Exercise - arrange the paragraphs in the correct order: Results and discussion by Mukasheva, Zhamilya

25

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:00:58 UTC

“The world was conquered through the understanding of dogs; the world exists through the understanding of dogs.” —Nietzche

Figure 1 illustrates the partisan profile of pet owners. Interestingly, although 35% of the public is petless, an average of 1.07 species per respondent is still reported in our representative sample. (Whether people had multiple pets of the same species was not reported.) The stereotype of a pet owner “is a more compassionate person—caring, giving, trustworthy” (Associated Press 2008). Democrats might well assume that this label was their own based on patterns of issue ownership, but Republicans appear to have cornered the market on pet ownership. As shown in figure 1, in all cases in which a difference between parties exists, it is Republicans who are more likely to own pets. Six percent more Republicans than Democrats own dogs (t = 8.90, p < .001), although there is no significant difference in cat ownership. Republicans are also significantly more likely to own fish (t = 3.61, p < .001), horses (t = 5.95, p < .001), and ferrets and rodents (t = 2.71, p < .001), although these other differences remain quite small at only 1% to 2%. More than anything else, it is dog ownership that makes Republicans stand out.

17

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:01:16 UTC

16

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:01:46 UTC

Of course, Republicans are different from Democrats in many other ways as well, so the question remains as to whether pet ownership truly has an independent impact on presidential vote preference. Is owning a horse correlated with supporting a Republican candidate simply because both horse ownership and Republican party identification are predicted by income? Does one candidate attract more support among dog owners because these people are home owners or in the stage of life in which dog ownership is most likely?

In the first model evaluating the impact on each dependent variable, I estimate a conservative model with only party, ideology, and economic perceptions as controls. In a second model, I include standard demographic controls as well as the litany of other potentially confounding characteristics.

12

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:02:05 UTC

Table 1 shows the results of two OLS regression models using Obama’s relative advantage on the feeling thermometer as the dependent variable. The first column provides a lean, potentially underspecified model testing the key hypotheses. Only the well known and important political and economic variables are controlled, including party, ideology, and economic perceptions. All of these variables behave as one would expect, predicting a large amount of variance in Obama’s relative advantage. But despite the fact that these variables play a very powerful role in predicting presidential preference, dog ownership remains significant, accounting for 5 points of additional McCain advantage. Interestingly, cat ownership and horse ownership also have a negative impact on Obama’s advantage, although cat ownership appears to have a much smaller magnitude of impact.

11

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:02:34 UTC

13

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:03:04 UTC

Given that other ostensibly nonpolitical factors may confound the relationships observed in Model 1, a second model provides the potentially overspecified equivalent, a humongous equation leaving no stone/variable unturned, including everything but the kitchen sink as a control variable to ensure that skeptics are convinced about what remains.

8

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:03:30 UTC

Here the impact of dog ownership is reduced in magnitude but hardly obliterated. The coefficient in Model 1 is reduced from approximately five points on the thermometer scale to only three, but despite the many demographic and other variables, it remains highly significant. With the inclusion of the other controls, cat ownership, a significant negative influence in Model 1, is no longer significant, nor is ownership of any other species of pet. Dog ownership is clearly unique in its impact on political preference in 2008

32

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:04:05 UTC

21

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:04:29 UTC

Table 2 shows the results of two logit models using vote for Obama as the dependent variable. The first model here is similar in results to Model 1 in table 1, but instead of the significant negative influence from cat ownership, only horse ownership has a negative impact on voting for Obama. The more fully specified Model 2 corroborates Table 1’s findings. Even after taking on a bloated collection of control variables, dog ownership retains its significant impact. The size of the coefficient is again reduced with the inclusion of so many additional controls (from −.32 to −.17), but dog ownership remains a significant negative predictor of casting a ballot for Obama, whereas ownership of all other species is, unsurprisingly, irrelevant to vote preference.

22

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:05:32 UTC

“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.” —Franz Kafka

When, on April 12, 2009, the Obama family finally acquired a dog, the headlines read, “The Obamas’ Dog Has Arrived—At Last!” At last indeed! The political relevance of this event resides in just how long it took the family to get a dog. By highlighting his family’s petlessness, Obama unintentionally created a point of difference between himself and many members of the voting public who had trouble identifying with a man without a canine.

23

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:05:47 UTC

The three-point difference in thermometer scores that survived an unusually extensive collection of control variables may not seem like a substantial effect at first. However, taken in context, one would be hard pressed to call this effect trivial. For example, considering oneself “born again” lowers support for Obama by less than this amount, and yet few would call this political contingent inconsequential.

9

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:05:59 UTC

In the analysis shown in table 2, with self-reported vote choice as the outcome of interest, the size of the effect was unmistakably substantial as well as statistically significant. According to the fully specified logit model, all else being equal, the odds decreased by 16% if the respondent was a dog owner. This large impact occurred despite the many other potential confounding influences controlled for in table 2. Given that the outcome of some presidential elections is decided by far less than such a margin, studies of voting behavior clearly need to take dogs and their owners more seriously.

10

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:06:16 UTC

In Obama’s case, the negative impact of his petlessness is clearly driven by the dog-owning public’s inability to identify with a president who didn’t know Frontline3 from a filibuster. I found no evidence that the votes of owners of other kinds of pets with more Obama-like personalities (e.g., cats) benefited his candidacy. In fact, the impact of owning other kinds of pets was either negative or negligible throughout, thus casting greater support for canine group identification theory. The dog-owning portion of the electorate appears to agree with Calvin Coolidge’s admonition that “any man who does not like dogs and want them about, does not deserve to be in the White House” (Rowan and Janis 1997, 3).

18

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:06:31 UTC

In short, Democrats should be wagging their tails over the arrival of Bo Obama, who could play well to potential swing voters in 2012. It is probably no accident that a seasoned politician like Ted Kennedy gave the Obamas the dog as a gift when the public was just about to give up on this long-awaited campaign promise. On the one hand, Obama supporters may feel some relief at knowing that the White House now has a canine resident, particularly in advance of the 2010 midterm elections. But if he is to reap the benefits of this change in lifestyle, President Obama would be well advised to give the pooch a much higher public profile than he has to date.

24

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:06:46 UTC

Thus far, Bo Obama has spawned a lookalike Beanie Baby and two children’s books, but he has yet to manifest a strong presence among the adult, voting public. The fact that he makes so few public appearances has prompted at least one blogger to speculate that this Portuguese water dog might be a Vietnamese water torture dog instead (Broughton 2009). Dog owners cannot be brought on board unless they are reminded of Bo’s presence. Assuming Bo does not bite (and perhaps even if he does), the president needs to parade him in front of the Washington press corps regularly to remind the American public that he, too, has a best friend.

19

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:07:02 UTC

14

zhamilyamukasheva — 2021-02-11 18:19:37 UTC

Despite their high profiles once in office, there is little empirical evidence as to whether or why dogs matter either to electoral prospects or to a president’s success once in office. A recent poll probing the voting trends of dog owners—who comprise nearly half of all U.S. households—found significant potential for influence in local elections. A whopping 98.6% of dog owners said that a candidate’s position or track record on issues such as breed discrimination, breed bans, or leash laws played a significant role in their electoral choice (My Dog Votes 2006).