the dynamics of incumbent politicians pt. 1

I went to a Stephen Colbert show recently (you can actually see me in a few of the audience shots), and all things considered, it was quite an interesting experience. Everything is very streamlined (it makes sense given that they have a lot of practice with it), down to even the bathroom breaks. They do a lot of encouraging the audience to have big reactions to jokes or guests coming on stage, which is something that I expected, but being in the audience live gives you a different sense of responsibility for enriching the experience of the TV audience.

Otherwise, it was a lot more political than I remember it being, which in retrospect does make sense given the upcoming presidential election. I don’t remember being this inundated with political content last election cycle, despite living in a more swing state than NY, but I’m seeing political content everywhere now, especially on YouTube.

As an aside, I was rewatching Oppenheimer a couple of weeks ago (which, as another aside, has taken the place of my favorite movie of all time, a spot I could not definitively fill until Oppenheimer. I am truly so sad that I could not watch it in theaters) and realized how different the politicians seemed in that age compared to my perception of politicians now (on either side of the aisle, to be honest). They just seemed so much smarter and more calculated rather than just spouting random brazen comments all willy-nilly. I feel the term “career politician” has been cast aside as an undesired trait in the past few election cycles, but I think that there may be a shift back towards “the swamp” in the sense of the intelligence and an all-around put-togetherness of our candidates. Right now, Pete Buttigieg strikes me as the most put-together politician who does think deeply about policy issues and is able to convey the depth of his thought publicly as well, but maybe there are a lot of people like this that I don’t know about because I’m not that much into politics. I don’t know too much about John McCain, but I’ve been seeing quite a few videos about him on my YouTube feed recently, and it reminded me of a different class of politicians who held high certain virtues which distance them from the current “Trumpism” effect.

Amidst that, it’s interesting to see how old Republican politicians who have acted in very different ways have turned to embrace the new Trump-era tactics and think about the incentive structure that leads them to so rapidly adopt the new regime.

All this has brought me back to this day last year when I was thinking generally about politics and what the incentives that dictate the way politicians act as they do are. Back then, I never really arrived at something that motivated me to make a full-fledged post. I’ve now since revisited the question, and it took me a little bit, but I think I’ve been able to put something together to model the behavior of politicians in a neat way. So with that said, before I close off for you to get into the PDF (although I’m in Markdown now with the new website, doing the LaTeX separately for the most part is still much better), this topic will be a two-post series. Today I first talk about the model in depth, and next week I’ll try to get my in-page Jupyter notebook feature working for you all to see some code to make some pretty visuals and see how one would address this question empirically.