IRCPPS in the Links: Does Prior Experience Impact Presidential Greatness?

John Sides considers the question at 538:

...A new paper by political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Arthur Simonprovides an answer. Knowing that previous studies such as this one haven’t provided much evidence that experience matters, they improve on these studies in several ways. For one, they focus on “modern” presidents, a category that begins with William McKinley (although similar results would emerge if the analysis had begun with Woodrow Wilson or FDR). This is because the modern presidency is a much different job that the presidency of the 1700s and much of 1800s. Messrs. Uscinski and Simon also expand the measurement of presidential greatness to include not just overall ratings but ratings on specific dimensions from the 2009 C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership. Finally, they develop more precise measures of experience. So rather than simply note whether a president served in the military (most presidents did), they count the numbers of years each president served in both wartime and peacetime...

IRCPPS in the Links: How US Political Campaign Advertising Works

John Sides writes on the subject in 538:

So what do we know about campaign advertising? There is a better answer to this question. Just as Mr. Beane turned to math geeks, we can turn to a different species of geek: political scientists. Here are the lessons of their research about when campaign advertising does and does not matter.

1. Campaign ads matter more when the candidates are unfamiliar...
2. Campaign ads matter more when a candidate can outspend the opponent...
3. Campaign ads can matter, but not for long...

 

IRCPPS in the Links: Andrew Gelman and Nate Silver on Predicting Presidential Elections

via Gelman's blog and Silver's 538:

Both are responding to articles about Alan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University who offered up a model for predicting winners in his 1992 book 13 Keys to the Presidency, claiming in an interview that Obama is a lock to win in 2012.