Henry

Following up on my review of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell last week, there’s a very nice piece on the book at N+1, which has a lot more to say about the book’s “levelling streak” than I could fit in a blogpost.

I know about N+1 thanks to a conversation with Scott McLemee, who does a very interesting article on ‘big processes’ sociologist Michael Mann for the Chronicle. There’s a short critical quote from David Laitin, a Stanford political scientist – this reflects a long standing argument (Laitin is no great fan of the kinds of research that Mann and others like him are interested in).

Finally, Cosma Shalizi makes it into _Physical Review Letters_, which I understand from my colleagues in the hard sciences is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

Matt Yglesias says that there’s “no content to the Bush democracy agenda,” and that it’s “just a rhetorical flourish.” I don’t think that this is quite accurate – the real problem is that the Bush democracy agenda wasn’t intended to promote the worldwide spread of democracy as an end-goal; democracy was supposed to be an intermediate means towards a fix for America’s security problems in the Middle East. As Josh Marshall pointed out last year, the rationale was that democracy in Iraq would lead to the eventual creation of “a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam.” In short, this was democracy promotion as _Realpolitik_ by other means. Thus, there’s no real inconsistency in principle with the toleration and indeed occasional encouragement of human rights abuses and autocracy in those parts of the world where US security interests wouldn’t be furthered by democratic reform. The problem, it seems to me, wasn’t so much the incoherence of the objectives (which were coherent, if wrong-headed) as the lack of any fundamental commitment to democracy _as such_, the unwillingness to use means of democracy promotion that might have had increased international legitimacy because they limited US power, and, of course, the profound and near-total incompetence with which the US pursued its goals.

Dan Hunter at the Wharton School has written a quite interesting paper arguing that the open source movement’s battle with various bits of the software and entertainment industry is a 21st century version of the Marxian revolution. There’s a lot to argue with in the piece – Hunter’s account of Marxist theory is sometimes a little more metaphoric than precise, and he perhaps overestimates the extent to which a nineteenth century thinker’s insights provide an accurate description of what is happening in open source today. But it’s nonetheless smart, funny in places (talking about the key role of “Marxist-Lessigist theory”), and valuable as an opening move in what I think is a quite important debate. Ever since listening to Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow hash out the politics of the information age over breakfast this spring (I, a mere political scientist, didn’t feel qualified to intervene), I’ve been convinced that there is something really _really_ important for leftists in the open source movement, and the free culture crowd more generally. The arguments which they are developing about how collective resources provide a basis for individual creativity, and, in an important sense, individual freedom could serve as the seed of a very interesting political program. The left really needs to start paying attention to this stuff, and thinking its implications through.

Via BoingBoing.

Atrios says today:

bq. So, it’s pretty much the case that we went into Fallujah because some warbloggers got excited about the video of the desecration of the dead civilian contractors.

This seems to me to be either (a) paranoid nonsense, or (b) stupid trash-talk. If there’s a third possibility, I’d like to hear it. Either Atrios is seriously claiming that warbloggers set US military policy, or he’s casting a dumb slur. Claiming that the disaster of Fallujah proves that the warbloggers were badly, horribly, wrong, is fine; it’s probably even correct. Claiming without any evidence that they were the main people responsible for the policy disaster is either tinfoil hat stuff, or Glenn Reynolds calibre scuzzy innuendo.

I’ve just finished Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s being marketed as Harry Potter for grown-ups; the comparison is a little misleading (among children’s writers, Clarke is much closer to Dianna Wynne-Jones than to Rowling), but it captures the novel’s likely appeal to people who don’t usually read fantasy. _JSAMN_ lacks most of the usual apparatus of the genre (dragons, rings and what-have-you), but still has something of its flavour. It’s a sly, funny, intelligent novel, and in its own way, quite subversive.

[click to continue…]

Kosuke Imai and Gary King have just published an article in _Perspectives on Politics_ that’s controversial – but quite important. King is a noted methodologist, who’s made very considerable strides in the application of models of ecological inference in the social sciences. On behalf of the _New York Times_, Imai and King applied their methodology to the disputed election results in Florida. The results are eye-opening.

(1) If overseas absentee ballots had not been counted illegally, there is a very small chance that Gore would have won the election outright. In Imai and King’s account (where they admit that there is some room for alternative interpretation), the chance that Gore actually should have won the election on this alone is around 0.2%.

(2) More to the point: if the recounted votes in Miami Dade and Palm Beach had not been rejected by Katherine Harris, Gore would have won with 82% probability. In Imai and King’s words

bq. To put it one way, the massive differences in probabilities from 0.002 to 0.82 for a Gore victory were due to the decisions made by Katherine Harris.

Finally, and most damningly, Imai and King find “strong and independent support” (albeit indirect) for the proposition that:

bq. the propensity of local election officials to violate the law and accept bad ballots was substantially greater in counties where Bush strategists believed there was more absentee ballot support for their candidate and tried to convince election officials to accept bad ballots.

One should note some caveats – ecological models are still as much art as science. Still, Imai and King have done their homework – they present a strong body of evidence to support the contention that Republican efforts to manipulate the count had a decisive impact in Florida in 2000.

I don’t have much time for Colin Powell, as a rule, but it’s only fair to note that his willingness to describe what’s happening in Sudan as genocide contrasts very favourably with the appalling behaviour of the Clinton administration over Rwanda. The New York Times says that the term ‘genocide’ “was used by the Clinton administration to describe atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda” – I don’t know that this is true. My very strong recollection is that Madeline Albright bent over backwards to avoid describing the murders in Rwanda as genocide, for fear that the UN Genocide Convention would be invoked. It was a quite disgusting episode in US foreign policy. As Philip Gourevitch describes it

bq. The desertion of Rwanda by the U.N. force … can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in U.N. peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

Best. Blog. Ever.

In commenting on the game of chess, Will Baude notes the following.

bq. Professor Leitzel of Vice Squad writes in to remind me of the 1913 Zermelo’s Theorem, which establishes just that: given the game’s finiteness (established above), there exists some strategy s.t. either white always wins, black always wins, or nobody does.]

Not so, as it happens, although it’s been the conventional wisdom among game theorists until recently – the inestimable James Morrow (whose “Game Theory for Political Scientists” I’m using as a coursebook this semester) states it a little more formally when he says that

bq. Zermelo showed that chess has a winning strategy: White can force a victory, Black can force a victory, or either can force a draw.

But, as discussed on my old blog last year, this very interesting paper by Ulrich Schwalbe and Paul Walker, shows that Zermelo said no such thing. Zermelo proved a much narrower result, and indeed explicitly states that he _hasn’t_ proved that chess has a winning strategy.

bq. The question as to whether the starting position … is a winning position is open. Would it be answered exactly, chess would of course lose the character of a game at all.

It would be very interesting to trace back how this error (and a variety of others) crept into the literature. Zermelo was never translated into English before Schwalbe and Walker’s paper, so I imagine that nobody much bothered to try to read him (especially since his article was published in 1913 and was quite likely printed in Fraktur). One person’s error was presumably picked up by others, and then disseminated until it became accepted dogma in the wider literature. Academic research sometimes resembles a game of Chinese whispers – because we all rely on the research of others, serious blunders can be perpetuated for generations before someone bothers to go back and recheck the work of their elders.

Update: Peter Northup has convinced me in comments and email that I’ve misunderstood Zermelo a little myself, and that the formulation that Morrow uses isn’t as offbase as I thought it was. What’s clear is that game theorists are incorrect in saying that Zermelo used backward induction as such, and that he doesn’t show that there is a winning strategy _as such_. I stand corrected.

Brad DeLong asks for one of us to explain this rather opaque Perry Anderson piece in the LRB about the reasons for France’s political and cultural decline – I’ll bite. Anderson’s prose is tangled and dense, but there is a thesis lurking there amid the thickets and thorns. His claim is that France is scuppered because the wrong set of intellectuals won. Anderson argues that the prospect of unity between the Socialist and Communist parties in the early 1970s provoked an intellectual backlash – the _Noveaux Philosophes_ and other partisan thinkers did a bang-up job in isolating Communism from the mainstream. This, together with conjunctural choices made by the Communists, meant that the Left had no real ideas left when Mitterand came to power. An “anti-totalitarian” front, in which the centre-left was a distinctly junior partner to the centre-right, came to dominate the intellectual landscape. The French Revolution – primal source of the cleavages in French politics – was rewritten by Furet and others so that its radical implications disappeared. It became a bourgeois liberal revolution that had failed. Thus the mess that France is in – the liberals have triumphed, but in so doing have robbed France of the deeper political arguments that used to drive its politics and intellectual life.

I’m only an amateur of French politics, so I’m not going to comment on the empirical plausibility of this thesis. I will note that it’s a rather _idealistic_ account of the driving forces of French history for a purported Marxist to be coming out with. Anderson seems to be claiming, if I understand him rightly, that the most important conflicts in French politics of the last two decades were fought out in the academy and in the journals of opinion. It’s not an entirely ridiculous argument in itself – intellectuals do play a role in France that they don’t elsewhere – but it’s still very strange coming from the mouth of a historical materialist.

Just came across a reference in a discussion board to one of my favourite bits from one of my favourite books – Robert Irwin’s Arabian Nights Companion – and thought it was worth quoting.[1]

bq. Other [thieves] used to make use of a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back. They sent this creature ahead of them into the house they proposed to burgle. If the house was currently occupied, then the owner would surely exclaim in surprise on seeing the tortoise (‘Oh look! There’s a tortoise with a candle on its back. I wonder what it’s doing in my house’) and the thieves would be warned off. If, however, the house was unoccupied, then the candle would help to guide the thieves as they went about their work.

fn1. I blogged last year about Irwin’s related, and wonderfully tricky novel, The Arabian Nightmare .

Over the next few days, I’m going to be trying to put together an annotated list of those papers at APSA that might be interesting to CT readers. It’s a very frustrating task. APSA uses database software that generates unique session IDs. The result is that it’s simply impossible to provide stable URLs for papers in the APSA database – the URLs are session specific, and anyone else trying to use them gets booted to a page asking for login and password. This seems to me to be counterproductive. It means that it’s difficult for political scientists to spread the word about interesting papers to their colleagues. It also makes it much more difficult to get relevant papers out into the wider public debate. There are a whole lot of bloggers attending APSA this year, some of whom have quite a wide general readership. It would be nice if they were able to disseminate some of the interesting papers easily to their readers.

As a supplement (or possible corrective) to my last post, this article by David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that six out of seven quantitative models presented at the APSA yesterday predict that Bush will win the popular vote. Note that these models aren’t trying to do the same thing as Erik and Paul’s paper – they’re predictive (sort of) rather than analytic. Note also that modelling has had a mixed success in predicting outcomes in the past. Still, all caveats aside, it’s an interesting datum.

Updated thanks to comments.

How is the Iraq debacle affecting Bush’s popularity? This is the subject of another intriguing APSA paper, co-written by Erik Voeten and Paul R. Brewer.[1] Like most papers being presented at APSA this week, it’s a work in progress – for one thing there’s a couple of months’ more data to be collected – but it makes some very interesting arguments.

A couple of key points emerge. First, public opinion on the war is affecting Bush’s popularity – but the relationship is complicated. The paper suggests that public opinion on the war can be disaggregated into three different evaluations – (1) of whether the war was a good idea in the first place, (2) of whether the President is doing a good job in prosecuting the war, and (3) of whether the war is going well. According to the paper, evaluations of whether the war was a good idea in the first place should have the strongest relationship with Bush’s popularity. However, they’re also the most strongly rooted of the three, and thus the most difficult to change. Evaluations of whether the war is going successfully or not, are the most likely to be changed by events – but also have the weakest effect on Bush’s popularity. A 1% change in the number of respondents who think the war is going well corresponds to a.29% shift in the evaluation of Bush’s performance in Iraq, and only a .17% shift in the the number of respondents who think the war was worth it.

The data suggest that there is a strong relationship between support for the war and Bush’s approval rating. A 1% increase in support for the war equates to a .74% increase in Bush’s approval rating (and vice versa). However, support for the war seems perhaps to be becoming less important in relative terms – there is some tentative evidence suggesting that economic confidence is now becoming an increasingly important influence on Presidential approval ratings.

The paper is an empirical investigation rather than a political brief, but it’s hard to avoid the temptation of trying to draw political lessons from it. First, it suggests that the war is hurting Bush’s popularity – but that in order to really make substantial gains, the Democrats would have to convince waverers not only that the war is going badly, but that it was a misconceived project in the first place. Given the rather remarkable level of cognitive dissonance that many war supporters seem prepared to tolerate, this is a tall order. However, as Erik and Paul note, a major event in the war could have quite substantial positive or negative consequences for Bush’s support. Second, while the war is still a key political issue driving support (or the lack of it) for the administration, the economy may be starting to play a more important role. Structural explanations of public opinion have their limitations of course – they can’t capture the more evanescent political controversies that may affect elections. Even so, there’s good reason to believe that the war and the economy are going to continue to have a powerful effect on people’s voting intentions – and on current form, that can’t be good news for Bush.

fn1. Full disclosure – Erik is a colleague of mine at GWU and a grad-school mate of Kieran and Eszter’s.