2016 campaign. We run that model and then the question is after you've taken into account on all of those factors, does fake news still have an effect? And it did. And it had enough of an effect to have changed the outcome of the election. Though we can't say that for sure, because we can't drill down to individual states, where the votes were very or the vote differences were very narrow, and those would be Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But we have, I think, a plausible case that fake news did indeed have an impact, maybe more to prevent people from voting at all, but also to peeling off some people from the Obama group who ended up voting for Donald Trump in 2016. David Staley 20:41 Is that just this country? Or is there a similar effect in other countries Paul Beck 20:44 Well there's been plenty of fake news in other countries. Other countries, particularly Western countries have seen this, they have different ways of trying to deal with it. The French have a very interesting way, and that is that they ban any kind of messages on the internet in the 24 hours before the election David Staley 21:04 Of any kind? Paul Beck 21:05 Of any kind. David Staley 21:05 How's that policed? Paul Beck 21:06 It's not easy to police, there are substantial fines that you pay. And as far as I know, there really wasn't any violation of that. But it is hard to police. The Germans have tried to handle it through censorship. Basically, it didn't work out all that well. So there was fake news there. We don't really know yet what impact it had. One of my colleagues, Eric Nesbitt, who is in the Communication School here is looking at that, and is kind of in the middle of that analysis. So we'll do it again, for those five countries, because it was everywhere. Italy had a lot of fake news, Germany certainly had a lot of fake news. Britain had a lot, both during the Brexit campaign, and during the election of 2017. A lot of it was Russian. The Russians have been very active in other countries, as well, I happen to follow Bulgaria pretty closely, because I have relatives from Bulgaria. And the Russians use their fake news, campaigned heavily in Bulgaria to try to favor the party they wanted to win. That was promoting good relations with Russia, and trying to undercut its opposition, which was more tied to NATO and more tied to the west. David Staley 22:22 So these are really incredible findings and data. I wonder, I mean, obviously, there are policy implications. Do you and your colleagues actually try to seek to influence policy with your results. Paul Beck 22:33 We do. For one thing, we like to get the results out there into the public domain, so that at least people will recognize and readers and others will recognize what's going on. We were very fortunate with the fake news piece, that we first published it in a thing called The Conversation. David Staley 22:50 Sure. Paul Beck 22:50 Which is a very good website for basically advertising academic research, but trying to render it in such a way that there's much less academic jargon and people can, ordinary educated readers can, David Staley 23:03 The sort of person that would read The Economist. Paul Beck 23:05 Exactly, exactly. And so in, I guess it was February of 2017, we had a piece in The Conversation that generated well over 1000 comments, which was really nice, except the comments were venomous, not against us, interestingly, but against each other. And we kind of learned something from that. And then later on, in late March and early April, The Washington Post picked it up. And there was an article by Aaron Blake, one of their really fine reporters, that was focused entirely on our study. There, there were a lot of comments as well, hundreds and hundreds of comments that were very high minded. We learned a lot from the comments about things perhaps we should have done. Had we had the ability to redo the survey, but we didn't of course, and other questions we should have asked and how we should have done the analysis. And then Michelle Goldberg picked it up in the New York Times. And she had an op-ed piece not so long ago, I think it was maybe November or December of 2017, where again, she was talking about our results, handling it well, saying that it's plausible that fake news made the difference in the 2016 election. But of course, when you have an election that was as close as 2016, it was 77,000 votes separating Trump and Clinton in the three pivotal states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, there are a lot of things that could make a difference there. But I think fake news plausibly is indeed one of them. David Staley 24:34 I'm just as likely to hear you on the radio as anyplace else. And you obviously have an ease and comfort here. I hear you on all sides of the official all the time. And of course, you're quoted in the media rather a lot. And so I wonder, throughout your career, have you always been sought out as an expert for media appearances like this, or is that something that's happened only recently or? Paul Beck 24:56 Well, it's, you know, for many, many years, I did things particularly focused on elections, but not much. Mainly, because if you're a regular professor, you've got all kinds of things that you need to do. You'll teach your classes, do your research, participate in committees, and do a variety of other things. And being in these media shows, or even preparing things for newspapers, and others, take a lot of time. So I didn't do a lot of that. And then as I was moving more towards retirement, I thought, well, that's something that, I think I have something to say. And I try to be reasonable in terms of the commentary that I make, I don't like to get into partisan fights. So I won't be on shows where they are identifying me as on one side, and somebody else on the other side, I just don't like that. And I've done more and more of that, of course, what happens is, people in the media pay attention to each other. And so if they see me quoted on a particular story, all of a sudden, I will get a whole swarm of requests. And the ones that, quite frankly, interest me the most are the ones that come from foreign correspondents. The United States is a very interesting country, and people follow our politics all across the world. And they're really trying to understand what's going on here. And so I've had a lot of interviews with people from as far away as Kazakhstan. And my favorite one is Kazakhstan, where there's a woman there, who has a radio talk show, and she will phone me after the election. And we will do this live interview, where she is talking in whatever language, they speak, in Kazakhstan, and then she is asking me the same, you're talking to the same thing in English, she'll have callers who call in speaking their native language, she will translate it for me, it's really been interesting. And my image of her is that she's in some ramshackle building in the capital of Kazakhstan, with a microphone in front of her doing the these interviews, but I've done them for a variety of countries. And I have friends in various countries around the world, who will say, in fact, I remember some Spanish friends and my wife, saying, We just saw your husband on television in Madrid. And I will feel good about that. Now, in 2016, I did over 300 interviews. David Staley 27:17 300. Paul Beck 27:17 Yeah. And again, if I'd been an active faculty member, I just couldn't have done that. David Staley 27:23 Well, and maybe you've already answered this question, I was gonna ask something to the effect of is such a public persona, or an interest in sort of influencing or sharing information with the public, is it an important part of what it means to be a political scientist? And maybe you've already answered this that, given everything else that academics are asked to do this is something that maybe isn't valued as much, is that a fair statement? Paul Beck 27:45 Well, I think it should be valued, I see it as part of my educational function. And even though I'm retired, I'm still a retired professor. I give talks in the community, I go anywhere where I'm invited. And I feel like my role is to try to make what's going on politically understandable to audiences. And there is, I think, a tremendous interest, particularly among elderly people, in what's happening. And people who are not elderly probably don't have the time to pay attention to these things. But I'll go to nursing homes, for instance, give talks there, and I'm always amazed at the number of people who not only show up, but ask me really, really good questions. David Staley 28:27 Yes, Paul Beck 28:27 Some of which I can't answer. And it's remarkable, actually. So I see it as part of my professorial role, that I probably wasn't able to fulfill as much then as I do now, just because I was too busy doing other things. And as you read in my introduction, I was an administrator for a long time. And of course, there you have no claims on your time. David Staley 28:50 None at all. Paul Beck 28:51 People are pulling you away to do this, and that, and I just couldn't do it. But once I stepped down from that, and then once I retired, it's something that keeps me going and keeps me interested in. That, and the CNEP, the Comparative National Election Project. David Staley 29:05 So what is next for the CNEP? Paul Beck 29:08 Well, what we're working on right now, of course, is planning this conference in Bali. David Staley 29:12 And what's going to happen at that conference, I mean, aside from meeting in Bali? Paul Beck 29:15 Well, a couple of things. One is, people will make presentations of their ongoing research. And our aim there is to push them to present results that are going to lead to published papers of one kind or another. We've done books in the past, and that's a possibility as well. The problem with the books, particularly the edited books, you know, we're the editors, and then their individual chapters written by other people, is they take so long to produce David Staley 29:43 Indeed. Paul Beck 29:44 That we just can't get them out in a timely basis. We published a book back in 2015, 2016, that even now hasn't been reviewed. In most of the major journals, it takes time for that to happen. So our hope this time is that we can get people, to write papers, to send them out to journals in political science, or communication, or sociology, whichever is the one that is appropriate for that topic. And so we're pushing people to present results in Bali, that then will be the first step maybe, or in some cases, more than the first step, into something that is publishable. We also will pay attention to our questionnaire. And these are very difficult sessions where we will say, Well, okay, new things have popped up on the world stage that are relevant for elections. Should we develop questions that tap those new things? Are there are old things that are no longer important, that we can kick out of the questionnaire? Now, that's problematic, because once you remove an item, you no longer can make comparisons with that item. And sometimes things come back, we have a question, for instance, that we use very early on, and it is how much do you trust the government in this case in Washington to do what is right? And after a while, we thought, well, we really aren't using that question. And it doesn't seem as relevant as it used to be. And then 2016 pops up. David Staley 31:12 And there it is. Paul Beck 31:13 And there it is. So we added that question to the 2016 American survey. And we added it in France, Britain, Germany, and I think the Italians did not add it. And that allows us to kind of anchor our analysis of present day elections with some kind of reflection on the past. So we'll have a session, and it'll be a difficult session, because everybody has their own favorite questions. And then there's a question of, okay, how do you word the question in a felicitous way so that people can respond to it, and it fits the local conditions, people can understand what it means. And we won't devise that wording there, that's not a committee effort. But Dick and I, my colleague, Dick Gunther, who is the co-coordinator of CNEP, and I will come back, work on the wording of a question, and then, with the wonders of the internet, circulate it to everybody, and invite their responses to it. David Staley 32:14 Paul Beck, thank you. Paul Beck 32:16 Thank you. Good to be with you. Eva Dale 32:17 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer, produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai