It goes without saying that the designated hitter is a travesty and a crime against baseball. So I was interesed to read, via Ken at Marginal Utility, an academic argument that Republicans prefer to see the pitcher bat, while Democrats prefer the designated hitter.

The paper itself is written almost as a parody of academic language:

Here, we argue that the common attitudinal roots of Americans’ partisan and ideological predilections and their opinions about the DH induces a relationship between those two phenomena, such that the former will, to a significant degree, drive the latter.

The authors make a half-hearted effort to control for fan base, but since the data they are using (a wide-ranging CBS survey from ten years ago) didn’t account for this, they’re forced to develop a dubious metric about American League states and National League states, which not surprisingly has a margin of error sufficient to make the metric worthless:

Also, note that we find no support for the proposition that the DH receives higher levels of approval in geographic areas near American League teams. While the point estimates for both AL State and NL State have the expected signs, neither is remotely as large as its standard error, leading us to conclude – with the appropriate caveats regarding sample size and measurement error – that differences in opinion about the DH are largely orthogonal to geographic variation.

There is, unfortunately, no data about whether fans of National League teams are less likely to support the DH than are American League fans. It would be hard to justify any conclusions about other causal factors without accounting for one’s favorite team, especially since at first estimation, I would think fans of National League teams more supportive of NL rules.

When one considers the geographic distribution of many of the big-market teams, one sees at least some evidence of an uneven partisan breakdown. Atlanta has a fan base that spreads across the south, while St. Louis has a large fan base across the lower Midwest. Similarly, American League teams dominate New England, the Pacific Northwest, and the upper Midwest (along with Detroit and Minnesota, Milwaukee was an American League team when the survey was taken). Perhaps this red-state, blue-state analysis is a wash, but I’d like to see some data either way.

Additionally, women are almost three times as likely to favor the DH than are men, and although the authors note that “women are a priori more likely to be Democratic”, they don’t control for this, or any other variable.

They find that Democrats are more likely to appreciate the designated hitter than are Republicans, but they never control for sex, or age, or one’s favorite team. So there’s no way to conclude, as the authors do, that Democrats like the DH because we’re forward-looking and open to change, while Republicans are traditionalist and reactionary.

There seems to be a correlation between political ideology and support for the designated hitter, but the paper offers no evidence that the correlation is causal, or attributable to something other than non-baseball and non-political factors.

(*) There’s no reason why non-technical academic papers can’t be written in standard English, and indeed the best scientists are able to explain their findings in language that is more easily accessible. What immediately springs to mind in this case is the comparison to David Romer’s excellent paper detailing a cost-benefit analysis about going for it on fourth down.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 3:18 pm, 19 July 2007 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.