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We reassess Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s prominent claim that shark attacks influence presidential elections. First, we assemble data on every fatal shark attack in US history and county-level returns from every presidential election between 1872 and 2012, and we find no systematic evidence that shark attacks affect elections. Second, we show that Achen and Bartels’s county-level finding for New Jersey in 1916 becomes substantively smaller and statistically weaker under alternative specifications. Third, we find that their town-level finding in Ocean County significantly shrinks when we correct errors and does not hold for the other beach counties. Finally, implementing placebo tests in settings where there were no shark attacks, we demonstrate that Achen and Bartels’s result was likely to arise even if shark attacks do not influence elections. Overall, there is little compelling evidence that shark attacks influence presidential elections, and any such effect—if one exists—is substantively negligible.

We are suckers for language. When surveys asked Americans whether the federal government was spending too little on \"assistance to the poor\", 65% agreed. But only 25% agreed that it was spending too little on \"welfare\". In the approach to the 1991 Gulf war, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they were willing to \"use military force\"; less than 30% were willing to \"go to war\". Even the less ambitious notion of democracy -- that it's a means by which people punish or reward governments -- turns out to be divorced from reality. We remember only the past few months of a government's performance (a bias known as \"duration neglect\") and are hopeless at correctly attributing blame. A great white shark that killed five people in July 1916 caused a 10% swing against Woodrow Wilson in the beach communities of New Jersey.In 2000, according to analysis by the authors 2.8 million voters punished the Democrats for the floods and droughts that struck that year. Al Gore, they say, lost Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, Florida, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Missouri as a result -- which is ironic given his position on climate change. The obvious answer is better information and civic education. But this doesn't work either. Moderately informed Republicans were more inclined than Republicans with the least information to believe that Bill Clinton oversaw an increase in the budget deficit (it declined massively). Why? Because, unlike the worst informed, they knew he was a Democrat. The tiny number of people with a very high level of political information tend to use it not to challenge their own opinions but to rationalise them. Political knowledge, [Christopher Achen] and [Larry Bartels] argue, \"enhances bias\".

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels and Escape from Democracy: The Role of Experts and the Public in Economic Policy, by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, are reviewed.

Lee reviews Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War edited by J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher.

Achen (Princeton) and [Larry M. Bartels] (Vanderbilt) challenge the conventional theory of democracy that depicts rational voters providing mandates to the winners of elections. The authors demonstrate convincingly that this romantic folk theory cannot withstand empirical scrutiny. They argue that the idealistic folk theory of democracy fails because instead of voting on the basis of issue preferences, citizens choose candidates mostly on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties.

A homeless man appeared Friday in Clark County Superior Court in connection with a stabbing last week outside of downtown Vancouvers Share House homeless shelter.Jacob Barraza, 32, of Vancouver is scheduled to be arraigned Sept. 10 on a charge of first-degree assault.Judge John Nichols held Barraza in lieu of $100,000 bail Friday and appointed Vancouver attorney Megan Peyton to defend him.Vancouver police responded just after 6 p.m.