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With 84% of the data missing, can we conclude that the Justice Deparment hires more conservatives?

One of my first stops for news is the “most popular” news on Yahoo!. I start here, not because I believe I’ll get tremendously valuable information or often anything that uses critical thinking in its writing, but because I know thousands of others do just the same. I am fascinated by what is considered most important to people, and even more fascinated as to whether that information is in any way truthful after careful study. Today’s browsing led me to an Associated Press article that I’m sure many people are taking very seriously, Report: Justice Dept. passed over Dems, liberals. This article, like many, leaves out important information, makes sweeping assumptions, and, in the end, doesn’t come to many solid conclusions.

A yearlong report? That’s all?

My gut reaction to an article of this nature–of which you can pretty well understand, just by reading its headline (and of which I’m sure a number of people did only that)–is Why is this surprising? Because I’m wary of gut reactions, particularly when it comes to politics, I tried to find out information on the Justice Department’s hiring habits under the Clinton administration. However, this information seems not to exist. The only information I could find that was close to discussing the behavior under the Clinton administration was that the American Bar Association has a seemingly liberal bias against conservative judges. So, it would appear that there’s some bias, somewhere, under every administration, and I can’t say I’m surprised by that.

One would think, though, that for the AP to write a report on the Justice Department’s behavior, they would want to make sure that similar reports had been written on administrations of the past. Without any comparison, there’s actually no way for me or any other reader to say, definitively, that the Bush administration is doing anything out of the norm. I mean, would anyone really find it surprising that people tend to hire those into political jobs that agree with their politics? On a subconscious, innocent level, that would be a very easy thing to do.

But there is no comparison, because there seemingly are no other studies like this. The article even reports the following:

The report marked the culmination of a yearlong investigation by Justice’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility into whether Republican politics were driving hiring polices at the once fiercely independent department.

Yearlong? In other words, this is a very focused and narrow view of the Justice Department’s behavior, under any administration. Fiercely independent department? How do we know this if there are no prior studies? It’s just an assumption, at this point, from what I can tell.

Abuse of administrative power is more important.

As early as 2002, career Justice employees complained to department officials that Bush administration political appointees had largely taken over the hiring process for summer interns and so-called Honors Program jobs for newly graduated law students. For years, job applicants had been judged on their grades, the quality of their law schools, their legal clerkships and other experiences.

So, really, only part of the problem here is the possible hiring of people with the same political bent. The problem is that the Bush administration felt too insecure and had to get its nose in the department. Even if this has resulted in different hiring practices (probably only slightly different), it is the abuse of power in regard to initial interference that should be noted most closely. Moreover, investigations should take place to see if this same interference is occurring in multiple departments. Considering this is the Bush administration, we can almost guarantee that. The hiring of more or fewer liberals is only a small part of the problem in a situation like this. Abuse of power, an increase of bureaucracy, is much more important, and we should not forget that.

The Numbers

In studies like this, I’m always interested in seeing the cold, hard data. Even more so, I am interested in how typically liberal media present that data, if it is done in a way that seems more dramatic than it actually is. Here is what the AP article had to say in regard to data:

But in 2002, many applicants who identified themselves as Democrats or were members of liberal-leaning organizations were rejected while GOP loyalists with fewer legal skills were hired, the report found. Of 911 students who applied for full-time Honors jobs that year, 100 were identified as liberal — and 80 were rejected. By comparison, 46 were identified as conservative, and only four didn’t get a job offer.

The first glaring problem in this is that we cannot automatically assume that liberals were rejected, simply because of their liberal affiliation, even if more liberals didn’t get jobs. To say, “This man is a liberal. His application was rejected. Therefore, all liberals have their applications rejected,” is a pretty obvious fallacy. A vast number of things could affect an application’s acceptance or rejection, only one of them being political affiliation; one of the biggest deciding factors in job application is often the interview, after all.

The other problem with this is the numbers. Out of 911 students, the article only mentions information regarding 146 of them. What can we learn about the hiring of the other 765 students? Isn’t that data important? That’s 84% of the data, thrown out the window. Why? Was that data not dramatic enough?

Working with the data they do give us is difficult, because the sample information is not equal. They tell us that 80 out of 100 liberals were rejected. Firstly, we have no idea how many liberals there are actually in the overall 911, so we’ll have trouble in making blanket statements regarding their hiring and rejection. The next problem is that they give information on only 46 conservatives, nearly half the information they give us on liberals, and nowhere near all the information on conservatives out of the 911, to be sure.

So, in other words, we can’t glean much of anything. While a rejection of 80 out of 100 liberals seems shocking, without knowing how many conservatives out of 100 of them were rejected, we have trouble being sure of anything. Even worse, is it accurate to assume that all 80 of the liberals who were rejected were rejected purely because of their political affiliation? If so, that is a huge statement, one that should not be ignored.

What would you do?

Being Libertarian, I imagine I would find it difficult to fully agree with anyone’s main-party-based politics, and so I doubt I would hire or reject anyone accordingly. However, is it really any surprise that an administration wants like-minded individuals in every part of the government that it can involve itself in? While it is certainly illegal on the books to determine someone’s employment according to political affiliation, race, gender, etc. alone, it should never come as a surprise that there are some chosen due to their similarities, rather than differences. Nor should those who choose people similar to them automatically be demonized, called narrow-minded, racist or sexist; it is often quite natural to choose those like us, without meaning anything by it or even realizing we are doing this. It should only be deemed a problem when it is done all the time.

From the AP’s limited report data, it’s hard to say what’s actually going on, if anything is going on, and if it’s any different from what occurred in the past.

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