Political Science

I’ve just come from a seminar given by Michael Tierney, who before launching into his paper on the Very Serious Subject of principal-agent relations in multilateral development agencies, encouraged us to visit and contribute to his list of “international relations themed music”:http://mjtier.people.wm.edu/teaching/irplaylist.php. Apparently, he begins his early morning classes by playing a song appropriate to that week’s topic so as to wake up the students. Contributions include “One is the Loneliest Number (Three Dog Night)” for the class on Polarity/Hegemonic Stability Theory and “Peace, Love and Understanding (Elvis Costello)” for Democratic Peace Theory. He pleads for alternative suggestions “to rectify the bad musical tastes of my colleagues,” which are indeed rather impressive. Sounds like exactly the right sort of silliness for a blog’s comment section – I’ll start the ball rolling by suggesting Tom Lehrer’s “MLF Lullaby”:http://www.song-teksten.com/song_lyrics/tom_lehrer/that_was_the_year_that_was/mlf_lullaby/ for a class on multilateral alliances, and indeed that Lehrer’s “We’ll All Go Together When We Go”:http://www.atomicplatters.com/more.php?id=70_0_1_0_M replaces Metallica’s _Blackened_ as the theme song for the week on Nuclear War and Its Consequences.

The current issue of _PS: Political Science and Politics_ has a “symposium”:http://www.apsanet.org/section_651.cfm on inequality and American democracy, collecting together various responses to the “report”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/taskforcereport.pdf and book issued on the topic by the American Political Science Association’s taskforce. There’s a lot of valuable commentary and empirical data in there; also well worth reading are the accompanying critical papers on “inequality and American governance”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/governancememo.pdf and “inequality and public policy”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/feedbackmemo.pdf. A lot of meat in there, including the below graph drawn from Larry Bartels’ “paper”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/PSJan06Bartels.pdf . It shows income growth by income level under Democratic and Republican administrations from 1948 to 2001. The solid line shows how families at the 20th percentile (lowest), the 40th percentile etc have done under Democratic adminstrations, the dotted line how they’ve done under Republicans. The difference is startlingly obvious. Under Democratic administrations, growth has been fairly egalitarian, ranging from 2.6% average growth for the poor at the 20th percentile to 2.1% for the rich at the 95th percentile. Under Republican administrations, the rich have done about as well as under Democratic administrations, but the poor at the 20th percentile have only seen .6% income growth. As Bartels says:

bq. Are partisan differences in the economic fortunes of American families really this stark? The arithmetic calculations from the Census Bureau data are straightforward. Their political significance can only be gainsaid by supposing that the apparent pattern is the result of a massive historical coincidence. Elsewhere, I have provided extensive checks on the robustness of the partisan disparity evident in Figure 2, including comparisons based on alternative economic units, time periods, and income definitions, statistical controls for historical trends, nonparametric tests, and the like ( “Bartels 2004”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf ). It seems hard to escape the conclusion that, over the past half-century, Republican presidents have been consistently bad for the economic health of middle-class and poor people.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/bartels.jpg!

Via “3 Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/ this very enjoyable “interview”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/przeworski/przeworski_munck.pdf with Adam Przeworski on his life, his research and his intellectual development. And on the causal explanations for dictators’ economic strategies …

bq. Then, for the particular question I addressed in Democracy and Development I thought I needed statistics. But in the work I’m currently doing on development, I am back to reading biographies of dictators and novels about dictators, which are very informative. I would like to get into Park’s shoes and Mobutu’s shoes and see why one of them was a developmental leader and the other was a thief. My current hunch is that developmentalist dictators are those who loved their mothers: obviously this is not something you will learn or be able to test with statistics, but when you read novels and biographies, the pattern becomes uncanny.

I started reading The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century by Colonel Thomas X. Hammes tonight. Hammes is a 29-year career Marine who has spent his professional life studying what he calls fourth-generation warfare, or counterinsurgency. In the small portion that I’ve read, it’s striking how scathing Hammes is about “transformation”, the push for a smaller, high-tech force:
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I “blogged”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/12/not-in-kansas-anymore/ Larry Bartels’ take-no-prisoners “critique”:http://www.princeton.edu/%7ebartels/kansas.pdf of Thomas Frank last week; now Frank has come back with an “equally frank rejoinder”:http://www.tcfrank.com/dismissd.pdf. It seems to me that Frank’s riposte to Bartels on the issue of how to define the white working class strikes home, although some of his other jabs miss the target. Since the definitional question is key to Bartels’ critique, it looks to me as if Franks comes out ahead (unless Bartels comes back with a more convincing justification). Still, I find some of Frank’s apologia unconvincing. He’s absolutely right to say that working class conservatism is still important, even if it isn’t a majority phenomenon – but there is a tendency (which Frank is by no means immune to) to generalize from the particular and to draw big conclusions on the basis of limited and somewhat impressionistic information. National survey data is imperfect – but it can serve as a very useful corrective to these tendencies, and it’s unfortunate that more pundits don’t use it (or at least acknowledge more directly the limits of the kinds of information that they do refer to).

(via Rick Perlstein)

Update “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/12/23/10559/462 is blegging social scientists to crunch NES data for a different measure of the ‘real’ working class.

Bill Kristol and Gary Schmitt in the WaPo:

   … That is why the president uniquely swears an oath – prescribed in the Constitution – to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Implicit in that oath is the Founders’ recognition that, no matter how much we might wish it to be case, Congress cannot legislate for every contingency, and judges cannot supervise many national security decisions. This will be especially true in times of war.

Josh Marshall has thoughts on possible difficulties with this notion that ‘the power to set aside laws is "inherent in the president."’

But without waiting for the dust to settle we’ll just step back and declare: so it’s settled, Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is the late-breaking, runaway dark-horse winner stocking-stuffer political book of the season. And we hereby open a new front in the war on Christmas, as it is clear the President, like Santa, doesn’t have the time to go to to some damn judge every time he needs to know whether someone is naughty or nice.

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I’ve just discovered when poking around for some figures that you can now analyse data from the “World Values Survey”:http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ online. This is a very neat tool, not only for political scientists and sociologists, but for anyone else who’s interested in getting basic information on attitudes in different countries to politics, society and religion. You don’t have to be a stats wizard to play around with the numbers. As far as I’m aware, the Survey is outstandingly the most comprehensive database of its kind.

In other news, Sam Rosenfeld points in comments to an interesting “response”:http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising/archives/001317.php to the Bartels paper that I “blogged”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/12/12/not-in-kansas-anymore/ a couple of days ago. According to David Gopoian and Ralph Whitehead, whether Bartels is right depends on how you define the white working class, and Bartels, by their books, is working with a non-standard definition. Bartels talks a bit in the paper about definitional questions, but it would be interesting to know what his counter-response would be.

I’d somehow missed this “fascinating paper”:http://www.princeton.edu/%7ebartels/kansas.pdf by Larry Bartels which “Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2005/12/index.html#008600 links to today. It uses NES data to argue that the thesis of Thomas Franks’ _What’s the Matter with Kansas_ is completely wrong. Poor white voters have become _more_ likely to vote Democrat over the last few decades. While they’re less likely to identify with the Democratic party than they used to be, the decline in Democratic party ID has been less marked among poor white Democrats than among richer ones, and is entirely attributable to losses in the South in the post-Civil Rights era. Nor, if you look at the preponderance of evidence, is there good reason to believe that poor white voters are more interested in cultural than in economic issues; if anything the opposite seems to be true.

Of course, Bartels’ argument isn’t only discomfiting to Franks; it also undermines the self-justifying claims of right wing pundits who consider themselves, against all the odds, to be populists. The one part of Bartels’ paper that I disagree with is its conclusion, which implies that mistaken Democratic angst over the party’s appeal to poor white voters is what motivates arguments over whether the Democrats need to fundamentally rethink their political message. If I understand Bartels rightly, he’s suggesting that the Democrats don’t need to change what they’re doing. I don’t think that’s true, and indeed it seems to me that some of Bartels’ earlier “empirical findings”:http://www.princeton.edu/~csdp/research/pdfs/homer.pdf point in the opposite direction. If, as Bartels has previously argued, the general public has a difficult time in connecting public policy with economic inequality, Democrats are likely to succeed to the extent that they can draw these connections in their rhetoric, and show how inequality affects not only the working class but the middle class too. That said, this paper seems to me to be a lovely example of how political scientists and other social scientists should be speaking to broader public debates, by using their expertise to examine whether the fundamental assumptions underlying these debates are fundamentally right or wrong. _And_ it describes Peter Beinart’s arguments as “fatuous.” What more could you ask for?

I’ve “complained in the past”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/22/learned-friends/ about the lack of an SSRN equivalent for political scientists (while APSA has put together a portal site for papers, it still leaves something to be desired; e.g. no stable permalinks). Now SSRN has created a new “working paper series”:http://www.clpenet.ca/mission.html which aims to bring together “international studies in comparative law and political economy.” This looks to be a great resource – the idea is to bring scholars in relevant fields of comparative politics, comparative law, international political economy and economic sociology into a single debate. There’s a lot of fascinating work on new modes of international and domestic governance – but it’s difficult to keep track of, because it’s split across several disciplines.Worth “signing up for”:http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=LSN-RES-all-inclusive-journal.

I see via “one of John H’s other incarnations”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/conservatives_in_academe/ that Mark Bauerlein is under the charming misconception that it’s a bad idea for aspiring sociologists to work on “the debilitating effects of the European welfare state” if they want to get their dissertations accepted. It’s always a good idea to, like, familiarize yourself with debates among “prominent sociologists”:http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/pu/workpap/wp05-2/wp05-2.html and other “social scientists”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521613167/qid=1129588238/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_8_1/202-1419967-7463003 before making these grand pronouncements. But at least Bauerlein’s error gives me an excuse to link to this “work in progress”:http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ss10/Downloads/SJ.doc by Margarita Estevez-Abe and Glyn Morgan, which argues against the European welfare state because of its institutional inflexibilities. Morgan and Estevez-Abe say, correctly, that certain European welfare states have some very dubious features, perpetuating gender inequality among other things. They argue instead for a normative standard based on a capacity for a wide-ranging individuality, which in turn requires a strong degree of _institutional flexibility_. That is, institutions should be able to accommodate a wide variety of lifestyle and career choices, rather than assuming, say, that women should confine themselves to the home and motherhood. [click to continue…]

The excellent “Equality Exchange”:http://mora.rente.nhh.no/projects/EqualityExchange/ — a repository for papers about the theory and practice of equality from philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, lawyers and economists — has moved. Adjust your bookmarks for the new site, and take the opportunity to have a look around one of the most valuable resources for political theorists and philosophers.

I’m just back from Germany where I’ve been to a very interesting interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Bremen ‘s Sonderforschungsbereich “Staatlichkeit im Wandel”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/ on Trade Governance, Democracy and Inequality. As usual in such cases, the bringing together of philosophers and practitioners was both stimulating and revealing of how little we know about one another. Starting my own, basically normative, paper, I asserted that a central purpose of trade rules should be to promote justice. I was informed that “justice” was one word that would never pass the lips of a WTO negotiator. Which, doesn’t show, of course, either that I’m wrong about what should happen or that concerns about justice aren’t lurking in the shadows somewhere. But it suggests a startling disconnect between the public rhetoric about global inequality and the concerns at the negotiating table.

“David Kopel”:http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4105129,00.html argues, rightly, that there is something very nasty about the willingness of companies like Google and Yahoo! to knuckle under to authoritarian regimes such as China by banning words from search engines, snitching out democracy activists and so on. He’s also correct when he “claims”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_09_25-2005_10_01.shtml#1127700874 that “the greedy and immoral policies of these corporations directly endanger Americans.” However, his claim that “[p]erhaps only consumer and shareholder pressure can persuade the American companies to change their evil ways” seems to me to be quite mistaken. Consumer and shareholder pressure simply isn’t likely to have much of an impact, when measured against the power of the Chinese government to ban these companies from access to a quite enormous and important marketplace. Nor does it seem likely to me that many large shareholders are likely to raise a fuss in any event. More generally, when firms weigh the power of consumers to use exit and protest against the ability of powerful states to impose heavy sanctions, and completely block access to important markets, they are usually going to do what the state(s) want them to do. The only solution that would have some chance of biting would be if the US passed legislation requiring US-based firms not to cooperate with Chinese government authorities on pain of substantial penalties, and enforced this regulation vigorously, transforming it into a battle between powerful states with big markets.

We’re going to see more and more of these problems cropping up. People used to think that the Internet would empower firms and other private actors against the state, helping the spread of democracy, free markets and all that. What we’re seeing instead is that firms and private actors have an interest in keeping powerful states happy, regardless of the impact on global prosperity, freedom and so on. This has always been the case – but it’s being exacerbated by the Internet. I’ve just written a “paper”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=799269 which talks about what this means for international politics (although it doesn’t discuss the particulars of the Yahoo! case).

A minor victory for San Francisco hotel workers, who are fighting a divisive battle over contracts with their employers. The American Political Science Association has announced that it is “moving its 2006 meeting”:http://www.apsanet.org/content_18472.cfm to Philadelphia, “[d]ue to the lack of progress in the protracted labor-management dispute in San Francisco.” This is the result of a deliberate strategy by the hotel workers’ union, which has been working on persuading academic organizations not to host conferences at the hotels in question, while they continue to try to hold out. Union officials figure that it’s time for academic lefties to put their money where their mouth is, and they’re damn right. I’m delighted that the American Political Science Association has done this.

Update: I should make it clear that my understanding isn’t that the APSA is taking a political stance on the underlying merits of the issues here. Instead, I read the press release to say that given the likelihood of disruption (which would stem from leftwing political scientists boycotting, or organizing pickets, alternative meetings etc in solidarity with the hotel workers), the APSA has decided to move to a less controversial location.