Elections

Greetings all, and thanks for welcoming me back on a longer-term basis.

Recently a few high-profile commenters have rediscovered Franklin Roosevelt’s relevance. First The Daily Show and then The New Yorker marveled at the aptness of Roosevelt’s cheerful scorn for those who say they will preserve Social Security (and Medicare, one might now add) while simultaneously promising to cut taxes.

It was a position Roosevelt was accustomed to ridiculing, as in this 1944 campaign film (directed by Chuck Jones!) depicting the Republican provision for Social Security:

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I can’t believe the Obama administration caved on this.

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

Thanks a lot, Kathleen Sebelius. God knows we wouldn’t want one of the groups least likely to use contraceptives properly to be able to easily get their hands on some Plan B. Up next: banning over-the-counter sales of paracetemol. Ha.

Belated Update: Reading below I do see that excerpt is misleading if you haven’t read the whole article; they didn’t take Plan B away from existing over-the-counter-sales, they just refused to extend it to full OTC status which would extend to those 17 and younger.

Will Hutton had a piece in the Observer a week ago about immigration policy in the course of which he made the following remark:

bq. the European left has to find a more certain voice. It must argue passionately for a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment.

I’m not sure who this “European left” is, but, given the piece is by Hutton, I’m thinking party apparatchiks in soi-disant social democratic and “socialist” parties, often educated at ENA or having read PPE at Oxford. I’m not sure how many battalions that “left” has, or even whether we ought to call it left at all. Anyway, what struck me on reading Hutton’s remarks was that calls for the “left” to do anything of the kind are likely to founder on the fact that the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right, and that many of us don’t want the kind of “good capitalism” that he’s offering. Moreover in policy terms, in power, the current constituted by Hutton’s “European left” don’t act all that differently from the neoliberal right anyway. In short, calls like Hutton’s are hopeless because the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are now so deep that an alliance is all but unsustainable. That might look like a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Assuming that what we care about is to change the way the world is, the elite, quasi-neoliberal “left” has a spectacular record of failure since the mid 1970s. This goes for the US as well, where Democratic adminstrations (featuring people such as Larry Summers in key roles) have done little or nothing for ordinary people. Given the failures of that current, there is less reason than ever for the rest of us to line up loyally behind them for fear of getting something worse. Some speculative musings, below the fold:
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Here’s some commentary on the Canadian general election from CT’s good friend up north, Tom Slee.

From Boring to Bizarre: Canada Votes 2011

For the second election in a row, Canada’s trip to the polls has, to use a technical term, gone weird. The big story this time round is the rise of the perennial third- or fourth-place New Democratic Party, making NDP leader Jack Layton the probable leader of the opposition and possibly even Prime Minister – something no one (and I mean NO ONE) would have believed possible three weeks ago. I was reluctant to accept Henry’s invitation to comment here because there are many people who know more about Canadian electoral politics than I do, but as NO ONE else had a clue this was going to happen either, it might as well be me to open the comment thread.

For any of you not completely up to date, here’s what’s been happening (note to self – switch to present tense here for that sports-commentator-like sense of immediacy):

• March 25: Stephen Harper’s minority Conservative government loses a no-confidence vote that found the government in contempt of parliament. (CBC report)
• March 27: The six-week campaign officially opens. The Conservatives attack Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff relentlessly for being too little Canadian (“He didn’t come back for you”) and too much academic (Harvard for God’s sake), but no issue catches fire with the public.
• April 12 and 13: The mid-campaign TV debates are held, one in English and then one in French. The French debate was moved forward a day so as not to clash with a hockey game. There is no big moment, no immediate announcement of a winner.
• Over the next few days, the NDP starts to pick up support from the Bloc Quebecois, despite never having a significant showing in that province.
• Around Easter, the Liberal vote starts to bleed to the NDP and support for the Grits falls from high 20s to low 20s, and all of a sudden the NDP has almost doubled its share from 17% up to about 30%, clearly in second place (see Andrew Heard’s page at Simon Frasier University, or ThreeHundredEight.com). The Google Trends results for the party leaders summarize the campaign as well as anything.

Which all raises two questions. What caused these dramatic shifts? And what happens next?

Causes first. The leaders are all known quantities; the policy platforms are basically the same as in the 2008 and 2006 elections; the Canadian economy was insulated from the worst of the financial collapse by a combination of oil and good fortune in its banking history; no political or economic issue has taken hold during the campaign. What gives?

It may be worth remembering that it’s the second time in a row that a Canadian election has gone from boring to bizarre. Back in 2008 the Liberals called an election and, then as now, everyone knew that the election would conclude with everything looking the same as before. The Bloc Quebecois would hold on to 50 or so seats in Quebec. The Tories, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Alberta-based Reform Party, were too socially conservative and too doctrinaire to make a breakthrough in seat-rich Ontario and would be limited to about 100 seats from the western provinces, the Liberals would get pretty much all of Ontario’s 100 seats plus some from the maritimes, and the NDP would stay at 20 or so seats. But Liberal leader Paul Martin stumbled and was labelled as “Mister Dithers”, the label stuck and the Tories took 40 seats in Ontario, enough to form a minority government. Once the Liberals started losing support, everything just went from bad to worse for them.

All I can see is that the self-referential nature of recent campaigns, in which poll results themselves have become the major daily news item, lends itself to wild and unpredictable fluctuations as voters’ opinions are shaped by their perceptions of the trends around the country. The patterns remind me of the Salganik, Dodds, and Watts studies of artifical cultural markets from a few years ago (PDF): social decision making leads to cascade-driven inequalities in outcomes, but the outcome is only obvious once you know the answer.

Despite talk of this being Canada’s first social media campaign, I think it’s uncontroversial to say that social media has had little impact. There has been publicity for student “vote mobs” and some questions about the legality of tweeting on election night (before the polls close in the west), but basically the campaign has been mass-media driven.

And as for what happens next? Well who the hell knows. The big questions are whether the NDP polling results will hold up and, in a country with strong regional distinctions, how the nationwide trends will be reflected at the level of individual ridings. It could be that the NDP surge leads to a majority conservative government, or it could be that an NDP-led coalition of the non-right will end up taking power, or it could be… well what? I look to commenters to tell us.

As for me, for the last few elections I have been actively involved in the local NDP campaign, and in 2008 that ended with the Conservatives winning over the Liberals by 17 votes; the closest race in the country. I have never previously considered tactical voting, but this time I have signed up at Pair Vote as my choice is strongly Anyone But Harper. I’d like to think it’s the right thing to do, but with this campaign, who knows?

Here comes my long overdue update on the Dutch government formation (I owe you one on Belgium too, but there isn’t much to report, except the lack of progress, and whatever that could be taken to imply). We had “elections in the Netherlands”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/09/dutch-elections-first-results-and-open-thread/ early June, and the right-liberals, VVD, emerged as the biggest party. They first tried to form a coalition with the Christian-Democrats (CDA) and PVV, the party of Geert Wilders (in fact, it is not a party, but a ‘movement’: Geert Wilders is the only member and the other people do not have any formal power, and from what we can gather in the media also not much real power.) But CDA refused to enter any talks/negotiations if VVD and PVV did not first come to some rough agreement between the two of them. So that turned into nothing.
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There are two national elections in the Low Countries this week — today in the Netherlands and Sunday in Belgium. The Belgian elections are actually hugely important for the future (or absense of such a future) of the country, since there hasn’t been any real functioning government in the last three years, and the Flemish voters are probably going to vote en masse for NVA, the flemish democratic nationalist party. More on this on Sunday.
In the meantime the Dutch voters had their chance to vote for a new government today, and “the first prognosis”:http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/verkiezingen2010/article2560933.ece/Exitpoll_PvdA_en_VVD_even_groot, based on exit poll results, is that the VVD (mainstream ‘liberal’ (in the European sense) right wing party) and the PVDA (the social-democrats/labour party) would both be leading, but only with 31 out of 150 seats. The Christian-democratic party, who were the biggest in the last couple of elections, would fall back to 21 seats. PVV, the right wing anti-immigrant party of Geert Wilders would have 22 seats, and other parties 16 (populist socialist party), 11 (Greens), 10 (Left-Liberals), and 7 seats for the orthodox Christian parties. So this is extremely scattered. All this needs to be taken with a serious pinch of salt of course – it’s merely exit polls, but nevertheless still interesting, since it shows how difficult it will be to form a coalition. It’s not unlikely that a four-party coalition will be needed.
For more background information, read “this post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/06/dutch_elections.html by Erik Voeten. The comments section is open for anything related to the Dutch elections, including predictions on what kind of coalition would be plausible, and actual results as they become available. I’ll add my bit as long as I am awake.

British Tory-lite deputy-PM Nick Clegg, has announced a very limited programme of democratic and civil-libertarian reform in the following terms:

bq. I’m talking about the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great reforms of the 19th Century. The biggest shake up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes. Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests. Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.

Over at The Virtual Stoa, “Chris Brooke asks”:http://virtualstoa.net/2010/05/19/its-exam-season/

bq. If you were marking examination papers on nineteenth century British political history, what mark would you give someone who described the 1832 Reform Act in these terms?

Indeed. And see especially, Ted Vallance’s response in comments to Chris’s post.

The struggle of the suffragettes for female emancipation, the extension of the franchise after WW1, all are as nothing compared to Clegg’s plans to curb CCTV cameras and biometric passports ….. An elected second chamber, sounds good. Electoral reform – subject to a referendum in which the dominant party in the coalition will campaign for the status quo. Talk about overselling yourself.

I’d almost be happier if this turned out to be some kind of fake. But in the meantime, while you may think of it as a badly flawed and unfair pie chart, I prefer to see it as actually just an extreme version of a genuine pie chart.

I’ve got a long post in the works touching on some of the same issues as John’s “recent piece”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/06/10/suicidally-strong-ip/, which began as a response to Larry Lessig’s recent silliness on socialism (which he has qualified in the meantime) but has since metastasized into something much shaggier and alarming. In the meantime, some speculation regarding a smaller question – is the Pirate Party’s presence in the European Parliament going to change anything? This is something that I wanted to talk about in a “bloggingheads debate”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/20468 with Judah Grunstein yesterday, but we got stuck into more general questions of copyright good or bad. Anyway – my answer to the question is yes, plausibly – but around the margins, and depending on what alliances it strikes.
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Our long national nightmare is almost over: today, after seven hard weeks of bowlin’ and shootin’ and drinkin’, the people of Pennsylvania will finally get to vote in our primary. It’s been a critical time in this electoral cycle, a time during which American news media were able to dig hard and deep into the issues that underlie the moral and constitutional crisis to which the Bush Administration has brought us: did Barack Obama meet <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Spies”>August Spies</a> at a fundraiser in 1886 before founding the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928? And what about Cindy McCain – <a href=”http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/05/can-cindy-mccain-really-be-that-perfect/”>can she really be that perfect?</a>

So I thought I’d write a little something about the candidates’ policy positions on disability, because apparently (a) no one knows that the candidates have policy positions on disability and (b) policy positions on disability are not as important as flag pins. Granted, disability policy never swings an election. And why should it? Unless you yourself have a disability, or unless you know someone with a disability, or unless you’re concerned about things like employment or health care, or unless you might get sick or injured someday, or unless you’re planning on aging, disability policy is irrelevant to you.

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… at least, that was what Bart De Wever, the leader of the small Flemish nationalist party, said in “an interview in La Libre Belgique”:http://www.lalibre.be/actu/belgique/article/408221/bart-de-wever-ce-pays-n-existe-plus.html. He doesn’t deny that when Belgium was founded, in 1830, it corresponded to what the francophone elite wanted. But these days, he argues, the media are divided, the culture is divided, public opinion is divided. There is no longer a unified society.

Whether or not that is true, the latest news is that Yves Leterme managed to reach an agreement on a new government yesterday. But what a government, and what an agreement! The coalition includes the three major parties (liberals, social democrats, and Christian democrats) and is asymmetrical, since the francophone social democrats are taking part, whereas the Flemish social democrats are not. This is highly notable, since until now federal governments have, to the best of my knowledge, never been asymmetrical in this way. But more worrisome, the agreement they reached is regarded by commentators from across the spectrum as extremely vague and weak. There are no details on the budget, yet there is an agreement on taxcuts (a demand from the liberals) and on an increase of the social benefits (a demand from the social-democrats), in addition to a commitment not to create a budget deficit. Perhaps they do believe in manna from heaven after all. Nothing is said about the Flemish demands to regionalise the social security system, employment policies and other responsibilities they wanted to transfer from the national to the regional levels. Nothing is said about how they will solve the problem with Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, without which future elections will be unconstitutional.

So no surprise that most media commentators ask: how long will this government last? De Standaard “summarizes”:http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelId=DMF18032008_117 the situation aptly: “No team, no programme, no budget, no leader.” And even if this government lasts longer than when the first real decision needs to be taken, what will it contribute to solving “the profound problems that are haunting this country?”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/

“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=the_pete_rose_of_politics#104506 on another of those principles that John McCain only “‘bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste'”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/17kristof.html?hp.

We now have the exact language of John McCain’s “second loan,” and it is a legal masterpiece, albeit an ethical travesty … rather than pledge his existing certification for matching funds as collateral for the loan, which would bind him to the system and thus the spending limits, McCain carefully pledged to seek to re-enter the system later, and to use a non-existent future certification as collateral. And while the system is “voluntary,” McCain essentially traded away for cash his right to choose whether to participate in the system, and even his right to drop out of the presidential race, allowing the bank to force McCain “to remain an active candidate” in order to reapply for and qualify for funds. He was betting the spread (10 points) on his own primary performance!

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is a promise to perpetuate a fraud on the American taxpayers: if he no longer intended to seek the presidency, he made a legally-binding promise to pretend to remain in the race just long enough to collect public money to repay the loan. … Is this illegal? Who knows. … What we know is that McCain found a way to use the public funds as an insurance policy: If he did poorly, he would use public funds to pay off his loans. If he did well, he would have the advantage of unlimited spending. There’s a reason no one’s ever done anything like this. It makes a travesty of the choice inherent in voluntary public financing, between public funds and unlimited spending.

Interesting interview on Dutch television yesterday – with “Andre Krouwel”:http://english.fsw.vu.nl/Organization/index.cfm/home_file.cfm/fileid/8734A856-DA20-27A6-825C47E17FFFDDE0/subsectionid/8734A0E5-F625-E3F6-7A547D82FF33EC56, a professor in political science from the Free University in Amsterdam who has designed “an electoral compass for the USA presidential elections”:http://www.electoralcompass.com/. The Electoral compass has been very popular for recent Dutch elections: by answering questions about the substance of the electoral debate, the programme compares your views with those of the candidates. Questions concern a range of issues, such as health care, pension reform, environmental policies, and so forth – and, unique to the US compass, questions on gun control, the death penalty and Iraq. In 2007 Krouwel and his colleagues designed an electoral compass for the Belgian Federal elections; and now they have designed one for the US elections. According to “their website”:http://www5.kieskompas.nl/, they are now also designing an electoral compass for the 2008 Spanish elections.

If you answer the 36 questions, your answers are compared with those of the candidates, and the compass tells you which politician has the closest views to yours (or rather, vice versa). It was interesting to note that the democratic candidates are all closely situated to each other on the compass, whereas there is much more internal diversity within the republican camp. I filled out the questions, and the compass revealed that my views are closest to those of Edwards. Yet it may well be that if I would have had the right to vote, I wouldn’t want to lose the historical chance to vote for a female or black American president, even if on substance, my views apparently are slightly closer to the views of Edwards (but then, Clinton and Edwards seem to be very close to each other on the compass). I’m curious to read whether you felt the outcome of the test was what you expected, and also whether the questions cover the most important issues that are being discussed (or should be discussed) in the US electoral debate.

One of the commenters to my post below suggested that Mike Huckabee was unlikely to do well among Catholics. “Philip Klinkner”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics.html (who is really blogging interesting stuff on the races) has some county-level data from Iowa suggesting that this is true.

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GOP caucus results (counties won by Huckabee in blue; by Romney in red)

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Distribution of Catholics in Iowa (the redder the county, the more Catholics)

An eyeballing of the graph suggests that the parts of the state where Huckabee had most trouble were indeed, more often than not, those places where there were more Catholics. Klinkner runs a regression testing how percentage of population religious, percentage of population Catholic, percentage of population evangelical, and percentage of population rural affected voting for Huckabee, and finds that the coefficient for Catholicism is negative, high, and statistically significant.

Update see “here”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics-again.html for Klinkner’s response to some of the methodological criticisms.