Political Science

Academics from Harvard University have conducted statistical tests on the output of voting machines and concluded that there is less than a 1% chance that their results could have been generated in any way other than massive voting fraud.

Of course, we shouldn’t get too excited about this right now. For one thing, their work has been called into question. And for another thing, they were talking about the Venezuelan referendum. But I’m certainly not above using cheap shock tactics to draw attention to a really interesting piece of statistical argumentation.

It’s one of those cases where there are points on both sides, and both sides have, extraordinarily, managed to treat each other with respect and not throw around “Devastating Critiques” of each other. I think that Mark Weisbrot has the best of it; his analysis of the audited “clean” sample shows the same result as the allegedly “dirty” sample. The only way that one could have got that result fraudulently would rely on a level of compromise of the Carter Centre’s random selection apparatus that seems very implausible.

But Rigobon and Hausman are correct to say that it is troubling, to say the least, that the audit sample shows a very different relationship between polling station size and the “Si” vote; I’ve been thinking about it off and on for a month and I can’t come up with any reason why that might be. If you’ve got some spare time on your hands (and if you’re a Democrat, you do), both papers are worth a read, if only to clear your palate after the crap that’s been thrown around at the Lancet study (btw, on that subject, I will post more, but in the meantime, nice one, Chris Lightfoot).

(PS: I misspell Rigobon’s name out of ignorance of how to create accents in HTML rather than any other kind)

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.

Spinning off from the general question of the left and third parties – what are the political consequences of the US left’s failure to create a long lasting set of social institutions independent of government? Colin Crouch, my former Ph.D. co-supervisor, gave an address which touched upon this last week, where he claimed that neither classical liberalism nor classical social democracy had much to say about society, the former obsessing about the market, and the latter obsessing about the state. He did, however, have to acknowledge that the left created a vibrant set of alternative social institutions in many European countries, which provided all sorts of social benefits to ordinary people. Usually, these networks of institutions were set up in competition with rather similiar networks that were run by the Catholic Church and Christian Democratic party. Both networks were intended to shore up political support by providing tangible goods in return. When I lived in Italy in the late 1990’s, there were a few remants of the old Leftist alternative civil society around – the _Casa del Popolo_ (People’s Palace) in Fiesole had some of the best pizza in town, and ran a great May Day festival.

Of course, none of this really ever got going in the US. The only really active set of alternative social institutions in the US isn’t socialist, or even Christian Democratic – it’s the localized networks associated with evangelical Christianity. The Catholic church also plays a role, especially in education, but isn’t anywhere near as important as far as I can tell (I may be wrong). It seems to me as an outsider that this has shaped the US debate on the proper relationship between state and society in important ways. On the one hand, most left-wingers are virulently hostile to the idea that ‘state’ type social services should be delegated to civil society, because they see civil society as composed of religious zealots who will require that anyone who accepts their services also accept Jesus into their hearts. While this may, or may not be true, it seems to me to be associated with a certain lack of imagination on the left, a failure to think beyond the state. On the other, the enthusiasm of the conservative right for outsourcing social services to civil society is equally a product of the social dominance of religious organizations. How many of them would be keen on this, if, say, there was a thriving set of social democratic third sector institutions that could compete with religious groups to provide services (and perhaps smuggle in a bit of indoctrination along the way?) Not many, I imagine.

Jacques Chirac “lambasted”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3848045.stm George W. Bush today for suggesting that Turkey should become a member of the European Union. It’s no secret that the French government would prefer, all things considered, that Turkey not become a member of the European Union, or that a fair swathe of political opinion in other powerful EU member states (such as Germany) is at best luke-warm towards the prospect. Nonetheless, if I were a betting man, I’d lay strong odds on Turkey getting the official nod as a candidate for EU membership before Christmas, and becoming a full member seven or eight years after that.

In theory, any one member state can block Turkey’s membership – new entrants to the EU require unanimous consent from all existing members. In practice, even member states that are hostile to Turkey’s candidacy, such as France, have enormous difficulty in articulating their hostility in public. And for good reason – their objections to Turkey are rooted in some pretty offensive notions about what ‘Europe’ should be (Christian, white). Whenever anyone tries to voice these opinions, they’re liable to get “blasted from all sides”:http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?aid=8324. The result is that the opponents of Turkey’s candidacy find it difficult to justify their stance in public – therefore, they’re liable to find themselves being herded into giving their tacit assent to a decision that they would ideally prefer to oppose.

It’s an interesting case-study for international relations theory. As Frank Schimmelfennig observed in his case study of the EU’s earlier enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe, this sort of phenomenon demonstrates the limits of realist theory. Powerful states such as France may find it difficult, or even impossible, to act upon their preferences if they can’t justify their actions with reference to prevailing community norms. It could also have quite profound consequences for international politics. The prospect of EU membership has already demonstrably pushed Turkey into greater respect for civil rights, and a weakened political role for the military. Expect this to continue, and indeed accelerate if Turkey becomes a full member of the EU, just as it did in Spain, Portugal and Greece. And as “John Quiggin”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001356.html said a few months back, a prosperous, stable, fully democratic Turkey within the EU could do wonders for the prospects of democracy in other countries in the same region.

I rather liked the discussion that followed from John’s “earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001450.html on voting systems. So just for fun I thought I’d try a more complicated version of an example I brought up in the comments there, to see what people’s opinions are.

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The idea that speculative markets can be used to forecast political events hit the headlines a while ago with the furore over terrorism futures. This idea is still around and the general claim that political events can be forecast by futures or betting markets is still being pushed hard. The main source of data is at the Iowa Electronic Markets, but there’s plenty more. Reader Jack Strocchi sent me this report on a study of Australian betting markets and elections.

As it happens, I’d already looked at this and come fairly rapidly to the conclusion that the betting markets weren’t much good, so I was struck by the money quote from author Justin Wolfers

The data suggests the Australian betting market is extraordinarily efficient. And why not? There’s a huge incentive for participants to do their homework, collect reliable information and make sure the price is right.”

Looking at the report and also the Iowa studies, the evidence in support of this claim still seems very weak to me. In 2001, for example,

The night before the election, Howard [the incumbent Liberal PM] was ahead in two of three major polls ….[on Centrebet] Howard was the favorite with odds of $1.55, suggesting a 64 percent probability of his winning the election,”

That is, on the crudest possible use of the polls, two out of three suggested a Howard win, giving odds almost identical to Centrebet. In fact, I doubt that any serious analyst would have given the Labor Opposition even a 25 per cent chance by election night.

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If the situation in Iraq is going to work out, it will be because of people like these.

The photos are well worth a look. The crowds don’t look huge, but it’s awfully hard to estimate crowd size from photos on the ground. In addition, the Iraqi demonstrators had to take a serious risk of being targeted as “collaborators” if they attended. (It’s also interesting to see firsthand how much of Baghdad could be mistaken for Los Angeles or Houston.) It does the heart good to see them.

Following Brian’s “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000944.html below about voting in Australia, I thought I’d mention a paper that raises some interesting questions about the relation between compusory voting and voter competence. Dan Ortiz has an article called “The Paradox of Mass Democracy,” printed in recent book called “Rethinking the Vote”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195159853/qid=1070746724/sr=12-1/104-9058318-2257562?v=glance&s=books (OUP), in which he argues that democracies are supposed to meet three conditions: (i) near universal suffrage, (ii) equality among those granted voting rights, and (iii) some degree of thoughtfulness among voters. The problem, as Ortiz argues, is that we can’t have it all:

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For amusement I was traipsing through the OECD health stats for various countries, and I was stunned by one of the things that springs out of the data – health care systems that are government run or funded tend to be cheaper despite being just as effective in every respect, and more effective in some respects. I’m sure someone somewhere has analysed the data properly, but even a crude analysis suggests the empirical case for having a government run or funded health care system is quite strong.

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“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000399.html and “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_lsolum_archive.html#106748057295088488 have been posting about the political compass test. “Brian”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000415.html#000415 finds the rightist bias of law professors depressing and expresses hope that more of the blogosphere’s philosophers will take the test (including me). So here goes. And yes, unsurprsingly, there I am in the “bottom left-hand quadrant”:http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/questionnaire.pl?page=printable_graph&X=-4.88&Y=-6.36 . I’m not sure about the company I’m keeping, though. George Orwell, Tom Paine and even Joseph Stiglitz and the Dalai Lama I can live with, but Naomi Klein and Tariq Ali? This chart needs another dimension.

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the second of a series of conferences with the title “Priority in Practice” which seek to bring political philosophers in contact with more gritty policy questions. It was good fun, there were some good papers and I learnt a fair bit. One of the interesting papers was by John O’Neill from Lancaster who discussed the controversial question of “contingent valuation”, which is a method by which researchers engaged in cost-benefit analysis attempt to establish a shadow value for some (usually environmental) good for which there is no genuine market price, by asking people what they’d be prepared to pay for it (or alternatively, and eliciting a very different set of answers, what they’d need to compensate them for its loss).

Naturally, people often react with fury or distaste to the suggestion that they assign a monetary value to something like the preservation of an ecosystem. They think that just isn’t an appropriate question and that it involves a transgression of the boundaries between different spheres of justice or value. John had a nice quote to show that researchers have been asking just this sort of question (and getting similar tetchy responses) for rather a long time:

bq. Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked- “What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?” To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said – “What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?” The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. (Herodotus, _Histories_ , III).

In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:

bq. Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.

Following the good advice on conference going from various parties, I’m off myself for the next couple of days to the annual American Political Science Association conference, where I’ll be sharing a “panel”:http://www.apsanet.org/mtgs/program/program.cfm?event=1414118 with Dan Drezner. Intermittent blogging in the meantime, dependent on access to Internet, and on whether I’m enjoying myself too much to blog (yes, you can have a good time at political science conferences).

If you’re interested in the relation between deliberative democracy and social choice theory, which Henry has just written about, then you might want to read an interesting and constructive paper by two of my new colleagues here at the RSSS, John Dryzek and Christian List. The paper, “Social Choice Theory and Deliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation” [pdf] just appeared in the British Journal of Political Science. Here’s the abstract:

bq. The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic
decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect.

It’s a good introduction to why results from social choice theory pose a challenge to what we think democracy can do, and also a useful corrective to the idea that these results should just make us chuck the whole idea of democracy out the window.