Abstract
James Gilligan introduces readers to his quest of explaining correlations between rates of homicide and suicide and presidential parties as a ‘mystery’ that begs us to ask why rates of lethal violence reached epidemic levels only when Republicans held the office of president of the United States between 1900 and 2007. This mystery, solved and explained in six chapters, uses public health epidemiology and correlational research to warn readers that a Republican in the White House ‘increases the rates of suicide and homicide,’ whereas a Democrat in the White House ‘decreases the incidence of lethal violence’ (pp. 161–162).
In Chapter 1, Gilligan begins by defining lethal violence as both suicide and homicide, explaining that both are aspects of higher-than-average violent acts in American society. Gilligan then proceeds to answer the main question of his book: Republicans are more dangerous than Democrats because when Republicans have been presidents, there was a net cumulative increase in lethal violence rates of 19.9 per 100,000 population per year between 1900 and 2007, whereas when Democrats were presidents there was a net decrease of 13.3 suicides per 100,000 per year during their years in office between 1913 and 2007. Gilligan assures readers that his results are statistically significant by stating that ‘there is less than 1 chance in 1,000 that any of these correlations between political party in power and rates of suicide, homicide, and total lethal violence (suicide plus homicide) could have happened simply by chance’ (p. 25). Although Chapter 1 presents hard numbers on lethal violence and focuses on three historical time periods where lethal violence rates rose to high epidemic levels, the data from which these rates were derived are not described in the chapter. Readers’ understandings of Why Some Politicians are More Dangerous than Others would best be served by skipping to Appendix A to unpack the basis of Gilligan’s statistical claims.
In Appendix A, Gilligan explains at length that the data used in his analysis are derived solely from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The NVSS data are one of the few sources that can be compared across geographic areas within and outside of the United States and are available for a long time period, dating back to the late 19th century. One detail missing from Appendix A is an explanation of how Gilligan retrieved and analyzed the NVSS data. For example, users of NVSS are able to publicly access the data through interactive web-based systems like VitalStats, Wide-ranging ON-line Data for Epidemiological Research (WONDER), Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS), and/or the Interactive Reproductive Health Atlas (IRHA). In addition, Gilligan emphasizes the importance of using age-adjusted data from the NVSS, but does not specify the statistical details of how he controlled for age in rates of violence across the century, leaving readers to wonder exactly how the highly dependent age variable did not confound the outcome variable of lethal violence rates.
In Chapter 2, Gilligan reviews several studies and discusses many real-world examples of how other variables such as unemployment rates, income inequality, inequality of wealth, and economic contractions (e.g., recessions, depressions, declining per-capita gross domestic product) are correlated with lethal violence rates. The primary take-away from this chapter is that these variables are statistically associated and therefore logically mediated or caused by the political party in control of the White House at the time. Readers should proceed with caution because correlation is not equivalent to causation. Gilligan asserts that evidence from the NVSS data indicates that there were three epidemics of lethal violence in the 20th century, all of which began when a Republican was president and ended when a Democrat was president.
In Chapter 3, Gilligan cites several sources to claim that the variables discussed in the previous chapter most closely related to lethal violence, such as unemployment, inequality, and economic contractions, also increase under Republican leadership. According to Gilligan, recessions began during Republican presidencies almost three times as often as Democratic presidencies. In addition, Republicans were more likely to pass recessions on to Democrats, as shown in 1913, 1933, 1961, and 2009. Gilligan explains that policies ‘determine both economic and behavioral outcomes’ (p. 69), which he claims differs according to two separate and distinct political parties in the United States.
In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, Gilligan focuses on a number of dualities to explain the differences in lethal violence rates across the two dominant political parties in the United States: shame versus honor, guilt versus innocence, humility versus pride, and caste versus class systems. As an experienced psychiatrist in state prisons, Gilligan expands on his central concept of shame as a primary cause of individuals’ violent behavior. He provides a number of examples of how shame motivates violent behavior in individuals before discussing the macro effects of shame in American, British, Canadian, German, and Japanese cultural contexts. These chapters highlight how lethal violence rates can be perceived as indicators of the psychological, social, and political health of countries around the world. Gilligan’s point is that regardless of the differences between Republicans and Democrats, the pervasive culture of shame throughout the United States creates a climate of lethal violence that outranks ‘every other developed nation on earth’ (p. 144).
Gilligan mentions that after the 2000 presidential election, states became characterized as ‘red’ or ‘blue’ based on how the state’s electorate voted in the election. Gilligan’s focus on the greatest contrasts between the Republican (red states) and Democratic (blue states) presidents without focusing on the complexity of Congress and the differences among the 50 states creates an ecological fallacy, where relationships at aggregated levels are thought to imply similar relationships at individual levels. In other words, if the NVSS data indicate that homicides and suicides are higher than average when Republicans are in the White House, then Republican presidents and the policies they enact must be more likely to cause increases in lethal violence. Although these inferences may be correct, as Gilligan so adamantly asserts, they are only weakly supported by aggregate data. Under certain assumptions, individual behavior can be inferred from aggregate data using a statistical technique known as ‘ecological regression’ (King, 1997). If Gilligan performed ecological regression analyses, there is no way of knowing because this level of detail is not specified in any of the book’s chapters or appendices.
Gilligan’s claim that Republican presidencies are more dangerous than Democratic presidencies ignores the complex policy creation process. In Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous than Others, a president’s political party is a proxy for a clear-cut conservative or progressive ideology, which is inextricably linked to policies across the United States that perpetuate lethal violence. At the federal level, successful policies enacted by Congress undergo a grueling legislative process, which may be further complicated when the houses are controlled by a different political party than the president. Perhaps one of the main problems with Gilligan’s focus on US presidents is that he does not acknowledge the importance of governance in individual states. It has been well-established that state legislatures are the ‘engines of democracy,’ where legislators most closely represent the interests of those who elect them; thereby making the legislative branch of state government closer to the people than the executive and judicial branches (Rosenthal, 2008). Across the 50 states, there are 99 legislative chambers with 50 governors and each of them are as unique and diverse as any aspect of life in the United States. Although Gilligan thoroughly explores aspects of the traditional Republican ideology that may indeed be dangerous, the balance of the three branches of government at both federal and state levels must not be ignored.