Cosma Shalizi makes a very interesting “research proposal”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/weblog/386.html – how could we measure the extent to which cronyism allows incompetents to land plum jobs in the Bush administration?
bq. What’s wanted — but what the journalists don’t provide — is a study where one builds the network of Presidential cronies, cronies’ cronies, cronies’ cronies’ cronies, etc., and then asks questions such as: How likely are close cronies to be named to government positions? How much influence does position in the network — centrality, say, or distance from the President — have on the likelihood of getting a government job? How likely are cronies to get jobs for which they are not qualified? Is position more important for incompetent cronies? Many people have asserted that networks of influence and social connection are important to how the modern GOP works … but nobody seems to have really studied this thoroughly. To do it right, you need to carefully define what you mean by “crony”. Since, ultimately, the whole species forms a single human web, you want to only consider ties which are actually meaningful indicators of political alliance and, still more, of nepotism and cronyism. Also, you want to set out your criteria carefully and rigidly before collecting data, otherwise there’ll be a lot of temptation to manipulate things as you go along, and the result will be closer to Lyndon LaRouche than to Randall Collins (or even Malcolm Gladwell). … Once you have people in the network, we need to see whether they’ve been named to government positions (not necessarily confirmed, just named), and whether they met the legally-defined norms of competence for those positions … to really do this right, we’d need to do it all over again, not just for the current administration, but for another one as a control — the Clinton administration, say, or Bush’s father; Reagan or earlier is probably too far back. This seems to be the only way to answer questions like whether this administration is more centralized than its predecessors, or more likely to nominate incompetents. … Even without doubling our workload by doing a comparative study, however, simply seeing the network of cronies would let us answer some interesting questions. Who really are the most central members of the network? Are they people with formal positions of authority? Are they people you’ve ever even heard of? Or are they comparatively little-known fixers with huge address books, but no officially constituted authority?
Sounds like an excellent research proposal, even if, as Cosma suggests, it would require teamwork and lots of money. As he says, nobody’s doing this. Political scientists tend not to do sophisticated network analysis (more for reasons of disciplinary history than anything else, I suspect – certainly not because networks are irrelevant to politics). Check out also Cosma’s ferocious and enormously entertaining new “book review”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/ of Stephen Wolfram’s opus from a couple of years back.
