by Richard Morin
Members of Congress tell the truth — the whole truth — only about a quarter of the time when debating major legislation on the floor of the House and Senate.
Instead, legislators mostly rely on half-truths, misleading exaggerations or outright inaccuracies when debating the nation’s business, according to two political scientists who have studied the quality of debate in Congress.
Gary Mucciaroni of Temple University and Paul J. Quirk of the University of British Columbia sought to see how truthful America’s lawmakers were in debating three major bills: welfare reform in 1995-96, the estate tax in 1999-2000 and telecommunication deregulation in 1996.
They meticulously sifted through the Congressional record to identify key claims made by each side to support its own case and to rebut the assertions of its opponents. Then they compared the claims with available data to see if they were true, false or somewhere in between. In all, they examined the accuracy of 18 claims made in 43 separate House and Senate debates.
How did the nation’s lawmakers do?
Not so well. In all, these researchers judged the claims made in only 11 of the 43 debates to have been largely substantiated by the facts. Another 16 were deemed to be “unsubstantiated” — a polite way of saying they were misleading, mostly false or flatly wrong. An additional 16 were judged a politically artful mix of fact and fiction. In all, as reported in their new book, Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress, the researchers rated the quality of the debates somewhere between “fair” and “poor” — a C-, at best.
Does one party tell whoppers more often than the other? It’s hard to tell, Mucciaroni said. “The Republicans performed worse than the Democrats in the welfare reform and estate tax debates, but not as much in telecommunications. We feel that this is probably due to the Republicans controlling Congress, especially the House. We might expect Democrats to do as poorly if they were in control…because majority status emboldens the majority to make more extravagant claims and they feel pressure to deliver ‘results.'”
The researchers stopped short of claiming that members of the House and Senate told deliberate lies to advance their positions. “We don’t pretend to know whether they are lying, are ignorant, or misperceive the facts and informed opinion on an issue,” he said. “Instead of using ‘flatly lying,’ we prefer ‘flatly incorrect’ or ‘flatly inaccurate’.”
Somehow, that’s not reassuring.
Tall and Smart
Researchers have known for decades that taller people earn more and have better jobs. Some researchers said it was because tall people had more self esteem. Others said taller individuals physically and psychologically dominated their shorter colleagues. Still others said it was height discrimination.
Two economists have a simpler explanation: “Taller people earn more because they are smarter,” claim Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University. “As early as age 3 — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests.”
“For both men and women, an increase in height of four inches is associated with an earnings premium of approximately 10 percent,” they report in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “An American man who is 6 feet 2 inches tall is 3 percentage points more likely to be an executive and 2 percentage points more likely to be a professional than is a man who stands 5 feet 10.”
They based their claims on an analysis of four data sets from the United States and the United Kingdom.
Who’d Have Thought?
School Makes You Smart and Ballet Tights Make You Embarrassed
“The effect of education on cognitive ability” by Torberg Falch and Sofia Sandgren. Working paper published by the Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Two economists find that every year of formal education raises a student’s IQ an average of about 3 points, regardless of family income or parents’ educational levels, raising new doubts that genetics alone determines intelligence.
“The effect of ballet dance attire on body and self-perceptions of female dancers” by Brena R. Price and Terry F. Pettijohn II. Social Behavior and Personality Vol. 34 No. 8. Two Mercyhurst College researchers find that female ballet dancers hate the way they look in black leotards with pink tights and think they look better in loose-fitting clothes.
