July 2012

Washington, America’s power center, recently experienced life without power—the kind that gets generated, not the kind that gets wielded. After a nasty storm knocked out the Beltway’s electricity for days during a heat wave, power brokers of the political type complained: Didn’t President Obama promise a smarter, more reliable grid? Yes, he did. And the blackout notwithstanding, the grid is slowly improving. In fact, its story is a nice parable about change in the Obama era.

On the trail in 2008, Obama had big dreams for a digital smart grid that would self-monitor and self-heal, minimizing costly outages by diagnosing problems electronically and rerouting power around them. He envisioned a national network of high-voltage transmission lines that would connect windy and sunny areas to cities, as well as smart meters and other high-tech gizmos that would give us real-time feedback and control over our energy use. He basically wanted to merge the grid with the Internet so we could adjust our air conditioners with our iPhones when we were out of the house, program our appliances to save us energy and money and sell power from solar panels and electric cars back to our utilities. Obama’s billions are gradually upgrading the grid. Utilities now receive updates on transmission lines 30 times a second instead of every two seconds. They are also expanding transmission, even though electricity use has yet to recover to prerecession levels.

A 2011 study published in the American Political Science Review, “ Results from a Randomized Field Experiment,” makes a novel contribution to the research literature by studying the phenomenon from inside an ongoing Texas gubernatorial campaign (incumbent Rick Perry in 2006.) The researchers, from Yale, the University of Maryland and the University of Texas at Austin, persuaded campaign operatives to allow $2 million in campaign advertising to be spent in ways that ensured randomness in the volume, timing and location of radio and television commercials in certain markets. The study also involved surveying voters in these ad markets and assessing how their views persisted over time.

The study’s findings include:

• “The maximum dosage of television advertising apparently boosted [the candidate’s] relative standing by approximately six percentage points. Advertising thus appears to have the capacity to induce a substantial shift in vote preferences. The variance in radio advertising volume is much smaller, and the standard errors are therefore larger.”
• “TV ads exert a strong and significant effect in the current week, smaller and statistically equivocal effects a week later, and no effects thereafter…. Overall, the analysis of dynamics suggests that the effects of TV, although powerful, were short-lived. Not only did they dissipate before Election Day in November, they vanished before the March primary.”
• The study does not support a prominent theory about advertising effects and voter learning; the findings contradict the notion that, though viewers may forget the particulars of a message, some effects may endure and viewers may nevertheless learn and absorb new attitudes at a deeper level.
• In contrast, the results appear to show that the principal way ads affect voters is by “priming” them and temporarily shifting the evaluative criteria by which they judge candidates: “The precise way in which priming occurs is subject to alternative but complementary explanations. One possibility is that the ads made people more likely to place certain considerations in working memory. Another is that the ads increased the weight that people accorded these considerations when evaluating the candidates. Whether these ads jogged memory or focused attention or both, they do not appear to have propagated enduring beliefs.”

A Q&A with Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Mann and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, are savvy political scientists who know Washington politics well. And they have been regarded as middle-of-the-road guys, centrists, for a number of years in DC. That is why their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, published by Basic Books in May, has startled some media types with its thesis, which argues, in a nutshell, that the core of Washington’s political dysfunction lies with the Republican Party. CJR’s Trudy Lieberman sat down with Mann to explore where he and his co-author think the media have gone awry.

The Federal Communications Commission presented another demonstration of its online television public file system.

Peter Tannenwald, who attended the July 17 demonstration at the FCC, sat in on this one, too. Good thing he did, since the show provided more details about the operation of the public file system than had previously been made generally available. Below you’ll find a list of some of the more salient take-home points Peter took home. Also, even though the revised public file rule still hasn’t technically taken effect, the FCC has already waived the political posting requirement (probably the most time-consuming part) for one station. Read on for details about that development.